Evolution Sunday

Willing Light
Evolution Sunday
Psalm 8 John 15:1-12
February 15, 2009
Rev Alan Claassen


On Friday morning I had saved some time to begin writing this sermon. I was doing a little reading, enjoying my coffee, listening to the rain, and then the sound stopped. It was snowing. In Murphys. And it kept snowing. And I thought I had better park my car down at the bottom of the hill we live on in case it kept snowing.
By the time I got all bundled up warm, got the car to the bottom of the hill, and was walking back up to the house, the world had changed. Snow everywhere, so beautiful that carpet of white simplifying everything.
It was spell-binding, mesmerizing. Filling the sky and laying down a sheet of white over the manzanita, and branches of the pine trees, and the hillside. I came back in side and opened the Bible to Psalm 8.
“When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place---what is humanity that you should be mindful of us?”
I could say an emphatic yes to all of that.
And then the power went out. I realized that I had no wood in the house and I had better get a fire going. So back on the warm clothes and gloves, gathering wood in the falling snow. And when that was all done I just had to go for a walk.
I remembered building snowmen and snow forts with our children when they were young. I remembered the joy in the household when two school students and one schoolteacher listened to the radio or watched TV and to learn that our school was among the list for closures or a late start.!
It’s a snow day!
And back inside I went again and returned to Psalm 8 and its imagined dialogue with God.
What is humanity that you should be mindful of us?
You have made us, in your image.
What is humanity that you, O Creator, are thinking about us?
And made us responsible for the work of your hands, all sheep and oxen, yes, even the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and whatever swims the path of the seas?
And then I found myself entering that dialogue.
How are we handling that responsibility of caring for the earth? Considering the reality of climate change, world hunger, the ongoing reality of war and violence, are we revealing that we are just a little less than God? Are we behaving in God’s image.
Do we need to adjust our vision of just who God is, who we are, and our relationship with Creation?
What would have happened in the course of human events if the Psalmist had instead said,
“Who are you O God that we are mindful of you?”
What would be the condition of the planet today if the Psalmist had instead written,
“You, have given us, the ability to respond to the work of your hands, as if were actually touching your hands. O God.”
What would have become of us if, instead of believing that we have dominion over nature, we could see that nature is our domain, our home, and that we are intimately connected with all life, human and non-human, mineral and water, air and soil. And that all of those forms of life are all in God and God is in all them?
What if we changed our image of God as being distant from us, on top of a mountain, or in some distant heaven, but instead, in each and every molecule, and in the connection between all elements, creatures, and forces in the Universe?
What if our God-likeness was not expressed in power over nature, but instead in knowledge of nature?
And what would happen if we saw that the ability to
observe nature,
ask questions,
develop theories,
test predictions,
extrapolate backwards to beginning of time and space,
were accepted as gifts from God?
When we consider the Universe Story, the story of the 14.5 billion years of the ongoing creation of the all life and culture as our new Creation Story we have entered into the possibility of experiencing that we, born of the Universe, are now the Universe reflecting back on itself.
When we look through the Hubble telescope and see the beautiful nebulae giving birth to stars, we are the eyes of God, looking at the creation of God.
And scientists are able to tell much of this story of the ongoing creation of the Universe. It is a story that cannot define the first moment, but it can chart beginning after beginning. There is in the Universe Story a beautiful mixture of mystery and knowledge that invokes wonder, gratitude and humility.
This discovery of beginning again and again was an obstacle for scientists along the way. Centuries ago people read the Creation Story in Genesis and thought that it was meant to be history rather than a meaningful narrative.
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is celebrated by many this year is not the only scientist who ran into this difficulty.
Tycho Brahe was an astronomer living in Denmark in the 16th century. He was an astronomer before the invention of the telescope. He was a careful observer of the night sky. He knew the stars of the night sky by observation and memory.
One night Tycho Brahe saw shining in the night sky a star he had never seen before. And this star wasn’t only new, it was brighter than Venus. Tycho studied this star for months, every night it appeared, until one day it was gone, never to return. His book on the star is called De Nova Stella, the new star, and eversince then these surprisingly bright and brief stars have been called novas, new things, and the really big ones are called super novas.
Later scientists would learn that the explosion of a supernova are what create and disperse the elements, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, iron and many others that are essential life as we know it on planet earth.
However, when Tycho Brahe announced his discovery of new star, ministers did not run to their pulpits to celebrate the abundance of energy released into the Universe.
They called Tycho Brahe a heretic. Like Galileo and so many other scientists, Brahe was branded an enemy of the church for suggesting what was then a most radical idea: that the Universe is always changing, moving, evolving, exploding, and growing.
For these ministers, a literal reading of the Book of Genesis was there preferred source of understanding how the Universe was created. To go against that interpretation was to go against God.
And yet, evidence of God’s creation was all around them, They were walking it, breathing it, eating it, being it. But their theology got in the way.



