A few weeks ago, it was reported that scientists have discovered a black hole the size of 10 billion suns, out there in a galaxy far, far away. 

 

This news gave me a great deal of pause.

 

Just this week, the Post reports there’s a black hole the size of four million of our suns at the center of our galaxy[1].  That’s far smaller than the 10 billion-sun black hole, but the attention-catching essence of the whole thing is certainly still there. 

 

I go around in my day-to-day life thinking that the earth itself is pretty large.  Heck, on a day with a lot of errands I can go around thinking that Montgomery County is pretty large.  Well, I am way wrong, because the Earth is nothing compared to the sun it rotates around. 

 

The Sun, our Sun, weighs 333,000 times more than the Earth.  If you lined up 109 Earths, you would span the diameter of the Sun.  If you wanted to fill the Sun up with Earths, say if the Sun were hollow and needed filling, you would need 1.3 million Earths to fill up our Sun[2].

 

So, in fact, Montgomery County is not all that big.  The Earth is not all that big.  What’s big, what’s really big, is the Sun.  And yet, there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy that is the size of four million of our Suns.  And that is nothing compared to the size of the black holes that seem to be at the center of some other galaxies out there.  Are you able to even conceive of a billion of anything?  A billion suns?  Ten billion suns?

 

I find this information sort of breathtaking.  Literally.  I feel like I can’t breathe, thinking about how big those black holes are.

 

Because, really, black holes are fascinating and all, but they don’t seem to be the most important thing the universe has to offer.  And the Milky Way is important and all, at least to us, but it’s only one galaxy.  Apparently in 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe.[3] There’s that billion thing again.  There’s that breathless feeling again.

 

So we’ve got this giant thing of relatively little bearing in the middle of just tiny one neighborhood of the Universe.  It’s kind of like reporting to Zimbabwe that there’s a really, really big pothole in Laytonsville. 

 

And all of this points to one thing, if you ask me:

 

We human beings are really, really small in the grand scale of things.

 

Really, really small.  Teensy.  All the things we are, and all the things we do.  Tiny, in comparison to the rest of the universe.

 

And because we are so small, it is possible…just possible…that we are equally unimportant. 

 

All the things we wrap our lives around.  All our accomplishments and all our failures.  All our hurts and all our joys.  All our fears and all of our comforts.  All of our striving and all of our worry. 

 

Small.  And maybe, by definition, Not.  Very.  Important.

 

This is really what takes my breath away, I fear, when I hear about the humongous black hole.  How unimportant I must be, because I am so small.

 

Our God Indra, from the story earlier, found himself in a similar situation, didn’t he?  Having somewhat accidentally realized that he was the king of the gods, Indra came to understand that being king was a very important role and as the king, he was a very important figure in his world.  Knowing himself to be at the center of the world, Indra began to act accordingly.  He called upon a master builder, Vitrakama, to begin working on his masterpiece, a palace fit to house a king such as himself.  The problem was, Indra became so enmeshed in what he was creating - since he knew how important he was and by extension how important his work and surroundings were – he became so enmeshed that he couldn’t stop.  

 

Indra couldn’t stop imagining or designing, and couldn’t stop making Vitrakama build and construct.  The results were glorious, of course, as you might imagine, but soon the project begged the question of perspective, the question of priorities.  Sure, Indra was the king of all the gods.  But was it therefore right for the master builder Vitrakama to spend the rest of his unlimited days building this castle, doing nothing else with his time or talents, until the end of time itself?  Was Indra using himself to the greatest advantage, spending his days building this castle?

 

At that point in the story, the real question became, How important is the work of building this castle, even for the very important king of all the gods?  Vitrakama didn’t ask this real question when he approached Brahma, the father of all – he just wanted off the project.  But Brahma knew what was needed.  What was needed was for Indra to regain the proper perspective, for Indra to see his proper place in the universe.  And so it was.

 

We here in the real world need this correction from time to time as well.  We get so busy in our lives, busy building up our little castles.  We worry our worries, and work hard, and we try to get more control over things, and we order our existences as best we can according to what we think is most essential.  We sweep others into our notions of what matters and what is most important, or other people sweep us into their notions – it hardly matters which way it goes. 

 

And then, every once in a while, we get the news:  There is a black hole in the universe the size of ten billion suns.  In other words, the stuff we do, the stuff we are, is tiny.  Tiny.  And that fact begs the question of whether what we do, whether what we are, matters at all.

 

This is the conundrum that Indra faces as well.  After being shown by the blue and black boy how very small even he is in the grand sweep of history, Indra is thrown for a loop. He sees that he is very little, one of a multitude, and he equates his newly discovered stature with insignificance.  In answer to the question, if I am small, then do I matter, Indra’s knee jerk response is “no.”  Something as small, as common, as Indra now knows himself to be, cannot matter, Indra decides.  And so he leaves his now apparently useless work behind and sits at the lotus feet of Brahma to think about things for a while.

