Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 19 then ends with a prayer which I invite you now to pray silently with me:

Do you hear the wonder in Psalm 19? Can you see and taste the wonder? This is the wonder that has led Jews in some times and places to introduce their children to learning by painting large Hebrew letters with honey and inviting their children to taste the sweetness of the letters. This is the wonder that led one Jewish woman in Los Angeles to create an interactive children’s museum to encourage children to learn Jewish traditions. Children explore the museum using all of their senses, whether lighting Hanukkah candles or tasting Passover flavors or praying at a reproduction of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. These are not “pretend” practices, but practices that engage children and adults in wonder. Indeed, the prayers from the reproduced Western Wall are sent to Jerusalem to be placed in the actual Western Wall. They are later buried on the Mount of Olives with other prayers from the Wall.

Do you hear the wonder of the Psalm? The heavens tell the glory of God and the earth proclaims God’s handiwork. Days pour forth speech, and nights declare knowledge. Images – profuse and vivid – stir pictures of sunrises and sunsets, mountains and valleys, waterfalls and ocean waves – all too magnificent to grasp in their wonder. The images also evoke the wonders of ecological systems, which, however fragile, are remarkable in the ways that plants and animals and sun and rain support one another in their complex, interactive lives. The psalm even evokes the wonders of the human body. However frail and fragile the human body is, it is a wonder of God’s handiwork. Dr. Roger Yu told my husband and me yesterday when he checked my husband out of the hospital: “The exactness of the human body is truly amazing.” Yet, as the psalmist says, all of this wonder is beyond human speech and words. We can speak of it, but we cannot fully grasp the mysteries.

The psalmist wants us to know that knowledge courses through creation, but its origins are in God. God not only communicates through creation, but also through the law, through which people come to knowledge and finally to wisdom. Psalm 19 calls the law by different names – commandments, decrees, precepts, and ordinances – all of which proclaim knowledge. These God-given words revive the soul, make wise the simple, are more precious than gold and sweeter than honey.

Psalm 19, with its passion for knowledge and wisdom, is fitting to rehearse as a new academic year unfolds. Boston University, and schools and colleges around the world, are sacred sites where people meet wonder in the biology lab, the poetry class, the library stacks when they are researching the social history of a once obscure country. Universities and schools for all ages are sacred sites where people stretch their abilities to relate with others, to ice skate as they never have before, to mesh with others in a winning hockey team. However odd this comparison between academic pursuits and the knowledge proclaimed in God’s universe, it is apt.

In Medieval Europe, religious orders founded universities to educate clergy and public leaders and to spread knowledge as far as people could imagine. Between the early 17th and 19th centuries, religious leaders in the United States founded colleges and universities for similar reasons. They often built the university libraries to resemble Gothic cathedrals. The Yale University Library even has a long aisle leading to what resembles a high altar, where the circulation desk sits. Consider the awe inspired by this early library architecture of Yale University, Bowdoin College in Maine, or the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. The architecture was no accident; it was a way to honor the sacredness of learning and the wonders

We can critique these practices of interlocking religion and academic study. We can argue, for example, that such practices are Eurocentric and they have fed the hegemony of Christianity in the United States and other parts of the world, communicating that Christianity was the only religion of a land. On the other hand, the same people who were passionate in their religious lives were often passionate in their search for scientific truth, poetic beauty, and anthropological understanding, and they were passionate about the wellbeing of the world. Further, scholars who made scientific discoveries or studied ancient literature or astronomy often experienced moments of sacred awe, whether or not they associated those moments with religion. Passion for learning and passion for the Holy, more often than not, go hand in hand, and we find this in most religious traditions. The psalmist who scribed Psalm 19 understood this well.

So where does this passion lead? I suggest that the passion for knowledge leads to probing. Remember the young hospital doctor who was in awe of “the exactness of the human body.” When I asked Dr. Yu if I could quote him today, he became curious and began asking questions. He described some of his own search through theological puzzles. His inspiration about the exactness of the human body has led him to questions about God, Jesus, and the universe. Similarly, when you and I allow passion for learning to do its work, it will lead to probing, even when the probing unsettles us and seemingly chases the passion away for a time.

Probing is a natural human act that takes many forms. We probe why a tragedy happened or why someone acted the way they did. We probe frontiers of neuroscience and frontiers of the universe, searching the planets and other distant bodies. Boston University was founded by religious people who cared about clergy education and public leadership. The founders were abolitionists who wanted to further justice in the United States. Today, Boston University continues to be related to the United Methodist Church as its historic founder and as a contemporary colleague in probing; however, the University is not owned or directed by that church or any other. Indeed, it has many other colleagues as well – granting agencies, other
universities, and people in many parts of the world. Further, a large percentage of the faculty and students here are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and agnostic, to name a few, but we are bound together with a common passion to learn and a common commitment to probing. We do not exist to promote a faith, but to promote probing. This is why Marsh Chapel encourages the probing of peoples across many faiths and why the University engages with and learns from people of many faiths.

This perspective of a modern university resonates with the Psalmist’s passion to know the world and to seek understanding. A modern university, as an open institution, does not ground its intellectual probing in a theological position on God and knowledge. But the psalmist was not addressing a modern university. The psalmist addressed the people of Israel – a religious people. The psalmist wanted this people of God to know the world and to know that the source of knowledge is God. As the psalm echoes through history, it now invites modern and postmodern people to be similarly in awe of God’s work. It invites people of faith and searchers who claim no faith to quest endlessly for knowledge and to know that quest as a quest for God. To probe God’s universe is to revere God, and to revere God is to probe God’s universe. Probing is itself an act of wonder – caring enough to dive as deeply as possible into the pool of knowledge.

Thus far, I have addressed the wonders of knowing. I have said nothing about the never-ending quest, the dangers of foolishness, or the new challenges that arise every time we learn something new. I was awakened to the challenges most recently by our four-year-old granddaughter. When her parents told her that Poppy was ill, she responded quickly, “He must be allergic to the snow.” Her parents had previously explained to her that we live in Boston, and one of their explanations included snow. That one stuck. When Kylie learned that Allen was ill, she immediately tried to understand why. She took the knowledge she had, mixed with her love for Poppy, and tried to diagnose the patient. Kylie’s response made her Mimi smile. Her parents, of course, took this opportunity to give her another lesson in geography and climatology because they do not want Kylie to stop probing. Probing always leads to more probing.

Authentic probing leads to insight, but often not to final answers. This week, we remembered the eighth anniversary of the horrific events of September 11, 2001. Probing those events has been challenging because people have often been willing to accept simple explanations that place blame on one group or another, then generalize the blame to everyone associated with that group. We have been content with “probing light” in contrast to “probing heavy.” Heavy probing does not end when a scapegoat is found; heavy probing seeks explanations in every possible corner of knowledge.

Why should we be so thorough in our probing? Here, the text from Proverbs is particularly insightful. It urges people to heed the teachings of their fathers and mothers and to resist the enticement of sinners who will lead them into war and greed. These sinners say: “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood; let us wantonly ambush the innocent” (1:11). Then they say: “We shall find all kinds of costly things; we shall fill our houses with booty” (13). After giving these warnings, Proverbs continues with a plea:

We easily fall into war and greed if we allow ourselves to settle for simplistic answers.

