Stars

If you were in worship at First Church this morning, you got all this already… some “star data” and a true story…

On the clearest of nights, if you’re at least 10 miles away from any source of light like streetlights and cars and lit up houses, and if your vision is relatively good, and depending on the time of the year, you can see anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 stars in the sky. The closest one to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, which means that the light we’d see tonight from that star was generated by that star about Thanksgiving, 2005. The brightest star in the night sky, the North Star, or Polaris, is 2,527,808,910,468,952 (2 quadrillion, 527 trillion, 808 billion, 910 million, 468 thousand, 952) miles, or 430 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight from that North Star was generated about the time Sir Francis Drake was wrapping up his circumnavigation of the globe. The farthest star we’d see on our really clear night isn’t really a star at all, but a galaxy, Andromeda, and it looks like a star because it is so far away, all of its stars look as if they are all one star. It’s 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is, or something like 14,696,563, 432,959,020,000 (14 quintillion, 696 quadrillion, 563 trillion, 432 billion, 959 million, 20 thousand) miles, which means the light we’d see tonight from the Andromeda galaxy was generated about the beginning of the Proterozoic Era, when the continents became stable and oxygen started to saturate the atmosphere. The star that is farthest from us but still in our own Milky Way Galaxy that we’d see tonight is only about 23.5 quadrillion miles, or 4,000 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight was generated a couple of centuries before Father Abraham’s vision in Genesis 15.

About the time the 12^th brightest star in tonight’s sky, Altair, was generating the light we'd see in tonight’s perfectly clear night sky (that’s about 17 years ago), we had a group of youth community young people staying at the Powder Horn Ski Resort on the western slopes of the Rockies. The last night we were at Powder Horn was a gloriously clear night, and after our worship time several of us sat outside as far away from any earth light as we could and just looked up. Several of the young people with us said they had never seen as many stars. Shooting stars darted across the night sky like fireworks, and one of them said something about how the light we were seeing at that moment was generated long in the past. Then one of the boys, one of the rowdy, always-hard-to-keep-down-on-the-farm-always-knows-much-much-more-than-anyone-else boys who we loved to be around but whom we always had to keep kind of a tight leash on, got up and started to wander off into the dark. Somebody called his name, and he just kept walking, so I went off after him. When I caught up with him, he was sobbing. Shoulders heaving, struggling to catch his breath sobbing.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The stars,” he said, ‘the stars. The stars might not even be there, and we’re still seeing them. That’s how it’s gonna be for us, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

And then I heard one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard, from the mouth of that frightened, distraught boy…

“You’re always telling us, Rob that we have a lot of life to live. Well, we don’t! We don’t have very long, maybe 90 years if we’re lucky. I’m already 16. I only have like 70 some years left. It’s like the stars! When I’m dead, people will still see me. Well, maybe they won’t see me, but they will still be affected by me, by the person I am. They won’t know me, they won’t love me, but they will still see me. And I want them to see me at my best, not as the jerk I am most of the time. I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk. I want them to see me how I really am.”

“I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk! I don’t want to be a jerk anymore.”