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In the late 1970s, NASA was preparing the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft to explore the outer planets and then continue drifting into interstellar space.
A few visionaries led by Carl Sagan proposed including a message from humanity: a kind of cosmic greeting card, for any intelligent life that might one day find these probes.
NASA agreed. So a small committee of artists, scientists, linguists, and anthropologists designed what became known as the Golden Record: literally a gold-plated copper phonograph attached to each spacecraft, built to last a billion years. They gathered on it 115 images of mountains, rivers, city skylines, human faces, mathematical diagrams, chemical structures. They put on 90 minutes of sounds like wind, rain, thunder, laughter, a baby’s cry, a kiss, the heartbeat of a human being. Music was added from every corner of the globe: Bach, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, Peruvian panpipes, Senegalese drums, Navajo chants, Azerbaijani folk songs, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” It had greetings from fifty-five languages, and a recorded message from President Jimmy Carter.
On the cover was a diagram showing how to play the record and where to find us, earth, in the galaxy.
The committee wanted to express not just facts, but our humanity: our art, our curiosity, our capacity for beauty and wonder. Carl Sagan called it “a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean.”
In 2012 Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018 both carrying with them a portrait of who we were at the end of the 20th century.
Almost. Because there’s nothing on it about God. Not a prayer. Not a psalm. Not a whisper of faith. And I wonder about that. The wisdom of it, really. I mean, to start, it seems to me that if there is a God of all things, then that would include whatever intelligent life form found the Golden Record. And if they were smart enough to translate the phonograph, then they were smart enough to understand the presence of a living God.
That said, I also recognize that it may just have been easier to ignore religion, and the God it orients around.
I get that.
Sometimes even for those of us who do religion as a profession, it’s hard to articulate exactly how to express the reality of our living God.
Sometimes that sense of the divine, that pulse of love, that quiet presence we feel deep in our soul, slips through our fingers when we try to put it into words. It becomes tangled in language, distorted by doctrine, and suddenly it feels safer, maybe even easier, to leave the topic unspoken. God is just too big to get our minds around.
Which is precisely why God came to us as Jesus. Because truth, real truth, human truth isn’t stored in data or defined by diagrams or even articulated in sacred texts. It is personal. It is person to person, in conversation, or shall I say in a dance that swings between wisdom and hope.
When I look back on my life, the greatest wisdom I’ve received has never come from a book or a theory.
It’s come from people: my parents who taught by example; mentors like Bob McCauley from AmeriCares and Ron Weinberg from my M&A days; people who guided me when I didn’t know what I was doing. And then there was Mrs. Van Zant, my high-school humanities teacher, who sparked my curiosity, and planted seeds of Christianity through the works of Dostoyevsky and CS Lewis. (sneaky Christian sabotage in a public school… and she was an Episcopalian).
These people are, for me, personal repositories of wisdom: human granaries filled faithfully and courageously with lessons on how to be human in a cosmos made by the living God.
But here’s something I’ve only recently begun to realize: while these folks have been store houses of wisdom for me, I was storing something for them – hope.
We forget sometimes that we are someone else’s hope. That’s how God designed grace to flow across time and over the generations: to move incarnationally, from one person to another, in a way that could never be imprinted upon a Golden Record.
It is a dance, wisdom and hope, that fell out of step in the Judean desert 2000 years ago. John the Baptist with his invitation: “You brood of vipers.” Probably not the best… but words that did express urgency over the crisis that fractured his community fueling: Chaos. Division. Suspicion. Blame.
Within that Jewish world there were factions upon factions: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots. The only thing they agreed upon was that they were out of relationship with God. What they didn’t agree upon was what to write on the Golden Record, that is to say how to live the dance of wisdom and hope in a way that was in tune with the cosmos composed by God.
Each group thought they were living it right, and the other group was living it wrong. John told them that they all had it wrong; that they all needed to repent, which literally means to turn around… a little dosey-doe back to God. This wasn’t about guilt or shame, but clarity. It was about separating the wheat from the chaff, the true from the false, the substantial from the vapid.
The threshing floor John spoke of was a communal space, the place where the people gathered to winnow, to discern what would be kept and what they should let blow away. The grain stored was that which would bless the community across time.
It’s a powerful image: the granary as the repository of what matters most, the place where the best of what we’ve learned and lived, is stored for the next generation: wisdom and hope.
Jesus steps on to that threshing floor and in doing so makes God personal. When He comes to be baptized, He brings with Him the new dance of wisdom and hope. He doesn’t come to separate good from bad, insiders from outsiders. He comes to reveal that the real grain of God’s kingdom is relationship itself: wisdom articulated and hope embodied.
He shows us that wisdom and hope aren’t a set of data points or a list of rules; only a person modeled for us by Jesus. For he said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…” (Jn 14:12)
Advent is the season of longing for this person, Jesus. Longing for his presence in the world. It is also a time to let this longing be fulfilled within our own lives.
While Advent is full of concerts, pageants, parties, deadlines, beneath it runs a deeper current, a call to slow down, to listen, to wait for the One who is coming… Hope anticipated, but also hope embodied.
This is a season of remembering that God’s message doesn’t arrive as an email blast but as a baby, carried in the arms of ordinary people.
That’s why the Church asks us in Advent to pay attention to the relationships that bring God’s wisdom and hold God’s hope.
My invitation to you this Advent is to find someone whose story you don’t yet know, and ask them to share it with you. Listen, then, for God’s wisdom. Wonder why God brought this unique human being into existence, and what from their lives have they winnowed, and what has settled on to the threshing floor? Then pick that up, that grain, and store it in the granary of your heart. In doing so, whether they see it or not, whether you even want to be it or not, you have become a vessel of hope. That’s how God designed grace to flow across time and over the generations: to move incarnationally, from person to person.
That is how we return to the dance tuned to the music that plays throughout creation.. all of creation, even in the lives of those intelligent beings who find and decipher the Golden Record.
And if they do so, and then decide to travel to this blue-green orb hanging in the Milky Way and spinning around the star called the Sun, when they land they find harmony amongst humanity. They find us dancing together.
That is what I long for. Maybe that is what you long for as well.
If so, share your wisdom by living the wisdom of Jesus. If so, be the hope, by seeing the hope of Jesus in people around you.
This is the season, Advent, when we turn around; when we pay attention to the beat of creation; and then dosey-doe back into step with the Living God.