Intending Good

All of us love a good transformation story. The troubled teenager who turns her life around and makes good. The man who is destructive to himself and others who confronts his issues and builds a new life. The rundown neighborhood filled with crime and broken windows that is redone and renewed. We live for those kind of stories.

So let me tell you the story of Joseph and his brothers, but let me warn you before we start that, if it's a story of transformation, it's an incomplete story. There is more reconciliation to be done.

It's a great story, though. The last chapters of the book of Genesis form one big cycle of stories around the figure of Joseph and it is a heck of a story. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber recognizes that. He turned it into a musical called Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But one thing you might ask as you watch that play or as you read this story is - where is God? What is God up to in this story? The people in the story will sometimes try to interpret for us what God is up to, but they're not always reliable. So we need to be asking, what is God doing?

We're picking the story up in chapter 45 of Genesis, so if you want to follow along in your Bible or a pew Bible I invite you to turn there with me. But by the time we get to this chapter we're getting near the end of the story. So maybe we need a little recap on the characters in this story.

The father who is mentioned in this story is Jacob, also known as Israel because of a little wrestling match he had one night with a man whom he took to be God and who gave him that name. And what do we know about Jacob? He began his life in a struggle with his twin brother Esau. Tricked his brother out of his birthright and his father's blessing. Ran for his life after Esau threatened to kill him. Was blessed by God in a dream where he saw a ladder reaching up to heaven. Travelled to his mother's far-off homeland where he fell in love with the beautiful Rachel. Worked seven years for her and was tricked by his father-in-law into marrying Rachel's sister, Leah. Worked seven more years so that he could marry Rachel as well. Tricked his father-in-law out of the best of his flocks. Scurried back to Canaan where he had a tearful reunion with Esau and then had a very large family.

What do we know about Jacob's family? He had twelve sons and at least one daughter. He loved the children of his wife, Rachel, more than the sons of Leah, or the maidservants with whom he also had children. And he loved Joseph best of all. So much so that he gave Joseph a special coat to well - that fabled coat of many colors.

The relationship between Joseph and his brothers? What do we know about that? Not that good, right? The ten brothers who were older than Joseph hated him. He was daddy's favorite. He was a tattletale. He was arrogant. He had these dreams. Once he was out in the fields and he said to his brothers, "Hey, guys, I had a dream. In my dream we were out binding sheaves in the field and then, all of a sudden, my bundle of grain stood up and all of your bundles came and bowed down to it. What do you think that means?"

Another time he was out in the fields and he said to his eleven brothers, "Hey, guys, I had a dream. In my dream the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing to me. Weird, huh? What do you think it means?"

Well, what it meant was that the brothers were going to try to get rid of him. The next time he came out to the fields they made plans to do him in. They were going to kill him, but one of the brothers, Rueben, intervened and instead they stripped off his fancy coat and threw him in a pit. When some passing slave traders came by, they sold Joseph to them for twenty pieces of silver and went back home to Jacob with the sad tale of how Joseph had been eaten by wild animals.

They thought it was the end of the story, but it wasn't. Joseph ended up in Egypt as the slave to a high Egyptian official. Eventually he ended up as the right hand man to the king of Egypt himself, the Pharaoh. It was his ability to interpret dreams that got him into this position. He knew that a famine was coming to the land following seven years of plenty and he was given charge of a grain storage and distribution program.

It was the famine that brought the brothers back into Joseph's life. Jacob sends the brothers from Canaan to see if they can get some grain. He sends them all except Benjamin, who has now become the favorite since Joseph's loss.

The brothers go to Egypt and they appear before Joseph, but they don't recognize him because he is made up like a mighty Egyptian. Besides, they thought he was long gone. Joseph doesn't tell them it's him, either. He toys with them. Demands that one of them go back to Canaan and get Benjamin. Eventually settles for keeping one of them in prison while the rest go back.

They come back with Benjamin and Joseph still doesn't let on who he is. He sends them off again and puts his silver cup in one of their sacks of grain. Joseph gives them a little headstart, then sends a servant after them and accuses them of theft. They deny it, but, wouldn't you know it, the silver cup is found in the bag of Benjamin.

