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THIS WEEK'S SERMON

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:12:09 GMT

by Kristen Dunn

When Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, every person of science immediately agreed with him completely, and every religious person immediately criticized him roundly.

What do you think? Sound accurate?

When the very first priestly scribe, inspired by God, sat down and wrote the beginning of a poem about creation, when he sat down and wrote: "b’reyshit bara elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz" – he was imagining that several thousand years later we would translate that as "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" and in the 20th and 21st century we would take that at as proof that Charles Darwin was wrong. What do you think?

Sound pretty crazy, no? But these are the kinds of assumptions that are at the root of the idea that evolution is in conflict with Christian belief.

Evolution is a way of talking about the biology of life on this planet. Evolution does not require that Christians abandon any of our faith, except one thing: taking the creation stories at the beginning of the Bible literally. Let’s explore that a little bit, that desire to take those stories literally.

The bible is a library that contains many kinds of books. Some are letters, like Hebrews and Romans and Corinthians, some are historical summaries like Chronicles and Kings, some are stories and poems like Genesis, and some are all poetry, like Psalms.

The impulse to want to take the Bible apart and make it over into something it is not is not a faithful or Godly impulse. When we seek to take the Genesis poems or stories literally, we are turning them into something they are not. No part of the bible, even the historical summaries, are intended to be like CNN, a camera on the details of events as they happened. Wolf Blitzer was not reporting live from the moment of the beginning of creation. Isaiah was not Dan Rather, standing at the gates of Jerusalem and telling us across the centuries what was happening.

Instead of a camera, the bible is a window. When we open this window, we can explore the hearts and lives of people in relationship to God. We can explore the prayers and poems of people who were inspired by our living, loving God.

When we begin to enter into that window, we can enter deeper into our relationship with God. When we use the Bible to stay in relationship with God, we are being faithful to God’s call. God calls us to come into relationship and stay in relationship.

Think about the relationships in your life. Husband, wife, friend, child. If a relationship lives and grows, it is about ongoing CONNECTION. We are not in relationship with someone if we take one thing that person has said, or one thing they wrote, or even something that someone else wrote about them and say HERE. (cup hands) I have it. This is all I ever need to know about you. I have the Truth. This is all I need. (close hands and walk a few steps away). That's not relationship.

But there is another way. Just like the trees planted by the stream in today’s reading from Jeremiah, when we are connected to the LIVING, eternal and everflowing and ever changing waters of God’s presence, we are strong in our faith. We can ask questions, and we can stand the heat, and we can withstand drought, and still the fruit of our faith will keep coming.

It is only when we decide that we already have all of the answers that we need, it is only when we decide that we have all of the Truth, it is then that we are in danger.

Friends, this cutting off is exactly what we do when we see the Bible as a literal document and evolution and other science in competition with it. When we are closed off to new information, we are like the tumbleweeds blown about by the wind. We are cut off from the living, flowing stream of God’s presence. Cut off, we keep trying to squeeze some new life out of what WE understand, but it is useless. In the end, our faith becomes hard and dry and brittle.

But God’s living presence never dries up. That is the good news we live in. That is the joy of our faith. God’s living presence is in the natural world, it is all around us. God is not limited just to what we can’t explain; God is in our science and in our poetry and in our everyday lives.

God acts in our lives, but not as a puppetmaster or as a drivethrough window. God is acting in every moment, in every bit of creation. Charles Darwin’s theory that biological life evolves is a part of our human uncovering of God’s creating work.

We cannot separate our human experience from our experience of God. When we try, we push God to the sidelines. When we try to say: this is science, and if it is science it is not God … then we are limiting God. Just because we begin to understand something doesn’t make it any less a part of God’s creation. Indeed, it is a part of God’s gift to us that we explore God’s creation with curious minds and spirits. God created at the beginning of all life, God is creating now, God will continue to create.

