I haven't posted here in a long time, but it is the easy place to post the sermon I gave at Peace Church 2/11/2024.
God is Still Speaking
Today is the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and the reading is always the transfiguration of Jesus, found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. We have Mark this year, without much description of what happened beyond that Jesus’s clothes became dazzling white. Matthew says Jesus’s face shone like the sun. In either case, Jesus’s physical body and clothes become the shining form of God’s light in the world. Notice that what happens here is that God is expressed in matter, rather than being separate.
The week before last I hosted a young man who is walking across the United States, from Washington State to Washington DC and beyond. I asked him for a word of wisdom from his journey, and he said “Find your walk.” He then asked me for a word of wisdom in exchange, and I said “Notice the small joys of life, like the sunshine.” When I notice the joy of the sunshine, or the roses I bought myself this weekend, I experience a small transfiguration of the physical world making visible God’s light.
The church has sometimes strayed into dualism that says spiritual things are good and the physical world is evil. I would argue there are many reasons to reject that interpretation. Remember instead our image of creation in which God says each thing is good. The goodness of God is in all of creation, even mosquitos!
The transfiguration is a particularly dramatic example of being able to see the physical and the spiritual at the same time. The physical and the spiritual are always co-present. Richard Rohr says that “Through the Incarnation, God in Jesus became flesh; God visibly moved in with the material world to help us overcome the illusion of separation… The Incarnation proclaims that matter and spirit have never been separate.” In other words, God became manifest in the physical world as Jesus, and the transfiguration made especially visible that physical body and God’s glory were merged. And it isn’t just Jesus; we are all body and spirit. Thomas Merton wrote: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Keep transfiguration in mind, as I turn to the science of the physical world. Today is part of Religion and Science Weekend, what was called Evolution Sunday when it started in 2004. It is celebrated at the service closest to Darwin’s birthday on February 12. The goal is to promote the idea that religion and science are compatible and to discuss the relationship between religion and science.
There are several ways to understand religion and science as compatible. Some people see them as separate spheres that apply to different parts of life. I would agree at least that science and religion have and should have somewhat separate methods. I was at the Episcopal Convent of St. Helena in Augusta once when someone asked one of the sisters how she discerned whether God was in a choice she made. She said if it turned out to have good fruits, then God was in it. From a scientific point of view that is backwards logic, that that you know the right choice by whether it worked. From a faith point of view it is a helpful answer. Yet I don’t want to separate matter and spirit, I don’t want to compartmentalize my thinking to separate faith and science.
Another common approach to reconciling religion and science is to see God working through evolution. Actually, this is tricky if you study biology a step deeper; scientists have come to understand evolution simply as adaptation to an environment rather than as progress towards higher forms of life. Scientists now believe that evolution is not fundamentally progressive. That doesn’t fit with our usual assumptions about God’s work in the work; many of us want to believe that God bends the arc of history toward justice. But be careful, perhaps that idea of progress is a remnant of imperialist thinking, a way of claiming that white Europeans are more advanced than everyone else.
Perhaps we can avoid getting stuck there by remembering the United Church of Christ advertisements that said “God is still speaking.” Evolution is about change, even if we take out progress. That can be a threatening idea or it can be a hopeful idea. The ancient Greeks tended to assume that any change was bad news, and we inherited from the ancient world an idea of God as absolutely unchangeable. Some conservative Christians even refuse to acknowledge climate change because they believe the physical world created by an unchanging God is in at least a larger sense fixed and unchanging. We can take a different approach but be patient with me, let me throw in a little history of science to get there.
Historically, there are several reasons why the theory of evolution seemed threatening to Christianity. You may assume opposition started from the literal interpretation of the bible, but the idea of a literal interpretation was actually mostly a result rather than a cause of Christian opposition to Darwin’s ideas. More significant was that Darwin’s key contribution was a mechanism for evolution, a mechanism that replaced God's creation of each individual species. Evolution conceptualized the world as always changing rather than perfectly created by an unchanging God. In addition, some of the opponents of evolution also rejected as unchristian the social Darwinist idea that people were poor because they were unfit. And indeed that was a danger of applying Darwin’s theory of evolution too broadly and led even in the United States to a strong development of eugenics, which still creeps in our thinking in all the ways we fail to provide opportunities for people with disabilities.
So one reason for opposition to Darwin’s ideas was that it made change central and at least necessary (and necessary was easily interpreted as good). Evolution fundamentally went in a different direction from the traditional principle that the good and God were unchanging. If science teaches us that change and growth are fundamental in the world of matter, and matter and spirit are never separate, do we then believe that God changes? I think I do, though a friend surprised me by saying “of course not.” In any case, “God is still speaking” at least tells us that our understanding of God can and should change as the world changes. We can update our vision, or in the words generally credited to Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
A few of you might have heard me use the phrase “update your vision” before. It was actually suggested to me by a therapist when I reflected on my role as guardian for my disabled sister. Her group home did keep up to date with new understandings how to provide as much autonomy and community participation as possible to intellectually disabled people, When I became her legal guardian I had to learn those new ideas as well. “Update your vision” became one of my principles of life, along with “there are always more than two alternatives.” And that commitment to keep evolving has led me to the path I’m now setting out on, looking for my post-career creativity in a new city and a new kind of community. It’s time to cast the nets out on the other side of the boat (John 21:4-6).
I do believe that God is a deep spiritual flow that suffuses our physical reality and coaxes us towards love and healing. I tend to make decisions not by counting pros and cons but by what has energy and excitement for me. More than a year ago, when I had the idea of moving to St. Louis, it had great energy for me, and it still does now even as downsizing my possessions seems endless. There is so much I need to let go of to make room for the new. I hope that as I work out the details I am listening to a deep enough intuition, an intuition that is an expression of who God created me to be and of the force of healing inside me.
To give a silly example, I was worried that I don’t have a good sense of how my furniture will fit into the small apartment I am moving to in St. Louis. I had picked out a new sofa to buy, but I hesitated, fearing it would be too big. Then I got a call last week from the manager of the senior apartment house I am moving into saying the larger of their two elevators had failed inspection and it was going to take two months to get the needed part. Some of my furniture may not fit into the smaller elevator, so it may have to be kept in an apartment on the first floor until the larger elevator is fixed. Instead of frustration, I felt relief. Suddenly it was a good thing I hadn’t ordered the sofa yet and the pressure is off to figure out in advance where I want the movers to put all the furniture. My hesitation turned out to fit the flow of events and I took that as a sign that I am on the right path.
My new home in St. Louis will be a ninth floor apartment on a south east corner in an independent senior living building. Why St. Louis when I have never lived west of the Appalachians? Because my daughter lives there but also because I am looking forward to being in a city again. I have started visiting churches and in fact I attended a UCC church online that also gave out epiphany stars the same day Peace Church did. Amazingly, at both churches I got the same word: “insight”! I’m not sure what that means, but I will start by listening for what is inside me waiting for a chance to be expressed. This move feels like an opportunity to let go of what I built as a Clemson professor and start a new life, one that is smaller and deeper. Over the 38 years I have been in Clemson I have changed a lot on the inside, but not as much on the outside. Now I will have a new life in which to keep evolving and changing.
If we were to read further in the gospel text after the Transfiguration story, Jesus and his disciples come back down the mountain and Jesus immediately returns to the gritty work of healing. Life necessarily includes both mountain top moments and doing the work. God keeps asking new things of us in community. The natural world keeps evolving, and history shows us that our human world does as well, whether for the better or not. I love the United Church of Christ for saying that our faith will change with the world. We will keep updating our vision of what it means to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God and our community.
Thank you.
