About ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire lies an archipelago of nine islands called the Isles of Shoals. They are rocky and craggy, beautiful, even as they appear rather inhospitable.
Rising from the middle of one of them, Star Island, is a striking structure, white as the sea caps, with a red roof. The Oceanic is nineteenth century resort hotel with a sprawling lobby, four floors of rooms, a gargantuan porch and a view of the sea from every side. Star Island gained its moniker centuries ago because “its broken crags extend in all directions like the spangles of a star.”
Star is a special place, an historic place, a place I was privileged to spend a week this summer preaching every day in the little stone meeting house built in 1800 by fishermen and their wives. The little chapel has been lovingly maintained through the years by members of Unitarian Universalist and Congregationalist congregations who have come to Star each summer for more than 100 years for rest, renewal and fellowship. The crew that gathered last week for the annual
“Life on a Star” family conference was like a congregation in and of itself.
Many of the extended families who attend have been making the pilgrimage to Star for generations.
We brought our spirits to the sea and gathered for a week of worship, lectures and workshops (in addition to fun and relaxation) on the theme: “Our Relationship With the World Around Us.”
We were privileged to have as a theme speaker USNH’s own David Mangold-Heiser, Director of Student Programs at the Peabody Museum. David delivered a masterful series of lectures on evolution, exploring the concepts of natural selection, micro and macro evolution, diversity of species, human evolution,
and the relationship of evolution, religion, and spirituality.
We had a great time exploring our relationship with the natural world, looking at how humans fit into the remarkable and yes, sometimes seemingly miraculous, process of the evolution of life on earth. We explored the evolution/creationism debate, but even more interesting than that debate to me was how Charles Darwin himself, descended from and married to a Unitarian, reconciled his unique discoveries about life with his spiritual beliefs and his religious disbelief.
So today, I’d like to bring some of Star Island back to USNH. I cannot bring the frigidly refreshing early-morning ocean waters or hot chocolate on the porch.
I cannot bring the sunrise over the eastern rocks or the sound of the gulls’ cries;
I cannot bring the view from the pulpit, looking out over the sea, but I can bring questions about the beginning, a creation story, a theory of evolution, and a reconciliation of the two. I can bring you Charles Darwin and his wife Emma,
and an invitation for each of us to examine our own lives for evidence of evolution,
tiny changes that lead to new ways of being.
This morning we heard a version of an ancient creation story well known to many of us.
“In the beginning…” I have to tell you, as I have been studying this passage
over the past couple of weeks, I must have seen at least five billboards with these words: “In the beginning, God created…” On 91, on 95, on the Boston Post Road.
Perhaps you’ve seen them too? The board has a beautiful picture of the earth from space and a little graphic of the “march of progress:” an ape, a hunched over proto-humanoid form, and a man standing tall. This, David told us last week, is a massively overly simplistic view of the complicated process of over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that led to, well, us. But nevertheless, on these billboards, there is a red circle around the graphic with a line through it.
I don’t know if I just haven’t been looking, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen an anti-evolution billboard before this summer. Not until I got a refresher in the majesty and beauty of evolution. Not until I was neck-deep in studying Genesis again.
Go figure. The universe works is mysterious ways.
~
This morning we read a slightly different translation of the first words of this familiar story. You see, biblical scholars differ as to whether the first verse of Genesis should read “In the beginning, God created,” or whether this verse was a “temporal phrase” describing what things were like when God started casting verbal orders around.
Something like: “In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and earth...” Or: “In the beginning when God set out to create…”
Does it matter? Perhaps not, but it does give us an example of the nuance of this text and what a difference a translation can make. And this little translation study
tells us that perhaps the ancients had no intention of saying that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing.
There was nothing, but there was also something. My favorite part of this passage is the description of what ancient story tellers imagined was present before anything else: “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
The Hebrew word for wind here is ruach, same as the word for breath,
same as the word for spirit. We are the breath of our ancestors. We are the spirit of God. There is poetry in this wind.
