Sermon

Today is a day set aside in approximately 600 faith communities throughout the nation and 13 other countries, whose pastors, priests, rabbis and imams, have committed themselves to highlight, in the course of worship, the respective truth and value that both religion and science have to proclaim.  At different times throughout history, these two disciplines have been seen as competitors or combatants.  We may well be in the midst of one of those times in current days.  But history also teaches us that those are often times, when those wedded exclusively to one or the other side, will someday regret. 

The lessons of history remind us, time and again, that any authority, including religious authority, that is left unchecked and unchallenged, and becomes absolute, runs the risk of becoming dangerous.   We need only to recall the sins of the Crusades and the assault by those who led the Spanish Inquisition to remember dark times within church history, as we were reminded by our President this week.

Once again, some within the church seek to frame the threat as one of us against them, faith versus science.  Too many forget the assaults made on Voltaire, Copernicus and Galileo, in their respective times, for speaking of scientific truths that were contrary to the religious truths of their time.   And once again, there is nothing to be gained in all this.  Science and religion are two different and respective truths.  They each pursue the truth as they frame it and each are legitimate and profound in their own way.

In recent years, this conflict has taken the form of those who demand that “intelligent design” be taught in the public schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution.  “Intelligent design” states that the wonders of creation are so complicated and incredible that they must have been created by something brilliant and mysterious.  It is basically affirming the theology behind the story of creation told in Genesis, but leaving out the name of God. 

I believe too often, many seek to use the Bible as the science textbook it was never intended to be.  When I walk my dog at night, I can relate to the sense of mystery and wonder that the psalm writer of psalm 8 felt.  “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them little less than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” 

When I look into the heavens at night, my voice joins the chorus of those throughout time who have looked up and wondered, “Why?”  “Why am I here?”  “Who created me and all of this?”

And if one looks at the world’s literature, we see differing explanations of how creation came to be over the centuries.  The legend of Gilgamesh, which so many of us read in world literature classes, is one.  The Babylonian story of the Enuma Elish, telling of a great battle in the skies between the competing gods is another.  That explanation of creation says that when the battle was over, the body parts that were severed in the “clash of the titans” became the planets and the moons, and the blood that was sprayed became the millions of stars.   These are some of the many creation stories which exist in the world’s literature, which we value as history and as inspired literature, but discount as science.

The book of Genesis has two different, and in ways contradictory, creation stories.   Our ancestors were seeking to make sense of the universal questions as we do.  And over time, different answers satisfied them.  

Today we hear, how in the last century, the great poet, James Weldon Johnson, crafted a new creation story, offering a new explanation for why we were created.   God was lonely.

And now, there are new voices, armed with the scientific knowledge of the ages, who tell another creation story.  Based in the measurable and rapidly increasing sciences of biology, physics, and chemistry, it tells of how creation came to be over billions of years.   It speaks a new truth to us, a truth we dare not ignore.   No truth, whether defined in the measured ways of science, or the inspired stories of Scripture or poetry, dare ever to claim to be the only truth.  They all have something to offer to our common understanding.

I believe that science and religion are not, and need not, be enemies or competitors.  Science and the theory of evolution that it holds dear speak to us in these days of the “how” of creation and life.  The Big Bang theory and the resulting growth of life from the particles that spread far and wide.  Religion and faith speak to the “why” of creation and life.  Why are we here and what is the purpose of the creation of which we are a part.

And so we turn to the Bible, not so much to learn the hows of creation, but to seek to know more fully the whys.  Our creation stories, and if you read Genesis carefully, you’ll see that there is more than one story of how the world and human beings came to be found there, seek to tell us something of the “why’ of creation.  The author of Genesis, no doubt drawing on years of discussion by the tribal elders by the campfires, crafted the account that tell of a kind and benevolent force that lay behind and beneath all of nature and of creation.  That our lives begin, full of meaning and purpose, when God breathes into our lungs air, blessing us with the Spirit of God.

We do not look to the beginnings of creation as a clash of the titans and of our earth as a dismembered body part.  We believe that the One who called creation into being, did so with a sense of love and purpose.  Our Genesis accounts affirm the importance of daily work and of living in covenant with others.  They reveal the human condition and how easily we are moved to jealousy and anger, sometimes resulting in homicide. 

