Photons are excitements that are part of light energy emissions. The God who said, "Let there be photons, let there be excitements," reaches into our world and into our hearts still to stir people, still to energize them. We have to have different ways of speaking how this light gathers and forms: super-clusters, clusters, galaxies, chummy little gatherings in the sky that are only a few million miles apart, the Virgo cluster. In our neighborhood we can look out and see sixteen hundred galaxies. One hundred thousand billion stars in each some say. The Hubble telescope finds a new corner of the sky with billions of new galaxies and stars all beyond our imagination. Clusters, though. That’s how energy and light seem to be organized. And for us that light shines in little clusters of people who gather when someone is in crisis, when someone finds a reason to support someone else. So it’s the same God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who creates those clusters even now.

Not all out there is light. There are hypothetical creations called the "black hole." We can’t measure them but we can imagine that they are there where stars collapse. There is darkness of such weight that some hypothesize that a golf ball size black hole would weight what our globe does. Light cannot penetrate it. It’s that thick. And there are black holes in our human existence in this century of the Holocaust, tribal warfare, and all the rest that goes on. And yet the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," penetrates even those black holes.

Dark matter stands against the light of the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness." Dark matter. Here again we have to depend upon astrophysicists, their telescopes, their instruments, their mathematics, their calculations. But most of them will tell you that probably ninety percent of our universe is dark matter; mysterious, unknown to us. It’s against that, in the face of that that God says, "Let light shine out of darkness." And in the comparisons we are using throughout these images of astrophysics, light and the light that God shines into our hearts, we have to say just as there are black holes of collapsed light, so there is dark matter that remains beyond our knowledge. We like to speak of it as mystery. Something that we will never penetrate fully. The depth of the wisdom of God, Paul says, is of that character. And so many things we do, living in the shadows, seems to fall in that non-light dark matter.

And all these things: big bangs, speed of light, photons, super-clusters, black holes, dark matter; all these dramas get condensed in a very simple word of Paul to the Corinthians. The same God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone into our hearts where the black hole and the dark matter remain on a different scale, but to us they are very real.

Søren Kierkegaard, in the nineteenth century, once said that for God to create a universe out of nothing—the big bang explosion—it’s not much at all of a job for God. But for God to forgive someone who out of willful ignorance misuses others—God who can reach in and change the heart and bring light to it—that’s the real miracle. The story about God gets condensed then in Paul’s writings in the New Testament to the fact that he shines the light of the knowledge of God, of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.

Light can fall anywhere in the world and we can interpret all that light as a gift and creation of God. Good things happen in all kinds of places. But this text was written to people who believed in God in a particular way; indeed, that this God shone in the face of Jesus Christ. We live in a culture in which not everyone, including those who would be listening to a public television station, would have the light fall on them that way. The face of Jesus Christ is a benign and loving face, but there are plenty of people—some of you who are listening who are Jews or Muslims or non-believers—who have trouble with that face of Christ. The more I read the Gospels the less I think that’s Jesus’ fault. He was a Jew, he was a rabbi, he was a compassionate person. I think the problem is the darkness that surrounds the face of Christ thanks to the people who claim to follow him. So let’s just say what happens if that light falls on them in a new way so they can regard those who believe in other ways or in no ways at all as sharing in a light that’s important to them.

I said earlier that we have no imagination really for the billions and billions—the word I used because astrophysicists use it—points of light. For us the scale is very close. A little object in front of our eyes can cloud out all those universes. But if our own hearts are dark or our vision is obscure or our ignorance overwhelms, our despair hurts, we crave that light. And so we take the power of that God and watch what happens when His power reaches us. We don’t really look for a new big bang. We’re in the original one, all the energy and light we have. We listen for the still, small voice. We’re not interested so much in: Is God big enough to be further than the most distant star or universe or other universes? We’re interested in whether this God can reach into the nearness of our own heart. And we find this God here.

Those photons of excitement occur, I think, in the conversation of people in whom the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ has reached. The little clusters of neighbors who support each other are really more important to us in our day to day doings than to speculate about super-clusters of the galaxies. Black holes. We’ll never be in one. It would take too many billions of years before our universe, our world, our star collapses into one. And the dark matter will remain dark for us though science may push back some of the boundaries and the horizons and throw light on and in that darkness.

But the glory of God is known. In all those Biblical stories where Moses faces a light in the bush that is not consumed and is then given a mission; Elijah and the chariot of fire; the pillar of light that guides the children of Israel; the stories that the Christian world knows when on a night the skies opened and the glory of God shone in the face, they’re told, of a baby. It’s dark upon the Earth on Good Friday, but all of the Easter stories find people looking fully at glory. Nowadays, in many churches, stained glass windows will allow light to fall through the face of Jesus Christ and that’s beautiful. And we hear it in wonderful songs. What matters most is whether it’s reflected in a way of life in which that light is passed on into a world where there is darkness, but where, again as Scriptures say, the darkness has not overcome, the light shines.

