SERMON:

SERMON: "Mystery Loves Company"

Rev. Paul Beedle

March 23, 2008

I remember Professor James Washington, at Union Theological Seminary in New York, talking about “Easter people.” He wanted us to be Easter people. He wanted us to know that after every crucifixion there's a resurrection. He was passionate about it. I remember a chapel service – only supposed to be about 40 minutes – and he was preaching, and he wanted us to know what it meant to be Easter people, to live as though we know the resurrection is coming and have no doubt about it, and folks gathered there for the chapel service were saying “come on, come on” and “amen,” and he was getting wound up, and he knew the service was only supposed to be about 40 minutes, and he started saying, “I have to calm down now. I have to calm down now.” He was passionate about it. After every crucifixion there is a resurrection. Count on it. We shall be changed.

“Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.” ^[2] What might that mean?

Michael Dowd, who styles himself a Unitarian Universalist evangelist for evolution, makes the point that in order for us to know spiritual truths the way James Washington wanted us to know the Easter message – with passion to live that message with a life-saving conviction about it – the account of the world that our religious and spiritual tradition presents must be in accord with our experience and intellectual understanding of the world. The two have to fit. He talks about the story in Genesis that says human beings were made from the dust of the earth as a true story: indeed we did grow out of the earth and its biological system. And more than that: we grew out of the stars. The elements that make up the earth and its biological system were created inside stars, so that it's accurate to say that we are made of stardust, that “out of the stars swung the earth” and that life arose from the dust of the earth and “life upon earth rose to love.” That, says Dowd, is the Great Story. ^[3]

And when we look into the night sky, we're looking back in time. The stars we see might not even be there any more, it's taken the light they shed so long to reach us. We may be seeing stars as old as the very ones that created the elements that now make up our bodies, from whose dust we are literally made. When we speak spiritually of the interconnectedness of all things, that's not just poetic license, that's literally true. And there's something in us that needs to know that, that wants to feel it, that this isn't just an idea, it's real. Look at how the world is, investigate it with all the senses and tools we have, and we find that we literally are interconnected with each other and with all that is. “Far beyond the grasp of hands, or light to meet the eye, past the reaches of the mind, there find the key to nature's harmony, in an architecture so entwined.” ^[4]

“Behold, I tell you a mystery.” We want our spiritual truths to accord with our experience and intellectual understanding of the world. That is how religious traditions begin. That is how each person's spiritual journey begins. Experience comes first, then the attempt to name and understand it. It is the way we are made. As babies, we take in everything, we have no filters, sensations and experiences and relationships wash over us, the universe relates unrelentlingly this one huge tangled yarn of mystery, and we become overwhelmed and start to cry and then fall asleep. In order to grasp its threads, to relate to any of its parts, we develop in the midst of it a more refined awareness and a capacity to pay attention to its parts and finally to name and to know them. And how much do we shut out in order to let in that managable flow that we are able to digest and turn into knowledge? Even after centuries of sophisticated and technologically enhanced scientific investigation, we understand less than a tenth of the content of the universe. And that's if our current understanding is correct. Investigation does not reduce mystery: it makes it more apparent just how much mystery there is.

John Lienhard wrote an essay about this. ^[5] He told how the historian “Henry Adams heralded the immense human energy of the twentieth century when he told us we were facing the irruption of forces totally new [and] told us that we were about to rediscover mystery. And we did so in the reason-defying logic of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Now a new yawning pit of implausibility opens up before us. Every day we read some new article about super-string theory, loop theory, dark matter, alternate universes, quantum computation, the cosmic anthropic principle, new implications of chaos theory upon our perception of reality, and simultaneous communication between particles – all being backed up with new evidence.” And I have to say, most or all of this new science is an overwhelming tangled yarn to me! But Lienhard's point is that: “We stand again on the threshold of mystery, just as we did in 1900 [when Henry Adams was writing]. Once more, our world is about to become unrecognizably larger than it was. Once more, hope wells up from a great ocean of untapped but inchoate possibility. Something is about to happen. Time and space are once more ready to turn and change, and to take us up to new mysteries and new heights – if only we let them do so.” He remembers “Christmas Eve, 1968, [when] astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and Jim Lovell rode their orbiter around the far side of the moon. They were the first living creatures to gaze on that surface, and, as they came around the moon, they read aloud from Genesis. The words, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, summoned up the vast expanse of space. In that moment the firmament was no longer an abstraction. Hope was immense. A few months later, that small footprint in the moon's dust seemed to tell us we'd completed what we'd set out to do. The culmination,” says Lienhard, “did not match our dreams. Thoreau had anticipated our reaction when he wrote: The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon ... & at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.” Mystery prevents the bridge, knowledge permits the woodshed. But the materials for the woodshed would not be available had there been no dream of a bridge to the moon.

“Behold, I tell you a mystery.” We want our spiritual truths to accord with our experience and understanding of the world, and our experience and understanding of the world reveals the vastness of mystery. “Still we seek to find a truth that we might understand and reduce to terms defined, vast and immeasurable time and space all so overwhelmingly designed.” Prays Jim Scott: “Oh, passing years might I know the faith that winters in the heart to be reborn in spring. To hear and to feel the pulse of life enters my soul as a song to sing of the oneness of everything.” ^[6] What do we do with the apparent paradox of our desire for knowledge and the benefits of knowledge, on one hand, and our need, on the other, for faith: an open-hearted stance toward the mystery of the universe, that can warm our hearts when we find the world a cold and withering place, and guide us to richer and more abundant life when the creativity and possibilities of the world are more in evidence?

