READING

Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry conclude this in the epilogue to their book, The Universe Story:

"The evocation of a new (ecological era) requires an entrancement (a deep spiritual relationship) within the world of nature in its awesome presence: whether in the Himalayan mountains or the Maine seacoast, the Pacific Islands, the Sahara Desert, the Greenland glacier, the Amazon rainforests, the Artic Snowfields, the prairies of Mid-America, or any of the other fantastic presentations that nature makes of itself.

Wherever we look, we need the expansive Earth, the distant sky, the flowering plants and trees and all that multitude of living forms about us: butterflies and bluebirds, Siberian tigers and tropical chimpanzees, dolphins and sea otters and the great blue whale.

… We belong to this community of Earth and share in its spectacular self-expression. This is the setting that seems to be implicit in the movements toward ecological integrity in the late twentieth and now early 21st century.

It is also the ideal that we find articulated in the earliest efforts of the various tribal cultures, as well as, in the earliest efforts toward the more
complex cultures.

While the human situation is definitively changed from this earlier period, we remain genetically coded toward a mutually enhancing presence to the life community that surrounds us. There is eventually only one story, the story of the universe. Every form of being is integral with this comprehensive story.

Nothing is itself without everything else. Each member of the Earth community has its own proper role within the entire sequence of transformations that have given shape and identity to everything that exists."

So ends the reading.

PRAYER

Creative and Loving Spirit,
be with us in this moment of relative quiet.
Still and calm our hearts and minds.
Let us feel the pulsing of our lives
and sense the pulsing of the life
that is all around us.

May our hearts beat in this moment with love,
love for ourselves,
love for our families,
love for our friends,
and love for this community.

May our hearts beat as one
with the common purpose of living.
May we each find our own unique
way to make a difference in our world,
our own unique ways to add back
to the beauty of the whole.

We are grateful for the gifts of life and love
and for our sustaining earth and universe.

SERMON

Last year’s movie, The March of the Penguins, gave us an in-depth look at the grueling and difficult lives of these arctic birds. We watched as the penguins went through their mating season, choosing their partner for the upcoming year, with the females eventually laying a large, white oval egg. They carefully passed this potential life with their feet to their male partners, being careful not to let the eggs slip onto the freezing ice. The males tucked their eggs on the top of their feet; a fold of skin came down and protected it from the elements.

They would be holding their eggs for weeks, protecting them and keeping them warm. The females, then, marched back to the ocean, miles away, to eat. Their bodies also have the ability to store food for the infants, and, by the time they were able to get back, in blizzard conditions, their chicks had hatched. The babies were carefully moved from father to mother and the mothers began feeding the babies. The fathers, nearly starving to death, then began the long march back to the ocean, for themselves, for food and for survival.

It was almost impossible to watch this icy tale, told to the tune of Morgan Freeman’s compassionate and tender voice, without feeling the deep love, or at least the amazing nurturing ability, of the father and mother penguins - accentuated by the parents kissing beak to beak; by their fluffing of their baby’s down; by the grief that one mother felt when her baby died (and when she tried to steal another mother’s chick, having all the other female penguins clucking her away); by the patterns of circles formed, especially by the males, as they created warmth by moving and creating a penguin wedge against the elements.

It is a wonderful movie and a wonderful testament to the beauty and agony of life and death, and to the harsh and gentle call of nature to love, to fight, to live and to survive. We can see the wonder of life in the story of the penguin…. How is it that we so often miss that same wonder in the stories of our own lives?

Wonder and mystery and awe are usually considered part of the religious or spiritual realm of sensibilities. But we live in a time in which religion has lost its footing, especially in the western world. The queen of the sciences, theology, as it was known for centuries, has been dethroned by science, itself. Science has given us the impression that all the details of life must be scientifically quantified in order to be real. It has created a mechanistic ethic
in which all happenings are reduced to chemical transactions and sterile equations.