To this point, the texts for today highlight the beauty of knowing and the ways that continual seeking can protect against foolishness, especially the foolishness of throwing our lives into war-mongering and greed. We have one more text knit into the lections today, however, and this one reminds us seekers that knowing requires something of us. As we come to know something, we become responsible for that which we know. Here is where Mark’s gospel speaks a challenge. About half-way through the gospel, Mark tells the story of Jesus traveling with his disciples. Along the way, he stops to ask: “Who do people say that I am” (Mark 8:27). The disciples respond with what they have heard others say about Jesus. Jesus then replies with another question, “But who do you say that I am?” to which Peter answers, “You are the Messiah” (29). Jesus responds by explaining that the Son of Man must suffer and be rejected and killed. At this point, Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him for saying these things. Jesus, in turn, rebukes Peter for not setting his mind on divine things. Then, Jesus calls the crowd to him and says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it.” (31-35)

The picture here is that people are asked to know and to speak what they know, but they are also asked to act upon what they know; the disciples and crowd were asked to give their lives for the sake of the gospel. Here we are in 2009, watching summer close and fall open. Here we are listening to the beauty of Psalm 19, invited into the joy of learning from the heavens and the earth, the days and the nights, the laws and precepts of God. Here we are listening to the warnings of Proverbs to seek wisdom and not be misled by the foolishness of war against the innocent and greed. And here we are listening to the challenge of Jesus in Mark’s gospel: to give our lives for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the gospel. Who would have thought that knowledge could be so rich, so important, so challenging? But it is! May you be blessed with a never-ending thirst for knowledge and with the courage to accept its demands and promises!

posted in Uncategorized on 09.13.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

posted in Uncategorized on 08.30.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Well, here we are, in an un-air conditioned nave in the peak of the Boston summer. And, after nine weeks of sermons on Darwin and faith, we are almost to the end of our summer series, turning to our second string as we round the last bend. We feel the heat and humidity. We feel the intellectual weight of our topic. We feel, yes, let us confess it, a bit distracted by the national debates on health care reform, by our preference to be at the beach right now, and by the prospect of the Red Sox trouncing the Yankees at least as badly as they did last night. Today, dear friends, amidst the heat and humidity, the gravitas of evolutionary theory, and our myriad distractions, we attend to our feelings. Let us pray:

O God, when I speak, may a message be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Amen.

That religion has primarily to do with feeling, not knowing or doing, was a central claim for Friedrich Schleiermacher in his Glaubenslehre, perhaps the founding text of liberal theology. We would do well to remember this as we consider the struggles of the last century-and-a-half between religion and evolutionary theory. To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution raises a number of conceptual problems for theology, many of which have been discussed throughout our Darwin and Faith sermon series. But as faithful people, our solving the conceptual problems does not resolve the tension between religion and science. The tension is not merely thought but felt, and we must be attentive to the feeling of the tension, and the feelings the tension produces, if we are to have any chance of such resolution.

What is this feeling?

I remember, about a dozen years ago, traveling from my home in Silver Spring, Maryland up to Princeton, New Jersey for a visit with Uncle Doug and Aunt Helen. This was a regular occurrence for my brother and I. While my immediate family were and are avid churchgoers, Doug and Helen were not. I distinctly remember, at one point, my brother asking Doug if he was a Christian. Doug replied that he was not. After pondering this for a moment, my brother looked up with raised eyebrows and pronounced, “Oh! You’re a Helenist!” Given that her own lineage was Greek, Helen was simultaneously delighted and amused by this naïve conclusion.

On this particular trip, I found myself browsing the copious bookshelves that lined the walls of their Princeton home. I came across a book making the case for evolutionary theory over against religion. This discovery led to a lengthy discussion with Doug about the merits of the theory of evolution and its discrepancies with biblical descriptions of creation. In spite of the fact that Doug is a professor of politics, or more likely because of it, he did not argue his case with anything like the stridency we see in typical political discourse. Instead he made his points clearly and calmly and invited me to consider and question them in a similar spirit. Indeed, it was not Doug’s argumentation that led me to experience for myself the tension between religion and evolution but the real tension that is there. Coming, as I was, with what I will charitably call a Sunday School conception of faith, my experience of the life of faith, of God, and of religious experience had very little way of coping with the implications of Darwin’s theory.

In fact, the tension between religion and science does in part arise from the contradiction between biblical images of creation and the theory of evolution. But this is still a conceptual problem and does not yet get at the feeling. In the face of contradiction, the normal human response is doubt: one of the two views, if contradictory, must be wrong. Religious doubt is especially deep. It reaches to something like what Descartes meant when he said that he doubted everything except that which cannot be doubted, namely his own existence. If he doubted then there must be a self that doubts and so he must exist. This is the meaning of his famous statement cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Arriving at this fundamental conclusion, however, required doubting absolutely everything else, all ways of knowing and thinking and understanding the world. At this point, the entire world of meaning, and all ways of meaning-making, must be completely reconstructed from scratch. Moreover, there must be a process of letting go of the old ways of understanding and finding meaning in the world. There is a loss here, and loss is accompanied by grief.

It is no different with the confrontations between religion and science in our own time. The truth that the world comes to be the way we find it, and that we come to be the way we are, as a result of evolutionary processes, requires doubting the Sunday School conception of faith. This is what Professor Wesley Wildman was pointing to in the first sermon of the Darwin and Faith series. There is no simple adjustment to the Sunday School faith, such as saying that the Sunday School God creates through evolution, that does anything like justice to Darwin’s theory. Conceptually, Dr. Wildman hit the nail right on the head. But now we must continue on to understand what letting go of a Sunday School faith implies, to see what the process of grief looks like, to examine our own feelings in the tension between religion and science. We are, after all, human beings, who have evolved to construct for ourselves worlds of meaning made up of truths that we can depend on. We have not evolved to simply let one world of meaning go and pick up another. If we had, those worlds of meaning would have no value. No, we are tenacious in our beliefs and cling to them precisely because they are valuable. They give us meaning and purpose, direction and confidence. And so, when they break down, we feel the loss and we grieve.

To be sure, this process of loss and grief takes place at the personal level. Darwin himself may be the best example of this. Being in training for the Anglican priesthood at Cambridge University when he made his journey on the Beagle, eventually leading to his landmark theory, Darwin had read the leading natural theologies of his day. Most of these, and especially the natural theology of William Paley, are versions of the teleological argument for the existence of God. The argument is to the effect that a world exhibiting such complexity, order, purpose and beauty as ours must have been created by an intelligent entity. Darwin’s theory of evolution, however, is precisely a demonstration of how complexity, order and beauty come about through the natural process of evolution, which only purpose is survival. Darwin saw and knew the contradiction explicitly. And for the remainder of his life Darwin remained ambivalent about faith. A letter from 1879 to John Fordyce is revealing. Darwin says,

[My] judgment often fluctuates.... Whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term ... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. -- I think that generally (and more and more so as I grow older), but not always, -- that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

Clearly, Darwin could no longer tolerate his earlier beliefs, but neither would his grief at its loss allow him to abandon faith entirely. Not all grieve in this way; many do abandon faith.

The grieving process takes place at the social level as well. We see this as many Christians resist the teaching of evolution in public schools and advocate the teaching of creationism based on their belief in a personal, purposeful go
d. We might diagnose this response to the challenge Darwin’s theory poses for such Sunday School faith on the Kübler-Ross grief cycle as somewhere amidst the stages of denial, anger and bargaining. Denial: such Christians continue in their faith lives as if Darwin had never published On the Origin of Species. Anger: Sunday School Christians express anger at the social adoption of evolutionary theory by challenging it in court, by denying that Christians who accept evolutionary theory are true Christians, and by attempting to keep politicians who accept evolutionary theory out of office. Bargaining: Recent advocacy of having creationism taught alongside evolution and the shift from strict creationism to intelligent design theories are attempts at bargaining with evolution. Given that Darwin’s theory was published 150 years ago and we are socially only at the fourth of seven stages, half-way there, we can see that the grieving process at the social level, especially where religious beliefs are concerned, can take a very long time indeed.

