Choosing a sermon title too soon is a little like naming a child before you know whether it's a boy or girl. What's in the bulletin is pretty close, but the title has ended up "Creator, Companion, Challenger."

I started to say, "before the baby's been born and you know whether it's a boy or a girl." Of course with sonograms, you don't need to wait until the baby's born any more.

Science has changed our lives.

Yet we live in a world that finds it easiest to keep science and religion in separate spheres. In 1925 a young biology teacher named John T. Scopes was put on trial for breaking Tennessee's law against the teaching of evolution. Scopes' defender, Clarence Darrow, was a brilliant agnostic. Scopes' prosecutor, William Jennngs Bryan, was a fundamentalist who captured the distance between science and religion with his comment, "I am more interested in the rock of ages than in the age of rocks."⁽¹⁾

We are poorer for treating science and religion as enemies and keeping them in separate spheres. Christians have three perspectives of God, each of which is enriched by a conversation between religion and science.

The first Christian perspective sees God as Creator. Of our two creation stories, the Adam and Eve story is older, written about a thousand years before Christ, and at its core tries to answer the question, "why is life difficult?" The six-day creation story is newer, probably written by priests in the Jerusalem temple after the return from exile, about 500 or so years before Christ, and while it gives a comprehensive picture of how the author saw the beginnings of the universe, the priestly author's real agenda was to promote the sabbath: God rested after working 6 days, and so should we.

NASA's web site describes today's view of creation, accepted by virtually all scientists, the hot Big Bang theory. The observable universe began ten to twenty billion years ago with an instantaneously expanding point. The universe has continued to expand. The distance between our Galaxy and external galaxies is gradually increasing....If the universe is dense enough, it will eventually collapse.⁽²⁾

The Big Bang theory can be quite attractive to religious people, because it takes you back to that point nanoseconds from the beginning and then stops with no explanation of what caused the Big Bang, what generated its energy, what determined the laws that the Big Bang would follow, or what came before. Religious people can delightedly say, "Ah, ha! That's where God comes in." In fact sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who believes every other defense for God can be toppled, unhappily calls this the "final redoubt from which [theology] can never be driven."⁽³⁾

From there on, however, Wilson believes there's no place for God. "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species."⁽⁴⁾ In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins, writing in "The Blind Watchman,"⁽⁵⁾ eloquently argues that if you really understand evolution as Darwin intended it, the involvement of a designer is excluded from the evolutionary processes of random mutation, and reproduction of those mutations adapted to survival.

At one time all explanations for how things worked and how things began were religious; then as we understood more and more things, we reserved to the domain of God those things we didn't understand. This is the theology of the "God of the Gaps" - God explains what science doesn't. I don't want to put my faith in a God of the Gaps. We have numbers of very bright, very vigorous people working very hard to fill our gaps of knowledge, and a God of the gaps is an increasingly small God.

I believe it's time religious people reclaimed the whole process of creation, the entire breadth and depth of the universe, the entire history of time and said God is present by definition, and whatever science discovers to be present, or discovers to be true is the work of God, and whatever science discovers about the processes by which things come to be are the processes of God, and whatever science discovers about the design of the universe, however we understand the design to have happened, is the design of God.

New discoveries make that design increasingly wonderful. The universe is vastly larger and more complex than we used to think. The larger the universe the more reasonable the idea of finding life elsewhere. We're increasingly aware of the very fine balance between order and chaos necessary to sustain the universe, and the very fine balance of physical forces needed to sustain life. We're increasingly aware that humanity will not last forever. If we don't destroy our own planet, eventually our sun will die or the universe will collapse upon itself. In short, we live in "an exciting world in dynamic flux, an unexpected universe whose mechanisms are ever more baffling and staggering in their beauty and complexity, where predictability is uncertain instead of deterministic, where matter and energy are interchangeable, and where evolutionary change occurs by leaps and bounds that defy mechanistically simple explanation.⁽⁶⁾ Sir John Templeton sees in this a message that we must be terribly humble about any claim to understanding we make.