In the 17th Century another scientist ran into a similar problem. His name was Nicolaus Steno and he is considered by some to be the founder of geology. At the time people had no understanding of fossils. And they believed that the creation of the earth was a one time event, everything made just the way that it was for all time. So when they saw, what we would call sea shells, on a mountain top, they imagined that these “stones” somehow appeared in the rock that surrounded them. They could not imagine that was in their day a mountain, had been underneath a sea or a lake centuries earlier.
Nicolaus Steno was first an expert in the dissection of animals and human cadavers at a time when the inner workings of the human body were not well known. He made many anatomical discoveries. And he was also interested in what were then called tongue-stones, the shells that appeared in mountaintops.
One day he had the fortune of being asked to dissect a large shark. In doing so he notice that the shark’s teeth were amazingly similar to objects he found lodged in the mountain rocks he had been excavating.
Eventually Steno published his findings and theories that described what we now know as sedimentary rock, built up layer by layer over centureis at the bottom of lakes and sea beds. The soft mud became the resting place for shells and sharks teeth, then hardened over centuries, and then uplifted, turned and twisted, separated by rivers, and broken apart by earthquakes. And even though Nicolaus Steno himself later became a Catholic Bishop his work called into question the prevailing idea of the centuries. “There was do science of the earth’s history at the time because the earth was not considered to even have a history. People had a history; not things, not nature. For an orthodox Christian, each part of the world had been created by divine fiat, more or less in its present form. There was no point in asking how mountains or valleys formed. They had just been created.”
If someone allowed that there had, in fact, been a few changes since Creation, these were seen as inherently chaotic. Changes could only mean the decay of God’s original perfect Creation.” (The Seashell on the Mountaintop, Alan Cutler, page 13.)
Charles Darwin is not the only scientist responsible for the teaching of evolution. He had predecessors going back at least two hundred years before him. And his book, The Origin of Species, was not about the beginning of life itself, but an explanation of how there could be so many animals, so closely related. Did God have to get back to the drawing board each time a new species came on earth? Or was there something inherent in the processes of life itself that allowed life to change, to experiment, to adapt to new circumstances, to be creative?
One of the amazing things about Darwin’s discovery is that he did not publish Origin of the Species until several years after his trip on the HMS Beagle and his time in the Galapogas Islands. It was not until another scientist came up with a similar theory that Darwin revealed his own research.
Fear of speaking of the truth because it would offend the locals stopped Darwin from publishing his work.
The reason for this Sunday being designated as Evolution Sunday by over 1,000 churches and 400 synagogues comes from a concern that so fundamentalist Christians, bless their hearts, are frightened of evolution and do not want it taught in public schools. This very issue just came before a school Board in Texas and fortunately was defeated.
Churches and synagogues around the country are saying that science and religion to not have to be enemies, that a description of the ongoing creation of the Universe does not diminish the role of God for those of us know God as real.
We Christians can celebrate that the book of Genesis, though not historical, is none the less insightful, in that it saw that Creation is an ongoing process, where light and dark make a day, and everything is related to everything else.
The gift of the Universe Story is that in it we have the story of the heavens and our relationship to them. We are a part of a wonderfully intricate web of creation. And we need to realize quickly that it is a lack of humility to believe that we have dominion over the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. They are our brothers and sisters.

Who ARE you God, that you are mindful of us?
May our minds be filled with knowledge and wonder of you.



NB The section on Tycho Brahe taken from a sermon by Rev. Deborah Streeter, entitled, “God and Supernovas,” and included in a resource packet created by the United Church of Christ called, “Creationism, the Church, and the Public School. Published in 1992