And as we wrestle with the question Why, today we hear one rather contemporary poet and theologian proclaim his ideas.  The sacred mystery we call God creates the world because God is lonely and eager to have something to play with. 

Faithful living calls gives us the chance to explore the “Why” of creation.   What is the source of love?   What sparks within us that ability to rise above our biology?  To love, to sacrifice, to look ahead, to dream, to create, to be inspired. 

In terms of matters as basic and as complex as sexual attraction, psychology tells us we seek the other who is capable of completing us; the one who heals our wounds of separation from our mother, our life source.   Biology tells us that sex is necessary to keep the species going, but makes no mention of its ability to enhance and deepen life.

What pulls us up, out of our biology, to experience in sex and relationships that which deepens life for us?   Allows us to know the joys and wonder of intimacy with another; growth, a desire to be more than our pure biological self?  What moves us from within?   What inspires us to pursue beauty in life?   

The Spirit of God, the breath of God fills our bodies and raises us above our natural order; bringing with it a depth and meaning to life beyond the reach of pure science.   I am so mindful that the root of the word “enthusiasm” is en theos, to be full of the theos, to be full of God.  And those moments of enthusiasm in the relationships of life are as sacred as anything we may ever know in creation.

We live in this day and age, in a culture of winners and losers.  We let ourselves get boxed in to deciding on the dualities of the world.   We either believe in the theory of evolution OR we believe in intelligent design.  We either trust in the ways and teachings of science OR we trust in the ways and teachings of religion.  And yet throughout time, history and the literature of the ages tells us that truth can come to us in many ways.

Science, in its advocacy of the theory of evolution, speaks of an incomplete and ongoing process in nature, where matter is shaping and being reshaped in microscopic ways every minute.  It helps us to understand some of the origins of life and to help to vision just where the creation is headed.

Faith seeks to offer, not an explanation of the how of creation, but of the why.  It seeks to offer meaning and purpose to an otherwise soulless process. 

Modern day thinking Christians are the poorer when they let the powers within either the church or the scientific community set this up as a dualism, an either/or.  Jesus calls us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.  We dare not ignore our mental abilities in the formation of our faith, for when we do, we run the risk of letting faith become superstitious or something less than what it is meant to be.  The heart cannot worship what the mind rejects.  And so we are called, challenged to do our homework, to not settle for the easy answers in the hard work of living lives of faith that recognize the validity and importance of the truths of science.

We embrace so much of what science and technology has to offer to use which improve our lives and the world around us.   Why ignore their efforts to help us to understand the mysteries of creation? 

We would not want a doctor using a textbook that was 500 or 3000 years old to treat us.  We would not enter a building that was engineered using the standards of Jesus’ time.  But we want to adopt learnings and techniques which were started then, but then grew out of those simple understandings.    So too, we would be wise to work toward blending the growing knowledge of the natural sciences with the principles of our time-tested faith.

Over campfires thousands of years ago, our ancestors looked high into the skies, seeing millions more stars than most of us living in light-polluted North America will ever see, and dared to ask and seek answers to the great questions of life, creation and faith.  For generations, they asked the questions and passed on their collected wisdom to the generations that followed, telling the truth as they knew it, through stories and parables, myths and metaphors.  Maybe they knew from their own experiences, that some of their wisdom would be embraced and some left behind on the ash heap of history.   I’m quite confident that when they began, they never dreamed of a written word and so they told the stories, stories that were shaped by the experiences and wisdom of those who heard them for centuries. 

They were not writing history books and certainly not seeking to create a science textbook, so let us use our minds to look to Scripture for the spiritual and eternal truths they sought to proclaim.  For in their stories of a Creator who breathes a bit of him or herself into every living being comes the lesson our heart most yearns for.

Within Christianity, we can wage a war against reason and science, which is a war we will lose in years to come.   Or we can hear the call of Jesus, who models for us the search for truth in all things, and challenge of Carl Sagan, who once wrote, ““A religion, old or new, that stresses the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”

So let us live our lives seeking to love and follow our almighty Creator, who is in indeed, above and beyond the truth of science, above and beyond the truth of Scripture, above and beyond all the mysteries of Creation.  For that indeed is the One who has called us into being, blessed us with the breath of life, and who calls us into full knowledge of both the truths of science and religion, that our lives might be enriched and made full.   Thanks be to God.  Amen.