The New England Church Pulpit New England Congregational Church UCC Aurora Illinois

As we begin our Advent journey today, Abraham Heschel offers us words that challenge us in the direction we might take:
Religion [has] declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religions speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

I would add to Heschel's statement one more thought, namely that until science and faith become partners, we will continue to see religion as a museum rather than a laboratory. God is still speaking, and as we come to this beginning of a new church year, let us hone our listening skills.

Science and religions have all too often been strange bedfellows, and to the chagrin of the church, we have been too rigid in preserving our doctrines at the expense of expanding our faith. It's time to rethink our faith in light of sciences new understandings.

The Bible gives us a world view based on the physics of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the earth sits at the center of the universe, and therefore at the center of God's attention as well. During the Dark Ages, the earth was hammered flat. Conservative clerics insisted that the planets were pushed around by angels--no further discussion. A thousand years later, Copernicus changed our vision of the universe, theorizing that the sun, not the earth, belonged at the center of things. Nevertheless, church leaders placed all their eggs in the Bible basket, interpreted literally, scorning Copernicus'ideas, threatening harm to those who believed him.

In 1611 the King James translation of the Bible was published with a note to readers that creation had occurred on the evening before October 23 in the year 4004 BC. In 1616 the church banned all books that suggested the earth moved at all. Galileo, believing Copernicus was right, continued his research in spite of the ban, but was forced by the Inquisition to renounce his findings.
But the scientific revolution could not be stopped, and in 1687, Isaac Newton planted the seeds of a new world view. Laying down the laws of celestial dynamics, he revealed a solar system that worked like a vast machine, with many parts--some as small at atoms and others as huge as the sun, but they all obeyed four laws. He gave God credit for the laws, but the laws themselves left very little for a deity to do. God was perceived as a night watchman who dozed in a lawn chair while the stars spun in their courses above.

Religion resisted the metaphor for a while, but the illusion of control proved too hard to pass up. Theology became increasingly systematized. It continues to influence us even today. In many churches you will hear God described as a being who behaves as predictably as Newton's universe. Say you believe in God and you will be saved. Sin against God and you will be condemned. Say you are sorry and you will be forgiven. Obey the law and you will be blessed. It is a simple and appealing formulae, comments Barbara Brown Taylor, which makes God easy to understand. Pull this lever and reward will drop down. But don't touch that button or all hell will break loose. In this clockwork universe, the spiritual quest is reduced to learning the rules in order to minimize personal loss and avoid hell, and maximize personal gain and achieve salvation.

This kind of a universe places emphasis on the individual welfare. The atom is the building block of the cosmos, and everything can be broken down into smaller things, and these are the things that count. In the human universe, then, nations, communities, churches and families are reducible to the individuals who make them up. If a child acts out, take the child to a counselor. Fix the child, without inquiring into the health of the family. If a poor woman sells crack, send the woman to jail to punish her without ever asking about the society which keeps her from supporting herself legitimately. The whole can be fixed by repairing the individual parts, so in essence there is no such thing as the whole.

Our prayers are often atomistic as well. We confess and ask and seek as individuals, seeing God as one who takes particular concern for the individual with not only the ability, but the interest, in making life good for us.

Give the church credit for finally coming around to embrace the new world view that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. But now it's past time to look again. New studies in science and astronomy give us a new world view, challenging our traditional understandings of God and our world. It is not a clockwork universe in which individuals function as discrete springs and gears, but one that looks more like a luminous web in which the whole is far more than the parts. In this universe there are no such thing as parts that form the whole, but the whole of the universe is the fundamental unity of reality. The whole is in everything.

This is the language of quantum physics, and it changes the way we define God and see our world. According to the quantum theory, the whole is not made up of the sum of its parts, but rather each part contains the whole in it. According to quantum theory, there is a kind of instantaneous, superliminal communication between quantum particles, and once they have interacted with each other, they have the power to influence each other, no matter how far apart they go. Subatomic particles that split into two parts are still a single system, each now spinning in opposite directions. And even if one part is on the moon and the other in your hand, if you reserve the direction of one, the other instantaneously reverses direction as well. There is a relationship between the two parts that goes beyond being a programmed machine. As hard as we might try to make the creation a machine, it insists on acting like a body, animated by some intelligence that exceeds the speed of life.

David Bohm, a prolific quantum physicist, says that the new science requires a radical change in how we conceive the world. It is no longer possible to see it as a collection of autonomous parts, as Newton did, existing separately while interacting. The deeper revelation is one of undivided wholeness, in which the observer is not separable from what is observed.

The universe has a memory that predates the Big Bang. Back before that explosion sent energy racing every which way at speeds faster than light, there was the egg of the universe in which all places were one place and all things were one thing. Mind, matter and time were not different yet. Then the universe was born and the one became many as the Biblical account of creation and the Garden of Eden poetically describe. Quantum particles became planets, galaxies, clusters and superclusters. Atoms became blue-green algae, toads, palm trees and swans. Space became here or there, as time became then or now. Yet the individual parts are informed by the beginning.

