The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.

Psalm 19:1-3

Can you bind the chains^[b] of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
³² Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons^[c]
or lead out the Bear^[d] with its cubs?
³³ Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s^[e] dominion over the earth?

³⁴ “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
³⁵ Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
³⁶ Who gives the ibis wisdom^[f]
or gives the rooster understanding?^[g]
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
³⁸ when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?

Job 38:31-38

To understand Psalm 19, I imagine a musician from the Jerusalem Temple walking outside on a starry night, in search of inspiration. It’s the beginning of a new moon, the best time to see all the stars. A full moon is 400,000 times brighter than the Milky Way. We can only see 300 stars with the naked eye at full moon, but at new moon, we can see nearly 3000 stars. It’s near midnight, so the musician gets the full panorama as he lies on the ground at the Mount of Olives summit. The night is cool, humidity is low, and the breeze light, with no haze. A little wind makes the stars twinkle and blur, but tonight the light is steady and bright.

As his eye finds Pleiades and Orion, wonder overtakes him and words pour in.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.

Since we live in Maine, we can relate to this experience, staying up late to watch a meteor shower or an eclipse turning the moon red. The experience opens the soul, reminding us that the universe is vaster than our town, our worries, or headlines. We need this injection of awe into our spiritual bloodstream.

But we see something different than the Psalmist, even as we gaze at the same sky. Our bright lights and pollution create a veil that obscures the stars of our galaxy into a dim band rather than a bright belt. We are also seeing with different eyes. The Psalmist saw helpful lights placed by God in the dome of the sky, showing us the changing seasons and glory of the divine. We see distant suns, with the closest, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away. These 40 trillion miles would take our fastest spaceships 10,000 years to travel.

I look into the skies and remember being five years-old and watching Neil Armstrong hop down onto the lunar surface, saying, “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” Through a telescope, I see things the Psalmist didn’t dream of, from the rings of Saturn to brilliant nebulas. From Carl Sagan, I learned there are billions and billions of galaxies. I watched Star Trek and dreamed of boldly going to where no one had gone before. Science class taught me the Big Bang Theory of the universe’s origin, where the Psalmist imagined God doing the work in seven days. (Well, six plus a day off.)

We see the same skies as the ancients, but we view them through different eyes. Knowing what science has taught us might increase our wonder of the universe as more expansive than the Psalmist. But the Psalmist had a clear sense that this was all done by God-for us, to show the glory of God. The night sky had no other purpose. We look up and wonder if there are other life forms. Instead of seeing God’s glory, we wonder if we matter to God at all. Are we just pointlessly orbiting one little sun, and why would God, if there is a God, bother?

As science has advanced and explained more of our natural world, religious people fear these discoveries will suck all the glory out of the universe. What space is left for God as science explains reality? My goal is to show that religion and science need to become closer allies, now more than ever, as our planet is undergoing a climate emergency that threatens our way of life. To do so, each side will have to have some humility, examine some of our underlying ideology and prejudice, and be willing to learn from each other and respect what we each bring to the table.

What went wrong between science and religion? People always go back to Galileo, who was persecuted by the Church. Why was his ingenious telescope viewed as a threat to truth? The worldview in the early 1600s was derived from ancient Greek philosophy. The earth was viewed as the human sphere of imperfection, decay, and impermanence while the heavens were the divine sphere of perfection, eternity and permanency. The moon was the dividing line between the two spheres. When Galileo looked through the telescope and described the lunar surface as craters and mountains of barren rock, it seemed more like Hell than Heaven. If it wasn’t more perfect, the whole worldview comes apart.

Why didn’t the church simply say, “That’s fascinating, let’s get to work and revise our worldview?” Let’s be honest, few people change their minds given new facts. The hierarchy of the heavens over earth justified earthly hierarchies. Kings ruled by divine right, Lords had authority in the Feudal order from the King, and serfs should know their place. A simple spyglass threw the whole system in doubt.

Science and religion have struggled with each other ever since, but the real culprit was never religion versus science — it was power, defending itself against truth that threatened it. Four hundred years ago, it was religious power afraid of what the telescope revealed. Today the threat runs the other way: political power is coming after science itself. In the current US political environment nearly 8,000 science grants were eliminated, and 10,000 scientists are out of government agencies. They study weather, disease, and climate change — leaving us less prepared for Ebola outbreaks and screwworm infestations in cattle, just the early signs of a much larger suffering ahead. People of faith should recognize this peril. This time, we need to be partners with science on the side of truth, not on the side of power that fears it.

Psalm 19 provides the framework of my hope for religion and science to work together. The first six verses poetically convey the theological purpose of nature. Nature is not only beautiful to gaze upon but teaches us about the nature of God. The Psalmist doesn’t just tell us to look at nature and praise God for the beauty of the earth. Nature is the speaker. Heavens declare, skies proclaim, the created order has voice. If we tune our ear to listen to creation, it reveals wisdom to us.

Science is one way we tune in to what nature is telling us. Science is a method of exploring the natural world through observation, testing and verification. What we learn is not only helpful for growing more food, curing cancer or planning a picnic. Science can be deeply spiritual, even mystical.

Just as science can help religion understand the created world, and give us practical and spiritual wisdom, religion can aid science with a moral foundation. Science doesn’t always lead us towards the good. Science can be a tool that creates chemicals that pollute the earth, biological and nuclear weapons of destruction. When science doesn’t respect the agency and limits of nature, it threatens the very foundation of life on earth. Science needs moral guidance from somewhere outside itself.

Psalm 19 has something to say. After six verses of the glories proclaimed by the skies, the next six verses shift:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
making wise the simple.
⁸ The precepts of the Lord are right,
giving joy to the heart.

If we want to be wise and well-rounded, we must absorb both the book of nature and the book of scriptures. I see them as two books with one source.



The book of Job helps us understand why faith and science must not be split apart. Job goes through great suffering. A storm destroys his home, kills his family, he is stricken with boils on his body, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. For 36 chapters, Job questions God’s fairness and argues with his friends who think he deserved this somehow, arguing everything happens for a reason. In chapters 38-41 God answers in a surprising way, by speaking poetically about nature.

I was delighted Thursday night to hear environmental activist Bill McKibben speak in Camden, when he quoted this very text. He said Job contains some of the best nature poetry ever written. McKibben pointed at something Job already knew and the Psalms already felt: hope, when life is going poorly, comes from looking beyond ourselves. The universe calls us to wonder far beyond us, and to remember we are a small part of it; small but still loved. That’s a call to both faith and science: awe and humility, together. God’s answer to Job isn’t an explanation. It’s an invitation back outside, under the starry skies. We are not the owners of this universe. It was never only here for our consumption. We have a sacred responsibility to respect all life around us.

So, this week, I’m asking you to do something simple: go outside after dark. Look up. And ask the question that started this whole summer — what if we got it right? What if the heavens are still declaring, and we stop long enough to listen? That’s not just a question for a sermon. It’s a question for how we vote, consume, and teach our children to wonder. Go outside this week. Look up. And wonder again.