This timeframe should not be entirely surprising. After all, the feeling with which Schleiermacher identified religion is not just any feeling; it is the feeling of absolute dependence. But it is hard to understand how we can absolutely depend on God if God turns out not to be who or what we thought. Sunday School faith tells us that God is a person, often imagined as a white man with a beard resting on the clouds, who relates to us as persons, giving us meaning and purpose in our lives. Dean Hill gave us three tools the Boston Personalists provide us for engaging with evolutionary theory, but Darwin’s theory contradicts Personalism’s central tenet, namely that personhood is the fundamental category for understanding reality. Evolution points out that the only purpose inherent in the ongoing development of the world is survival. Evolution as a process is tragic, as Alfred North Whitehead understood the term, pointing toward “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” As Dr. Wildman pointed out in relation to Darwin’s own struggle with faith,

Surely such a loving, personal deity would have created in another way, a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, less mindless chance, fewer tragic species extinctions, less dependence on random symbiotic collaborations, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit.

If evolution is true, as it surely is, then that upon which we absolutely depend is certainly not personal.

Upon what, then, can we depend absolutely? Who is Darwin’s God? Darwin’s God is a creator god who creates us not personally but as part of a world that exhibits complexity and beauty and change and chance and order and that presents us with myriad choices, the decision among which make us who we are. Darwin’s God is not scaled to human concern; God is the creator of the H1N1 flu virus just as much as you and I. Darwin’s God creates a world not of predetermined outcomes but of competing interests. Darwin’s God creates not the world of utopic idealism, exhibiting a nice, neat, orderly progression, but the messy, mean and infinitely interesting developments in life. Darwin’s God, like Anselm’s God, is that than which nothing greater can be thought. As human thinking develops, as it has with Darwin’s theory of evolution, that which is greater than human thought and presses it to its limits must also expand. We can absolutely depend upon God to be more than we could ever imagine or comprehend. Darwin’s God is not as attractive as the personal God, because Darwin’s God does not care particularly about us, but Darwin’s God is more honest about the God we discern in the world God creates, whereas the personal God tells us more about our own desires and selfishness than about God in Godself. Darwin’s God is absolutely dependable to resist our selfish interpretations and demand humble submission.

We can see the unattractiveness of Darwin’s God when we consider the present debates about health care reform. Darwin’s God looks much more like the death panels that conservative politicians and pundits impugn upon reform proposals than anything any Senator or Congressperson could ever dream up. From the evolutionary perspective, human flourishing would certainly be greatly improved if societies were not encumbered by the old and infirm; humanity would be much more suited for survival. But none of the proposals in Congress suggest any such thing. Last week, Dr. Rodney Petersen warned us of the dangers of social Darwinism. Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to make wise decisions with regard to health care reform such that those who need care are cared for while also stewarding resources responsibly. But these wise decisions must be made in light of the human needs of our present historical moment. They cannot be attributed to a personal divine will and given ultimate cosmic significance. Darwin’s God will not accept such responsibility.

We stand in the same relation to the teaching about God revealed to us in Darwin as the disciples did to the teaching about God that Jesus offered them in our gospel reading today. With them we ask, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Jesus knew that accepting it would be difficult, that there were some who did not believe. And Jesus asks us today along with the twelve so long ago, “Do you also wish to go away?”

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that we need not turn away. Like Peter we can both address the conceptual contradictions and take up our grief at the loss of our Sunday School faith. And so with Peter we can say, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

posted in Uncategorized on 08.23.2009 at 2:13 pm

By Marsh Chapel

posted in Uncategorized on 08.16.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

posted in Uncategorized on 08.9.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

February 12, 2009, came and went without much fanfare in Cleveland, Ohio. I venture to say that few people were aware that there was anything noteworthy about that day. Yet February 12, 2009, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of two people who have had a profound impact on the world as we know it: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. How intriguing that these two giants of influence upon world civilization were born, one in the United States, and the other in England, on the very same day!

Abraham Lincoln is arguably one of the greatest, if not the greatest President, that the United States has ever had. His issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and his steady hand of leadership following that provocative act was masterful, to say the least. His attitude of forgiveness and reconciliation towards the Confederacy did much to set the tone for healing the deep-seated wounds that had divided the regional factions of this country for generations. His ability to translate lofty ideals into practical and effective strategies of leadership is admired to this day. Indeed, Lincoln’s philosophy and leadership style have provided a conscious and intentional role model for President Barack Obama and his administration. Abraham Lincoln is a leader well worth studying, a statesman well worth emulating.

On the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, across the pond another person who would influence the world in a profound way was also born: Charles Darwin. Initially studying to become a priest in the Church of England, Darwin developed a deep interest in naturalism.(1) During a visit to South America and the Galapagos Islands, he examined the fossil remains of ancient organisms and observed the diversity of life forms in isolated environments. Building on these observations and based on additional work over more than twenty years, Darwin developed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1859, he published these ideas in his profoundly influential book, The Origin of Species.

Darwin proposed that all living species are descended from a small set of common ancestors — perhaps just one ancestor. He held that variations within a species occur randomly, and that the survival or extinction of each organism depends upon its ability to adapt to its environment.

Darwin’s view engendered immediate and intense controversy, especially in religious circles, a controversy with has continued to this day and shows no signs of abating. Darwin himself was concerned about the effect of his theory on religious belief, and took pains in The Origin of Species to point out a possible harmonious interpretation: “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone,” he wrote, “A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of his laws.”(2) Darwin concludes his book by saying, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simply a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”(3) While Darwin’s personal religious beliefs seem ambiguous and varied, it is worthy of note that far from being ostracized by the religious community of his time, Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey.(4)

While no serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life, a recent Gallup poll indicates that only one-third of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is well supported, with the remainder being equally divided between those who agree that it has not been well supported and those claiming that they just don’t know enough to affirm evolution or reject it.(5) These statistics have remained essentially unchanged over the past twenty years.

The theory of evolution rests on two basic ideas: 1) that all of life is related, and 2) that species change over time. First of all, scientists insist that all of life is related. If you hug a tree, you are hugging a relative, a very distant relative, but a relative, nonetheless! From the outset, one of the objections to the idea that we are all related is the idea that human beings are descended from apes and monkeys. Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin’s, is reported to have said that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor, only ashamed to be related to anyone who obscured the truth!(6) Scientists reassure us that we’re not descended from apes and monkeys the way those species are now. It’s that we share common ancestors.

How do we know this? The same way we know whether people are related to one another. Everybody knows, (thanks to courtroom television!), that DNA can be used to determine paternity. Because children share the DNA of their parents, we can tell whether people are related by seeing if their DNA is the same. This principle works across all living things.

While the study of genes and the DNA which comprise them has been going on for years, the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, revealed more about the interrelatedness of life than humanity had previously known. It was discovered, for example, that while there are 3.1 billion letters of the DNA code arranged across 24 chromosomes comprising the human genome, there are only about 20 - 25,000 protein coding-genes. That was especially shocking in light of the fact that the gene count for other, simpler organisms such as worms, flies, and simple plants seem to be in about the same range as that for humans, approximately 20,000 protein-coding genes. Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project until last August, comments, “Many of us were shocked to discover that God writes such short stories about humankind.”(7)

Another striking, and I believe, theologically profound finding coming from the Human Genome Project is that at the DNA level, all the different members of our human species are 99.9 percent identical!(8) That similarity applies regardless of which two individuals from around the world you wish to compare. Take a look at the person to the right of you, and to the left of you. Ninety-nine point nine percent of your DNA is exactly the same! Thus, by DNA analysis, we are truly members of one family.

