Catchy title?

Yes, it’s Advent and, yes, I’ve written before about the meaning of Christmas. But I always try to pause and really try to wrap my head around the whole thing. On the one hand, it’s actually pretty easy to think, “yep, God chose to come to earth as a little baby. That’s something!” And, then we go from there.

The philosopher side of me tries to find perspective, which requires going deeper. Today, the geek side of me went to outer space.

Here’s the thing about God supernaturally becoming a zygote and arriving as a human being nine months later. It’s outrageous. We’ve all learned our Greek mythology, of gods and humans interacting, sometimes even marrying and having children: half human, half god. We can picture Olympus and Zeus and Apollo and Athena and Achilles and all of them. Stories that we know are not real but also stories that echo some things we know to be very real.

The Christian story is also a story. Some people maintain it to be entirely unreal, akin to Greek mythology. Others claim it to be entirely real, unlike Greek mythology. If true, it is beyond mind boggling, hence the title.

So, why bring up outer space?

Well, as I was quietly reflecting on the implications of the Christian story being real, I was once again taken to a place of trying to fathom the nature of the power behind it all.

(It’s at this point that I may lose some readers. I’m sorry.)

You see, if the Christian story is true, then there’s this all powerful God who is actually behind and above all creation. And, in order to get a grasp on what that really means (other than to nod our heads and go, “but, of course!,”) my head pictures the power of creation. Unfortunately, there are only so many ways I can do that, all of them quite limited. Bluntly, creation is a pretty big thing … both unimaginatively large and infinitesimally small. The amount of mass and energy involved is really beyond our comprehension. We are reduced to utilizing mathematics and physics to try to capture its essence because our imagination only takes us so far. Ironically, though, it’s in the imagination that the mathematics and physics of the thing actually comes alive.

One of the most common ways for us to picture all of creation is to call to mind those incredible pictures of our massive universe, home to hundreds of billions of galaxies, many of which are home, themselves, to hundreds of billions of stars. And, maybe it’s not hundreds of billions but trillions. All the product of an explosion from an object so small, it was only a minuscule fraction the size of an atom. The best scientific minds in the world have agreed on this fact for a long time now. Very cool.

And, that’s nothing compared to the power of the God of the Christian story. Which brings me to supernovas.

A supernova is the single most powerful piece of nature in the known universe. In a galaxy like ours, I’m told, they occur about once every fifty years. Or, about once a second in the entire universe, at least according to NASA. In wanting to understand a bit more about the power of God, I found myself reflecting on supernovas.

Feel free to check out for a bit as I go full geek. 🙂

A supernova is the death of a star. Its resulting explosion will outshine an entire galaxy full of hundreds of billions of stars.

The larger Type II supernova results when a star at least ten times the size of our sun runs out of hydrogen and helium at its core. Its heavier elements like carbon build up at the center, causing gravity to pull the lighter elements inward. Once the star’s core exceeds a certain mass, the entire star begins to implode (collapsing inward). As it implodes the core heats up and becomes denser. Finally, all of this stuff basically bounces back off of the core, expelling everything into space in a gigantic explosion. One does not want to  be in any kind of proximity when this happens. Most or all of the heavy elements in the universe are the result of supernovas.

I guess I bring this up because the amount of power, mass, and energy released in these regular astronomical events that dwarf our lives, living as we do in towns, cities, and villages, driving our cars, talking on our phones, plowing our fields and carrying on, gives us just a teeny window into the power of God.

This incomprehensible reality can either push us away because it seems too fantastic (a derivative of “fantasy”) or it can draw us inwards as nothing else can. How and why would the central character of the Christian story burst through the fabric of time and space and all semblance of the normal state of things to enter the womb of a woman?

This Christmas season, we are called to think again, as I regularly do, about who Jesus was and why he came and what any of this has to do with supernovas.

We are left once again with the dilemma of whether or not to believe the Christian story. Is it crazy?

I’m reminded of perhaps the most famous of C.S. Lewis’ remarks, which I have shared before but seems always worth repeating:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

What we celebrate this month, is not the birth of a moral teacher who arrived to tell us how to lead the right kind of life. It is not the birth of an obscure itinerant Jewish rabbi, in the long line of failed messiahs. Instead, we celebrate the incomprehensible event that a power, infinitely greater than all of the supernovas in the last 14 billion years, is behind the birth of a child. What we do with that notion is something worth pondering.

Merry Christmas