February 13, 2022 Sermon
Sermon title: "God and Darwin"
Scripture: Matthew 22:34-40
(Other lectionary choices include Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, and Luke 6:17-26.)
Matthew 22:34-40
The Greatest Commandment
34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" 37He said to him, " "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Every year about this time (the second Sunday of February) more and more churches, including our own, are joining forces to proclaim that being religious does not mean that we must deny what science tells us, nor if we consider ourselves scientists, do we have to deny religion. The second Sunday of February has been chosen because Charles Darwin was born close to that date in 1809. His birthday: February 12, the same date in the same year as Abraham Lincoln’s! Yes, Darwin and Lincoln were born on exactly the same day! (Poe: b. 1809) Getting back to the point: it is possible to be a person of faith as well as to be a person of science. I called this sermon “God and Darwin”, because to some, it might appear that belief in God might mean one couldn’t believe in the findings of Charles Darwin, namely, the theory of evolution. Well, not only do I believe that we CAN believe in both; I also believe we MUST! Did you hear today’s Scripture reading? Jesus says to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and MIND! I would ask you how in the world can you love the Lord your God with your MIND if you aren’t open to everything modern science has found out? Now, that doesn’t mean science hasn’t made any mistakes; it has. But for me, to love the Lord our God with my mind means that I don’t deny empirical reality when it is staring me in the face! This has happened before. The church denied the scientific reality that Copernicus proclaimed when he gazed at the heavens through a telescope. Galileo told the church that it was wrong for the church to say that the sun and the moon and the stars all revolved around US on the earth. We know now that everything seems to be in motion, not only the earth going around the sun, but also our solar system and galaxy moving around with OTHER solar systems and galaxies.
So, the church was wrong then because of the assumptions it made. Let’s not us be wrong because of assumptions WE make. Some of our Christian brothers and sisters have assumed that the Bible is a science book; it is not. The Bible is the story of God’s search for us, of God’s redemptive power, of God’s yearning for a relationship with us. When we try to use the Bible as a science book, we are being unfair to those who wrote it and to those who are featured in it. The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age when people thought diseases were brought on by evil spirits. In the worldview of Biblical writers, heaven was up there, earth right here, and Hell down below – they believe in what was called the Three-Story Universe. You and I don’t believe that way today, and we have science to thank – in part – for how we believe. You and I know that bacteria and viruses cause disease. As far as Heaven and Hell are concerned, we tend to think of those places not in spacial terms but in terms of some other dimension.
I certainly believe that Evil exists – but I don’t think anybody here believes that if you go straight down you’ll find the home of the Devil where there’s a guy with a pitchfork who makes sure the fires are always burning. And the same can be said for God: I certainly believe God exists, but I don’t believe that if you go high enough you’ll find the Pearly Gates with St. Peter standing by outside checking to see who goes in or not. God is as infinite and majestic as the farthest star and as close as the person sitting next to you. God is everywhere, not confined to some place that we call Heaven. And not confined to church, either!
As I was talking this sermon over with my wife, she mentioned the idea of both/and, not either/or. What I’m saying is that it IS possible to be as scientific as possible AND as religious as you feel you must be. Charles Darwin was married to Emma, and she was pretty religious. Darwin’s studies of various species made him question his own religious faith. And I think it can be said that Darwin died an atheist or an agnostic – but he and his believing wife Emma stayed together until his death. The two of them accepted the other’s worldview. In a way, each of them had a both/and existence – Emma didn’t say, “Charles, you must believe as I do,” and Charles didn’t say, “Emma, you must believe as I do.” They accepted each other because they LOVED each other. Instead of demanding either/or (you know: “It’s MY way or the highway!”), they enjoyed their life together. Each could appreciate the other’s differences. That’s love. That’s both/and. That’s an appreciation of the many different aspects in God’s great creation. (Movie: Robin Hood (Costner, Freeman).
I mentioned that Lincoln and Darwin share the same birthday. So, let me get a quote from Lincoln in here. He said he could understand how somebody who always looked at the ground might think that there was no God. But Lincoln said he couldn’t understand how ANYONE who looked up into the heavens and saw all the wonders of the stars overhead and all the apparent order of the universe – he didn’t see how ANYONE who saw all that could say that there was no God. Well, that’s Lincoln – but that’s not YOU. What do YOU think? Darwin ended up tending not to believe; Lincoln believed. So how do you decide?