The second fact of evolutionary biology is that species change. This was what Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands and what scientists (and non-scientists) observe all the time. The size, shape and color of plants and animals change through time and space, demonstrating the difference between living things and nonliving things. A chemical species, such as water, never changes. At sea level, water always boils and freezes at the same temperature. Water is always colorless. There was never a time or a place where pure water was red or green, for example. But s
pecies of living things change over time.

In her recent book, Evolution and Christian Faith, Joan Roughgarden, professor of biological sciences and geophysics at Stanford University, says, “The single-tree-of-life and species-change discoveries are the bottom-line, take-home facts. I believe these two facts must be taught in any science curriculum today. Not teaching these,” she states, “Will cripple the minds of children, as though asking them to find a place in modern society after being raised by wolves.”(9)

Far from being at odds with religion in general and the Christian faith in particular, I find the two major premises of evolutionary biology quite compatible with orthodox thinking. First, all of life is related. The most accepted theory of the creation of the world among scientists at the current time is the Big Bang theory, which states that at a single moment, approximately fourteen billion years ago, the universe began.(10) Of course, the Big Bang theory begs the question of what came before that, and who or what was responsible for the forces coming together that created the universe in the first place.

Francis Collins writes, “The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.... For the Judeo-Christian tradition, the opening words of Genesis are entirely compatible with the Big Bang.”(11) Genesis 1:1 tells us that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Theology has long held that the universe was created by God out of nothingness (ex nihilo). Astronaut Robert Jastrow, in his book, God and the Astronomers, states, “At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”!(12)

The creation-poem set in the Garden of Eden describes God creating all the species of plants and animals. Does Genesis 1 contradict evolution’s tree of life? No, Genesis does not specify one way or the other about whether the plants and animals God placed on earth are related to one another. They are, however, all designed and made by the same Creator. Genesis does not tell us how God created; it only tells us why: God created humanity in God’s image for fellowship with God.

All of life is related, a fact which has now been proven by science, a fact which has broad implications as communication increases and the world continues to shrink before our very eyes. All of life is related, we realize as we to irreparable damage to the land, water and to the species of plant and animal life that God has created over millions of years. All of life is related, we need to remember as we seek solutions to problems that threaten to destroy the very breath of life that God breathed into our nostrils at the dawn of creation.

That brings me to the second fact of evolutionary biology that is also quite compatible with the Christian Gospel: that species change over time. Scientists have observed mutation occurring in plants and insects and other species through laboratory experimentation and the examination of fossils. Change is vital to the survival of living things. Change is also fundamental to our belief system. Change is a cornerstone of the Christian Gospel.

I have chosen Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus to illustrate my point. Nicodemus was intrigued by the teaching of Jesus and the way of life he demonstrated. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, for he didn’t want to admit to the other intellectuals of his day that his education and his profession had not brought him the happiness and the satisfaction for which he yearned. Nicodemus sensed that there might be something more that he was missing. Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, that he needed to accept God’s lordship of all things and start looking at life through fresh, new eyes. The most important part of life, according to this Jewish teacher, is not what we can get, but what we can give. We can begin living a new life not someday when we die, but here and now, today.

We don’t know whether Nicodemus came to faith immediately or whether the process took a while. But we do know that after Jesus was crucified, Nicodemus came with Joseph of Arimathea to claim and care for the body of Jesus. Nicodemus, formerly afraid to be seen with Jesus for fear of what people would think, was now willing to risk his reputation and his very life in order to care for the body of his crucified Lord. A profound change had taken place in his life.

Whether or not the account in Acts is totally accurate, we know that another man was changed dramatically, as Saul, the persecutor of Christians, became Paul, the Apostle, the greatest missionary the Christian church has ever known. Again, a change of heart and life is a fundamental result of the Gospel message.

Species can change. It was the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, who urged his followers not to be satisfied with where they were in their spiritual lives, but to go on to perfection. Citing Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” John Wesley urged a continual striving, a continual process of change and growth causing the Christian believer to evolve, if you will, toward the person God intends us to be.

For some, the change is profound and dramatic. The Apostle Paul is a prime example. For others, the change is more subtle and gradual. But for all living things, change is essential, not only to our growth, but to our survival in God’s world. It is true in the physical realm; I submit it is also true in the realm of the spirit.

Some people have the gift of storytelling. When Professor Harrell Beck lectured on the origins of the Hebrew Bible, he made the story so real that I wanted to sneak a peak to the corner of the room to which he was gesturing. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the Bedouin shepherds and the campfire they had built to take the chill off the night air. (I found later that others in the class had experienced the same feeling.) Dr. Beck said that when he went to speak at local churches (which was frequently), he wanted to take a Bible, and rip off the back cover, to demonstrate the fact that God did not stop speaking in the second century A.D., nor have the acts of the Apostles ceased. “The Bible is still being written today!” He would proclaim in a thundering voice. Species can change. Species do change!

In his book, The Language of God, Francis Collins tells about being asked to head the Human Genome Project. At the time, he was quite happy at the University of Michigan, and commented that never imagined himself a federal employee! “I initially indicated no interest,” he wrote, “But the decision haunted me. There was only one Human Genome Project. This was going to be done only once in human history. If it succeeded, the consequences for medicine would be unprecedented. As a believer in God, was this one of the moments when I was somehow being called to take on a larger role in a project that would have profound consequences for our understanding of ourselves? ... I have always been suspicious of those who claim to perceive God’s will in moments such as this, but ... the potential consequences for humankind’s relationship with the Creator could hardly be ignored. Visiting my daughter in North Carolina in November of 1992, I spent a long afternoon praying in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this decision. I did not ‘hear’ God speak — in fact, I have never had that experience. But during tho
se hours... a peace settled over me. A few days later, I accepted the offer.”(13)

Collins’ work has demonstrated and confirmed the theory of Charles Darwin, that all of life is related and that species change. As Harrell Beck so dramatically proclaimed to our seminary class, the Bible is still being written today! God is still speaking; God is still creating; the Bible is still being written. What will your chapter say? How will you demonstrate your awareness of your relationship to all of creation? How will you respond to God’s call to continue to evolve and let God create in you the person that God desires you to be?

I believe that as long as we are living, we are always evolving. May we always seek to grow in the image and likeness of God.

Notes:
1. Collins, Francis. The Language of God. New York: Free Press., p. 96.
2. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. , p. 452.
3. Ibid., p. 459.
4. Collins, p. 98.
5. Ibid., p. 147.
6. Ibid., p. 98.
7. Ibid., p. 125.
8. Ibid..
9. Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006., pp. 24-25.
10. Ibid., p. 64.
11. Ibid., p. 67, 82-83.
12. Ibid., p. 66.
13. Ibid., p. 118-119.

posted in Uncategorized on 08.2.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

posted in Uncategorized on 07.26.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

There are those who believe religions can be understood anthropologically and sociologically, except for Christianity. Other religions are humanity’s search for God, while Christianity is God’s search for humanity. Religions are human endeavors, except for mine. This way of thinking could be called Christian exceptionalism.