Religious fundamentalists have responded by trying to turn creationism, the biblical story of Genesis into a science, and even using new terms, such as “intelligent design,” to make it seem more palatable -- creating not only bad science, but even bad religion, as Karen Armstrong says in her book, A Short History of Myth. The problem, as we well know, dates back to Charles Darwin, a naturalist and a Unitarian, who first theorized that human beings weren’t that different from other species, and that we had evolved perhaps from a more ape-like creature. What’s important here, besides the discoveries of science, is that humanity’s place in the scheme of things had been apparently demoted. Humans were no longer seen as so unique, created in the image of God. Darwin’s discoveries about the theory of evolution aren’t much different than the radical shift which Copernicus made when he discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, and that not everything, including the sun, revolves around the earth.

What Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry suggest in their book, The Universe Story, which traces the beginning of the universe from the so-called Big Bang 15 billion years ago to the formation of our Sun and Milky Way galaxy, some 5 billion years ago, to the appearance of the first elements, hydrogen and helium, to the only known first cells of life that evolved on earth - is that instead of considering that humankind has sunk or lowered through our understanding of evolution, that we need to realize that we are connected to all, and that everything else, especially all of life and our evolving earth, should be raised up, at least in our minds, to the level of humankind -- for everything we know and have learned should fill us with awe.

This is my third, and last Sermon in a series examining the incredible story of science and how it effects our thinking and belief systems, especially our religious thinking and religious beliefs.

We have contemplated together the awesome nature of the story of the universe, the Big Bang, as I mentioned, which occurred some 15 billion years ago - creating an expansion of space and time and matter, which created supernovas, which created stars, which created planets (and some 100 to 150 billion galaxies, our Milky Way being only one).

And that somehow from the evolving nature of helium and hydrogen, to oxygen and carbon dioxide, to all the elements of the periodic table that we know, there evolved the first living cell only 4 billion years ago upon this living Earth, the only living planet of which we know. Somehow photosynthesis developed and then sexual forms of reproduction, and then the first multi-cellular animal emerged 700 million years ago. And then, only about 2.6 million years ago, our first human ancestors walked. What’s so hard about all these numbers is how short has been the history, especially the recorded history, of the human species.

We have had ritual burials, the first form of religion, for only 100,000 years.
We had our first Neolithic villages, the first time groups of people lived
together in order to pool their food and other resources, only 12,000 years ago. Everything we know about human development and human civilization is as a tiny blip on the time scale of the universe. But what a wondrous blip is life.

We have talked about the wonder of the first cells and how they developed to form ever more complicated versions of animals and plants. How incredible is the variety to our eyes, but how similar all living forms are, genetically. How much we have in common with the catfish, the blue bird, the dog, the cat, the chimp, and even the mushroom or the pumpkin.

I agree deeply and profoundly with Swimme and Berry. We have, as a species, gotten carried away by our science and knowledge, the minutia of so many connections, without understanding or appreciating the bigger, complex fabric that holds all this fragile life together. We are interconnected, and every tiny difference is all the difference in the world, as we know it, but every tiny difference also connects us back in a most profound relationship with all of life.

Our seventh principle, “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” is an absolute imperative. When we view the process of life and evolution and the teachings of science from this perspective, we are connected to the butterflies, and the dolphins, and the rainforests, and we do not begin to know what is lost when we change our world, especially through pollution of our water and the skies, or the impact of how our use of energy is warming our planet.

Always in religious thought, philosophical or theological traditions, there is deep wisdom, at least the deepest wisdom we have been able to create. From the beginning of humankind’s ability to think and to record and notice the changing of the seasons and cycles of the moons, we have known and felt as human creatures, this deep connection to all of life, and our deep connection to our planet earth.

Understanding it better shouldn’t destroy those bonds … we should, instead,
be building ever greater bonds of understanding, connection, and relationship. But in our time, we have replaced religion with science. Science, however, is only knowledge and reason. It doesn’t replace humanity, or human emotions and feelings, the wonder of the development of life itself.