In numerous ancient creation stories, life springs forth from a primordial sea:
From Mesopotamia, the Enuma Elish has distinctive parallels to the ancient Israelite story. It begins with two watery beings, Apsu and Tiamat, whose salty and sweet waters mingle together in darkness and chaos.
Egyptian mythology also begins “in the beginning” when there was only Nun,
the great celestial waters of the Unmanifest.
So, life springs forth from the oceans. Uncanny sometimes, how ancient stories echo truth. Astrophysist Niel deGrass Tyson, in his book on the beginning of the universe entitled Origins, writes that after the Big Bang, for hundreds of millennia,
matter and energy cohabitated in a kind of thick soup…” in other words:
“the great celestial waters of the Unmanifest.”
And, as it turns out, a much shorter time ago, only between 385 million and 275 million years ago, the first four legged creatures made their first steps on land. Strange looking terapods, ancestors of modern amphibians are thought to have crawled out of the water, filling an entirely new evolutionary niche.
They became all the “creeping things and wild animals of the earth.”
Anthropologists and natural historians can trace the origins of the many species that populate our planet as far back as single celled organisms. And astronomers and astrophysicists have looked back into time through the night sky and theorized that the origin of our universe was the Big Bang.
But, as we heard this morning, the jury is still out on what, if anything, came before that beginning. It could be a black hole, it could be a multiverse with multiple universes. The singularity that caused the Big Bang could simply have appeared, ex nilio. As much as we know, we still do not, ultimately, know the origin of our universe. As much as we know, there is still part of us that is connected to the people thousands of years ago who told the story we heard today.
I love creation stories because they are just that, stories. Marvelous imaginings about how it all came to be. We think of ancient peoples staring up at the sky
making sense, the best they can, of the lights they see there, of the diversity of flora and fauna, of the opposable thumbs and thought that allowed them to create, to fish and farm, to live and love. It all had to come from somewhere. Why not a formless void? Perhaps it is only coincidence that that part comes close to the truth.
~
Charles Darwin waited until he was engaged in 1838 to tell his beloved future wife Emma that he no longer believed this particular story. His developing theories about evolution had eroded his belief in the Creation story, which ended his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, which made him question the truth of the Christian Revelation. It all came tumbling down.
He had been advised that he would do well not to tell his wife at all of his
“honest and conscientious doubts” as it might upset her to think that they would not be reunited after death. But honesty was crucial for Darwin, and so he told his beloved that he “fully accepted the Christian morality, and wanted to believe in an afterlife and the promise of salvation, but [that he] could not persuade himself
with the arguments that others found satisfactory.”
Emma was upset. She was a Unitarian. She believed in the tradition of Rational Dissent, and that it was one’s direct experience rather than doctrine that determined faith, but she still believed strongly in “Christ’s promise of salvation through faith.” And so when Charles shared his doubts, she feared she would not see him again in the next world, and this did indeed deeply sadden her.
Questions of religion and faith remained difficult for the Darwins. Especially after the death of their daughter, Annie at 10 years old in 1851. Emma found some comfort in her beliefs, but Charles “set the Christian faith firmly behind him.”
His writings betrayed his grief and his struggles with the “cruelty in natural life.”
Biographer Lyanda Haupt writes that Darwin “knew so deeply and so personally and viscerally what death was now after Annie's loss.” And yet what emerged in his writing was the affirmation “over and over [of] this circle, the endless unfolding of life."
It wasn’t until 1859 that Darwin would publically release the theories he had developed nearly 20 years earlier. He had discovered what we now know:
it is the cycle of life, the pain of death and the beauty of new life that create the astonishing array of creation’s diversity. All from the humblest of origins.
Darwin himself affirmed the mystery and majesty of the evolutionary process.
A process that deserves as much or more reverence as any creation story from old:
"There is grandeur in this view of life ...” he wrote, “from so simple a beginning,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
He no longer believed the biblical story, but he never lost his wonder,
his reverence or his awe, and indeed, his belief in a God that got it all started and then left life to its own devises. “When I wrote The Origin of Species,” he would later write, “my faith in God was as strong as that of a bishop.”