Benjamin is arrested and brought back. The brothers plead for Benjamin's life. They know their father will never survive the loss of another favorite son. One of the brothers offers himself as a replacement.

This is where we pick up the story today. Joseph has ratcheted up the anxiety so much that even he can't take it anymore. So verse one tells us that he could not restrain himself in front of all the people in the room. So he sends the other members of the court out. Joseph seems to be concerned with how this is going to look. He's concerned for his appearance. But he's not very successful because verse 2 tells us that the Egyptians could hear him wailing in the next room.

Now pay attention to a couple of things here as we read on. Pay attention to who cries and how many times Joseph refers to himself. Verse 3 is where he finally makes the big reveal. "I am Joseph," he says. "How is my father?"

At this point, he hasn't offered a big reunion. He hasn't said, "All is forgiven. Come on over and give me a hug." He has just laid the bombshell on them that he is Joseph. So the brothers don't answer. They are scared. They don't know what Joseph might do to them.

In verse 4 Joseph says, "Come over here." And they come. He's decreasing the distance between them. Not using his elevated status as a barrier. But he's still not telling them what he's going to do. In fact, he begins by reminding them that he is their brother and they sold him to the Egyptians. He's naming the wound. He's pointing to the act that has dominated all of their lives. The thing that needs to be healed.

In verse 5 he says, "Don't be grieved or angry with yourselves because you sold me into slavery." Joseph thinks he knows how they're feeling. But do we know that's how these brothers feel? We've seen how they are kind of protective of their father but not a whole lot of grief and self-loathing.

In verse 7 Joseph goes on to interpret the situation. "God sent me ahead to preserve our lives. God sent me to preserve your future." Verse 8: "You didn't sent me. God sent me and made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his house and a ruler over all Egypt." Three times he repeats it - God sent me. It's all about him. In fact, Joseph seems to deny that the brothers had any hand in this at all. The emphasis is on God and Joseph. Joseph is the object of God's favor. Joseph is the one who was the focus of those dreams he shared in the field with them so long ago. Now Joseph's dreams have come true. His brothers have come to bow down before him.

Then in verse 9 he uses his position to give the brothers a command. "Go back to my father and tell him that his son, Joseph, says, 'God has made me lord of all Egypt. Come down to live with me, you and your children and all of your possessions. I will support you through the famine.'" The brothers will be taken care of, but primarily because of Joseph's concern for his father.

Then by verse 14 he gets around to the hugs. He starts with Benjamin. No surprise. Then he turns to his brothers and weeps over them. But notice that the Bible never says whether they join in the weeping.

Now what do we say about a story like this. I love the stories from Genesis because they are so honest and they give us real people who act like the real people we know. They make big mistakes and they have big character flaws and despite all that they end up being claimed by God. That's hopeful for us.

There is reconciliation in this story, too. A dark chapter in this family's history is beginning to be closed. And when we see it played out on the stage or in retellings, this scene is lifted up as the happy ending.

But is there something missing here? It's an imperfect reunion, isn't it? Joseph gets a chance to be magnanimous and to embrace his brothers. He can find comfort in the dreams and visions that tell him that he stands within the realm of God's favor. But the brothers don't have that assurance. They can't be sure of any favor, not even their father's. What they desperately need is a blessing, a healing, a word, an act that will help them know that they too are recipients of grace.

The brothers kind of disappear in Joseph's story. As he tells it they don't even get credit for their sin. God is working it all out and it's not their crime but God's plan that sends Joseph to Egypt. If they don't get a chance to confess their sin and to own it, they don't have the chance for absolution and healing. We rejoice when we see people who have been estranged from each other embracing, but what we want even more is transformation.

You know from your own life how distorting sin can be. You know how it turns us in on ourselves...keeps us from living open, joyful lives...keeps us from experiencing the life God intends for us. Sin is the thing Jesus went to the cross for. Sin is the thing that God says 'No' to. Sin is the thing God did not create and the thing that God cannot tolerate in the restored creation. Sin is the one thing in the universe that is truly ours as human beings. It is an impossibility for God but it is all too real in our lives. How does God deal with sin?

