Proof?

Sorry to have been missing for a few days.  It was a very busy week, and I'm heading into another busy one.  I'll try to post this week, but if I'm not here, know that I'll be back soon.

Mike Slaughter's, in his book, Renegade Gospel, wrote about a scientist named Francis Collins.  Dr. Collins was the leader of the Human Genome Project.  The goal of the project was to map all of the base pairs in the human genome and to identify and map all of the human genes.  Fascinating and wonderful stuff:  Collins wrote the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  Slaughter quotes Collins:

It took me a while to get comfortable sharing this experience with other peope in science.  I was happy to talk about it with my family and with other people who were not in the scientific arena.  But like most scientists, I had this fear that having accepted something in the way of a spiritual world view, I would be perceived as having gone just a little bit soft; that this was not compatible with the rigorous "show me the data" attitude that a scientist is supposed to have towards all things.

Now, I might say that particular conclusion is, in itself, all wrong.  There will never be a scientific proof of God's existence.  Science explores the natural, and God is outside the natural.  So there is going to be no substitute for making a decision to believe, and that decision will never be undergirded by absolute data-driven proof.

So often I hear people say, "When I look at the sunrise, I wonder how anyone cannot believe in God. How could this be so beautiful without having been a creation of God?"  Really, though, I don't believe a beautiful sunrise is proof of God.  Don't get me me wrong; I look at a sunrise, and I am inspired by God's creative power, and yet, I know that it is my faith that allows me to see it.  It is not proof of God.

When I worked in the lab, I was fascinated with the intricacies of how our bodies work.  The idea of the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) coding our cells with the instructions to function was amazing to me.  Still is amazing to me.  In it, I can see the wonder and majesty of God.  And yet, I know I see that beauty because I already believe.  It is not proof.

You must believe without proof, and then you will see God everywhere.

Gift of Faith

From Mike Slaughter's book, The Renegade Gospel:

People believed it was impossible for the human body to break the threshold of four minutes in running one mile - that is, until Roger Bannister did it in 1054 with a time of 3:59.4.  The barrier that had stood for centuries is now broken regularly.  What was considered undoable is now doable!  For the impossible to become possible, you must believe it is possible; you must believe it before you can achieve it.  To be raised to a new way of living, you have to die to an old way of thinking.

My husband rides bikes.  He rides what I consider (what anyone would consider) to be long distances on a bicycle. For example, last Saturday he rode 106 miles to raise funds for a Children's hospital in town.  I have to think twice to DRIVE 100 miles, because it's a long way, but he doesn't.  He just does it.  What used to be undoable is now doable because he has changed his way of thinking.  (Not to mention trained and trained and trained, but still - you have to believe you can do it).

So it is with faith.  Faith is a gift given to us by grace, but we still have to open our minds and our hearts to the gift.  Today is the either anniversary of the day I started as the Associate Director of the Foundation where I work.  Am I sitting at my desk at work because God has called me here?  Me, a trained biologist, who knew more about splicing DNA than planning estate gifts (I mean, I knew NOTHING about planned giving, so it might be an unfair comparison), am now starting my eighth year of doing this.  Has God called me to this ministry?  I say that God has.  I might have believed it was undoable, but faith (and training, training, training) has made it doable.  The gift of faith given to me, and the faith of those who said, "Come be Associate Director," have opened the gift of this ministry to me.

I thank God for this faith, which is certainly a gift of grace.

Servant or Volunteer?

I'm still reading Mike Slaughter's Renegade Gospel.  He says this:

...we come to Jesus offering ourselves as volunteers rather than as servants.  ... Volunteers serve out of convenience of their calendars, controlling when, where and how they participate. ... Volunteers follow Jesus up to a point - the point of interference with their lifestyle.

I get what he is saying, but I don't completely agree with it.  Do you?

Slaughter doesn't call people volunteers in his church - he calls them servants.  I agree that we are to be servants of God - available and obedient to God's call, regardless of the inconvenience.  I don't believe (and maybe Slaughter doesn't either) that we are servants of our church.  God has placed particular calls on my life, and that includes the work I do in my job, in my family, in my community and in my church.  They are all calls from God, and there are times when one will have priority over another.  God calls me to know how to do that - and that is part of the service I am called to do.

