How to honor religion and science -- USA TODAY, February 16, 2009

Thursday was Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the bicentennial of his birth — an anniversary that is particularly poignant this year because of the link between his freeing of the slaves and the inauguration of our first African-American president. But there was another man born the very same day whose contributions continue to cause division and debate, especially in religious circles: Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who established the theory of evolution.

We have made a great deal of progress in racial equality over the past 200 years, but we seem to have reached a stalemate — in some quarters — when it comes to Darwin's theory of evolution, and reconciling faith and science.

I've been a fan of Darwin since I was a double-major in religion and biology in college in the early '80s, and I have long sought — as many have — to find a way to make peace between the two. This is no mere academic exercise for me, but an effort that I and my religious colleagues need to make if the USA is to remain a nation of strong faith and innovative scientific research. The challenge of reconciling the two is greater than ever, with the percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution actually declining, to about 40% from 45%, over the past 20 years.

Why? For the most part, Americans fail to see that science and religion answer very different kinds of questions. Some insist on combining the two into a faith-science hybrid, and the result is an establishment like the Creation Museum in Kentucky, at which displays show dinosaurs living in the Garden of Eden. Unlike other museums, this one does not consider its dinosaur specimens to be 450 million years old. Instead, they are said to be 6,000 years old, based on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. This kind of mash-up raises more questions than it answers, and doesn't honor either religion or science.

Meaning vs. mechanics

In my experience, it is better to keep them separate and use them to answer two very different sets of questions about creation: "how" questions and "why" questions. Science answers the questions of how life has evolved on earth, while religion answers the questions of why there is life. When I open my Bible to Genesis, I don't look for scientific information about the structures of life. I read it as a faith-based explanation of why life exists and why we are to care for it.

Religion is very good at probing questions of meaning, while science excels at exploring the mechanics of the world we live in. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and a participant in the National Prayer Service after Barack Obama's inauguration, began her career as an oceanographer and studied the evolution of squid. She discovered that the Bible's creation stories have more to do with the meaning behind existence than with the particularities of how creation happened. She concludes that science and religion both give us knowledge, but that they are, as she puts it, "different kinds of knowing."

Science is truly godless in the sense that it does not assume that a divine being is at work in every animal, vegetable and mineral. Instead, it finds its answers through proofs based on observation and replication by multiple sources.

Darwin's theory of evolution forms the foundation of modern biology, and it has been proven true — most recently, in a 20-year experiment in which a researcher took a single bacterium and watched it reproduce and evolve for over 44,000 generations. Observation and replication give scientists answers to questions about the mechanics of life, but these approaches don't even attempt to explore the meaning of life.

Does this mean that science and religion are on separate tracks that will forever move in conflicting directions? Not necessarily. Francis Collins is the scientist and medical doctor who oversaw the Human Genome Project and authored the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He sees no contradiction in accepting that humans are the product of evolution and believing that God decided evolution would be the method by which humans would be created. As a scientist and a Christian, he has coined the term "BioLogos," from the Greek bio for "life" and logos for "word." This term is grounded in his belief that God spoke life into being.

This fits my understanding that words have real power, and that the word of God is a creative force in the world. From the beginning of the Bible to its end, there is testimony to the power of what God accomplishes through a word: Genesis reports that "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light," while the Gospel of John says God's "word became flesh and lived among us" as Jesus. Although religious people are going to disagree about many theological points, there is wide agreement that God's word has creative power. This is BioLogos — God speaking life into being.

Seeking peace

In the interest of reconciling science and faith, a helpful distinction would be to say that science deals with things and religion deals with words. When scientists perform their experiments, they are making measurements of the physical properties of things, and no words are allowed to change the results of their research. When religious people use words, on the other hand, they are attempting to create new realities by expressing their understandings, experiences and deepest convictions. There is nothing empty or cheap about religious words used well. In fact, they can influence numerous lives and change the course of history.

And the two men born on Feb. 12, 1809? Darwin looked at the things of this world and came up with the theory of evolution, which has helped countless scientists to understand the mechanics of how various species have come to exist. Abraham Lincoln drew on his deepest convictions to write the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, expressing his belief that our nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." These words had real power — first to free the slaves, and then to start us on a path to equality that has resulted in the presidency of Obama.

There can be peace between science and faith if their distinctive contributions are respected. Scientists will continue to study how things work, while religious leaders will speak of the meaning of life and use their words to create new understandings. This distinction might even be helpful to our new president, as he uses his considerable rhetorical skills to advance one of the goals of his inaugural speech: "to restore science to its rightful place." It's a worthy goal, one that can be embraced by both the scientific and religious communities.

