Genesis 1:1-2:4
Matthew 28:16-20

I am continually amazed at how the universe functions and astounded that it operates in such a way as to give and sustain life. I’m constantly surprised at how much we are able to learn and know and equally amazed at how little we know.  This makes the words of a verse by Ed Kilbourne especially relevant.

The higher you climb, the more that you see,
The more that you see, the less that you know,
The less that you know, the more that you learn,
The more that you learn, the higher you climb.
            (Ed Kilbourne, “The Higher You Climb)
           
We continue to climb in our understanding of life.  As we climb we wrestle with the claims of religion and science.  A few years ago The Clergy Letter Project was started to celebrate the importance of both religion and science.  Part of the premise of the organization is the celebration of Evolution Weekend designated this weekend.  It was Charles Darwin who changed the way science looks at the creation process and we just celebrated his 200th birthday last week (February 12th).  So this weekend is an appropriate time for us to focus on the importance of both science and faith. Too often the disciplines of science and faith are seen as competitors giving opposing explanations.  We are much better served by both disciplines when we see them as complementary, completers, two disciplines looking at and explaining life from different perspectives. 
           
In 1969 a one ton meteorite fell to the earth in northern Mexico.  At a conference I attended (January, 1990) at the Washington National Cathedral, Owen Gingerich brought a fragment of the meteorite with him, estimated to be 4.6 billion years old.  Walter Brueggemann, a theologian, brought a copy of the Bible with him which is about three thousand years old.  Frederick Gregory, an astronaut who grew up in Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, DC, was also on the program at this conference.  He began his remarks by saying, "I have touched the rock and I've read the book.  I believe both."  (Heavenly News Workshop, Washington National Cathedral, January 6, 1990.) 
           
For centuries there have been people who found it possible to embrace both science and faith and those who have found it impossible.  The church often has been threatened by science because too often the attitude and language of religion has been one of certitude and absolutism.  There also have been those in the field of science who spoke with certitude and functioned on a premise of absolutism.  Absolutist attitude and language in either sphere closes off discussion, shuts down communication, and widens the gulf that separates two important areas of inquiry and study.  The effort of people in each of these spheres of inspection and study led them in the pursuit of truth.  The trap into which some people from both disciplines have fallen is they thought they could come upon the whole truth.  They failed to realize that revelation of truth may come from anywhere and no one and no discipline of study ever sees or grasps the whole truth. 
           
The tendency has been that when someone came up with a theory or an interpretation that differed from what the church and religion understood, that person was condemned.  Copernicus, with his discovery that the earth revolved around the sun, was excommunicated.  Years later Galileo had an insightful understanding of the difference between religion and science.  He said that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.  Of course Galileo was not seen in a favorable light by the church either.  When the Hubble telescope was launched (1990) into space and when the first sights were seen through it, many scientists claimed this was the most significant event in studying the universe since Galileo.  One scientist even said we would now be able to see the very edge of our universe.  Galileo centuries ago and Frederick Gregory and others of our contemporaries, are able to accept the interpretations of life made by science and faith without seeing them as contradictory.          
           
Are science and religion opposites?  Are they in competition with each other?  Are they contradictory?  Is it possible to believe the messages of both science and religion?   What has been most helpful to me is to realize that scientists and religious leaders are interpreters of events, but the questions that form the backdrop of their inquiry are different.
           
Most estimates of the age of the universe put it between ten and twenty billion years old.  The task of science is to explain how and when things happen as they do.  One of the ongoing efforts of astronomy is to explain how and when the universe began.  “Science is progressive and self-correcting; no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs.” (Francis S. Collins, The Language of God p. 58) Scientists are interpreters. 
           
We live in an extravagant universe, ever evolving and expanding.  In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, has 200 billion stars.  If you could bore a hole in the sun and somehow put in 1.2 million earths, you would still have space left over for 4.3 million moons. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter and 93 million miles away from earth.  Alpha Centauri, the star that is next closest, is five times larger than the sun! The moon is only a little over 200 thousand miles away, and you could walk to it in 27 years. 
           