One time a professor was going to share with his class an image for the atonement. The atonement is the word we use for talking about how God reconciles us with God through the cross. God reconciles us through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. The professor held up a glass and it was a dirty glass. Smudged and covered with dirt. He said, "This glass is us and the dirt on the glass is the sin that has marred our lives. God hates the sin of our lives. God's justice demands that it be dealt with."

The professor set the glass down on the table and held up a hammer. "This hammer is God's justice which will come down with full force on the sin of the world." He raised the hammer up over the glass and began to bring it down and at the last minute he put a metal pan between the hammer and the glass so that the pan took the force of the blow with a mighty crash. "That pan," the professor said, "is the self-giving love of God which interposes itself on our behalf, preventing us from getting what we deserve for the sin in our lives. It is Jesus' death on the cross."*

It's a dramatic image, but something is wrong with the way that story is told. The glass remains unchanged. It's still dirty. To extend the analogy, Jesus' death may give us a different status with God, but we are still not transformed. And what we desperately want to know is that we can be changed.

This is where Methodists want to talk about the power of God's sanctifying grace. God's justifying grace is powerful...amazing. It opens the door for all people to come before God boldly...to know that because of the work of Jesus Christ we can have a place in the reign of God. But there is more. Now that we have come in, we want to be changed.

So we open our lives to fellow Christians in small groups. We know that we can't see all the problems in our lives on our own. None of us is that self-aware. We need others who will listen to our struggles, ask us about our spiritual journey, support us in our failures, and confront us in our stubbornness. If you are not in a small group that does these things you are not yet fully immersed in Christian community. Talk to me and we'll hook you up.

Where is God in this story of Joseph? What is God up to? Joseph says that God is taking evil intent and using it for good. God is doing that. But something more happens in real reconciliation. God is not just redirecting events, God is transforming people. God is taking us sinners and restoring us to health.

We know this because we have seen God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus God was reconciling all the world to God's own self. That's what 2 Corinthians tells us. God became incarnate, became human, became one of us, so that we could see what true humanity looks like. And ultimately so that we could be truly human ourselves.

Ask yourself - is Joseph really the pinnacle of what humans can be? Or is there something more? Don't we want a deeper experience of transformation for ourselves and for the world?

Do you remember the story of Allison Jolly? The district ministry to migrant peoples here on the Shore grew up in an old gas station in Wachapreague named the Allison Jolly Casa de Esperanza. Allison Jolly was a young woman who was killed by a Mexican migrant worker here on the Shore. It was a horrible crime. It could have led to a lifetime of bitterness and hatred.

Allison's father was devastated. Who would have asked him to seek reconciliation with the man who killed his daughter? If he never reached out to the migrant community, who would have batted an eye?

But he did reach out. He wrote the man in prison and offered his forgiveness for what the murderer had done. He gave the building in Wachapreague to Carmen Colona for use as a food and clothes pantry for migrant peoples in our midst. He took the evil that had been done and sought out God's intent to make it good.

Don't tell me that reconciliation isn't a powerful thing. In our stumbling, imperfect reunions there is a distant echo in heaven where the reconciling God is still reaching out to us. We live with imperfection and we long for something more. We see our world wounded and scarred. We see our lives imprisoned by old wounds and bad habits. We see huge divides and rifts between us and those we would love.

But God...God sees brothers and sisters reunited, long lost children, prodigals even, returning home, orphans given new homes, and communities where all share in God's abundance. God sees the world as it should be and as it will be and as it already is, if we will open our hearts and eyes and hands to do the sanctifying work of grace. How good and pleasant it is when we dwell together in unity. Thanks be to God!

*Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., Christian Doctrine, [Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1968], p. 242-3. Story adapted.

Rebekah's Choice

Mary Karr was seven years old when her mother had “an episode.” She lived in a Gulf Coast oil town in Texas. It was 1961. At seven you don’t realize that things could be different than they are. You’re still learning what this wide, wonderful world is all about. But Mary Karr’s mother was having difficulties – a mental breakdown.

She was a smart woman. An artist. But also a struggling woman. So one night, while her daddy was out at a bar, Mary’s mama pulled her and her sister out onto the lawn of their small house and started piling up things. Things like her artwork and Mary’s springy hobby horse that she had started to outgrow. Things like their clothes. And she poured gasoline on the pile and it went up in flames. Mary huddled next to her sister and watched her metal horse start to melt.

