Texts: Psalm 8; Psalm 24: 1-6
Two Pathways Toward Wonder
“Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder: the starry heavens above, and the moral law within.”
So said Immanuel Kant in 1788, at the end of his book of ethics, The Critique of Practical Reason. Kant was a famously earthbound German philosopher, not much given to flights of fancy, still less to admissions of personal rapture. And yet at the end of that work, he yields to a kind of poetry as he considers the immensity of the world, and the immensity of the human heart: the heavens above and the moral law within. Two pathways, perhaps divergent, perhaps intertwined, both moving toward similar ends.
It’s a pattern of horizontal and vertical orientation that is visually represented in many, if not most, pieces of sacred architecture. Take the Parthenon in Athens. The pillars surrounding it give it a vertical orientation, as if to the heavens, while the foundation, as well as the pediment above the entrance, suggest a horizontal orientation, extending toward the earth. It’s an architectural pattern that’s displayed in our own Meetinghouse, where the vertical columns suggest our orientation to the sky, to the cosmos, while the pediment above and the foundation beneath suggest a countervailing orientation to the earth. The starry sky above and the moral law within. The heavens above and the earth beneath. Those two basic orientations form the basis of all religion. But it might be truer to say that those orientations form the basis of what it means to be human. Still, they both lead toward wonder.
I’d like to invite your imaginations to extend along both of those pathways this morning. In these dog days of summer, beset by troubling news all around, it might be that we could all use a reminder of the wonder that is the world, and of the wonder that exists in the human heart. I’ll invite you along those pathways by sharing something of the wonder and awe I felt when our family visited the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida several weeks ago on our summer travels, an awe that many people revisited recently around the anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. But then I’ll share something of what I learned about a civil rights leader in the 1960’s, and his religious quest to direct attention not to the starry sky above, but to the moral law within, which is to say, toward the earth, toward the people of the earth, and toward the obligations we bear toward one another. There are lessons to be learned from each, the awe of the sky, and the awe of one another.
Let’s start with the Kennedy Space Center. We happened to arrive two days before the anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, though you wouldn’t have known it. It was business as usual at the Space Center. It was a blazing hot day, and the crowds were modest – at least compared to the theme parks an hour away in Orlando. I confess I wasn’t sure what to expect from the day – only that it seemed a worthy use of a day when traveling through Florida. I wasn’t alive in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, but the Shuttle program was a continually unfolding background story of my youth – the ongoing presence of astronauts in space, every few months. There was, of course, the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, which my entire middle school gathered to watch, and there was the optimism that somewhere out there, if only we could get there, there were inhabitable worlds beyond our imaginings. But for me, it was all a kind of background ambience, where the foreground was formed by more prosaic concerns – family events and neighborhood friends, school and church and all the rest. Outer space, I confess, is not, by and large, where my imagination ordinarily extends.
So I was surprised, during a recreation of the Apollo rocket launch, at just how moved I was by the whole experience. I felt a kind of child’s wonder looking at the control room, watching the news broadcasts, feeling the building shake as they demonstrated what it was like on that July day in 1969. And I felt dumbstruck when we were ushered into a hall that contained one of the Apollo rockets, not a replica, but one that had been built but never launched. My jaw went slack just staring at the immensity of it – you know, where you do that thing where your eyes go a little vacant and you start mouth-breathing…that was me. Standing there, I could suddenly, kind of, sort of, actually relate to the kooks who, wherever they are, believe it was all a TV stunt, a hoax, a camera trick, because who in their right mind could believe it’s possible to get a monstrosity like that into outer space?
But my incredulity kept growing the more I considered what a feat it was. Because who in their right mind could believe that it was possible not only to get it up there, but then to steer it? And who could believe that not only could you steer it, but that you could shed the pieces you didn’t need, and then pilot it 400,000 miles through outer space and then land it on a moving target? And then ok, fine, say you can comprehend all that, but then to believe that after walking on the moon, you can launch back into space and then figure out how to cross that 400,000 miles once again in order to crash land back onto the earth – it’s staggering to imagine. But then too, consider this: who could believe that any person would have the nerves to undergo the ordeal? I mean, I get a little nervous back in coach every time I board a commercial flight. You’d need nerves of steel, to say nothing of other important body parts, just to make it through lift off, let alone to make it back home alive. And not only that. You’d need scientific and mathematical skills that, from my limited vantage, feel nearly superhuman.