One of the great things – and also the FRUSTRATING things – about this whole issue of religion is that there is no unbiased source for you to check out. The bible was written by people who believe, so of course you are going to find in that collection the verse, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” OF COURSE, you are going to find a quote like that in the Bible because the Bible was written by people who believed there was a God! And if you read something that tries to convince you that there is no God, the person writing that book already believes that way, so you aren’t getting an unbiased account. Sorry about that, but that’s the world for you. You must choose for yourself. I personally believe that God gave us our minds to make choices, and if we don’t think for ourselves, we are not making good use of the wonderful minds God has given us.
I mentioned a moment ago that Darwin tended not to believe in God. Permit me to suggest that perhaps Darwin had a little baby faith to begin with, so anything that rocked that little baby faith had a good chance of destroying that faith. Maybe Darwin took the Bible literally, such as God made the world in six days and then rested on the seventh, as it says in the first pages of Genesis. I don’t happen to believe that’s how the earth came about, and I’m guessing that most of the members of this church don’t believe the earth was created in seven days, either. Remember, the Bible isn’t a science book; it’s more like poetry. Have you guys ever been in love, or thought you were in love? Have you ever read a love poem that says, “Here eyes were azure pools of blue”? does that mean you could go swimming in those pools? KER-SPLASH! KER-SPLASH! No, of course not: poetry uses similes and metaphors to get across its meaning (Mention Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”)
So, maybe Darwin took the Bible literally, and what he discovered in the natural world didn’t jibe with what he thought the Bible said. So instead of adjusting his faith, he threw it out totally. Also, there is a passage in the Bible that says a day is a year to the Lord. Pull out your hymn books, please. Turn to hymn #67 – we aren’t going to sing it; I just want you to read it. (READ verse – that says, “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.”) What that says to me is that God thinks in terms of eons and eons; we think of days and months and years. Another verse says, “From everlasting Thou art God.” What that says to me is that God was here before the earth was made and will be here long after the earth is gone.
I mentioned that Darwin didn’t adjust his faith. The early church had to make some adjustments in its faith. They thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes – but as people started dying, it must have occurred to some that, “You know, we’d better start writing some of this down. Maybe the Lord isn’t coming back quite as soon as we thought.” And the Apostle Paul addresses some of those concerns in 1 Corinthians 15.
The point is, we must let God be God and not hold onto our understanding of how and when God must act. In the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”, near the end, another persecution of the Jewish people is taking place in this little Russian village, and the Jews must flee or perish. A young girl asks the rabbi why they must leave, because it was her understanding that they were to wait until the Messiah came to their little village. The rabbi’s answer is wonderful; he says, “We will wait for him someplace else.” Why is that answer wonderful? Because already the rabbi is adjusting his faith; he’s letting God be God. He trusts God to be faithful, but his faith is deep enough to let God be faithful in God’s own time, not his own time or his people’s own time, but in God’s own time.
What I personally wish Charles Darwin had thought when he made all his world-shaking discoveries is, “Wow! The plan of God in his creation is so much more complex than anybody ever could imagine. And I feel blessed that Almighty God has revealed a small part of his plan to me.”
Have you ever thought about the possibility of life on other planets? I think about it all the time. And the reason I think about it is that when we make contact and enter into a relationship with other creatures in God’s universe, we’re going to have to re-write our theology! For example, did Jesus die for the sins of the creatures on planet X, or just for the creatures of planet earth? Does God so love the world of planet X as much as he loved OUR world? Maybe you and I are like the graduates of the class of 1491: Columbus hasn’t discovered America yet and we think the world is flat. (Have you seen that bumper sticker, “The world is flat – Class of 1491”?) As I said earlier, let’s not be wrong because of the assumptions we make. Let’s let God be God and let us love God with all our hearts and souls and MINDS – and let’s not be too shocked if God surprises us a little on the way. Amen. May the Lord be with you.
Pastor Skip