Then her mom took Mary and her sister inside and sat them in the bedroom while she overturned the kitchen, pouring cutlery onto the floor. She came back into the bedroom and held a knife in the air over her children as she wailed, “Noooo.” Finally, before she did any harm to them, she called for help.

Mary Karr wrote about this episode in her memoir The Liar’s Club which won the National Book Award. She says:

I did know from that night forward that things in my house were Not Right, this despite the fact that the events I have described so far had few outward results. No one ever mentioned the night again. I don’t remember any subsequent home visits from any kind of social worker or concerned neighbor. Dr. Boudreaux seemed sometimes to minister to my health with an uncharacteristic tenderness. And neighbors dragged my sister and me to catechism classes and Vacation Bible School and to various hunting camps, never mentioning the fact that our family never reciprocated. I frequently showed up on doorsteps at suppertime; foraging, Daddy called it….But no one ever failed to hand me a plate, though everybody knew that I had plenty to eat at home, which wasn’t always true for the families I popped in on.

The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.[i]

You ever had that sense? You know, that maybe your house is Not Right. That maybe, somehow, because of that you are Not Right. That maybe you will only be able to survive in the world because of your constant efforts to fight off the Not-Rightness. There’s a lot that’s Not Right with the world.

But we don’t talk about such things at church, do we? Here it can seem that all families are perfect. Or maybe it’s like Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s fictional village in Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. We may be guilty of giving the impression that there is no room for the Not-Rightness of our lives. But when we speak truth we know that there is a lot that is Not Right.

The Bible knows this. The Bible speaks this. Even in stories like today where Isaac meets Rebekah and it seems like all is right with the world.

Isaac, however, has his own memories. He was the child of promise, born to Abraham and Sarah when they were both in their later years. His name meant “laughter,” one of God’s little jokes. For, you see, when his birth was announced by three heavenly visitors to Abraham and Sarah’s tent, Sarah began to laugh behind the tent flap. “How absurd! A baby at my age?” she thought. Abraham himself had fallen down on his face laughing at the news once before. But God had the last laugh. The child was born and his name was Laughter – Isaac.

Isaac was the only son of Abraham, whose name meant “father of many nations.” Except he was not the only son. He was certainly Sarah’s only son. Certainly the one God had tapped as the inheritor of the promise. But there was his half-brother Ishmael, born to Abraham’s servant, Hagar. There were the fights between Sarah and Hagar. There was the day when Abraham finally sent Hagar and the child, Ishmael, off into the wilderness. If God had not intervened then, they both would have died.

Then there was the day that Abraham got Isaac up early in the morning for a trip. On the donkey they took with them Isaac saw split wood. Signs that they might be making an offering. Two servants came along. For three days they traveled, Abraham looking always toward the mountains, like he was waiting for a sign. Abraham taking the lead, looking forward, silent. The boy Isaac following behind. The split wood rubbing together on the donkey’s flanks.

Three days they traveled and then Abraham stopped. He told the servants to stay. “The boy and I are going over there to worship; then we’ll come back to you.” Abraham took the wood from the donkey and put in Isaac’s arms to carry. Abraham himself took a knife.

Isaac finally broke the silence. “Father?”

“Yes, my son.”

“We have flint and wood to make a fire. But where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”

Did Abraham take a long time in answering? Or did he just tell it out? “Son, God will see to it that there’s a sheep for the offering.” And they kept on walking.

Abraham finally came to stop and built an altar. He took the wood from Isaac and laid it out on the altar. Then he took rope and he tied up his son Isaac and laid him out on the wood. He raised an infirm hand to the sky and in it Isaac could see the knife flashing in the desert sun, ready to come down upon him. Was it in his head? Was it from his father’s lips? Or was it from the very skies itself that the word came? A long “Noooooo.” It could not be that Isaac should end his days this way. God must provide another way. And there in a thicket was a ram caught by its horns. The ram became the sacrifice.

But what must the journey home have been like? Did Abraham tell his son about the command he heard from heaven? The command to offer his son, his only son, as a sacrifice? Did he tell the boy how he agonized over it? How he resisted it? How he argued with God like he had for the sake of the people of Sodom? Did he tell him that he knew all along that God would provide? That in the end, somehow, God would come through?