It’s not superhuman. Once upon a time, the unthinkable occurred, and the scientific community, together with industry and government, joined together to produce an impossible accomplishment. The scale of organization, of funding, and of public imagination needed to produce that event are staggering to consider. There aren’t many feel good moments in America these days, and there aren’t many sites that allow us to feel an unambiguous pride in the things we’ve accomplished, but the Kennedy Space Center is one of them. The more I learned that day, the more my mind returned to the words of the Psalmist, words we heard earlier: thou hast made us a little lower than the angels – not gods quite, not immortals, but nearly so. And I wondered: if it’s possible to accomplish this, then what isn’t it possible to do? The starry heavens, the vertical dimension of human life, has drawn us, and we’ve responded with unimaginable ingenuity.
But what of the horizontal dimension of life, what Kant gestured toward when he spoke of the moral law within? What about the earth, and other human beings, and not only human beings? That’s where the image on the cover of your bulletins becomes important. Days after visiting the Kennedy Space Center, I learned that none other than Ralph Abernathy, a Baptist preacher who had taken over the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after MLK’s assassination, was present at the Apollo 11 launch on July the 16th, 1969. He arrived with some 500 people, most of them poor, all of them black or brown. He brought several mules with him as well, seen in the foreground of the picture. Abernathy did so as a reminder of America’s unfulfilled promises at the end of Reconstruction, when the formerly enslaved were promised 40 acres and a mule in order to help rebuild their lives after the trauma of slavery. But it wasn’t a historical point he was making. It was a contemporary one, which continues to resonate fifty years later. What are we to make of a society that spends billions to put human beings on the moon, that organizes in such a superlative way to make the impossible happen, that dreams so spectacularly and that manages to make those dreams a reality – what are we to make of a society that can do all that, but that can’t or won’t address the basic human needs that exist everywhere around us – for food, for clothing, for shelter, for dignity and human rights? What are we to make of a culture so technically advanced, and so wealthy, as to undertake the exploration of outer space while neglecting the needs of the so called widows, orphans, and strangers living within that society?
Translated theologically, that society would be akin to the churches who concern themselves solely with the individual’s orientation to the heavens, to God, while neglecting their obligations to their neighbors. I don’t have to tell you that such churches, such theologies, abound in America, then as now. It’s not that they’re entirely wrong in that vertical orientation. Sometimes I admire them in their single minded focus. They’re addressing a part of what it means to be human. But in so doing, they neglect an entire dimension of human and social existence, the truth that we are creatures of the earth and for the earth. The space program would be the secular analogue of that vertical orientation. But Abernathy’s was a powerful reminder that for all of our technical expertise, for all of the evidence that we are but a little lower than the angels, we have too often failed to allow our horizontal imaginations and ambitions to be fully utilized.
To his credit, Abernathy wasn’t dualistic in his approach. It wasn’t an either/or that he proposed. The day prior to the launch, Abernathy met with NASA’s chief administrator, Tom Paine, and by all accounts, it was a cordial meeting. Abernathy admitted that he too was awed by the technical achievements of space exploration, but asked that NASA, and the United States government, might dedicate as much of their considerable expertise to addressing conditions of poverty in the United States. Paine, for his part, said that if he could substantially address the problems of hunger or overcrowding by aborting the mission the following day, he would. He affirmed Abernathy’s point, promised his support of future projects, and asked for prayers for the men who would be risking themselves the following day. Abernathy said he would, and the two parted on a conciliatory note.