If one nation consumes significantly more than most of the rest of the world, and has a foreign policy based on keeping its citizen’s desire to consume sated, and if this nation uses its military to police its foreign policy, this nation would usually be called an empire. If we say that nations that become empires are inevitably oppressive of others, except for my nation because my nation, unlike other nations, is good and well-intentioned, this might be called nationalist exceptionalism.

A Boston University professor named Andrew J. Bachevich has written what I think is one of the most important books of the decade. Bachevich is a retired bird colonel, a student of the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, a long-term opponent of the war in Iraq, the father of a soldier who gave his life in Iraq. His book is a stinging critique of American consumerism, foreign policy and military policy. The book is entitled The Limits of Power. It is subtitled “The End of American Exceptionalism.”

Galtism -- the idea that the rich are rich because they are superior to the poor-- is an exceptionalist way of thinking. There are lots of examples.

One of the reasons Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was so shocking at the time it was published 150 years ago and continues to be at the center of the cultural wars of our time is that Darwin’s theories challenge and undermine pretty much every expression of exceptionalism.

Darwin discovered in his study of nature a radical egalitarianism. Life has evolved the way it has not because some forms of life were especially ordained or superior but simply because the organisms that are best adapted to their environment tend to produce more offspring while those less well suited tend to diminish.

The phrase “The survival of the fittest” does not mean the survival of those who go to the gym the most. It means the survival of those who happen to fit best within the environment in which they find themselves. It could just as well be called the survival of the luckiest … the survival of those species that find themselves in the time and place that happen to fit them best.

Not divine selection, not moral selection, not even intelligent selection –I’ve known some folk who were exceedingly intelligent and have not tended to produce more offspring (watch an episode of the TV show “The Big Bang” sometime). Not selection by any merit but natural selection.

Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, says: “Darwin’s theory challenged the notions of human exceptionalism and brought to light this idea that humans are a result of natural processes, meaning we are not as ‘special’ as we once thought.”

The new book Darwin’s Sacred Cause argues that a major driving force behind Darwin’s study and research was that he believed nature shows that there is no basis in nature for slavery, prejudice and human suffering. One of the authors James Moore says that Darwin believed nature teaches us that there is “no high or low, better or worse. Things [are] just different.”

What do we think about this, those of us who read poetry and pray and sing hymns and listen to sermons?

Well, clearly we human beings are special. It wasn’t raccoons that built this beautiful chapel, was it? It wasn’t chipmunks who wrote the music we hear the choir sing.

Of course, we are special, just maybe not as special as we once thought. Whatever else we are, we are animals too. We need to eat.

I travelled in Africa some with a bishop I used to work for who had visited Africa many, many times. He used to tell me that when you travel in Africa and someone offers you food you eat it because you can never be sure when you’ll eat again.

I asked him once why he thought a certain African nation kept electing an obviously corrupt president. He said that when you have experienced starvation, you will elect anyone you think will feed you. This is not that different from the “It’s the economy, stupid” election campaigns here in the US, is it?

We do not have to be enslaved by our appetites but we usually get in trouble if we try to deny they exist. I know eating disorders are a complicated thing and I don’t want to trivialize their causes, but the Jungian therapist Marion Woodman, who was anorexic as a young woman, believes that one of the things that food disorders, and their prevalence in our society, symbolizes is a desire not to be bound to the earth, not to be dirty, not to make dirt, not to be human. The prevalence of food disorders symbolizes a desire to be more than human, to be angels, to be gods. She calls it an “addiction to perfection.” Maybe all addictions are.

We don’t have to be enslaved by our appetites but, as my mother used to say, “You’ve got to eat.” I knew an exceptional person years ago who starved himself to death as a protest against homelessness in America. I never want to see such an exceptional thing happen again.

Whatever else we are, we are animals too. And part of it is that we are sexual. We don’t need to be slaves to our sexual drives and feelings but it is generally not very smart to pretend they don’t exist. You know who was very practical and down-to-earth about this? Some of you will be surprised. The Apostle Paul. I’m not kidding.

Apparently for some of his life Paul was celibate, and he writes in one of his letters that he wishes all Christians could be like him in this way so that they could concentrate all their energies on ministry, but then he adds this proviso. However, he says, “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” (I Cor. 7: 6-7) It is not a good idea to pretend that you are not sexual. It is better to find healthy ways of expressing our sexuality. It seems to me a pretty enlightened way of thinking for the times, admittedly in a guy sort of way. I think if Paul knew what we know today he would agree with Massachusetts and Connecticut and Idaho. It is not a good idea to expect human beings not to be sexual.

Whatever else we are, we are animals. We are sexual. And we are subject to the vicissitudes of earthly existence. We have not figured out how to do away with disease and death yet.

I miss Sue Zable. Sue was an ordained clergyperson and a seminary professor, but she plunged into congregational life like any rank-and-file Christian. Sue even took a turn at chairing our finance committee. You know how rare it is to find a seminary professor who’d be willing to chair a local church finance committee … or capable?

Sue got cancer and too soon died. You know the scripture she quoted to me most often as she was fighting her cancer? She quoted the words of Jesus saying that God “makes [God’s] sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matt. 5:45}

Cancer happens. Disease happens. Death happens. We
can study disease and try to eradicate it and we should, but apparently God or nature does not except us from natural disasters, disease, physical anomalies, congenital disorders, or any of the rest of it. Apparently God or nature does not dole out diseases to those who deserve them or grant good health to those who deserve that. We are not excepted.

A friend sent me this week a photo of somebody’s great-grandmother sitting in front of a birthday cake with three candles on the cake. The candles were in the shapes of the letter 1, 0, 0 and spelled out 100. She was leaning forward toward the cake using the flame of the second candle to light her cigarette. Go figure.

I love listening to your choir on your podcasts but on the treadmill at the gym, I sometimes to listen to a British guitar player and songwriter named Mark Knopler. I like him because his lyrics are often a combination of profundity and fun. He wrote these lyrics:

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together, baby
Sometimes you're a fool in love
Sometimes you're the Louisville slugger
Sometimes you're the ball
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're going lose it all

You gotta know happy - you gotta know glad
Because you're gonna know lonely
And you're gonna know bad
When you're rippin' and a ridin' and you're coming on strong
You start slippin' and a slidin' and it all goes wrong, because

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug …

One day you got the glory
One day you got none
One day you're a diamond
And then you're a stone

Everything can change
In the blink of an eye
So let the good times roll
Before we say goodbye, because

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug …

John Richard Newhause said, before he died, that the mortality rate seems to be holding steady at 100 percent. No exceptions.

Apparently God doesn’t make the sun shine on the good or grant them health and wealth and advanced degrees, nor does God make it rain or send trouble and hardship to only the unrighteous. Apparently God doesn’t make an exception for me or you. So where is God in all this?

Of course, it is too big a question to answer in one sermon. But I think there are a couple of hints in the book of Hebrews as to where God might be in the midst of natural selection and evolution.

I turned to the Book of Hebrews because it asks the question, What is a man? What is a woman? What is a human being? But I found there some hints to the question: where is God?

The Book of Hebrews says (I think this is absolutely delightful): “Now God did not subject the coming world about which we are speaking to angels.” (Hebrews 2:5) Then. Later, talking about Jesus, Hebrews says; “It is clear he did not come to help angels but the descendants of Abraham.” (Hebrews 2: 16-17)

Whatever God is doing in the universe, it is not in the angelic realms of elevated and lofty sentiments and nobility, not in the rarified purity of heavenly places. It is in the world where whatever else we are we are animals and we are sexual, and where we are healthy and full of life sometimes and where we get sick and die other times. No exceptions. That world. This world. The world of windshields and bugs and Louisville sluggers and balls.