I can't always say "yes" at church, because sometimes it's not the highest priority.  Another part of my service is higher.  Sometimes I have to say "no" to a family event because I have to do something for work.  Sometimes I need to take time off from work for a family responsibility.  Sometimes I miss church, work and family time to go on an Emmaus walk, and for that weekend, God has called me to place that at the highest priority for my time.

I asked a pastor once, "Why don't you like the Walk to Emmaus?"  His answer was that it pulls people out of worship.  I'm not convinced that this was actually his reason, but still - God calls us to many ministries, and calls us to prioritize them (with God's guidance).  That doesn't make me a flighty "volunteer."  It makes me a servant "volunteer."

A God Worthy of Praise

Mike Slaughter, in the book Renegade Gospel, writes:

Do you remember the periodic tables of elements from high school chemistry class?  Everything your body is made of can be found on that chart.  What a humbling thought.  All the chemical elements that comprise my physical body, can in essence, be found in the dirt.  This is what i means when your forehead is marked with the burnt ashes from the prior year's Palm Sunday palms.  It's an important reminder of the fragile and transient nature of our time on earth.  As God told Adam in the garden, "For dust you are, and to dust you shall return"  (Genesis 3:19)

In our office, we often marvel (with disbelief) at the fast passage of time.  At the beginning of January, we'll talk about how quickly Annual Conference will arrive (in June), and once we are past that, how quickly Christmas will arrive - and another year is finished.  Time does pass quickly, and our lives are fragile.  This is an important reminder to us.

As I read this passage today, I did consider the fragility of life and the passage of time, but I was also reminder of what a majestic and powerful God we have.  We are literally creatures of dust, formed by a marvelous creator - a creator who can take carbon and water and many other elements and create a person - a breathing, walking, thinking, creating person.  Isn't God worthy of praise!?!

Science and God

In reading Mike Slaughter's book, Renegade Gospel, I found a wonderful quote from Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the Humane Genome Project.

The purpose of this project was to map out and sequence the entire genome of the human species. When I worked in medical research, this was a fascinating idea to me, full of potential for scientific advancement and medical breakthroughs, and I still feel that way.

I imagine Dr. Collins is a very scientifically oriented person. What might surprise some is that he also wrote the book The Language of God.  He argues, "belief in God can be an entirely rational choice and that the principles of faith are, in fact complementary with the principles of science."  Slaughter says that Collins called the sequencing of the human genome, "both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship."

In a society where we so often think science and faith are opposites that should never mix, this is a breath of fresh air.  And it rings of truth. Science is God's art, and the study of it is an occasion for us to delve deeper into the ways of God.  I am a scientist and a lay minister, and I find those two parts of me are actually so intertwined as to be one.  They do not contradict each other but instead enhance each other.

For those who feel differently, I urge you to have a stronger faith that is not threatened by science. Science reveals God in a way that would please God, I believe.

The Ultimate Authority

Our bible study group at church is reading Renengade Gospel: The Rebel Jesus by Mike Slaughter. I'm up to lead the group next Sunday, so I'm reading Chapter 2 today.  Lots of thought provoking snippets here.

Have you ever considered that some of us - and maybe some of our churches - practice Bible idolatry, "acting as if the written word were the highest authority."?  Don't read that and think that either Mike Slaughter or I don't believe in the authority of the Bible, but is there one that is higher?  Of course there is.  It is God.  God is the highest authority.

Consider verses from John 1:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Logos is the Greek word in this passage that means Word, but with better clarity, it means Jesus, the Living Word.  To take liberties with the passage, we could read, "In the beginning was Jesus, and Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God." It's not really correct completely, but it might be easier to "get."

Consider the passage that some refer to in order to defend the supremacy of the written word over anything else; 1 Peter 1:23, which reads, "For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God."  Here, again, the word is Logos - the Living Word.  The verse refers to Jesus as the enduring Word of God, and through that Living Word, we have been born again of that which is imperishable.

Slaughter suggests that when we are faced with difficult Bible passages, such as some of the very violent words in the Old Testament, or the edict to take and eye for an eye, that we stop, and we go to read the Red Letters of Jesus, and then we reread the troublesome passage through this lens.  Look at what is troublesome through the eyes of Jesus - the Living Word, and the ultimate authority.