I love that moment for a lot of reasons. I love it because it evidences a civil and thoughtful dialogue about projects and priorities in which both parties respected one another, and found ways to affirm the worth of each other’s position. I love it because it suggests that we need not treat what we ourselves value as a zero sum game, a dualistic either/or. But I love it because Abernathy brought a much needed reminder amidst the hoopla of the moment that something is askew when so much money, organization, and learning is dedicated to one impossible task, while other basic human needs go unmet. Now, you might say that one of those tasks, space travel, is rooted in the soluble realm of scientific knowledge, while the other, addressing poverty, is rooted in the insoluble muck of the human condition. Abernathy, and King before him, simply responded that shortages in housing, food, education and the like aren’t rooted in the fog of something called “the human condition,” but rather in a conscious decision about priorities, resources, and yes, about what a society truly values. What I love most about Abernathy’s elegant protest, though, is its simple reminder of the horizontal, earth bound dimensions of our humanity. Yes, an important vertical dimension exists for us, but there is also such a thing as moral and ethical norms, which we find not outside of us, in the sky, but inside of us, and upon the earth. That moral law binds us to one another and to the earth in a horizontal fashion. That too is what it means to be made a little lower than the angels, not gods, not immortals, but still graced with an unimaginable splendor.
You may wonder what this has to do with you, with us, with the world as it is in 2019. Those are fair questions. But here’s why I’m sharing this story with you. I’m sharing it with you, first of all, because the Apollo 11 story and all that followed it are a wonderful parable of what we’re capable of accomplishing as human beings. Today, there’s renewed interest in space exploration, and even now the ship that will take the first humans to Mars is being built on a site in New Orleans East. That vertical dimension still calls, and while I confess that I’m skeptical of the aims, I wish that project all the best. Today, however, I think it’s Abernathy’s voice that we need to heed. It’s the horizontal, earth based dimension that calls for our attention. None of the issues that Abernathy raised have gone away – if anything, they’ve been exacerbated by even greater inequality. But it’s also the earth itself that calls to us now, including how we address the problem of an overheated planet addicted to fossil fuels. The Apollo 11 mission and all that came after it demonstrate the ingenuity and creativity that belong to us all. If the political will could be mustered, if we had a visionary leader who summoned us to it, and if we had a little external competition – from China, say, or Russia – I have little doubt that it would be possible to meet the challenges of an overheated planet head on. Such a project begins in the imagination. It begins in pulpits and churches, in lecture halls and articles, and in policy proposals that initially seem to be on the margins. Who in 1930 or 1940 would have thought landing on the moon was a credible proposition? Maybe as few as there are now who find the prospect of turning the tide of climate change a credible, or even for some, a worthwhile proposition. But human beings are capable of impossible things. I would have us all reclaim our human possibilities, reclaiming that affirmation from the psalmist that we are but a little lower than the angels. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I continue to believe that’s true.
It’s true collectively. But I believe it’s true for each of you individually as well. In these discouraging days, when it seems there is little to be proud of, it’s worth remembering that you are but a little lower than the angels, capable of unbelievable splendor, to say nothing of unbelievable feats of courage, dignity, and ingenuity. It’s a poetic way of affirming not only your worth, but everything that you are capable of. Part of what makes you, and all of us, splendid has to do with the vertical dimension of our lives, the ways in which we’re oriented toward the heavens above. But part of it has to do with the horizontal dimension of our lives, and the way something – call it a moral law, call it the trace of an obligation, call it the plea of the human face, call it what you will – the way something connects us to one another, and to the planet itself. Don’t neglect either dimension. They’re both an important part of who you are. Still, given the ways our social fabric, to say nothing of our planet, are being eroded, perhaps now is the time to restore that horizontal dimension to its fullest.
Two things fill the mind with awe: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Two pathways toward wonder. Two pathways toward the immensity of the world, and the immensity of the human heart. Both remind us of the gifts we possess, of the strength that is ours, of what we might yet achieve. The sky will always have those who answer its call. I hope we will be among those who also respond to the call of the earth, and to the call of those to whom we are bound not by nation or race or religion, but by our common humanity. We are capable of extraordinary things, and a Baptist minister with a couple of mules and a ragtag collection of people help to remind us just how limitless those possibilities still are.
