Isaiah 40:21-23
21 Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
23 He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
I am reading a memoir by an award winning female astrophysicist who discovered a process for finding exoplanets, places where life like our planet’s life could exist. Though I don’t always understand the intricacies, I appreciate cosmology for putting my life into perspective. When I feel disgust within my body upon hearing that a group of powerful humanoids wearing expensive suits have made another terrible decision in some boring windowless room that will make them wealthier and adversely affect most of the people on the planet… well, it helps me to know how small of a blip in the universe we earthlings actually are.
Isaiah, before any telescopes or satellites, looked up at the sky – the same sky I see and also a very time-changed sky – and marveled. When I read his words on the bigness of God, my anti-establishment self gets all excited about the reduction of the rulers of this world to nothing. Dust. Naught.
And how does this powerful past-present-future God bring about these perspective bending acts of justice? He comes as least powerful – a baby. He’s born poor, in a barn. He’s given to a young girl to take care of, to feed with her body; this all powerful God person is literally made of the cells of a woman. Now that’s some good science.
Universal God, stretch out your heavens over us as a tent of safe haven. We need your powerful presence when we are feeling powerless. Thank you for coming to our earth as weakness, as poverty, as the other. Amen.