When we stay connected to our living, creating God we are like those trees planted by the stream. When we cut ourselves off from God – either by saying that one translation of the Bible is a literal understanding of the whole mind and work of God, or by saying that science contains all that we need, then we become like those tumbleweeds.

"Truth, Reality, Facts"

Mon, 14 May 2007 18:20:56 GMT

"Truth, Reality, Facts"

By Harry T. Cook

Majority of Americans Reject Theory of Evolution

Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that a god was not involved.

Oh, well then. Charles Darwin and about a million scientists since Darwin must be mistaken.

Who would want to be marked down as saying that he or she did not want to know the truth, experience reality or to be given the facts? To be sure, people in certain circumstances, while they may wish to have the facts, would just as soon they be kept from others. As to truth, it is the pearl of great price for the seeker. As for reality, someone has said it "is that which, when you refuse to accept it, refuses to go away."

I quote here my friend and colleague, Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine:

The truth is problematic. Some people do not like the truth. It forces them to face unpleasant facts. It destabilizes their fixed beliefs. It often compels them to change their minds. Even when the truth confirms what they already believe, the process of testing gives them anxiety . . . Only an open mind can pursue the truth with success. People with privileged premises, with opinions they are unwilling to change, are not interested in the truth . . . An open mind listens to new ideas even when they are outrageous. It cultivates new ways of thinking even when they are threatening . . . It is willing to alter its convictions even when the change is painful. An open mind is a servant only to evidence.

Those words were prefatory to a recent three-day colloquium featuring two of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary biblical archaeologists: Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar. At issue was the real – as opposed to the imagined – history of the Jews.

Question: Did the much-celebrated Exodus as chronicled by the biblical book of the same name and that is the entire rationale for the tradition celebration of Pesach – or Passover – actually occur? Answer: No archaeological evidence supports such a thing, and, in fact, puts up a firm argument against it.

Question: Was the Land of Canaan (today’s Palestine) entered and occupied in triumphant conquest by Israelites under the sponsorship of Yahweh as described in the Book of Joshua and so often used geo-politically to support the claims of the modern State of Israel? Answer: No archaeological evidence supports that assertion, and, in fact, all evidence points to other origins of the people called Israel. As for Yahweh, who could know?

Question: Was the Jerusalem of David and his celebrated reign as real as the Bible says, or was it largely imagined? Answer: Imagined. Little evidence supports the idea of a glorious Davidic kingdom, and lots of evidence undercuts it.

For traditional Jews, all this is disturbing news because it is incontrovertible evidence that what the Bible says turns out not to be true – at least in a literal sense. Without going into detail here,

similar problems arise for traditional Christians and some of their beliefs, viz., in the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus – though it’s pretty hard to see how the validity of either could be settled by archaeology. Obstetrics and mortuary science, perhaps, but not archaeology. See my book Christianity Beyond Creeds./2

The Exodus, the resurrection and now evolution. – As Rabbi Wine wrote: An open mind is a servant only to evidence.

The news item that appears atop this essay was surprising to me. I know that some significant number of people refuse to accept the evidence modern science has turned up where evolution is concerned. I just didn’t know how many. That’s a lot of closed minds.

The evidence – archaeological, geological and biological – to support the refinements over a century and a half in the Theory of Natural Selection is overwhelming. No serious scientist in any relevant field of endeavor doubts it. Tries to falsify it? Absolutely. Attempts to disprove Darwin’s conclusions have been under way ever since 1859 when The Origin of Species was published. That’s how it works. That’s how a set of hypotheses is elevated to the rarified level of "theory." Therewith: reality.

A not irrelevant footnote: Not long ago my pastoral counsel was sought by a family, one of whose loved ones had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The family, as it turned out, wanted my help in keeping that truth from the person in question. "It’ll scare him," they said. They meant that it scared them. "We shouldn’t just tell him the truth, should we?" I insisted and eventually prevailed.