Or did they walk back down the mountain in a horrible silence? Did Isaac know that from this moment on he had now inherited the promise from a wild and holy God who was always going to leave him unsettled and always at risk? And how many nights did Isaac fall asleep with the vision of his father holding aloft a knife in his trembling hand over his trembling throat?

Did they ever tell Sarah? The Bible doesn’t say. Perhaps they did because the next thing that happens in the biblical story is that Sarah dies. She was 127 years old. But if she heard the tale of the sacrifice on the mountain it might surely have hastened her demise.

The almost-sacrifice of Isaac is told to us as a lesson in faith. Faith even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when it is affront to our reason and our heart. Abraham is blessed because of his faith that God would provide. But faith like this doesn’t lead to harmony or safety. It doesn’t make the story of God’s people a Pollyanna tale of good things happening to good people.

In fact, from this point on in Genesis, God does not intervene nearly as much into the lives of Abraham’s family members. There are prayers and promises, dreams and blessings that all remind us that God is there – but faith from here to the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3 is not lived out as a drama between an intervening God and an obedient people. Faith from here to the burning bush is ordinary people – even Not Right people – struggling to get by and to make sense of the world. And meanwhile the promise of God to make of Abraham and his descendents a great people is coming true. Which makes the time between the mountain of sacrifice and the mountain of the burning bush a good model for our times – as ordinary people like us – even Not Right people – struggle to get by and make sense of the world.

So where do we go from here? What happens to a family after a trauma like this? After Sarah dies, Abraham finds a suitable burial site for her. But he knows that he will follow soon behind. So he called his senior servant to his side and made him swear an oath. “Put your hand beneath my thigh and swear by God that you will get a wife for my son Isaac from our homeland.” They were living in a strange land. Though God had promised this land to them, they were just sojourners. So Abraham sent the servant back for a wife from his own people.

The servant gathered up ten camels for the long journey back to the old country. When he came to a well in that far land he got down off of his camels. He had them all kneel by the well. And he prayed a prayer to the God of his master, Abraham. He prayed that, when the young women of the town came out to get water, he would say to the right girl, “Lower your jug and give me a drink.” And she would answer, “Here is something for you and let me also water your camels.” A woman who would water your camels – now that would make a fitting wife for Isaac!

Well, you can guess what happened next. A girl came out to the well with a water jug on her shoulder. She was a stunning beauty. You can almost hear the servant thinking, “Let her be the one!” She lowered the jug into the well and drew up the water. The servant ran to he and said, “May I have a sip from your jug?”

“Yes, of course, drink,” she said. “And…[wait for it!]…I’ll get water for your camels, too.”

The man watched in awe as she dipped the jug ten more times for each of the thirsty camels. Then he pulled out gifts – a gold nose ring and two arm bracelets. He gave them to her. And because he was from the Eastern Shore he started to ask about her family. “Whose daughter are you? Is there room for us to come stay the night?”

Then the “aha!” moment as he learns that she is of the family of Abraham’s brother. Her brother, Laban, welcomes the servant in along with all of his camels and the other servants who were with him. They bring food to eat, but the servant won’t eat until he tells the whole tale. He ends by saying, “God has led me to your door to get a wife for my master’s son. Now, tell me what you are going to do.”

They respond by saying, “Yes, yes. This must be of God. Yes, yes. Of course, you must take Rebekah to be married to Isaac. But let her stay another ten days before you go.”

The servant resisted. He was ready to return. So they bring in Rebekah and we finally hear her speak. How she felt about the deal being made about her, we don’t know. But at this moment when she can make some sort of statement she chooses to go. “I’m ready to go,” she says.

So off they go, back to the strange land and there’s a little Hollywood moment as they arrive. Isaac is out in the field at the end of the day mediating. He sees camels coming across in the fading light of day. Rebekah looks up and sees Isaac, though she doesn’t know who he is. She slips down off the side of her camel. “Who is that man out in the field coming toward us?” she asks.

“That is my master,” says the servant.

