Matthew 17:1-9
This weekend, congregations across the country and across multiple faith traditions are celebrating Religion and Science Weekend. The movement started as Evolution Sunday and coincided with the birthday of Charles Darwin. I’m not quite ready to place Darwin in my canon of alternative saints, so maybe I should refer to him as “Nearly Saint Charles.” After all, it took courage, arrogance, or both for Darwin and other scientists of the 19th century to challenge literal interpretations of the Biblical Creation myth.
It took courage in 2004 for pastors in Wisconsin to challenge the selective literalists who insisted that the two creation myths in Genesis must be read literally, though they generally pretend there is only one, along with the Flood myth pre-rabbinic authors borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. Their push to teach their anti-science Christian heresy in public schools was a warning of what was to come, and indeed has come.
Three years after that campaign to keep real science in the schools, Evolution Sunday evolved into Evolution Weekend as Jewish communities joined the movement for Shabbat. In 2023, after the Covid-19 pandemic showed just how widespread and dangerous the anti-science movement was, it became Religion and Science Weekend.
The theme this year is “Truth Matters,” and wow, is that obvious, as our nation has been overtaken by several oddly aligned cults: a personality cult around a rapist and racist; a wellness cult selling 21st century snake oil, the logical intersection of end-stage capitalism and self-help; and of course, white Christian nationalism, a perversion that twists the words of Jewish and Christian scripture in ways we have not seen since the fall of the Third Reich. All funded by the billionaires who own the media, and increasingly, our government. But we science in this church, and though only two of us took an ordination vow to speak the truth with love, truth telling is in our congregational DNA.
I could try to approach the topic from the science side, but I’d most certainly get a lot of it wrong, especially if I tried to discuss quantum mechanics, which I find fascinating and mysterious. I have the exact same experience of God, fascinating and mysterious, but at least in that case I know the fancy words that might convince you, on some days, that I’m not completely clueless. So let’s go with that.
Ancient humans, faced with existential angst and encountering the mysterious and transcendent, created placeholders for powers unknown and uncontrollable, gods with a small “g.” The Yahweh cult of ancient Israel was incredibly innovative, moving from polytheism to monotheism, from idols to a God that could not be depicted, from a God that behaved like a human despot to a God that was compassionate, always forgiving and seeking reconciliation with God’s chosen people. Jesus, as unique as he would turn out to be, would not be possible without the theological entrepreneurship of the Jewish prophets.
Ancient humans … created placeholders for powers unknown and uncontrollable, gods with a small “g.”
The followers of Jesus, all Jews, experienced something in him that felt God like. The official feast for this day, Transfiguration, represents as theophany, a manifestation of the divine. His followers experienced him as still present to them even after they had seen him tortured and executed. The movement that followed went through many theological contortions and a fair amount of bloodshed to make sense of how God could be God and Jesus could also be God and a human and God could still be present as the spirit that animated Christians and their congregations. But every iteration of God was understood as a person, with will and agency like a human person, communicating with human persons.
That constructed understanding of God got warped by Hellenistic philosophy, imperial authorization, and institutionalization. In Christianity, God became this paradox, unchanging and all-knowing, while also a puppet master in the sky, still a backstop for the unknown and transcendent.
The thing is, culture allows humans to transmit knowledge across tribes and generations. Culture changes. Even more critically, human knowledge routinely reached a tipping point when sudden surges in knowledge occurred. The biologists who recognized and named the process of natural selection represent one moment in that trajectory. The physicists of the first half of the 20th century and the geneticists of the latter half were other iterations of that pattern, and today there is zero doubt that life evolved from a common ancestor, that we humans are bipedal primates with an inflated sense of our own importance, and that human chauvinism is not only wrong, but also dangerous.
The three great monotheisms, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are sometimes known as “religions of the book.” And that is part of the problem. Orthodox versions of each of these faiths believe that God’s direct revelation to humans stopped centuries ago: with the last Biblical prophets in Judaism; with John of Patmos in Christianity; and with Mohammed in Islam. God is available in print, and while we might quibble about translations, no one is seriously arguing that we should be adding material to the canon of scripture.
We keep God in the little boxes humans constructed centuries ago, experiencing cognitive dissonance when our definition of God fails to cohere with our experience of the world.
It will not surprise you to hear me say that our understanding of God must evolve, not as a defense against expanding human knowledge, but because we constructed it to begin with as a placeholder for what can never fit in that box, source and love and transcendence and the resilience and drive of life, and our embodied human experience of all of that.
Anything we call God will always be provisional, as real as a painting, which is not the thing that is the subject of the painting, but merely makes you think of the thing, real or imagined, Chagall’s “Fiddler” or Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
When we say God, there must always be an asterisk, a confession that we have no real clue what we are talking about. It is all well and good to write a “Summa Theologica,” as Thomas Aquinas did in the 13th century, as Karl Barth attempted to do in the thirteen dense books of “Church Dogmatics,” a project left unfinished at his death. And maybe that is precisely as it should be, every theological work beginning with a disclaimer and ending with an ellipses, unfinished.
That is precisely as it should be, every theological work beginning with a disclaimer and ending with an ellipses, unfinished.
But I don’t want to stop with our human definition of God evolving. I want to suggest that God is evolving too, for to live is to change, and I do not worship a dead God.
It is fine that our thinking starts with ourselves. It is natural. But we should be well past the hubris that claimed that God was like us. The God we created in our own image it too small. If we want to see God, we should not be looking in the mirror. We should be looking in telescopes and microscopes and the fossil record and the tree canopy, for every creature is a work of God and a book about God, just as the mystic Meister Eckhardt declared just a few decades after Aquinas foolishly tried to sum up theology.
Every creature is a book about God as is every quasar and quark, and if God is reflected in creation, then God is movement and just enough chaos for creativity, room for the serendipitous self-organizing that is complexity. If creation is not the same today as it was yesterday, why should God be frozen in time?
And creation is not the same today as it was yesterday and will not be the same tomorrow. Biologists watched natural selection in action during the Covid-19 pandemic. Urban flocks of a bird known as a Dark-eyed Junco have shorter beaks than their counterparts in the wild. Scientists at UCLA documented how beaks lengthened as a result of the pandemic, when urban sources of food like pizza crusts disappeared from the campus grounds during the anthropause.
It is time we let God come out of our definitions, out of death by printing press, and allow God to be alive, exuberant and wild.
Natural selection is truth. Change is real. Our sun will die, and so will we, but, as Walt Whitman declared, the powerful play will go on, and this day, you may contribute a verse, changing the world with your love and creativity. May it be so. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Evolving God,
we are in a time of discontinuous change,
human knowledge and technology surging ahead
faster than our character.
We pray for those impacted by social media,
radicalized and traumatized,
called to their worst possible selves
by the siren song of anonymity.
We pray for the children
manipulated and groomed
as predators and pranksters
take over Twitch and Tik-Tok,
flood Fortnite and Roblox.
We pray for the communities
damaged by AI-mania,
as electricity prices soar
and data-centers suck up our precious water,
for job loss on top of job loss,
the slow-motion collapse of work with dignity.
Jesus lived in a time of discontinuous change,
the colonial system of Judea finally breaking
three decades after his death.
We pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father…