The person, now deceased, was actually comforted in learning the truth about himself. It gave him what he called "room to maneuver," to say what needed to be said to those to who needed to hear it. He told me in one of our last conversations that, and I quote, "There is no substitute for reality." No, indeed.

Reality is that which,

when you refuse to believe,

it refuses to go away.

ANYBODY REMEMBER PAT'S MEMORY PILLS?

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:20:16 GMT

Still Waiting for Answers

Surely no one beyond a handful of the most self-deluded Republicans in Congress was surprised at the disclosure by George Tenet, the former intelligence director, that there was never a serious debate in the Bush administration about whether Iraq actually posed a threat to the United States.

It has long been evident that President Bush decided to invade Iraq first, and constructed his ramshackle case for the war after the fact. So why, after all this time, are Americans still in the dark about the details of that campaign?

For that matter, why don’t Americans know the full truth about Mr. Bush’s illegal domestic spying program or his decisions on how to handle prisoners of the war on terror? And now there are new questions begging for answers — about the purge of United States attorneys and about campaign pep rallies in executive branch agencies that might well have violated federal law.

For six years, the Republican majority in Congress ignored the administration’s power grabs, misdeeds and incompetence or, worse, pushed through laws that gave legislative cover to some of Mr. Bush’s most outrageous abuses of power. Now that the Democrats control Congress, they have opened the doors of government in welcome ways. But the list of questions just seems to grow.

We hope Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, enforces the subpoena of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss prewar claims about Saddam Hussein’s long-gone weapons programs. Ms. Rice, who was national security adviser before the war, says she has answered every possible question. Actually, we don’t have room for all our questions.

Just a few: Did she vet the briefing Mr. Bush got from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s rogue intelligence shop on Iraq’s alleged efforts to acquire uranium? The Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department thought, correctly, that the report was false. So why did Ms. Rice permit the president to repeat it to the world? Or did Mr. Bush also know what he was claiming was wrong?

The same applies to other claims about Iraq, including a false report about the purchase of aluminum tubes for bomb building, talk of mushroom clouds and fairy tales about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. When it became clear the intelligence was false, why didn’t Ms. Rice make sure the public found out? Before the war, Ms. Rice was not in a post requiring Senate confirmation, but she is now. If she refuses to testify, the House should hold her in contempt.

It is imperative for Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, to finish two remaining studies on prewar intelligence that his Republican predecessor, Senator Pat Roberts, had no intention of completing. The first, on the errors made by the intelligence agencies in predicting what would happen after the invasion of Iraq, is expected to be finished next month. The final piece of the report will compare what administration officials said about Iraq with the actual information they had. Both reports are essential for understanding how this country got into this mess. Mr. Rockefeller will have to make sure the White House does not drag out the declassification procedure.

And then there are the questions about the purge of federal prosecutors. There is mounting evidence that many of the eight fired United States attorneys were punished for refusing to prosecute Democrats on phony election-fraud charges. Who ran this purge? And is it true, as it now seems, that others were rewarded for bringing weak corruption cases timed to close races?

For the last six years, the White House has also conducted seminars in each election cycle that certainly seem like an effort to use government agencies to help G.O.P. candidates. Did they violate the law that forbids the use of federal offices for campaigning?

Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s political “architect,” is at the center of both of these scandals. Congress needs to issue, and enforce, subpoenas to compel him and other top White House officials to testify.

Mr. Bush’s supporters are already arguing that Congress’s much-needed investigations are politically motivated and backward looking. Actually, the baldly political act was the Republicans’ refusing to do their constitutional duty of oversight for the last six years. Mr. Waxman said his panel issued four subpoenas to the Bush administration under Republican leadership. The same leadership issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton administration.

As for looking back, Mr. Bush has hardly given up the habit of stonewalling Congress, or shown that he has learned the limits of his power. The war in Iraq not only continues, but Mr. Bush is escalating it and repeating many of the same myths about Saddam Hussein. The country does not need any more myths. It needs answers.