John 1: 1-4, 14
by Rev. Carson Overstreet
Van Wyck Presbyterian Church
August 12, 2018
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. - John 1-4, 14
Armstrong and Aldrin would walk on the moon for 3 hours while Collins would stay in orbit taking pictures and doing experiments [1].
Aeronautical science requires thorough preparation; this mission was in the making for over a decade with the work of nearly 400,000 people [2]. Our own Rob Johns was a part of this effort at NASA too!
Before Armstrong and Aldrin even put a foot on the moon, they had an hour to recover from the long space flight. And Buzz Aldrin prepared for this audacious mission in a unique way.
“Aldrin got on the comm system and spoke to the ground crew back on Earth. ‘I would like to request a few moments of silence,’ he said. ‘I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way" [3].
Then he reached for the wine and bread he’d brought to space—the first foods ever poured or eaten on the moon. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” he later wrote [4].
Then, Aldrin read some scripture and ate. Armstrong looked on quietly but did not participate [5].
Aldrin later confessed that “he’d come to wonder if he’d done the right thing by celebrating a Christian ritual in space… Aldrin said, “But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God [6].”
It leads us to the next question from the pews today: How should we reconcile logic and faith, science and religion?
Barbara Brown Taylor give some insight into how the divide came to be between religion and science in her book, “A Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion.” She says:
In the ancient world, religion and science were little more than two ways of being curious. The truths each of them told were assumed to be divine truths…The [divorce papers for science and faith were served] in the sixteenth century when Copernicus guessed that the earth circled the sun instead of vice versa.
For the first time, the truth that could be observed in the real world conflicted with the truth revealed by God in Scripture. Copernicus and the Bible could not both be right about the placement of planets, and the scientific revolution began.[7]
As soon as Charles Darwin wrote “On the Origin of Species” in 1859 the debate raged among Christians and scientists. There seemed to be no chance for religion and science to reconcile. Ever since people have looked at logic and faith, science and religion as if they are oil and water; they do not mix.
It is important for us to know that not all subscribe to a complete divorce between faith and science. Remember a few weeks ago I shared with you that faith and science are asking two different questions. Faith asks why we were created to find purpose in our lives. Science asks how.
Bill Brown is an ordained minister of the PC(USA), a theologian, lover of science, and my Old Testament Professor of Columbia Theological Seminary. I share his wisdom with you:
My conviction is that one cannot adequately interpret the Bible today, particularly the creation traditions, without engaging science… Central to the Christian faith is a doctrine that resists the temptation to distance the biblical world from the natural world: the incarnation.
Barbara Brown Taylor puts it well: “Faith in an incarnational God will not allow us to ignore the physical world, nor any of its nuances.”
Such faith calls us to know and respect the physical, fleshy world, whose “nuances” are its wondrous workings: its delicate balance and indomitable dynamics, its life sustaining regularities, and surprising anomalies, its remarkable intelligibility and bewildering complexity, its order and chaos.
Such is the World made flesh, and faith in the Word made flesh acknowledges that the very forces that produced me also produced microbes, bees, and manatees.[8]
This harmony Bill Brown speaks to is the Word made flesh as we read in John’s Gospel. The Word is God speaking creation into being. The Word is Jesus Christ who is the light of the world, who brought all things into being. And the Word is also God’s wisdom to bring about a “creative plan” to govern the natural order of all creation, humanity, and matter to live in relation to God our Creator [9].
There is a great freedom that comes from putting theology and science, faith and logic in dialogue. That freedom is expressed in two profound words: “awe” and “wonder”.
The late John Glenn was well known for being the first astronaut to orbit the earth, but he was also a man of faith (Presbyterian ruling elder). His career at NASA filled him with awe and wonder.
Glenn said, “Looking at the Earth from this vantage point [of aerospace], looking at this kind of creation and to not believe in God, to me, is impossible. To see [the Earth] laid out like that only strengthens my beliefs."
And Glenn’s congregation was filled with awe and wonder for his God-given talents in science. Before Glenn’s orbit mission, the church wrote a letter of “prayers and gratitude on behalf of the Presbyterian Church” saying, “John, your church is grateful for the service you continue to share with millions of Americans and citizens of the world.”
Krista Tippett is a woman of faith and the interviewer for the “On Being” podcast. For twenty years Tippett has interviewed individuals from diverse backgrounds on a multitude of subjects in search for deeper meaning within the human life. Her first question always begins by asking her subject to share the story of their faith background.
She once interviewed John Polkinghorne, a renown theoretical physicist who belongs to the Royal Society like Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and Steven Hawking. When Polkinghorne hit mid-life crisis he didn’t go out and buy a muscle car, he studied theology. He became the first professor at Cambridge to hold a chair in the disciplines of physics and theology. He also became an Anglican priest.
Polkinghorne shared this with Tippett:
If working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. And I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of every day. It's cloudy, it's fitful, you don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing. If you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are. So that it's a complex world and quite different from what we expected. But it's an exciting world because it turns out we can understand it, and when we do understand it, we have a deep intellectual satisfaction.
Now, if the physical world surprises us and is different from everyday expectation — common sense, if you like — it would not be very odd, really, would it be, if God also turned out to be rather surprising. Things that are just on the surface, easy to believe, are not the whole story. There's a deeper, stranger, and more satisfying story to be found, both in science and in religion.[11]
God deeply cares about the physical and sacred aspects of creation and humanity. The Psalmist said, “I praise you [God], for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know full well” (Psalm 139: 14). Both faith and science reveal this great truth in their own ways.
Our faith seeks understanding through the mystery of God’s grace and with the beautiful mind God has given us. Know that even as we might question the relationship between faith and logic – God has ordained them to dance together since before the world began.
The writer of Proverbs says: The Lord created me – WISDOM – at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth…when he established the heavens I was there…When God marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race (Proverbs 8: 22-23, 27, 29b-31).
Our Creator God knows how all things work. God also knows the unique purposes he has for each creature, person, microbe, and atom created. Maybe when we are united with God face to face we will know about all of this more fully. But for now there are many things we do not and cannot fully comprehend.
Let us give thanks to God for the gift of wisdom in the sacred and in the sciences. And may we strive to be good stewards of the mysteries of God’s grace.
In the name of God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.
Sources Referenced:
NASA photograph of Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Mike Collins (1969)
[1]NASA website for education
[2] Erin Blakemore, “Buzz Aldrin Took Holy Communion on the Moon: NASA Kept It Quiet,” History.Com Stories, July 18, 2018
[3] Erin Blakemore, Ibid.
[4] Gregg Brekke, “John Glenn, Presbyterian Ruling Elder and National Icon, Dies at Age 95,” Presbyterian News Service, December 9, 2016
[5] Erin Blakemore, Ibid.
[6] Erin Blakemore, Ibid.
[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, “A Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion” (Cambridge: Cowley Productions, 2000). P. 6.
[8] William P. Brown, “The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[9]The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, “Volume VIII: Luke and John” (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015), p. 443.
[10] Gregg Brekke, “John Glenn, Presbyterian Ruling Elder and National Icon, Dies at Age 95,” Presbyterian News Service, December 9, 2016
[11] On Being: Krista Tippett and John Polkinghorne, January 13, 2011
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