One thing is to let our knowledge inspire our faith. Carl Sagan wrote about how we store knowledge in our bodies and brains – the hardware of knowledge – in his best-selling Cosmos: “For a whale [or a human being] to live there are many things it must know how to do. This knowledge is stored in its genes and in its brains. ... The information stored in the DNA ... of a whale or a human or any other beast or vegetable on Earth is written in a language of four letters – the four different kinds of ... molecular components that make up DNA. How many bits of information are contained in the hereditary material of various life forms? ... A virus needs about 10,000 bits – roughly equivalent to the amount of information on [one printed] page. ...A bacterium uses roughly a million bits of information – which is about 100 printed pages. ... A whale or a human being needs something like five billion bits ... a thousand volumes. Every one of your hundred trillion cells contains a complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you. ... [Y]our liver cells have some unemployed knowledge about how to make your bone cells, and vice versa. The genetic library contains everything your body knows how to do on its own. The ancient information is written in exhaustive, careful, redundant detail – how to laugh, how to sneeze, how to walk, how to recognize patterns, how to reproduce, how to digest an apple. ... But suppose what you had to do was so complicated that even several billion bits was insufficient. Suppose the environment was changing so fast that the precoded genetic encyclopædia ... was no longer entirely adequate. ... That is why we have brains. Like all our organs, the brain has evolved... Its structure reflects all the stages through which it has passed. ... The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons – about a hundred trillion bits ... [t]he equivalent of twenty million books ....” ^[7] That's what our bodies and brains do to retain knowledge. Now consider how we experience that. Sagan comments that: “Eating an apple is an immensely complicated process. In fact, if I had to synthesize my own enzymes, if I consciously had to remember and direct all the chemical steps required to get energy out of food, I would probably starve.” ^[8] Dancers and athletes speak of “muscle memory” – they're able to make their bodies move in extraordinary and beautiful sequences of action without consciously thinking through each step. Genes and brains accomplish so much without us consciously directing them! Religion scholar Joseph Campbell spoke of this sort of thing as the wisdom of the body. Knowing we are supported by this “wisdom” can nourish the open-hearted stance toward mystery that is faith.

When our knowledge of the nature of the universe jives with our experience of life's mystery, it satisfies that something in us that needs to know that the meaning we seek in life is substantial, that wants to feel it, that this isn't just an idea, it's real. Michael Dowd describes the solution to the Earth's first pollution crisis – when single-celled organisms had produced what to them were toxic levels of oxygen, and formed multi-celled organisms in order to survive – as a law of the universe: it always evolves toward greater cooperation and complexity. I read recently about some of the legacy of this tendency. ^[9] For all that Carl Sagan describes about the DNA in our cells, we're made of more than those human cells. Riding around inside our trillions of cells are many more trillions of micro-organisms. “The total number of microbes associated with our adult bodies exceeds the total number of our human cells by a factor of ten ... we're sort of a superorganism – one that's 90 percent microbial.” ^[10] And these microbes inside us “talk to each other all the time [and] tend to behave like multicellular organisms” – they “coordinate their activity via microbial chatter.”^[11] Now, other microbes come into our bodies through our food. “Relative to the hordes of microbes living in the gut, the incoming microbes make up only a teensy minority. However, based on the chemical dispatches issued during their transit through the intestines, the gut's longtime residents `start to change what they're doing.' ... [D]epending on which microbes permanently inhabit any particular individual's gut, the [transient's] message may resonate loudly or fall on deaf ears.”^[12] That's what goes on in mocrobial communities. Doesn't it also sound like what goes on in human communities? The meaning we find in forming and belonging to communities may be a spiritual manifestation of an inherent process of the universe. Culture – in more ways than one – begins at the microbial level!

So what about culture? Carl Sagan wrote: “Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.” ^[13] John Lienhard observes: “Many ... ideas have lain dormant for years and are only now resurfacing...” Thoreau wrote about a bridge to the moon, and “in 2002, NASA sponsored a conference for exploring design issues involved in building a space elevator” that would rise from the Earth's surface, terminating in a satellite in geosynchronous orbit! ^[14] They're talking about that because they think we may be able to develop materials to build such a thing – such as a 22,000-mile cable strong enough not to break under its own weight – and because it's an alternative to burning a lot of fuel flying a rocket up there. Perhaps communication and cooperation have similar latent potential. Perhaps: “Like the birds whose patterns grace the sky and carry all who join in love expanding, the message of peace will rise in flight taking the weight of the world upon its wings ... Peace is in the dance of trees, who stir before the first breath of wind is yet perceived. Trust in the song, becoming one with the dance, and all mysteries can be believed.” ^[15]

Footnotes

^[1] I Corinthians 15:51-52

^[2] I Corinthians 15:51-53

^[3] www.thegreatstory.org

^[4] from “The Oneness of Everything” by Jim Scott, in Singing the Journey.

^[5] John Lienhard, “Space: The Final Frontier!” www.uh.edu/engines/Inventingtimespace/time&space.htm

^[6] from “The Oneness of Everything” by Jim Scott, in Singing the Journey.

^[7] Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter XI “The Persistence of Memory”

^[8] ibid

^[9] Janet Raloff, “Nurturing Our Microbes,” in Science News (March 1, 2008).

^[10] ibid

^[11] ibid

^[12] ibid

^[13] Sagan, op cit.

^[14] Lienhard, op cit.

^[15] Scott, op. cit.

^[16] I Corinthians 15:51-53