Warren Zevon was another song-writer. His lyrics too were often smart and funny. He abused substances severely and then found sobriety and then was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of cancer. He knew he was dying. He agreed to go on the David Letterman show. It was an amazing show. You can watch it on YouTube. You should.

Zevon talked with Letterman openly and with a sense of humor about his impending death. At one point in the interview Letterman asked Zevon, “Is there anything you know from the place you are at now that I might not know?” At the edge of death, is there any knowledge that you can share with me who will be there someday too?

Zevon said, “Not really. The only advise I could give you is: enjoy every sandwich.”

Where is God in the world of natural selection and evolution? I think God is in the sandwich. Isn’t this what we Christian say we believe – that God is in the bread and the wine?

Every four years Methodists elect delegates to national and regional conferences, and they pass the rules of the church and elect bishops. Back in Washington there is a very funny resolution that some people wrote that we will be voting on next year. It says that Methodist clergy shall not campaign to be elected as delegates to General or Jurisdictional conferences neither shall they campaign to be elected as bishops. This is a very funny resolution.

Passing a law that Methodist clergy should not jockey for position and power and prestige within the church is like passing a law that hound dogs should not sniff nor monkeys scratch.

See, I think God is somewhere in the midst of grubby church politics. God is in the midst of the fervent departmental wars in this university. God is in the midst of the wheeling and dealing in the halls of Congress. Whatever God is doing in our world, God isn’t doing it in the realm of the lofty and angelic. God is doing it in the world where we eat and mate and practice politics. God is in the bread and the wine. We ought to taste every bite, laugh at everything that is funny, cry about all the sadness. God is in the sandwich.

The other hint I see in Hebrews is that God is somewhere in the rules to which we are subjected. Not the rules we make but the rules we can’t do anything about … the rules with no exceptions.

God is somewhere in the rule that when the humidity in the air reaches a certain point at a certain temperature, it is going to rain on us whether we are righteous or unrighteous.

God is somewhere in the rule that determines the sun is going to set at 8:16 p.m. tonight in Boston whether we are good or bad the rest of the day today. Test it if you want. Be as good or as bad as you can be today, and the sun will still set at 8:16 p.m. in Boston tonight. Check it out.

No matter whether we are righteous or unrighteous during the night tonight, the sun is going to rise at 5:26 a.m. in Boston tomorrow morning. No exceptions.

God is somewhere within the rules to which we are subjected. The rule that the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent. The rule that none of us gets out of here alive. The rule that a sperm and an egg will meet and seed new life. The rule of survival of the luckiest.

God is somewhere in the rule that we more or less reap what we sow … the rule that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time …. Malcom X’s rule that chickens come home to roost …. Dr. King’s rule that truth crushed top the earth will rise again.

God is in the sandwich and God is somewhere in the rules to which we are subjected.

Eight years before he completed The Origin of the Species 1851, Charles Darwin’s 10-year-old daughter, Annie, the light of his life, died. It was a massive grief. After her death, Darwin concentrated even more on his work. He plunged into it to it almost to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe he was just compensating for his pain.

But something else may have been at work in him. It may be that when our world has fallen apart the rules of the universe can feel to us like everlasting arms.

We find God in the sandwich and somewhere in the rules that we can neither make nor change. No exceptions.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.19.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

For those of us who love the Bible, Darwin has not made reading it any easier, has he? He has wrecked havoc with the opening chapters of the book, sure, but more than this, he has raised the question of where we are to discover the God of the Bible in a world of evolution and natural selection where there seems little place left for God to be, little left for God to do. Darwin has compelled us to read the Bible anew asking new questions. He hasn’t made reading the Bible easier.

I think the Christian Century writer Amy Frykholm is right when she says that most mainline Christians have made our peace with Darwin.

“We may not have grasped all the nuances of the scientific debate,” she says, “but we have concluded that evolutionary science is good science and therefore must be compatible with good theology. … We believe that [evolution and] natural selection [are] evidently part of God’s method of shaping the natural world.”

We have accepted the thrust of Darwin’s ideas but most of us have not really explored very carefully the implications of this for our understanding of the God of the Bible and the biblical story.

“I, for one,” Frykholm says, “do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. … While I think the contents of the two boxes are compatible, I rarely try to work out the terms of their relationship.” [italics mine]

“Perhaps that’s because the content of the two boxes are, when mixed, still combustible,” she concludes. There are implications here for the way we read the Bible that we are still trying to figure out.

I want to suggest that Darwin and the evolutionary sciences which he helped birth have actually done those of us who love the Bible a favor. Darwin has not made it easier for us to read the Bible but he has compelled us to read it more profoundly.

Of course, it wasn’t only Darwin. The same century that produced Darwin produced David Strauss, Julius Wellhausen and other pioneers of higher biblical critical thought who have taught us that the Bible is intricately layered and richly contextual. It is the same century that gave us Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. Lots was happening in the era that produced Darwin, and all these have all done us a favor because they have compelled us to look more deeply into scripture to find God. But certainly Darwin too.

Darwin, with his radical commitment to discernable truth, forced us to realize that we will not find God in the cosmology, biology, epistomolgy, or superficial politics of the Bible. No, we’ve got to look more deeply than this within the Bible to find God.

An image that works here, I think, is the one the apostle Paul uses in II Corinthians. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul says. (II Cor. 4:7) And the clay jar he is talking about most of all is himself. Paul is a clay jar. His ideas are clay jars. His writings are clay jars even when they later become part of scripture.

A clay jar is disposable. It is temporary. It passes away. It is important only because it contains the treasure. Someday the treasure will be poured into some other clay jar. The clay jar has only passing value. Our goal is to discern the treasure both held and hidden within the clay jar.

Darwin compels us to read the Bible this way … to look into and beyond the clay jars to find the treasure … to look more deeply within scripture to find God.

God is not found within the details of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1, mostly borrowed from Babylonian mythologies. The details of the seven days are disposable. God is found, if we are to find God, deeper down within the story -- within the form that pulls itself up out of the void, within the impulse to life, within the drive toward intelligence.

God is not found among the trees and the snakes of the Garden of Eden of Genesis 2. The details of the Eden story are disposable. God is found, if we are to find God, deeper down within the story, in the human capacity for good and evil, in the struggle within us between self-indulgence and responsibility.

God is not found within the laws of the Pentateuch. We will not find God in the “shalts” and “shalt nots” of various and sundry commandments. We will not find God in the condemnations and abominations of Leviticus. Those laws are temporary and disposable. We’ve got to look deeper to find God. We’ve got to look at the pull within humanity to make laws, the impulse within us to discern how we are meant to live morally. The specific laws themselves are clay pots but they hold and hide the treasure of the awareness of moral responsibility and culpability within the human spirit. This is where we will find God.

God will not to be found in the various social and political structures of the Bible. The social and political orders of the Bible are all temporary and disposable. The imperfect biblical governments riddled with such institutions as slavery, the divine right of kings, and patriarchy are clay jars. If we want to find God we must look beneath the superficial social and political institutions of the Bible to the human impulse to live together orderly and justly and in harmony. The flawed biblical attempts at this are just temporary and passing pointers toward the longing for the realm of God. This is where we will find God in the Bible.

God will not to be found in the biblical theories of atonement and propitiation and substitution. These are clay jars. They hold and hide treasure. God will be found deeper, within the cross, within the human capacity for true altruism, self-giving, and agape love.

