Christmas Astronomy

I imagine very few of us have seen the night sky as the ancients did. I can only point to one occasion, in high school, when I joined my youth group for an illegal border crossing into a tiny village in Mexico. We must have been a hundred miles away from the nearest candle or light bulb, and there wasn’t a hint of moisture in the desert sky. Every star, planet and UFO could be seen with precision, and the Milky Way looked so close I could almost taste it.

Everything in the sky was so far away yet felt so close. There was a rainbow of colors, a spectrum of brightness, and twinkling that looked like a million Christmas lights. Falling stars shot across the heavens at various speeds and distances. I wish I could go back there now and see it again.

The stars will most likely never be reached by humans. The only spacecraft anywhere close still has tens of thousands of years to go before it reaches the heat of our closest neighbor star. Only a smattering of celestial bodies I saw that night in Mexico are reachable by spacecraft: the moon and a handful of planets.

Theoretically, an alien youth group on a nearby planet could have been gazing at me. To them, Earth would have been a pale blue dot among many twinkling dots in their sky. They wouldn’t have seen oceans, continents, or the light in inquisitive eyes of anyone looking back at them; so insignificant and meaningless we would have been. No desire to travel to our planet and surely no reason to even think about it.

But there was a moment in history when God, far beyond all unreachable stars and planets, made a mission to visit the blue dot. He gazed at our watery home and saw a piece of a continent that had a stable and a manger suitable for his bed.

There was a group of stargazers within hiking distance of that manger who noticed something special in the heavens. Something shining among the twinkling stars pointed them in the direction of Bethlehem, so they joined the mission. So far away, but reachable, so they went.

I learned a word recently from an astronaut describing her experience in space: ineffable. It means, “Too great or extreme to be expressed in words.” From space, the stars can be seen in three dimensions, unlike the measly flat portrait that left me agape when I looked up from the Mexican village as a teenager. She said being surrounded by a mobile of space objects left her eyes full of tears unable to fall due to microgravity.

Every Christmas, I reflect on Jesus’s ineffable mission to planet earth. This year I’m focusing on the unimaginable distance to the edge of our universe and the inexpressible love of God that focuses his eyes on our tiny space home. He traveled far. Farther than a trip to a remote village. Farther than the curious magi. Farther than any space alien could ever dream of traveling. To visit and spend quality time with my family and me.

I don’t really believe in UFOs, alien youth groups, or illegal border crossings, but I believe there was an event in the heavens, millions of miles away, that led curious stargazers to Jesus. The same Jesus who made an unbelievable visit to a small town on a tiny planet shining dimly near a small yellow star in one milky galaxy deep within a vast universe held by the hand of God.