 

This story reminds me of the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible.  You may be familiar with it, or at least familiar with the culturally adopted notion that to be like Job is to have misfortune heaped upon you, without cause.    

 

Job does, indeed, suffer.  He is a good person whose riches are lost, whose reputation is ruined, whose children are killed, who experiences terrible diseases.  He is shunned by society and sets himself up to live on a pile of ashes, holding a piece of pottery with which to scrape at his sores.  All this happens in the first two pages of the book of Job. 

 

The next forty pages, almost the whole rest of the book, are spent in Job’s various efforts to figure out how all this could have happened to him, he who was a good man, undeserving of suffering.

 

Job has annoying friends who visit him and tell him what he must have done wrong to deserve this turn of events.  Maybe he secretly sinned.  Maybe he wasn’t faithful enough, despite outward appearances.  Maybe this.  Maybe that. 

 

Job himself joins in the pity party.  Sometimes he is upset.  Lots of times he is angry.  He beseeches God to tell him what he did wrong.  He rails against a God who would allow something like this to happen.  He demands answers to his questions, and the greatest question of all is the same one that Indra faces, the same one that we face when we think on the black hole that is so much larger than we can imagine.  The question Job demands an answer to is this:

 

Do we matter?  Are we important?

 

Job needs correcting in the same way Indra does.  Which is to say that Job needs a righting of perspective.  When God finally does talk to Job, after 40 pages of lament and questions, God does not explain anything about what’s been going on with Job.  God doesn’t engage in any of the arguments that Job and his friends have presented.  Instead, a rather sarcastic God reveals to Job the way the world actually works:

 

Where were you, when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements – surely you know!  On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

…Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place…?

…Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?  Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?  Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?  Declare, if you know all this.[4]

This is just a small sample of how God responds to Job; God goes on in similar vein for five pages, outlining all the parts of the universe that were built by God and which exist with no knowledge or understanding on the part of Job. 

 

And by the end of the speech, Job also goes to sit at the lotus feet of Brahma, so to speak, and he says to God, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”[5]  Job gets it; he learns that he is small, that he and all his suffering are a very tiny piece of a vast universe.

 

So both Job and Indra come to understand how small they are in the larger scope of things.  But neither of their stories end there, and that’s good for us, because our question has not been answered.  We know, like Indra and Job know, that we are small.  But we still do not know if we matter, if we are important, in the midst of all of our tiny-ness. 

 

Well, for Job, after this conversation God turned everything around, and I guess that answers his question of whether he matters in a world where his distress was so inconsequential to the grand scheme of things.  At the end of the story, God intervenes and blesses Job, restoring his health and his stature and his riches, his family, his honor.  God blesses the latter days of Job more than his beginning, and bestows upon him the sort of life that Job thought he deserved, that many of us think we deserve, and Job died old and full of days.[6] 

 

After all, this is the same God that we see through the rest of the Bible, the God who knows all the sparrows of the sky and has numbered all the hairs upon your head[7].  The Bible tells us that God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, personally, and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made[8].  Small or not, we matter.  The message throughout the Bible is that, yes, we are small; the message is equally that God loves us, and that we belong.  We belong, tiny creatures in this vast universe of ours, where there are black holes the size of ten billion suns.

 

Lord Indra’s story tells us something, too.  For when the mentor god looked for Indra and went to the lotus feet of Brahma where Indra sat in meditation, the mentor god revealed an answer to the question of our mattering as well. 

 

“Now you have learned,” the mentor god says to Indra, “that you are but one Indra of the numberless Indras in the dream of Vishnu, in the visioning of Brahma; and you have learned too that you are past the peak of divine splendor and power of the young god who dropped his lightning bolt on the monster and saved the world.” 

 

“But lord, the world is saved.”

 

“You are a wiser god, you are deeper god, you are a god of greater understanding than the young god who looked at his lightning bolts and wondered what they were.  You are the god this world needs now.  Be who you are.”

 

Folks, these stories tell us the same thing.  They tell us not to be distracted by false notions of our own grandeur, and they tell us not to be thrown off when we learn that we are tiny.  In fact, the stories tell us that our power has nothing to do with our size, because in a universe this fearfully and wonderfully made we human beings are always going to be just a small part of the whole. 

 

But for all of us, in the realm we can see and touch and experience day to day, not far away in a giant black hole but here, in the world we know, we are gods.  We are the very creatures that our worlds need now.  We are loved, we are seen, we belong in ways that we will never fully understand, and we are wiser than we were. 

 

And so I tell you what the mentor god told Indra, all those many years ago:  Be who you are, small as you may in fact be.  We need you to be who you are.  Be who you are.

 

Amen.