Darwin, not Darwin alone, but Darwin for sure, Darwin compels us to search more deeply in scripture to find God. To look within and past the clay pots that hold and hide the treasure.

It is hard to tell how much of this Darwin himself knew. He went from being a candidate for the Anglican priesthood to becoming an agnostic but, even as an agnostic, some days he affirmed his belief in God. He was not a very good agnostic. For some, you know, agnosticism doesn’t mean that they can’t believe in God. It just means they can’t believe in the god being imposed on them. I suspect it was this way with Darwin.

A new book just published this year by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin’s Sacred Cause studies Darwin’s personal papers and notes and even the scribblings in the margins of the books he read and comes to the conclusion that Darwin’s compulsion to discover the ancestry of humanity was motivated by his hatred of slavery. Slavery was one of the clay jars defended by many of its proponents as “biblical” and “natural,” and Darwin believed natural selection undermined the legitimacy of slavery that natural and biblical theologies were sometimes used to justify.

A fascinating book by Keith Thomson Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature explores the debate about evolution for the 150 years before Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species. Thomson discovered that many of Darwin’s predecessors and adversaries in the debate about evolution, especially William Paley, feared the idea of evolution because they feared social change. Paley and others preferred to think that poverty and misery were the give
ns of nature.

It may well be that Darwin knew at some level of his being and intellect that the God of clay jars is an idol and that Darwin’s passion for observable truth was an effort to liberate God as well as humanity.

There is inspiration here for the struggles of our time … obviously the struggle to protect the integrity of science and the academy from those who would corrupt them for ideological purposes, but also the continuing struggle against patriarchy, the struggle against racism, the struggle against poverty and economic injustice, the struggle for gay and lesbian inclusion and equality.

Part of the reason finding God in the depth rather than the shallows of the Bible is important is because it returns the Bible to us as an agent of transformation in our lives and world. We’ve wanted the Bible to give us information or theories or explanations or rationales or justifications, and what the Bible has wanted to give us instead is life.

If we can find God in the depths of the Bible, perhaps we can find God again in the depths of the world we live in today and in the depths of our own lives.

One of my heroes when I was a student here 40 years ago and then a young minister was a South Baptist preacher named Carlyle Marney. He died 30 years ago this year.

Carlyle Marney was once spending a couple of days at a seminary in the South. He wandered into a room where some of the seminary students were having a discussion. They were arguing about where the Garden of Eden had been located. Some thought it had been in the Middle East; others thought it had been located in Egypt.

One of the students asked Carlyle Marney where he thought the Garden of Eden had been. He said: “I know exactly where it was. It was at 1611 Locust Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”
The students looked at him in wonderment, so he continued.

“It was at 1611 Locust Street in Knoxville,” he said, “that my mother gave me some money when I was a small boy to go to the corner store to get milk. When I got there, instead of buying milk, I bought candy. I had eaten the candy by the time I got home. When I got there I hid in the hallway closet behind the coats. After awhile, my mother came and opened the closet door and pushed aside the coats and looked at me and said, ‘Carl, what have you done?’

So you see,” he told the students, “the Garden of Eden was located at 1611 Locust Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”

Each of us has in our life a Garden of Eden.

Each of us has in our life a Tower of Babel, an Egypt, a Red Sea, a Sinai, a wilderness and a Promised Land. Each of us has in our life a Jerusalem and a Temple, a Babylon, an exile, a Diaspora, and a homecoming. Each of us has in our life a Bethlehem of Judea, a Capernaum, a Samaria, a Jerusalem, a Gethsemane, an Upper Room, a Golgotha, a betrayal, a denial, and an empty tomb. Each of us has in our life a Pentecost, a road to Damascus, an Isle of Patmos, a New Jerusalem, and a heavenly city.

If we can learn to find God in the deep places of the Bible, then perhaps we can rediscover God in the deep places of our lives and of our world again.

Darwin has not made it easier for those of us who love the Bible to read it. But he has helped us read it more profoundly, to look into the Bible more deeply to find God.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.12.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

We spend a part of each summer on a small lake. Ours is a real ‘Once More to the Lake’, lake, with much of the beauty, memory, quiet, seclusion and sense of mortality in E B White’s fine story of that name. The tight belt and wet shorts follow the swim--and forecast death.
We do a good job at the bad job of deceiving ourselves about how short, how fragile life can be. And therefore, to the same end, about how wondrous, splendid, magnificent is every hour and every day.

One night we puttered about in a boat with a 9 horse motor. No one else was around, no one else was in sight. We let the motor idle, then die. And all around there was endless silence. That quiet that tingles and tickles. We sat in the boat. We sat a good long time. We had talked enough, so we just sat. There were 6 or 8 different bird calls, repeated, moving against the background of the nothing, the quiet. There was then, after a while, the long low frog call, and again, and again. There was a little quiet wind, just enough to move the trees. Two dogs barked, but only a little. A bass jumped, then another. Then the long stretch of stillness, again. A deep, long quiet. At last a car moved along the shore road, slowly and softly but with enough steam and sound to break the mood.

Here is our experience. Mystery. Silence.

In faith we face our experience. At its depth, our experience is about mystery, and about the exploration, step by step, of that mystery, along the trail of the mystery of discipleship. In fact, that is a lot of what faith is meant to do, to help us truly to face up to our experience. Today, before we receive the Eucharist, we shall depend on our faith to help us face our experience as creatures, surrounded in a vast creation, older and larger than we have imagined, and shrouded in a mysterious silence. We shall look for help in the writings of one of the great Boston teachers, the father of a philosophy called ‘Personalism’, Borden Parker Bowne. We shall see whether he, and others like him, can help us in our discipleship, our experience, in mystery, in silence.

Our lectionary gospel today, Mark 6, acclaims the mystery of discipleship, and reminds us of the requirement to let things go, to leave unnecessary, weighty baggage behind. Jesus’ representatives, you and you all, are not to take anything unnecessary along for the journey: no bread, no bag, no cash, no change of clothes. You take only a staff, a defensive weapon of self-protection from the wild dogs of pride, sloth, and falsehood. (Falsehood and sloth can hurt you. So can pride.) Tie your running shoes double tight so that when you need to vamoose, to amscray, to make like a tree and leave, you do so dragging along no dust.

This summer we listen for a good word about Darwin and faith. Our preachers represent the best of Protestant preaching both regionally and nationally, and together they well blend ‘the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. Some are teachers with pastoral experience. Some are pastors with scholarly accomplishment. All are themselves disciples—knowers and lovers both. Their presence this summer is in the service of the ministry of the word. We thank them for their gifts to us: Drs. Wildman, Neville, Snyder, Yoost, Wegter-McNelly, Peterson, and Br. Whitney. Our series, “Darwin and Faith”, is unabashedly evangelical in purpose. We are reaching out to those whose mother tongue is the scientific method, who with us affirm the truth in Darwinian theory, and who seldom, if ever hear the preaching of the Gospel of truth to include evolutionary truth. We are reaching out to those in lab coats, holding stethescopes, using microscopes, who remember the trial of Scopes. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the miracle of discipleship, are yours, too, we affirm. We are also reaching out to those who have long been seized by the confession of the church, but who discern a falsehood, whether spoken or silent, in the church’s own preaching of the Gospel of truth, who seldom if every hear that preaching to include evolutionary truth. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the mystery of discipleship, can continue to be yours as well, 200 years after Darwin’s birth and 2,000 years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Today, we ask, we wonder, did those here in Boston 100 years ago, midway between Darwin’s birth and our morning Eucharist, leave us something to guide us along the trail of the mystery of discipleship?