A key moment in my own religious pilgrimage came back in college when I read a little paperback by MIT's Professor of Mathematics at the time, Norbert Wiener.⁽⁷⁾ He introduced me to the concept of entropy, that everything in the universe is running down. Windup toys run down and stop. Untended buildings fall down. Wiener was writing about communications theory where entropy means messages become garbled. As children most of us have played an entropy game called "Telephone." You sit in a circle and whisper a message to the next person, who whispers what they heard to the next, and so on. The last person tells out loud what they heard, and everyone laughs, because sense has broken down to nonsense. Entropy: yes, life's like that.

But in contrast to entropy I thought of evolution from non-life to viruses, protozoa, tadpoles, birds, mammals, and human beings. It's as if the message in the telephone game started out as gibberish and became clearer and clearer each time it was passed from one person to another until the person at the end reported something of profound beauty, clarity, and wisdom. I don't need to believe that God "loaded the dice" or surreptitiously intervened in the process of evolution, or disbelieve any of the scientific conclusions of famous biologists or physicists. But I look at the same evidence and the meaning for me is the presence of God the creator in the entire process and all its details. ⁽⁸⁾ Allan Sandage, director of Mount Wilson Observatory, said, "They said I am on some kind of religious quest, looking for God, but God is the way it's put together.⁽⁹⁾

In the autumn of 1932, speaking to the German League for Human Rights in Berlin, Albert Einstein said, "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is."⁽¹⁰⁾

The most appropriate response to knowledge of the universe, whether from the perspective of religion or science, is humility and wonder.

On January 1, the Washington Post gave us short biographies submitted by 100 people. One of them wrote, "I am Erin Flanagan. I live in Alexandria. When I was 7, I read a book about Lincoln. He said he didn't see how man could look up into the heavens and not believe in God. At my house, we didn't believe in God, so I went home and told Mom. She said, "That was long ago. We go up there now, in rockets. And there's nothing. No God. No nothing." That night I lay down on the grass and looked at the stars. And I knew, for the first time, that grown-ups could be wrong."⁽¹¹⁾

As religious people, we experience God as Creator-and God as Companion: close as well as distant, immanent as well as transcendant, Emmanuel, God with us, who "walks with me and...talks with me, and...tells me I am his own.⁽¹²⁾" The word "companion" literally means, "with bread," and Christians affirm that God our Companion is known to us in the breaking of bread together. The more we know of the universe, the more startling and audacious such a belief is: six billion humans on this planet, and 20 times more galaxies in the universe than there are people on earth-and God, my companion, cares about me.

A God who cares turns out not to be the meddlesome tyrant that some atheists love to hate. A God who cares bestows free will. A God who cares does not violate that free will by forcing himself upon us. A God who cares took a risk in creation ⁽¹³⁾ and is vulnerable to disappointment in our exercise of free will. A God who cares listens to us, and to listen is to be changed by what you hear. This morning's reading from the book of Jonah refers to God's mind changing following the repentance of the people in Nineveh. A God who cares, who takes risks, and who experiences vulnerability is the God Jesus' portrays as a grieving father seeking his lost son.⁽¹⁴⁾ Arthur Peacocke suggests our macho culture deals more easily with the masculine adjectives for God the Creator-active, powerful, external, and has difficulty with a personal God precisely because we have to use feminine words like caring, responsive, vulnerable.⁽¹⁵⁾

Physiology now echoes the idea of change. Once we were taught that we had at birth all the brain cells we would ever have. Last fall Princeton scientists announced the discovery of "new neurons...continually added to the cerebral cortex of adult monkeys,"⁽¹⁶⁾ and hence, by extension, to humans. The implication of this is to confirm our own intuition: we are changed by our experiences. Change is essential to intimacy, and the implication is that a God capable of intimacy is a God who not only causes change, but is constantly being changed.

If the proper faith response to God the Creator is humility in the face of the universe, the proper faith response to God the Companion is respect in the face of humanity. People of faith are people who have the assurance that they can listen-even to things with which they disagree-without being harmed.