A ray of light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so if you were going that fast you could get to the moon in 1 and a half seconds.  If you kept on going, you would hit Venus in two minutes and eighteen seconds because it's a mere 26 million miles away.  Four and one half minutes and you would pass Mercury, 50 million miles away.  Mars is a little closer, but then you've got Jupiter‑‑ 367 million miles away, and then Saturn, twice as far as that! 
           
Eventually, you would get to Uranus, Neptune, and finally Pluto‑‑2.7 billion miles away.  But when you get that far, you still haven't even left our solar system. There is one star out there way beyond our system called Betelegeuse which is 880 quadrillion miles from us and has a diameter larger than the entire earth's orbit!  And who knows what's beyond that!  It really is an expanding, evolving, extravagant universe.  (John McArthur, THE SUPERIORITY OF CHRIST, (Panorama City, CA: Word of Grace, 1986). 
           
Wolfhart Pannenburg, noted theologian, has observed, "The existence of the whole world owes its being to the free activity of divine creation. . . . Every creature is in need of conservation of its existence in every moment, and according to theological tradition such conservation is nothing else but a continuous creation.  This means that the act of creation did not only take place in the beginning; it occurs at every moment."  (Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Modern Science and the Doctrine of Creation," Nashville:  International Christian Digest, vol. 3, no. 3, April 1989, p. 37.)
           
I am intrigued by the responses and reactions of people who have had the opportunity to journey into outer space.  The reactions are similar regardless of where home is on earth for the traveler, whether a United States astronaut, a Russian cosmonaut, or someone from another country in the world.  All seem equally impressed with the beauty and unity of the earth and the importance and vital necessity that we who dwell on the earth recognize our common bond, common heritage, and common home rather than competing to conquer each other. 
           
Senator Jake Garn's experience seems to be typical.  He wrote that his flight aboard the Discovery space shuttle was almost impossible to describe. "I know now what it feels like to be out of this world. The experience is exhilarating, breathtaking, awesome.  No.  Those words aren't strong enough; space flight is indescribable.  The best way I can share the experience with you is to set down some of my thoughts as I recorded them in my space diary. 
           
"I was overcome by the beauty of the earth below.  I don't think the words exist to convey what it's like to see the earth from space.  The curve of the earth, the swirling eddies, the patterns of clouds marbling the surface above the brilliantly blue color of the water and the blue-green of the land...the sheer beauty of the earth and the excitement of being in a position to  see it made this the greatest experience of my life.
           
"Using binoculars, I once counted 22 discernible layers of blue in the band of sunrise color that would be seen from earth simply as blue..." 
           
"As I looked at our earth in the black velvet of space, at the stars‑‑far brighter and more numerous than I'd ever seen from earth‑‑and saw the vastness of the universe extending beyond  imagination...
           
"I did not question that there are worlds such as ours, where other children of God are living and working to fulfill the  measure of their creation."  (PARADE MAGAZINE, 11‑3‑85, pp. 16‑17.)      
           
A small child who has not traveled to outer space seemed to have a similar response as that of Senator Garn.  The child listened to the story of creation told to her by her grandmother.  After the child heard the story, she exclaimed, "Oh, I love it!  It's so exciting!  You never know what God is going to do next!"
           
The late President of the University of New Hampshire, Fred Engelhardt, was once heard to say, after taking a trip through the lake region and mountain ranges of his state, "I hope I'll never get used to it!" 
           
Pablo Casals observed, "When I awake in the morning I go immediately to the sea, and everywhere I find God in the smallest and in the largest things. I see God in colors and designs and forms. I constantly have the idea of God when I am at the sea. What is God but this world in which we live‑‑alive with God’s life! What is music but God! Every human being is a miracle. The world is a miracle that only God could make.  Think of how no two grains of sand are alike; how there is not one nose, one voice like another; how, among billions and billions of living and non‑living things in the Universe no two are exactly alike.  Who but God could do that?  God must be present all the time!  Nothing can take that from us!" 
           