Martin Marty: I think through other people, like parents who tell you about it. I grew up in depression country and in a world that I now read in books was supposed to be a world of grayness, drabness, dryness. Yet I compare with kids that I grew up with, including a brother and a sister, and we find that Christmas Eve was great fun and Easter morning was great fun. We had stories connecting them. I would always go back to that. But it also comes to me still through a good sermon—I like to hear a good sermon—music and art. But most of all, I think, when I see it in generous people.

Talbot: You talk about growing up in a depression time. Westpoint, Nebraska, where you were born. What were those individuals and institutions early in your life that shaped your religious sensibility today?

Marty: As I was saying in the message about the word "clustering," I think clustering was important. I remember a flood in 1937 when after church the minister had us take an offering for the people of Louisville, Kentucky. I later married somebody who had been in that flood. I remember after church he held up the collection plate full of dollar bills. A dollar bill would be like one hundred and fifty today to those people. They clustered. They needed each other. Nobody went hungry and yet there are people who would have had it not been for that. Music. My father was a church organist and he taught us all the good stuff and the literature that went with it. A caring mother. And then all of these people in a small town who knew each other and they knew how rough things were and had to create a world of meaning and light.

Talbot: What was that epiphanous moment, if it could be described that way, for you when you made the decision to go into ministry?

Marty: I didn’t have one moment. I had a lot of little lights go on. I would say the most important things in life come through billions of little particulars. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I thought I wanted to be an artist but I wasn’t good at that. I love history and I got into that. I had good experiences in the church life as a child. I went to prep school and I think the nearest I came to an epiphany was when I tried out theological school and they assigned us field work. I was at a TB sanitarium in St. Louis where in a barbaric system they had a scale of A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4. If there was a 4 above somebody’s bed it meant that they would be dead next week. Twenty or thirty of us would go on a big bus out there every week—a dreary thought on a Friday afternoon. But we would come back singing, singing, singing. We were glad that we had been involved in these lives. And I think that reinforced for me the fact that all these stories, the art, the music, the literature, the history comes alive in the way it gets told in the lives of these people that I had never known before and never heard of again.

Talbot: You say the story is getting told in the lives of these people. You could be called the grand marshall of keeping the language of faith alive, the chronicler of emerging issues and trends in religion and American culture. You say in the forward of a just published book, Hidden Treasures: Searching for God in Modern Culture by Jim Wall of Christian Century magazine, that it’s easier to get a hearing for things of the spirit in public media or secular university today than in previous decades. Why do you suppose that is?

Marty: When I say that I think I’m probably counter-trend because a lot of people think that the Word is all disappearing, but I think it’s the opposite. In the middle of this century you could get a hearing for one voice: men, Protestant men, men who ran the world of America. That has dwindled or taken it’s place among all the others. But if you take all the voices that come out of Latino and Hispanic America, take the voices of the Gospel in the choirs on public space, public television—you can’t keep gospel music out of there, it’s all over the place. You go to fashionable book stores in fashionable cities and they may be down on historic religion very often and yet there will be a big section called "Spiritual, Metaphysical, Occult, New Religion, Holistic, etc." All these point to the kinds of hungers. I think that we carry some habits that say that these are things that you don’t talk about in such places. We are finding out that if you don’t, people will talk about them at some other level. I think that we’re having to listen to the voice of the people and it is getting easier.

Talbot: You say all these pointed to certain hungers. How does that reality relate to the project that you direct— the Public Religion Project—to issues of public ministry?

Marty: The Public Religion Project I would say trades upon the degree of the vitality of private religion. That is, public religion is not political religion, though it may have a bearing on politics. Public to me is what goes on in the gallery, in the town meeting, on the campus, in conversation, wherever people take it out of the meditation chamber into the public zone and have it reckoned with, where different kinds of people come together and bounce off each other. Some of that is politics, some of that is media, some of that is business, some of that is education, or wherever. All that is void and empty if it doesn’t come from impassioned hearts.

I always like to quote a French thinker from early in this century who once said, "Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics." I have to tell people that he didn’t mean mysticism, he meant the passion of the heart seeking God or reached by God. And by politics he didn’t just mean the ballot box. He meant the word which comes from polis, the human city and the concern for the city. So I’m interested in that kind of spirituality that moves from the quiet chamber into the public zone and I’m commissioned these years with a three year grant from the Pew Charitable Trust to be as noisy as possible about religion going public.

Talbot: You are also engaged in a wonderful series of books with your son, Micah Marty. Tell us about the most recent one.

Marty: Yes. He is a photographer in black and white, a landscape photographer. I write meditations to face a page a day in books called The Promise of Winter and, before that, Our Hope for Years to Come. It’s a wonderful collaboration. I learn a lot from it.