That kind of faith is sometimes difficult to find from either the perspective of science or religion. Religious adherents of something called "creation science" feel the core of their religion is under attack from science. The National Association of Biology Teachers' is so fearful of undermining chance as an essential part of evolution that their official statement on evolution excludes even the possibility of a Creator. In looking at various web sites arguing creationist or evolutionist points of view I started to get a headache and realized, "time out," everybody is shouting, nobody is listening, and I'm not going to learn anything here either about science or about God.

What makes us behave so frightfully to each other? Einstein didn't believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings,"⁽¹⁷⁾ and this apparently upset the press of his day, which hounded Einstein from place to place. One time they followed him to a beach where he'd stopped to look at the ocean and tried to get a statement as to whether he didn't really believe in God after all. Many of the internet pages on topics like creation and evolution are posted by partisans who hope to persuade us of the truth of creationism or atheism by shouting louder than their opponents.

For Christians, the necessity of respect is undergirded by Jesus' words, "just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."⁽¹⁸⁾

We meet God the Companion through other people. In another of the Washington Post's New Year's biographies, we hear: "My name is Alan Roit, from Springfield. I thought I learned the truth of life at the age of 10, when I met a man who saw my grandmother walk into a gas chamber at Treblinka. I discovered the real truth of life at the age of 45, when I met my wife, Sheila. Now I see that life is full of love, beauty and trust.⁽¹⁹⁾ "

We experience God as Creator, as Companion-and as Challenger. God who dazzles us with beauty and truth and comforts us with intimacy and presence also challenges us to be more than we are. That is after all what the biologists, at an elemental level, are saying is essential to evolution: every living species is challenged to adapt, change, survive and produce another generation -- or die. Life that fails the challenge fails to survive.

But in Scripture and in life we see something that goes beyond biological survival. In the book of Exodus, Moses, a shy man who stutters is challenged to approach the Pharaoh of Egypt and demand that the slaves of Israel be freed. In this morning's reading, Jonah is challenged to go alone into the foreign city Nineveh and tell them to change their ways or face destruction. Would you sell a life insurance policy to a person willing to take that kind of risk?

The psychiatrist Carl Jung once declared that among his thousands of patients in the second half of life, "There has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life."⁽²⁰⁾ Victor Frankl, who survived the German prison camps, observed humans with a search for meaning even in the very worst of conditions. Abraham Maslow the psychologist, identified a hierarchy of needs that include survival at the basic level, but then progress to security, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization.⁽²¹⁾

Theologians point to altruism, the human willingness to sacrifice oneself for another, especially for a stranger, as an indication that something is going on among humans that has gone beyond adaptation for biological survival. From an evolutionary point of view, who is a more evolved representative of the human race, Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa-or Attila the Hun?

God doesn't let us prove God's existence, but if we can infer God the Creator from the universe, and God the Companion from intimacy, then we can infer God the Challenger from commitment. People have a space in their lives only commitment can fill. We are honored when people ask us to make commitments and then we honor ourselves by keeping them. Studies confirm that adults who have a strong sense of purpose in life experience greater well-being, live with less dread of death, and are less likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. ⁽²²⁾

If the proper response to God the Creator is humility, and to God the Companion is respect, then the proper response to God the Challenger is collaboration.

Too often we think of God's Holy Spirit as a pleasant fog that surrounds us with a sense of wellbeing, or think of a spirit-filled church as one which is entertaining in a religious sort of way. But if you read through the Bible, what the Holy Spirit does a lot of the time is issue challenges, and a lot of these challenges are not consistent with our survival needs!

Albert Schweitzer, musician, medical doctor, theologian, who gave his life to a hospital in West Africa, in 1906 wrote a scholarly account of the quest for the Jesus of History but ended his book having discovered God the Challenger in a text which echoes the call in this morning's reading from the Gospel of Mark:: "The truth is, it is not Jesus as historically kinown, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it....he comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" And sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.⁽²³⁾

The Christian idea of God as Trinity turns out to capture some of the mystery and disorderliness of the new world of science. As Creator, God is transcendant, distant, and powerful - and yet known to us as our Heavenly Father and Mother. God as Companion is incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth breaking bread with his disciples in Galilee - who is also addressed by the book of John as the Logos, the Creative Word which was with God creating from the first day. The Biblical book of Proverbs assigns that same Logos role of being with God creating from the beginning to the feminine Sophia, the Greek name for Wisdom. The Spirit of God who challenges is also the Holy Spirit who fills us with emotion and wellbeing. In the end we say all these are one God. Perhaps the complexity and interrelationship of God models that of the universe.