The Poetry Prescription -- FPC sermon excerpt

One snowy night in Vermont, a large group of rowdy teenagers broke into an empty summer house near Middlebury College. In a bout of drinking and partying, they trashed it. They broke a chair and threw it into the fireplace, discharged fire extinguishers, tossed beer cans, smashed china, and soiled the carpet with vomit and urine. The damage exceeded $10,000.

The offenders were caught, and then things got interesting. Since the house had belonged to the great American poet Robert Frost, the kids were sentenced to … poetry.

Yes, that’s right. Poetry. You could call it “poetic justice.”

According to The New York Times (June 8, 2008), the criminal justice system called on Jay Parini, a Robert Frost biographer and literature professor. He had been writing a book called “Why Poetry Matters,” and this assignment challenged him to put his theory into practice. His job was to try to use poetry both to punish and to rehabilitate them.

One of Parini’s lessons revolved around the poem “The Road Not Taken,” which begins with the words, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It cautions us about the fateful choices we make in the dense woods of life, and how our choices matter — with one path leading to another. Frost concludes it by saying,

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The young offenders began to wonder about the choices they had made, and where those choices were leading them.

And even harsher lesson came from the poem “Out, Out,” which tells of a young man’s precious life spilling away in a buzz saw accident in Vermont. The boy is cutting firewood in his yard, and the day is almost over when his sister calls him to join the family for supper. Suddenly, the buzz saw leaps and cuts off the boy’s hand. “Then the boy saw all,” writes Robert Frost,

Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart —
He saw all spoiled.

The doctor is called, and the boy is sedated. His pulse is taken, and they listen to his heart. They hear little … then less … then nothing. They cannot believe it. The boy is dead.

Jay Parini reports that the juvenile offenders in his class seemed shaken to their foundations. This was, for them, a wake-up call: “Don’t waste your life.”

The poetry prescription can be powerful medicine. “Poetry is about life and death and who you are as a person,” says Parini, quoting Robert Frost. Poetry gives us images, figures of speech, similes and metaphors that help us make sense of life. Frost once said, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”

So how can we get educated in metaphor? How can we learn about life and death and who we are as people?

I’m convinced that the best place to start is in the words of the Bible.

The apostle Paul knew all about metaphors — figures of speech in which comparisons are made between unlike things that have something important in common. High school English students, you know metaphors, don’t you? Love is a rose. That man is a snake. God is a rock. These are all metaphors. We use them every day.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that faithful Christians are athletes. This is a metaphor, of course, since we have no evidence that any of the Corinthians played sports. But Paul wants them — and us — to be educated in metaphor, so that we’ll be safe to be let loose in the world. He uses poetry to teach us about life and death and who we are as children of God.

Paul knows that metaphors are powerful, and he uses them constantly: “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27). “You also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:22). “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light” (5:8). “You are all children of light and children of the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:5). Temple of the Holy Spirit. Body of Christ. Dwelling place for God. Children of light.

That’s who we are. This kind of poetry can actually shape our lives.

Cave-Dwelling Christians -- FPC sermon excerpt

When I was first ordained, I was called to serve an old church: The First United Church of Christ in Milford, Connecticut. Founded in 1639, this church existed for 137 years before the founding of the United States of America.

But the Milford church is just a baby compared to a church recently discovered in a cave in Northern Jordan. Dating back to the first century, this underground chapel probably served as both a place of worship and a home. Archaeologists believe that about 70 persecuted Christians used the cave after fleeing Jerusalem. These early Christians had to live and practice their faith in secrecy until the Romans embraced Christianity several hundred years later.

“We found beautiful things,” said one of the archaeologists to the BBC (June 10, 2008). “Pottery shards and lamps … a very old inscription … coins … and crosses made from iron.” If this turns out to be an authentic church, it will be the oldest ever found, by about 200 years.

The very first believers were Cave-Dwelling Christians.

Now we can certainly understand why the members of this first-century church practiced their faith in secrecy. The Romans were actively persecuting Christians, and their army completely flattened Jerusalem in the year 70. So the church had to go underground if it wanted to survive.

But what is our excuse today? When I look around, I see many of us behaving like Cave-Dwelling Christians, even though we have no fear of persecution in the United States. We come inside the walls of this Sanctuary to worship, and rarely have congregational activities outside the church building. We talk about our faith in church school classes and small group meetings, but feel awkward sharing what we believe with the world.

It almost as though we are practicing our faith in secret.

In contrast to the way we behave today, Jesus took his ministry out into the world, healing the sick, casting out demons, and preaching throughout the region of Galilee. In the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus leaves the synagogue in Capernaum and enters the house of Simon and Andrew. He goes outside the walls of the sanctuary, and visits Simon’s mother-in-law, in bed with a fever. He takes her by the hand and lifts her up, and the fever leaves her. She is instantly healed, and then she begins to serve them (Mark 1:29-31).