Homily for Tuesday, 10 February 2015– Memorial of St. Scholastica

Tuesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Genesis 1:20-2:4a; Psalm 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Mark 7:1-13

If we were to write a book or make a movie about our first reading today, could we not call it something like, “God Saw How Good it Was: Part 2”? Yesterday we heard Part 1, the first four days of creation in Genesis 1, and today we hear the last three days of the Genesis 1 creation account.

“God saw how good it was,” Genesis repeats after each day of creation, the central and timeless truth of Genesis 1. But what does God create on the sixth day? God creates human beings “in his image… male and female.” God gives us great responsibility over the rest of God’s creation: “Be fertile and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it,” that is, act with God’s goodness and loving care for creation, not abusively but in grateful service toward creation. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.”

And then, on the sixth day the repetitive words of Genesis change slightly. We hear that, when God had finished creating the universe; all its living beings; us, “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.”

This leads me to ask a possibly controversial question of us this morning: Is it not perhaps arrogant of us to assume that we are the only beings in the universe who make God’s creation not only “good” but “very good”; the only beings in the universe capable of some kind of relationship and understanding of an infinitely loving and creative God?

I ask this question mainly because I just finished reading a wonderful book by a Jesuit brother and priest, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller, astronomers at the Vatican Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Their book, inspired by a question first raised at a General Audience by Pope Francis, is called, Would you Baptize an Extra-Terrestrial?

This assumes there are extra-terrestrials out there who would want to be baptized; that there are extra-terrestrials out there at all. I mean, there is no scientific proof that extra-terrestrial intelligent life exists, let alone with awareness of a loving creator God. There is no Biblical mention of extra-terrestrials either, unless, as my professor of Old Testament in the seminary used to joke, “They’re in the divinely-inspired footnotes”!

But still I ask, “What if”? As Guy Consolmagno, Paul Mueller, and Pope Francis have asked, what if we were to encounter aliens who exit a UFO, have pointy ears, bug eyes, and green skin like the ones in children’s drawings, or who look like ET from the movie; who, like us, have some awareness of relationship with a loving creator-God; who maybe speak in backward sentences like Yoda from Star Wars? Challenge our faith, would ET?

Challenge our faith… perhaps. But I hope we would be able to consider such a being, like any being or thing God has created, as even more evidence of timeless truths that go back to the Book of Genesis; to the beginning of our universe: God’s love is limitless. God’s love is creative. God looks upon all creation, known or yet unknown to us, and indeed it is “very good.”