My father, who spent his career as a Methodist missionary, spoke of science in describing his call, at a time when the Scopes trial was a fresh memory and his older brother was already on his way to a career as a biology teacher. "In my Junior year I decided that Jesus' words were meant for me: 'For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.'⁽²⁴⁾ I decided that I would throw my life away for the people and causes for which Jesus gave His life. I loved science and its experiments. I would make my life an experiment to see whether what Jesus said was true. I am now 84 [he wrote in 1994] and can make my report: It is true!"⁽²⁵⁾

1. The New York Times, July 10 through 25th, 1925.

2. David N. Spergel (dns@astro.princeton.edu), Gary Hinshaw (hinshaw@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov) and Charles L. Bennett (bennett@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov), "The Big Bang Theory", Microwave Anisotropy Probe, National Aeronautical and Spase Administration, May 21, 1999 (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/big_bang.html)

3. "As science proceeds to dismantle the ancient mythic stories one by one, theology retreats to the final redoubt from which it can never be driven. This is the idea of God in the creation myth: God as will, the cause of existence, and the agent who generated all of the energy in the original fireball and sset the natural laws by which the universe evolved. So long as the redoubt exists, theology can slip out through its portals and make occasinal sallies back into the real world. // Whenever other philosophers let their guard down, deists can, in the manner of process theology, postulate a pervasive transcendental will. They can even hypothesize miracles." Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 191-192

4. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 1

5. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

6. John M. Templeton and Robert L. Herrmann, The God Who Would be Known: Revelations of the Divine in Contemporary Science. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989. p. 1-2.

7. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Doubleday, 1950, 1954.

8. See also God as a "countercurrent to entropy, a sort of biogravity that lures life upward...God introduces new possibility spaces" into human existence." Homes Rolston, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History, Cambridge University Press, 1999, cited by Philip Clayton, "Biology meets theology", in Christian Century, 117:2 (January 19, 2000), p. 62

9. Sir John Templeton, The Humble Approach: Scientists Discover God, Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 1981, p. 13

10. Albert Einstein, "My Credo", in Michael White and John Gibbon, Einstein: A Life in Science, p. 262

11. Erin Flanagan, #30, "100 Lives: This is Who We Were", Washington Post, January 1, 2000, page M4.

12. In the Garden, UMH #314

13. Arthur Peacocke, "Science and God the Creator" in John Marks Templeton, ed., Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator, New York: Continuum, 1994

14. Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.p. 32

15. Arthur Peacocke, in Creation and the World of Science, quoted in John M. Templetonand Robert L. Herrmann, The God Who Would be Known, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989, p. 168

16. Office of Communications, Princeton University, "Scientists Discover Addition of New Brain Cells in Highest Brain Area," October 14, 1999. Http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q4/1014-brain.htm.

17. Upon being asked, by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York, April 24, 1921, if he believed in God. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 502

18. Matthew 25:40, NRSV.

19. Alan Roit, #43, "100 Lives: This is Who We Were", Washington Post, January 1, 2000, page M4.

20. Ronald P. Philipchalk, Psychology and Christianity: An Introduction to Controversial Issues. University Press of America, Lanham, MD, p. 149

21. Ian Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, p. 36

22. Ronald P. Philipchalk, Psychology and Christianity: An Introduction to Controversial Issues. University Press of America, Lanham, MD, p. 149

23. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, orig. published 1906; New York: Macmillan, 1964. P. 401,403

24. Mark 8:35

25. Rev. J. Wesley Day, "A Missionary Life," 1998, http://www.freeyellow.com/members7/wesleyday/index.htm