In earshot of Mark 6 and 1 John 4, our response is in the affirmative. They teach us something about confidence, something about experience, and something about development.

First, confidence. The Personalists lived and taught a robust confidence about faith facing knowledge, religion meeting science. In particular they had no fear of learning from evolutionary theory.

For most of its history, Boston University has been the home of Personalism, a distinctive North American philosophical perspective, whose best known disciple was M L King. In addition to offering certain theological perspectives, Personalism celebrated the freedom and potential of the human person.. For Borden Parker Bowne and Edgar Brightman, their late Kantian idealism made man the measure of all things, and saw in personality a clue to the nature of the divine. Listen briefly to Bowne, in his major work, titled, simply, ‘Personalism’, cited throughout the sermon, and published in 1908, halfway between Darwin’s birth and our service today:

“A wise naturalism has displaced the false supernaturalism of earlier time…We may admit the evolutionary formula as a description of the order in which things come along, such that the earlier forms were simple and homogenous, and the later forms more complex and differentiated.” (18)

Science and religion, long star crossed lovers, need each others’ embrace now, in 2009, perhaps more than at any other time in human history. Science flounders without the wonder, legacy, discipline, morality, and purposeful compassion in religion at its best. Religion flounders without the factual honesty, native humility, reverence for experience, and practical compassion in science at its best. Truth is truth, in learning and in piety. Of course, among others, Paul Tillich wisely taught us this 50 years ago. Of course, among others, Howard Thurman, that lover of penguins, wisely preached this, ‘in the sweep of the natural embrace’, 50 years
ago.

Our Boston University forebears, the Personalists of all five generations, give us the gift of confidence. In person, in fact, they were confident people. I studied under a fifth generation Personalist at Ohio Wesleyan, Dr. Lloyd Easton. My father studied with Edgar Brightman, here at BU, who filled the Bowne chair in those years. The Personalists still have some things to teach us, about Darwin and faith.

Philosophy, theology and preaching begin in wonder. The experience of lasting good is a mystery to be explored, a depth to divine. So Bowne asked, ‘What is the power at work which produces the phenomenal order?’ (96)

Second, experience. For all of their idealism (another subject for another day), the Personalists focused on experience, and, more narrowly, on the mystery of experience.

Bowne: ‘Philosophy is simply an attempt to give an account of experience (4)…Experience itself must be accepted as unconditionally trustworthy (32)…Experience itself is the primary fact (89)…All thought about reality must be rooted in experience (104)…For us, the real can never be anything but the contents of experience, and whatever we may infer from them (108)… Our problem is to explain the world of experience (149).

Their understanding of experience continuously pronounced an apprehension of mystery.

Mystery in experience. Perhaps an epigrammatic chorus will help: Philosophy begins in wonder. The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder. Experience is a mystery to be explored. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ‘No one has ever seen God’. God is seer, not seen. God is not in time, time is in God.

Mystery in experience. They argued that the strength of our necessary negation needs to be further strengthened still, to include ourselves, and to include our own limitations: a personal, even humble admission of our ultimate ignorance. For all our knowledge of the connections between water, rock, plant, fish, bird, and animal life, we are still sitting in silence, on a boat, the 9 horse motor now stilled.

The whole boatload of wisdom literature in the Bible could be cited here (Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, all):

Mystery in experience. The wisdom chorus: My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways. Where were you when I forged the foundations of the universe? I perceived that under the sun the race is not to the swift…time and chance happen to all. There is no speech, nor are there words…

Mystery in experience. Bowne: “there is nothing to excite alarm in any permissible doctrine of the transformation of species”(250)

We who embrace a strict negativity, a theological via negativa, the marrow Protestant aversion to idolatry, need to make sure that we are negative enough, that our negation extends far enough, far enough to include us, too.

Once you admit the reality of the invisible, in your own experience, you make space for the exploration of mystery.

Mystery in experience. Is memory real? Are dreams things of substance? Are thoughts things? What about dread, longing, fear, anxiety, hatred, despair—are they actual existential realities? Is friendship something real? What about trust, or affection, or confidence or agreement? And love? Is love more than affective byproduct? When you say, ‘I love you’, does the verb refer to anything real? Let me ask you about hope. When you say, ‘I sure hope so’, does the verb refer to anything? What of faith? When you say, “I have faith in him”, does this mean anything?

Memory is invisible. So, too, are dreams, thoughts, dread, friendship, trust, affection, confidence, love, hope, and faith. All these are things invisible, heaven not earth. Do you admit to their reality? Or not? Once you admit, in personal experience, to the reality of the invisible, you admit, in general, to the possibility of invisible reality. As Bultmann once wrote, the Gospel is the triumph of the invisible over the visible, of what is not visible over what is.

A central, particular case of this mystery of the invisible is what Bowne terms the ‘mystery of self-determination’: “This is something which cannot be mechanically analyzed or deduced as a necessary resultant—it can only be experienced…It can only be recognized as the central factor of personality, the condition of responsibility, and the basis of the moral life. (210).

Our need is to understand, to face, our experience--which includes experience of the invisible, the non-material. Our experience includes more than the very real dimensions, equally present in cosmic and personal life, of the impersonal, the ambivalent, the inattentive, the passive, the wild, the violent, the inexplicable, and the wasteful.

Third, development. The Personalists took up the Darwinian insight into development with all its random, wasteful, violent, unforeseen effects.

Development, change, progression are at the heart of things. The Personalists saw and emphasized this many decades ago. A Darwinian perspective causes us to value development, to see continuities between our own created being and the rest of the known world, to acknowledge continua and continuity, all of which will help us in our time. Bowne: “the universe is no fixed and completed static fact, but rather a process” (213). Again: “No developing thing can ever be understood or defined by what it momentarily is, but only by all that which it is to become” (247)

In addition, they argued that social Darwinism needs strongly to be avoided. Bowne passionately opposed Spencer and others, and gave us an example for avoiding the social misapplications of Darwinian theory that threaten to emerge in any age.

Bowne’s idealism we may dispute, or not. But regard, for a moment, his conclusion, which we may be inclined to admit:

“The more we dwell upon this view, the more mysterious our life becomes for the imagination…In its relation to man the space world is largely a potentiality, waiting for realization by man himself. There are harvests waiting to grow, and flowers waiting to bloom, but it cannot be until man sets his hand to work. The flora and fauna of the earth are increasingly taking their character from our will and purpose. Even climate itself is not independent of our doings and misdoings. The space world is nothing complete and finished in itself, but is forever becoming what we will it to be.” (276).

In the mystery of discipleship, here is a witness, a Personalist witness from 100 years ago, to affirm confidence, experience, and development. In faith, with an affirmation of confidence, experience, and development, we may continue to face our experience. You may take confidence. You may trust experience. You may engage development.

The author of 1 John knew theological difficulty better than we do, and, in concert with the author of the Gospel of John displayed more spiritual courage than we normally do. He said: “No one has ever seen God”; the d
ivine, the invisible, that beyond our poor power to add or detract, the unimaginable. But this author then moves ahead. He invites you to explore mystery. He even gives you the necessary clue about how to do so. “If” (a big if) “we love one another, God’s love abides in us and is made whole in us”. Dwells and develops, lives and lasts. How? How so? It is a mystery, the mystery of discipleship. You are invited to travel light. You are invited to come along.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.5.2009 at 11:00 am