For Wilshire Baptist Church
The headline on National Geographic’s website the day after Christmas read, “A giant star is acting strange, and astronomers are buzzing.” I’m not a star geek, but those words got my attention, so I dove in and learned that the red giant Betelgeuse may be getting ready to explode.
If you’re a novice like me with most of your star knowledge learned while laying on a blanket in the back yard at night with your father the navigator, then you at least are familiar with the constellation Orion. And if you know Orion, then you can visualize Betelgeuse, the bright red star marking the hunter’s right shoulder. Only now, that star is the dimmest it’s been in almost a century, and that dimming means the star is dying. But before it dies, it will explode in a spectacular light show known as a supernova.
The big question is: when will that happen? And the next question is: has it already happened? Because here is the mind-bending reality: Betelgeuse will probably explode within the next one million years, or it may have already exploded and we just haven’t seen it yet because it would take light from that event 600 years to reach us. That means if we see the explosion of Betelgeuse in our lifetime, we will be witnessing something that happened during the European Middle Ages.
As I contemplate that, this annual ritual of turning the calendar to a new year seems pretty insignificant. In the grand scheme of things, our page turning is like the flutter of a flea’s wing; our little moments of life are a whisper of a breath compared to the wind blowing across the vast oceans. And yet, these small days are our days, and they are God given, and they loom huge and precious to us.
These days also are eternal. They connect us to everything that has ever been and everything that will ever be. I look back at my calendar and see that in December, LeAnn and I attended one wedding and five funerals. We would have preferred a reverse of that ratio, but whether marrying or burying, the notion of eternity and our place in it floats on the air. The late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey used to include on his noon news a salute to a couple that was “celebrating 50 years on their way to forever together.” Newlyweds probably don’t think about that too much because they are living in the moment, but it will come around again to them some day when one goes on ahead into that hidden forever land.
Meanwhile, those of us living these brief moments on this small planet turn the page to another year, and we pray for God’s grace and mercy for the journey ahead. But rather than being anxious or fearful about what 2020 may bring, we might do well to live in awe of God’s creation and be grateful for our place in it. Perhaps that is what UC Berkeley’s Sarafina Nance was expressing when speaking to National Geographic about the demise of Betelgeuse: “I don’t think it’s going to explode any time soon, but I am excited [for] when it does.”