Quick Summary:

This Tuesday the New Horizons spacecraft, after traveling for 9 ½ years at a speed of nearly one million miles a day, will fly within 8,000 miles of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, a journey, all told, of over 3 billion miles. “It’s an amazingly rich system for such a small place,” says astronomer John Spencer, “and probably a lot of what we think we know is wrong.” It’s hoped that this expedition through the Kuiper Belt, to Pluto, and beyond will help answer critical questions about the role Jupiter and Saturn had in sculpting the early solar system.

Over the last two centuries physicists have been on a quest for the ultimate unifying theory—a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework that could fully explain all physical aspects of the universe. There’s something within the human species that keeps us striving for language to explain how things work, where we come from, and what the ultimate fate of our Universe is. Today in our reading from Ephesians we hear a theological response to these questions:
"With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to God’s good pleasure set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth."

The universe, says Paul, is not impersonal but personal; not accidental but purposeful.