She slips her veil over her face, according to the custom. And though the text doesn’t tell us this, I’m sure they ran in slow motion across the field until they met as the music rose to a high crescendo. Isaac took Rebekah as his wife and he loved her. The text does say that. The credits begin to roll.

Then there is the last line to the 24^th chapter of Genesis. The line that says, “So Isaac found comfort after his mother’s death.” And here’s the thing we need to hear in this passage: Love stories don’t take place in isolation. They take place in the midst of a hundred other things. They take place in the wake of a traumatic death. They take place as people move from their home. They take place in the midst of conflicted families. They take place with rich people and with servants. They take place for men and for women.

The story of Isaac and Rebekah can seem like a quaint little biblical interlude. But it happens in the shadow of so many things. It happens in the shadow of God’s promise that the stars of the heavens and the sand of the sea can’t begin to describe the bounty of the future. It happens in the shadow of children sent off into the desert to survive by their own wits and by the angel of God. It happens in the shadow of a knife in a trembling hand that means faith and risk.

The stories of Genesis that the Jewish people and now we in the Christian Church look back on are stories of trauma and drama. They remind us that we live on a knife’s edge. On one side of the cut is the danger of human choice – we always have this choice. The choice to say “Yes” to life. To be engaged in the world. To take on for ourselves the responsibility to act in this world as we believe God is calling us to act. We can’t shirk our role in this world.

On the other side of the cut is the promise of God’s presence. Even when it is unseen. Even when we are shackled by the traumas of the past and the things that have been done to us. Even when we can’t see God’s new day, God is already there in it, bringing it to new life.

And where do we see that in this story? In a girl with a water jug. In the receiving and giving of gifts. In the hospitality of strangers. And in Rebekah’s choice to say, “I’m ready to go.”

There’s a lot that’s Not Right about this world. You may believe there’s a lot that’s Not Right about you. You may believe that the only thing standing between you and damnation is an eternal struggle against the Not-Rightness of the world. But you’d be wrong. There’s also something terribly, terribly right with the universe. And God will not rest until all is made Right. Thanks be to God.

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[i] Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club, [Penguin: New York, 1995], pp. 9-10.

The Big Bang and Beyond

I’m going into some awkward territory today. It’s a little like what it was like when I tried out one of the new exercises on the Wii Fit Plus we’ve got at home. It’s a video game that’s supposed to help you get fit and one of the exercises has you stand on the Wii Fit board and move your hips to hit numbered mushrooms that appear on the screen. Hit the right mushrooms to add up to 20 and you’ve succeeded. My family enjoyed watching me try this out because it combined two of my worst features – math and balance – to great comic effect.

Well, today’s sermon does something similar. We are beginning a series today on faith and science which means that I will have to combine two more of my worst features – understanding science and talking about it. There is a reason I am not a scientist. But I think it is worth doing because there are many people who believe that faith and science cannot coexist.

On the one side there are people who are so steeped in the scientific method that they think of religious belief as something akin to superstition. When you believe that science is the only reliable road to truth, then religion seems archaic and unhelpful. When you believe that nature is all there is, there seems to be no point in talking about meaning and purpose. Ideas of the soul and of eternity have no significance. There is no Creator and theology just seems to be a lot of invented language with no evidence to support it. Why do we need God or faith when I can explain the universe without reference to either of them?

On the other hand, there are believers who feel that science is a great threat to Christian belief. Ever since Galileo had his famous run-in with the Catholic Church in the 1600s because he refused to recant his belief that the earth revolved around the sun (and not vice-versa), there has been tension in the air between faith and science. The tension became intense in the 19^th century when Charles Darwin introduced the idea of evolution. The effect of these discoveries was to suggest that human beings had a different role in the world than Christians had assumed. If the sun didn’t revolve around us, then we occupied a place in the universe that didn’t seem as central as it used to. If creatures were evolving and had ancestors who looked quite different, then was that true for human beings, too? What, then, do we make of the biblical accounts of creation? What of the special role of humanity within creation – made in the image of God? What was that image and where was that God? Some Christians decided it was all a plot by scientists to destroy faith altogether.