The writer of Ephesians put it like this: there is one body and one spirit...one Lord, one faith, one baptism, God who is above all and through all and in all (4.4-6). It is not enough to proclaim that God is responsible for this unity, but to proclaim that God is in the unity--the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that makes it all go. Light of all light, love of all love. Paul Tillich's name for this divine reality was "the ground of being." Moses heard God say "I Am Who I Am." This is the Force who is not somewhere up there or down here, but everywhere, the God we pray to by our very living, making communication with that Force an oxymoron. We are to that God as the wave is to the ocean. How do you tell where a wave stops and the ocean begins? Each is in the other, making communication an issue of being, a matter of relationship, a part of a vast web that is ever growing and changing and becoming new.

And in that vast luminous web, God is still creating, God is still acting, God is still speaking. On the outer edges of space, new planets are being formed. We are learning more and more about the beginning of time, when things went bang in the immense night before time, and we do so by studying the way that process is being replicated on the outer edges of space today. God is still speaking.

God is still speaking, and if we are willing to listen to the new discoveries of science we will learn something new about God. Well, at least new to us. And we will learn something new about ourselves and about those around us. God still speaks in the still small voices of scientific discovery and the loud voices that clamor when particles collide and energy is created just a few miles from us at Fermilab or Argonne Laboratories.

God is still speaking, and if we are willing to listen we will notice it takes on the voice of the hungry and the tenor of a butterfly's wings or the cry of a baby or the silent, wide-eyed look of a child who has recently discovered something new about their world.

God is still speaking because God is dynamic, not static. God didn't stop creating at the end of the seventh day. God didn't stop talking when the bible was finished being written. God doesn't stop talking when church is finished. God doesn't stop talking when you are reading a novel or a bedtime story to a child, or reading texts from other religions or when you grapple to understand a mathematical formula or when you make music in the shower. God's voice is a multi-toned, multi-pitched, multi-lingual voice that is heard in the language of people and animals and rocks and stars all over the world. God speaks the language of science and art; God is the voice of various religions and cultures; God is the voice of mathematics and music; God is the voice of justice and love.

We are part of a luminous web that glows with the light of all that is created and being created. God is the web, the energy, the space, the lightBnot captured in them, but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is.

The Bhagavad-Gita expresses it this way (9.4-10):
I permeate all the universe
in my unmanifest form.
All beings exist within me,
Yet I am so inconceivably
vast, so beyond existence,
that though they are brought forth
and sustained by my limitless power,
I am not confined within them.
Just as the all-moving wind,
wherever it goes, always
remains in the vastness of space,
all beings remain with me.
They are gathered back into my womb
at the end of the cosmic cycleC
a hundred fifty thousand
billion of your earthly yearsC
and as a new cycle begins
I send them forth once again
pouring from my abundance
the myriad forms of life.
These actions do not bind me.
I stand apart from them all,
indifferent to their outcome,
unattached, serene.
Under my guidance, Nature
brings forth all beings, all things
animate or inanimate,
and sets the whole universe in motion.

The good news is that God is still speaking. The question is: are we still listening?

-Gary L. McCann
(With gratitude to Barbara Brown Taylor whose book The Luminous Web; Essays on Science and Religion, was used extensively in this sermon.)

PASTORAL PRAYER

God who far beyond us, who speaks in languages foreign to our ears and who acts in ways that are strange to our way of thinking, be present with us this day as we begin our Advent journey. We seek new life; we want to be midwives to the birth of peace in our world; and by our acts of justice and our deeds of joy, we pray that we may birth God in our world. Speak to us in languages we can comprehend, and at the same time open our ears to hear you in the languages you are still speaking. We see an old man, toothless and unshaven, smile and if we are listening carefully, we will recognize your smile. We hear a baby crying in our midst, and we sometimes get annoyed, but if we are listening carefully, we will recognize your voice. We have seen the first snow of the season, and though it hampered our holiday travel plans, we heard your still small voice shushing us, telling us to quit worrying about getting somewhere and enjoy the beauty of the all that is around us.

We pray not only for ourselves, but as worship in community should always lead us, we pray that others will hear your voice during this Advent Season as well: may those who grieve hear a word of consolation; may those who feel hated hear a word of love; may those who are afraid hear a word of hope; may those who are at war hear a word of peace, and may those who celebrate hear a word that will inspire them to speak words of hope to all around them. For those named and unnamed today who need to hear your voice, speak to them. And as we pray for you to speak, we offer ourselves to be your voice that through our actions, our attitudes, our voices you will continue to speak.

In this world, we live, not so much by straight lines that connect us, but by overlapping circles that engage us one with another. We live in linear time but cognizant that your time is more of a sphere where past, present and future are all around us all the time, that loved ones gone before us are not that far from us and that the future does not loom but embraces us each moment in the present. Indeed we live in a world wide web which is larger and more important than the one we log onto with our computers, a web that stretches far and wide to encompass people of all races and all religions and all mental capacities and all emotional levels and all economic levels.

In this Advent season, journey with us to find the child through whom you taught us how to love with an unconditional love. May the coming weeks be ones of excitement and joy, of challenging business as usual, of stretching our faith to encompass new ways of thinking and living. In the name of the One whose birth prompts our celebration, Amen.

Copyright © 2004 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved.

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