Science only seeks to explain, it cannot, by itself, render ethical or moral decisions - what is left is still life, and the way we choose to live it. We still need ethics and values and morals; we still need religion and spirituality, art and music and literature; we still need the deepest of our human emotions.
For even if our deepest emotions can be explained by hormonal and chemical reactions in the brain, nothing will ever take away the greater question of why?
Why do the penguins care? Why do they journey through hard ice and sludge to bring back small bits of food for unseen chicks? Why do the geese fly in formation and call encouragement? Why does our heart soar when we see a flock of birds in flight or a school of dolphins playing? Why do we cry when our babies are born? Why do we cry when we watch our children, and all children,
grow into adults and go through all of life’s passages?

Love … connection, relationship, caring, nurturing, compassion … this is the deepest and grandest emotion of all humans and perhaps of others within the animal kingdom. The wonder that love exists, and its poignancy is even sweeter against the certainty of death and sorrow, loss and bereavement - knowing also that we are capable of evil as well as good, doesn’t take away from the gift of love. The potential to be loved and to love others is our greatest human development, and it gives hope and meaning to the human condition.

My goal today is to connect these grand themes …. the evolution of the universe, the evolution of life, the ever evolving sense of human expectation and human fulfillment - with our religion, our Unitarian Universalist religion. And to me science and religion are connected within our faith.

First, the fundamental, historic idea of Unitarianism is the idea that God is one. Unitarianism was the heretical argument against Trinitarian Christianity - that God, higher knowledge, ultimate reality, was not split into three - Father, Son and Holy Ghost - but is one, one unified and higher force, one organizing and creating force.

The hardest thing about being Unitarian for the last 400 years is that we know,
and our forebears always knew, that this force is not the bearded, judgmental
God of the Hebrew Bible. We have known or felt that there is a force in nature, in life, in humanity, that is unifying and powerful. This is the force that Buddha and Jesus both talked of; this is the force of Hinduism; the Way of Taoism - one unifying force in nature, something that binds us each to each and all together, and connects us through our living.

Our theology today can be as grounded as ever in a search through reason and science; through thought and sensibility for the unifying force, the unifying why of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists found this why, this force in nature …. They knew it was not nameable nor governed by any one religion, but open to all. It was a unity beneath the diversity of all human existence and all of life.

And, finally, from our Universalist heritage, and I am certain of this one thing,
that the greatest thing we have achieved as living organisms, in a very huge and unknowable universe, is love. Our Universalist forebears believed in Universal love. That God, should God exist, would not judge against one person verses another based upon beliefs. God would be loving, and loving to all its creatures. God would be love. We take so for granted our ability to love, and yet it is our greatest spiritual achievement, and, it is the foundation for most religious thought: Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islam.

The ideas of unity and love give us the foundation for our morals and ethics
and all our principles. We believe in the worth and dignity of all people, because we are all one. And we should love one another, the very best we can, equally. We seek justice and equity and peace in our world because we are all one, and we are instructed by the deepest values of human thought, expressed in all religions, to love one another.

What science also has taught us is that we should love our planet and all its life forms as well … that we are connected through the miracle of the evolution of life. And that it is wise, not just pagan or a superstition, to be grateful for the changing of the seasons, and the wonder of our turning earth around the sun.
For every detail and circumstance has led to the profusion of life -- the call of the seagull, the upstream run of the salmon, the diversity of the butterflies and orchids, and the passion of the penguins.

Our message to our world is unity and love. There is a unity beneath all the diversity. It is literally encoded in our genes. We are connected to every single living form on earth, to earth itself, to our solar system, to the Milky Way and to the universe. We are one, in unity with all. And we love. We should offer this universal love to one another, to our planet, and to all that we come to know and witness in our universe. We may be afraid; we may fear for our own survival; but we can still choose to love -- for the experience of love is the greatest gift of living.

AMEN.