I’m going to mark out some territory between those two poles today, recognizing that I still have a lot of questions, many of which are not going to get answered. I don’t believe that the discoveries of science have done away with the need for faith. We have learned a whole lot from the pursuit of truth in science. We know so much more about where and how and when the universe came into being and what the history of life in it has been. Science is great at answering those questions. It’s not so great at other questions that we also want to know the answers to – things like why the universe was created or what its character is – whether there is purpose and meaning in its history and what the significance of human life is. These are questions that take a different sort of knowing. I believe that faith is proper realm for asking these sorts of questions and the kind of truth we get by going to the Bible and to our experiences of God is still truth, though it may not have scientific evidence.

I also don’t believe that we have to reject science in order to pursue this truth, though. Astronomical discoveries, natural selection, the theory of relativity – all of these things challenge the way we understand God and they blow my mind – but they aren’t things we have to reject out of hand in order to hold on to our belief. In their own way, they expand our knowledge of the wonder and majesty of the universe. It is more grand and more intricate than we ever imagined. That doesn’t mean that God has disappeared – it just means that we have more ways to marvel and more language to do it in. As the psalmist says in Psalm 8, “When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” [Psa. 8:3-4]. That could have been uttered by a shepherd two thousand years ago looking into the night sky over Palestine or an astronomer peering into the deepness of space using the Hubble telescope.

So my opening response to the question of whether I believe that faith and science can co-exist is similar to the response of the man who was asked whether he believed in infant baptism. “Believe it?” he said. “Heck, I’ve seen it!” I have seen faith and science work together because I’ve seen it in my own life. Galileo himself was a man of faith and he said something that seems to me just right: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."[i] In other words, why would God give us the tools of science and forbid us to follow where they lead in understanding this universe?

Now this is where I get a little intimidated by the science. The picture of the universe that modern science presents us with is so vast that it does make us human beings seem very small. For many years we had a much shorter chronology for telling the history of the universe. When the Archbishop James Ussher used his interpretation of the Bible timeline to calculate the origins of the universe in 1654 he famously determined that it began on the evening before the 23rd of October in 4004 BC, right about suppertime.

A universe which began 6,000 years ago and in which human beings have existed since, O, about the 29^th of October, 4004 BC, is comprehensible. But what if the days that Genesis describes were not twenty-four hour days? What if Genesis presents us with a picture of a process that took place over millennia, eons, vast stretches of time?

Astronomers looking into the origin of the universe now tell us that it all began almost 14 billion years ago – an almost unimaginable length of time. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest who used to direct the Vatican Observatory, tries to put it all in perspective by comparing that vast stretch of time to a single year. If we consider the Big Bang that created the universe to be the event that starts the year on January 1, then it took over 7 months before the earth took a form somewhat like we know it. August 14 would be the birth of the earth. It took three generations of stars living and dying to sow the chemical abundance that led to life on earth. Even so, it was not until September 4 in this imagined year that the first life appeared on earth. Dinosaurs did not appear until December 25. They didn’t go extinct until December 30. And the first humans appear on December 31 at 11:58 PM. If the whole cosmic history is likened to a single year, we humans have been here for two minutes.[ii]

This is the kind of timeline that makes some of the New Athiests say that it is irrelevant to talk about a God and human relationship with humans occupying such a microscopic portion of the story of the universe. Richard Dawkins, who is one of these prominent New Athiests says, “Deep time makes theology superfluous.”[iii] If the Creator was so concerned about making people, why did it take billions of years and what seems like an accidental process?

Albert Einstein, the great physicist of the 20^th century, was not ready to stop talking about God, but he also thought that new discoveries about the nature of time and space made the idea of a personal God hard to hold onto. He could see the beauty of the underlying laws that bring a sense of order to the universe, but he could not imagine a narrative that made God more than the author of the whole thing. He couldn’t imagine a God you would talk to – pray to.

We do talk about that kind of God, though. We do talk about a God who is more than just a great clockmaker, putting the universe together like a finely-made clock and winding it up to work on its own without any more involvement from the maker. Maybe the God we read about in Genesis 1 might be that kind of God – speaking and bringing things into being…keeping an observer’s distance. But it’s certainly not the God of Genesis 2 who gets down in the mud and makes a human, breathing into its nostrils. A God who sees the loneliness of the human creature and makes a woman. A God who walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. And it’s a long way from the God who is born in a manger and eats by the lakeshore and washes feet and dies on a cross to free the people from death and sin.