A little girl, a university president, and a great artist in their own ways came to the same conclusion.  With their own words they expressed the same idea.  With their minds and eyes they answered the creation questions of who and why.  They did not answer the questions of how, when, or what, although they could have wrestled with those and drawn conclusions that need not be contradictory nor mutually exclusive.                   
           
Nothing can be said or done to prove or disprove God.  Such proof is impossible.  Besides that is not the task of either science or faith.  The task of science is to seek answers to the questions of how, when, and what.  The task of faith is to portray what the world looks like through the eyes of one who believes and trusts in God and attempts to answer the questions of who and why. 
           
"The theological doctrine of creation should take the biblical narrative as a model in that it uses the best available knowledge of nature in its own time in order to describe the creative activity of God." (Pannenburg, p. 38.)
           
Perhaps nowhere is it clearer that we attempt to limit God than in our views of how, when, where, and why of creation.  J. B. Phillips wrote a book in the 1960s, Your God Is Too Small, in which he expressed many of the ways people limit God.  Reflecting during his adult life, theologian Richard J. Mouw said he often has asked how he and some of his closest spiritual kinfolk limit God now.  He concluded that if he had to choose the variation on Phillips's title that best captures his most recent corrective thinking about God, the title would be Your God Is Too Fast. 
           
Mouw said this became clear to him during a luncheon conversation.  The question of "creation science" came up.  He and some others were attempting to explain the view held by some of a literal six-day creation.  Finally, one scholar threw up her hands in despair and asked, "Don't these people realize that God likes to do things slowly?"
           
Mouw said many people don't realize this at all.  They insist that God likes to work fast.  "They think the only proper way to honor God as the creator of all things is to assert that God created everything quickly." (Richard J. Mouw, "Humility, Hope and the Divine Slowness," The Christian Century, vol. 107, no. 12, April 11, 1990, p. 365.)
           
The creation accounts in Genesis were not written as a prehistoric scientific treatise or as an historical or scientific proposal of how the universe began.  Walter Brueggemann has suggested a new and insightful way to understand the Genesis creation narratives.  Recent biblical studies have revealed that these creation stories were put together during the Exile and that they served as liturgy for worship by those in Exile.  The Exile was the bitterest, harshest experience of anything the nation Israel had encountered.  Having been formed into a nation out of a motley band of ex-slaves and having risen to prominence in the world, it was a crushing blow for them to be defeated in battle, captured, and many of their leading citizens deported.  As the days in exile added up to weeks, months, and years, the people became more and more discouraged.  What they thought was an orderly development and progression of life had suddenly become chaotic for them.  Instead of order being brought out of chaos, chaos destroyed the order.    
           
The Israelites reflected on their situation and God's interest in them.  They tied creation and redemption closely together.  The sign of hope for them in their exile and bondage was creation.  If God could bring order out of chaos at the beginning of the universe, then God could do it again in their situation.  There is plenty of biblical support for the teaching that God will win over guilt, oppression, and loneliness.  This teaching is strongly emphasized on especially bad days. 
           
Several years ago a seminary student told about attending worship service in her home church in Charleston, SC the first Sunday after Hurricane Hugo had devastated the area.  The people came to church in work clothes because they already had been cleaning up debris early on Sunday morning, and they would go back to the task after worship.  The pastor read the creation narratives from Genesis, had a prayer, and sent the people home.  The scripture passages served as liturgy for the people.  They served as words of hope.  While Hugo had done its damage and for awhile chaos won out over order, that was not the final word.  On especially bad days we need to hear the word of hope and promise that order is stronger than chaos, creation is more powerful than discreation and that God not only creates but also re-creates every moment of every day in every life. Whether you are a religious leader, a scientist, or both or neither, you can believe this, you can count on this, you can take this with you wherever you go:  God not only creates but also re-creates every moment of every day in every life.