The Gospel and a Billion Miles to Get There
ITS 1985 AND I’M HESITANT at the back of a group of ill clothed and ill-appreciated students in the basement of a chapel on my college campus. It’s a musty room with thin, indoor/outdoor blue green carpet and we’re all singing the latest contemporary Christian song, “Our God is an Awesome God”; Our God is an awesome God / he reigns from Heaven above / with wisdom, power and love / our God is an awesome God. We add emphatic claps here and there for emphases and like slaps in the face they serve to remind me to pay attention.
The truth is I cared deeply about the words, but I just couldn’t grasp them so my mind wandered. Our God is an Awesome God slipped out of my lips like a stray piece of baloney. I knew they were falling limp to the ground as soon as I uttered them. I’d searched the Old Testament in hopes of being struck by the awe of God in the form of some kind of divine combustion of mightiness, but it continued to elude me. The kind of awe that I imagined when face to face with the Almighty should make me feel like I’d just crested a hill and got air on the other side.
Last night my husband and I watched a special on the Webb telescope. The telescope cost 10 billion dollars and according to Nasa will focus on four main areas: first light in the universe, assembly of galaxies in the early universe, birth of stars and protoplanetary systems, and planets (including the origins of life). For the sake of my psychological well-being, I’ll choose to ignore that parenthetical and incomprehensible ‘including the origins of life’ part. Belly buttons or no belly buttons, I’m perfectly content with the Adam and Eve exegesis.
We decided to watch the show because it was a let’s watch a documentary or something evening. Ken Burns was still on his-way-too-long sabbatical, and we knew from experience we couldn’t trust The History Channel. I’ve never been all that interested in space other than in movies where the astronaut gets tangled in his tether, it snaps, and he begins to float away into nothingness. I find that terrifyingly interesting. But as I soon discovered, there’s no nothing about it.
The Webb telescope was launched Christmas day of 2021 and the first images are of nebulous cloud-looking back-lit mountains and luminosities and rotating colors like galactic Ferris wheels indescribable to even the most accomplished Psilocybin consumer. There are images of things that detonated billions of years ago. Not only this, but the photographs are taken of only a pin dot of space, leaving the rest of the vast universe unattended to. There’s a star-forming region called NGC 3324. Naming a region NGC 3324 means there’s a lot more regions to name. The dictum ‘I am because I think I am’ is beside the point. It turns out I Am is a lot bigger than I am, and our God is indeed an awesome one.
You might think that in seeing the immensity of God in only the tiniest pin dot of his creation would solve my existential crisis over a song I sang as a freshman in college. It didn’t. In fact, it made things worse. While I finally grasped on some tiny level the awesomeness of God, now I couldn’t grasp that our God was an awesome god, that he was my God. I knew God was big, but I didn’t know he was that big and it seemed nothing short of blasphemous to think a God that ignites a flame that lights numberless stars too glorious to comprehend is mine. The photographs put me in a cold sweat. God is big, yes, but I hadn’t understood the macroscale reality of him.
Fear is an unsettling word and when referring to God we can toss it back and forth like a hot potato, inclined to hand off the expository responsibility to less candid words: awe, reverence, wonder. MDiv-less and not predisposed to pick up a commentary, I just googled the Hebrew word, which indeed means fear: yir' ah; “fear” or “terror.” Terror is a new one for me. Not only is our God an awesome god our God is a terrifying god, something the Webb telescope has now made perfectly clear.
Last night in bed, nebula still playing across my eyelids, I hesitantly laid my case before God: Now that I finally understand your true awesomeness, calling you my God seems blasphemous. And yet there are verses like Psalm 38:15 that call you ‘my Lord’ and ‘my God,’ as though I somehow own you—like we’re hanging out at a coffee shop.
There was no accompanying vision or audible words, but he did answered me. What I heard was True blasphemy would be you not calling me mine. In fact, the terror I felt when I glimpsed images of his glory was in truth a terror of the distance between us. Gospel tracts can’t do that distance justice; one inch between two metaphorical cliffs on a patch of paper to represent an eternity of distance. But then as much as scripture tells us how awesome he is, it also tells us he reaches down with his strong right arm to pull us close. I am faint and microscopic compared to him. My infirm soul and God the creator of souls. Only an awesome God could pull off such a feat and it would be blasphemous not to believe it. How blasphemous it would be if I didn’t sing songs to my God with a handful of college kids in the damp basement of a chapel clapping like a fool.
In my childhood room there was a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall, a flimsy cardboard thing popping out of its frame that I used to stare at before I went to sleep. In the picture Jesus is cupping the face of a young girl in his hands, maybe five, and looking straight into her eyes. I remember at the time it made me think of the passage in the Bible where Jesus says to suffer the little children to come unto me. The girl looked a little like me; short, straight, reddish-brown hair, a little pudgy. I imagined in the picture that I was the only one with him even though it says in the Bible there were a lot of other kids waiting to come unto. It was only him and me. He was looking into my eyes because he knew me and wanted me to know him back, to know that he was big enough to collapse the universe to make it that way.
