Astronomy Lessons at Roselawn Cemetery

After our son's jazz band concert on Tuesday evening, we walked outside on a clear, warm evening. Our friends, Craig and Mari, looked up at the sky and invited us to look through their telescope at Jupiter, which was bright in the clear night sky.

So naturally we went to Roselawn Cemetery. We got a little distance from the city lights so we could better see Jupiter. This image is a pretty good representation of what we saw. Pretty amazing! We saw Jupiter with its four biggest moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Craig shared with us how amazed he was to think of Galileo seeing basically this same sight 400 years ago. From his observations and curiosity over time, Galileo named the moons as he also noticed they revolved around Jupiter. Of course, Galileo's discovery that the moons revolved around Jupiter rather than around Earth shocked some people. Displacing Earth from the center of the universe was threatening to powerful church leaders, and of course led to judgment of Galileo because of their theological stuckness.

This leads me in Holy Week once again to remember that Jesus came to redeem people like us - people who make mistakes and get stuck in outdated worldviews. Jesus came to take on all that we experience and bring us to a new life marked by love (and that shift is hard for us). Jesus came to free us for life as we really experience it, including new observations. That means we can be curious (like Galileo or Jane Goodall or like any child you know) and ask questions. We can ask what those dots are next to Jupiter. We can watch the dots move over time and observe something that may surprise us as we learn they are Jupiter's moons. We can be open to new awareness, new understanding, and new perspectives. We can also be open to how things change over time.

On the way home from our astronomy lesson at Roselawn Cemetery, Anna and I heard Dr. Amy-Jill Levine on MPR speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Levine professed to being a Jewish woman whose heart is filled with her own faith but who finds the message of Jesus about the kingdom of heaven to be significant and compelling. Her openness and curiosity are examples for me that we are actually making strides in understanding faith with greater openness. It is just that we are painfully slow as we zigzag with steps forward, sideways, backward, and forward again. I am ready for more lessons this week as we travel through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday toward Easter.

If you want to hear Levine's talk, you can find it here: Dr. Amy-Jill Levine