Our Burning Giver of Life

Reflections on the Sun and the Wrath of God

“For the Lord God is a sun and shield” – Psalm 84:11

Earlier this week my friend sent me an video from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) - a space telescope with cameras always pointed toward the sun. The video showed the sun belching a huge wave of hot plasma – larger than its circumference – rapidly into space. A great eruption on its surface, like the detonation of a bomb.

This so called “coronal mass ejection” turns out to be a relatively common event on the sun; during solar maximum it can happen multiple times a day. The sun, on its surface, is actually a quite terrifying, violent place. A place where explosions are normal, boiling is the default, and where your skin would vaporize so fast your nerves wouldn’t even have time to respond. 

Even here on earth, 93 million miles away, under the protective blanket of atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetic field, we dare not look directly at it but for a glance, or our eyes will fry. We cover our skin, lest it burns purple, or turns cancerous black and white. Even here, a large coronal mass ejection can disrupt our electric grid, plunge us into the dark.

Sometimes, I think, we view God like the surface of the sun. A God of fire and wrath, of death and destruction, an all powerful being to be feared. A God who, if we anger him too much, will scorch us with the flames of hell, vaporize us before our nerves have time to react. 

Better, we think, to hope it’s just not true. Better to avoid its glare by turning away. Take shelter elsewhere. Duck inside, and cover your eyes.

And to some extent, this view makes sense. Is it not God, the scriptures say, that rained down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, wiping these cities from the face of the earth? Is it not God who, in the final revelation, threatens devouring fire from heaven, a fiery lake of burning sulfur to torment day and night forever? 

I recall the words of the prophet Nahum: “the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath… the mountains quake before him, and the hills melt away. The earth trembles at his presence… His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him.” 

I look around me and see the pain, wickedness, terror, and destruction in the world. I see devastating storms, blistering evils, cancers of the heart. And I too tremor. I too want to duck inside. 

And yet, the surface of the sun is not its core. What we see is not its heart. 

By mapping its rumblings (a fascinating field called helioseismology), capturing neutrinos, and improving our computer models and understanding of nuclear reactions, astronomers have been able to start to look beneath the sun’s surface, and to glance, if indirectly, the fiery furnace of its core.  

At one level, our models suggest the inside the sun is even more terrifying: chaotic random motions of photons and particles, and swirling convection cycles pumping energy towards its surface. And deep in its center, a 27 million degree furnace, particles flying around any which way, slamming into each other, compressed under pressures greater than 10 billion adult elephants standing on your head.  

Yet here, in this center, occurs a delicate dance, the source of all energy that makes life possible. Look closely. 

Deep in that fiery core, the smallest particles – not even atoms, but protons, the tiny core pieces of atoms – meet essentially at random. Despite the extreme temperatures and pressures, their repulsive electromagnetic force should keep them from ever touching. But a strange quantum property of microscopic particles – that particles exist not just in one place, but smear out into little waves – means they can touch, like a brushing of fingers, a grabbing of hands at the brink of mount doom. 

Many of these little interactions fall apart, but sometimes, before they do, they find another. And if so, something crazy: mutually supported, they are able to form a stronger bond, and in that bond, in a sense, relax. These tiny particles, 10^-27 kilograms, need to carry just a tiny tiny bit less energy being together. Like dropping your bag after a long hike, a little of their mass is released as energy, a mere 4 picojoules per reaction, 2 hundred thousandths of the energy required to lift a mosquito. 

Yet the collective sum of these tiniest interactions, one, two protons at a time, is that 46 aircraft carriers – two more than the entire world’s fleet – of atomic backpacks are converted to energy every second: from this slightest shift in the slightest of particles, enough energy to power our entire solar system, our entire planet, our entire lives. 

When people generate energy, we tend to work on large scales. Great coal power plants, large hydroelectric dams. I remember driving on the highway past a huge field filled with wind turbines, while passing an oversized rig, 100 feet long transporting just a single blade for another. The pistons pumping in my engine, I was struck by the ways we, humans, are people of the large, the mechanical, the regular repeating pattern. We like structure, clarity – things bright, and obvious. We like to see and be seen. 

But for all its radiance, that doesn’t seem to be the inner way of the sun. All the coal on our planet, it turns out, couldn’t power the sun for even a second. Even with a million earth’s worth of fuel, a coal powered sun would have burnt itself out long before the first life occurred on our planet. No, the sun deals not in large pumping pistons, but in the brushing of subatomic fingertips, not in megawatts and horsepower, but in breaths of a mosquito.

The prophet Elijah, afraid for his life, and hiding in a cave on Mount Horeb, experienced God’s presence. A great storm, an earthquake, and a fire all pass by. But the Lord, the scriptures say, was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire. But after the fire came a gentle whisper. It was in hearing the whisper Elijah pulled his cloak over his face – in the whisper Elijah encountered God.

For all my wishes otherwise, God, I begin to see, is more subtle. His thoughts are not my thoughts, nor his ways my ways. 

But that doesn’t make them not good.

In Isaiah 49 God’s people have reached a point of despair. “The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me” they cry. In our modern world, does it not often look the same? God is dead, the modern prophets say. And yet, the scriptures record God responding to their cry. “Can a mother forget a baby at her breast?” God asks. “Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” 

Engraved on His hands?! Painful, permanent, ever in His sight. Indeed, quaking Nahum, in speaking of God’s wrath, writes in the very next sentence “The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him.”

I’m reminded that though we can’t look at the sun, we experience it’s warmth. Though we live far separated from this terrifying being, it feeds us, and blesses us. It’s a giver of life, light, beauty, shifting afternoon rays through a green leafy tree. Yes, I must acknowledge, we need the sun. Directly or indirectly, everything from our entire electric grid to a tiny opening blossom depend upon its light. 

“Lift up your eyes and look around!” Isaiah records God saying. “After the suffering of their soul, [my follower] will see the light of life and be satisfied.”