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Feb. 8, 2009
Isaiah 40: 21-31; Mark 1: 29-34

More light, more truth, is breaking from your word.
More light, more truth --  
Holy Spirit, help us hear what needs to be heard.
      (from a hymn by Christopher Grundy)

Now that I've introduced the whole idea of light, I'd like to take you into darkness for a moment. If you are willing, would you close your eyes and just experience the sense of darkness that comes when the light is shut out.

This is the darkness of the universe before the Big Bang.
This is the darkness of the universe before we hear
about a creative power that brings light,
a power that begins to bring order out of chaos.  

Now in this darkness, could you think for a moment about your image of God.  Not simply a physical image, but who or what God is for you.  
There may well be more than one image, and that's OK.
There may be contradictory images, and that's OK too.
Let the images play in the darkness.

Pause

Now come back to the light of this day.

I wanted to start with thinking about images of God because today's readings give us two distinct images of God's presence and power in the world.
They are images that made sense to the people of Isaiah's time and of Mark's time.
They are images that still have something to say to us today, I think, but they are also images that run head on into the understandings we now have of how the natural world functions.

So for a lot of people, these old images of God from our scriptures either lead to a rejection of God or to a rejection of the scientific knowledge we have gained over the past several hundred years.

No one name has become as much a flash point in this whole discussion as that of Charles Darwin.  This coming week, we will observe the 200th birthday of the scientist who dramatically altered our understanding of how species adapted to a changing environment and in the process, evolved into forms different than that of their predecessors. Darwin was born in England on Feb. 12, 1809 - the very same day that Abraham Lincoln was born in the United States.  

Fifty years after his birth, Darwin published The Origin of Species, the book that detailed his theory of evolution and that created an earthquake in the religious establishment that is still giving off aftershocks today.  Just as Galileo bumped up against the religious authorities in the 1600s when he argued that the sun, not the earth was the center of the universe, Darwin's theories faced withering criticism from believers who thought he was taking God out of the creative process - particularly the creative process for human beings.

Imagine - we were no longer the center of the universe, we were no longer created as fully-formed humans by God in a beautiful garden.  Maybe God had no power at all. Maybe God did not exist at all.  And so there was a rush to crush the careful scientific work that explored how the world works and to cling to understandings that left God in his heaven so that all would be right with the world, to paraphrase the 19th century poet Robert Browning.

This stand-off between religion and science did not start with Darwin, but his theory of evolution surely escalated the stakes. At the same time, scripture scholars were deepening their understanding of how the Bible reflected the various historical periods in which its books were written and they began to understand the literary way the authors used stories to make bigger points about the meaning of life.
They came to understand, in other words, that the Bible was not a history book or a scientific text book, but instead, a book about how people felt God's presence in their lives - and how their understanding of that presence evolved over time.

All of this provoked reactions from some who felt all of this too profoundly shook up their understanding of God, of the world. They came to be known as fundamentalists, those who take the Bible literally, who embrace the Biblical story of creation and reject the whole idea of evolution as, at best, a flawed theory.

So go back to your image of God.  How close is it to the one that Isaiah described in this passage we heard today. Isaiah wrote this passage as the Israelites were trying to find their bearings in exile in Babylon, having been ripped away from their homeland, from their temple. Were the Babylonian gods stronger or better? Had the Israelites' God abandoned them?

Isaiah offers a portrait of God "who sits above the circle of the earth ... who stretches out the heavens like a curtain."  This God asks: "To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal?"  

This God, says, Isaiah, "is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth."  And even though this portrait of God is of one who is all-powerful, far above humanity, Isaiah also offers words of reassurance to these people whose lives have been turned upside by a conquering enemy.

The God in whom the Israelites believe "gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless ... they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint."

That was how the people 600 years before the birth of Jesus understood God and the world around them.

In Mark's Gospel, Jesus embodies God in the midst of humanity, not a far off deity sitting above the circle of the earth, but God walking among us.

Jesus encounters the ill mother-in-law of his follower, Simon, and, in Mark's words: "He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up."  He took her by the hand. This image of God is tactile, intimate, caring.  

In theological terms, the God of Isaiah stands apart from, above humanity, while the God of Mark is among us.  And in theological terms, both understandings of God help us understand something of who God is.

But neither of these portraits of God are particularly persuasive to most scientists in the 21st century.  To the degree we understand how the universe came into being, physical principles were at work. To the degree we understand how humans came into being, the law of natural selection helped living creatures evolve into who we are today.  And to the degree we understand how the body responds to illness, divine forces do not alter natural processes.

So where does that leave us as 21st century followers of Jesus, as people who gather together here on a Sunday morning in a time of worship of God, as people who look to God for strength in the midst of uncertainty, for hope in the midst of life's troubles?

There has been amazing work done over the last century by religious thinkers who take the developments of science as seriously as their own belief in God.

They have learned an important principle that applies to both science and theology - to be continually open to self-criticism and dialogue, recognizing that our understanding of things is always tentative. As the prayer said at the beginning of this reflection, there is always more light, more truth breaking forth.

They have drawn distinctions between the facts of science and the beliefs that grow out their own experiences of the presence of God in their lives.  

They embrace the idea that a divine force could propel the universe into being and sustain it through the ages, yet they also understand that this is not verifiable in the way science works.  

They understand the distinction between teaching science in the classroom and the explorations of belief in families and in communities of faith.

(Just as an aside: One good example of this work is the pastoral letter that the leaders of the United Church of Christ published just a year ago. There are copies of it in the narthex niche and there are resources related to it on the UCC web site. This will also be one of the topics at the UCC General Synod in June that Kristin will be attending as a delegate from Wisconsin.)

There are times in each of our lives when having a sense of God's grandeur and power are important to us.

There are times when we desperately hope that somehow the natural forces that cause illness and calamity will exempt us and that hope leads us to reach out for divine intervention, praying that some power bigger than nature might come into play.

And there are times when we understand that
God's presence comes to us in the vastness of a star-filled sky, in the touch of a beloved,
in the evocative strains of a piece of music
or in the flickering of a candle.
It comes to us in the person sitting next to us in the hospital or holding our hand as we stand at a parent's gravesite or serving us a warm meal as we have come in off the street.

God can be both far beyond us and deep within us.  That does not deny our scientific understanding of the world. It simply is another part of our reality.

A few weeks ago, folks in one of our book groups came up with an image of God that I would like to leave with you today. It's not the only image of God - just one that I found particularly helpful in thinking about this whole swirl of ideas around creation and God beyond and God within.

It's as simple as a bowl of soup.

Think of God as the broth the fills up the bowl.

Think of us as the vegetables in the broth - a wonderful variety of elements - carrots, peas, celery, beans, tomatoes -many shapes, many colors, many textures.

Within this soup, we live and move and have our being.  The broth is outside of us and we soak it up within us.  It sustains us and goes well beyond any one of us.  

It's not the only image of God. It's not the complete image of God.
There's a reason why the Muslims have 100 names for God, but only know 99 of them. The last one is known only to God.  There's a reason that in Jewish tradition, God is not named at all - only God can speak the divine name.  
There's a reason why as Christians we understand God as a being beyond comprehension, yet a being as close as the light within our souls.

We can walk in our amazing world with our eyes open, grateful for minds that allow to explore the realities of that world and for spirits that allow us to experience the wonders of our God.

So let us join together in singing verses 1 and 2 from a hymn that honors both faith and learning. It's number 411 in your hymnals.