Can we tell that story and still believe that the universe is the vast thing that astrophysicists tell us that it is? Is it reasonable to believe that we, who exist in just the blink of an eye on the grand scale of things, can really be the object of a Creator’s love and care?

What if the very fact that we are asking these questions points to the unique role that we play in this universe? Paul Davies, who is a physicist himself, says that “if the laws of physics hadn’t been pretty close to what they are, there would be no life. There would be no observers” of the universe.

“Now, sometimes we just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what.’ You know, ‘if it had been different, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.’ But I think that’s unsatisfactory...because the universe has not only given rise to life, it’s not only given rise to mind, it’s given rise to thinking beings who can comprehend the universe. Through science and mathematics, we can, so to speak, glimpse the mind of God…And I think that this suggests…that life and mind are not just trivial extras. They’re not just an embellishment on the grand scheme of things; they’re a fundamental part of the nature of the universe.”[iv]

Which means that science may lead us to a more faithful understanding of who God made us to be. Maybe a universe that is much, much bigger than us, much bigger than we thought and of which we occupy only a tiny corner, can give us more humility. Maybe a world in which we share more with the creatures around us than we let ourselves believe before can give us more compassion for our fellow beings and more concern for this habitat we all share. Maybe a universe that is still evolving can help us understand that there is still a story to be told. The story of the ages is still unfolding and the creation remains unfinished and we have appeared in these latter days of the drama to play a role and to take our part as co-creators with God.

When we talk about creation in the Bible we usually look to Genesis to tell the story, but there are other books that tell some of that story. Psalm 104 describes God stretching out the heavens like a tent and setting the boundaries of the sea. The gospel of John begins with, “In the beginning was the Word – the pre-existent Christ who helped to form it.” And Job ends with God appearing to put poor, suffering Job in his place.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God thunders. “Who sends thunder and who is present when the beasts of the field need food and protection?” The answer is God. All through these final chapters of Job, God talks about a world that is wild and gritty and untamed. But it is also a world without humans. Everything God talks about is about God’s care for the creatures and the land.

So why does God tell Job this? John Holbert, a biblical scholar at Perkins School of Theology, says that perhaps God describes the world this way to show that “we are a part of God’s created order – simply a part.” And the amazing thing is that we are invited to join God in the wildness and the wonder – taking on the fight against chaos and evil, in confidence that God opposes it and has overcome it, and marveling in the majesty.[v]

The biblical story tells us this. Science can help us in this. They do not have to be alien methods. They can speak to each other and sometimes with each other.

The energy Christians have put into fighting evolution is misplaced. Yes, evolution is an inadequate way to talk about the creation of human beings. Every scientific model is inadequate and is only waiting the next discovery to be remade or replaced. But evolution, the Big Bang, quarks and dark energy are not deceptions. They represent the best attempts within the language of science to describe the world. Scientists are teaching us how to be better lovers of the universe God has created. And when we are steeped in our own story of how God is reconciling all things to God’s own self in Jesus Christ, we are offering the world the language that will help us love God and live out of that love. Thanks be to God.

“We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.” - from The United Methodist Church’s statement on Science and Technology, The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2008, para. 160.F.

Genesis 1:1-4 [NRSV]

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

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[i] Galileo Galilei, quote from the radio program “Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God,” Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, April 1, 2010, American Public Radio, http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/asteroids/transcript.shtml.

[ii] Chart provided by Fr. George Coyne, from the radio program “Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God,” Speaking of Faithhttp://blog.speakingoffaith.org/post/491338401/the-dance-of-the-fertile-universe-trent-gilliss. with Krista Tippett, April 1, 2010, American Public Radio,

[iii] Richard Dawkins, quoted by Dr. John F. Haught, “Biblical Faith and Evolution,” Fondren Lecture delivered 1 February 2010 at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, author’s notes.

[iv] Paul Davies, in Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit, [New York: Penguin Books, 2010], e-book location 585-594.

[v] John Holbert, “Preaching and Creation: The Convenient Texts of Genesis and Job,” delivered 1 February 2010 at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, author’s notes.