Through his work, he gained a deeper admiration for the astounding beauty of our world. And truly, is there a more marvelous a story than the true story of our planet? A story of survival, of adaptation, of becoming and newness, the story of the creative unfurling of each leaf on the tree of life.
Whether or not we believe in God, however we may define God, we are the spiritual inheritors of the wonder that drove Darwin in his work. For so many of us, the beauty of the natural world is the truest expression of the divine.
And we find in ancient stories yet another expression of ultimate mystery. So let us take the poetry of wind, spirit, breath And ask what new life is being breathed into us? What spirit is at work in the watery chaos of our lives?
Now, I do not believe that human beings are the culmination of the evolutionary process. And I learned from David last week that evolution is never “goal oriented.” So, with apologies to the poet, we are not the result, not the outcome of millions of years of creation. You and I were certainly not the objective
of the expansion of the universe.
But I do know that we are made of star stuff. And I believe that there is still time to evolve. So let us ask who we are becoming. What has been your evolution this summer? What variations have you made in your life, that are leading to an evolution of spirit? These may be tiny changes; they may be big. Either way, as we make our way toward fall, what is leading you to an evolution into a new way of being, a new way of living?
These are questions I am asking for myself and also for USNH here at the beginning of this congregational year. How will we evolve together to be as relevant in the twenty first century as we were in the twentieth?
What changes do we need to make in order to adapt to new ways of doing ministry together?
How will we survive and grow and thrive with new generations?
What kind of wind is blowing in this special, sacred place?
What kind of new way will we build together?
Because, friends, the arc of the universe is long, and we still have time…we still have time to be who and what we need to be.
May it be so.
Resources
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes. Riverhead Books. 2002.
“Death Of Child May Have Influenced Darwin's Work” heard on Morning Edition February 12, 2009.
Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. W.W. Norton, 2005.
“Ruach,” Strongs Concordance 7307 http://biblehub.com/hebrew/7307.htm
“What is the Big Bang Theory” Universe Today. http://www.universetoday.com/54756/what-is-the-big-bang-theory/
Rising from the middle of one of them, Star Island, is a striking structure, white as the sea caps, with a red roof. The Oceanic is nineteenth century resort hotel with a sprawling lobby, four floors of rooms, a gargantuan porch and a view of the sea from every side. Star Island gained its moniker centuries ago because “its broken crags extend in all directions like the spangles of a star.”
Star is a special place, an historic place, a place I was privileged to spend a week this summer preaching every day in the little stone meeting house built in 1800 by fishermen and their wives. The little chapel has been lovingly maintained through the years by members of Unitarian Universalist and Congregationalist congregations who have come to Star each summer for more than 100 years for rest, renewal and fellowship. The crew that gathered last week for the annual
“Life on a Star” family conference was like a congregation in and of itself.
Many of the extended families who attend have been making the pilgrimage to Star for generations.
We brought our spirits to the sea and gathered for a week of worship, lectures and workshops (in addition to fun and relaxation) on the theme: “Our Relationship With the World Around Us.”
We were privileged to have as a theme speaker USNH’s own David Mangold-Heiser, Director of Student Programs at the Peabody Museum. David delivered a masterful series of lectures on evolution, exploring the concepts of natural selection, micro and macro evolution, diversity of species, human evolution,
and the relationship of evolution, religion, and spirituality.
We had a great time exploring our relationship with the natural world, looking at how humans fit into the remarkable and yes, sometimes seemingly miraculous, process of the evolution of life on earth. We explored the evolution/creationism debate, but even more interesting than that debate to me was how Charles Darwin himself, descended from and married to a Unitarian, reconciled his unique discoveries about life with his spiritual beliefs and his religious disbelief.
So today, I’d like to bring some of Star Island back to USNH. I cannot bring the frigidly refreshing early-morning ocean waters or hot chocolate on the porch.
I cannot bring the sunrise over the eastern rocks or the sound of the gulls’ cries;
I cannot bring the view from the pulpit, looking out over the sea, but I can bring questions about the beginning, a creation story, a theory of evolution, and a reconciliation of the two. I can bring you Charles Darwin and his wife Emma,
and an invitation for each of us to examine our own lives for evidence of evolution,
tiny changes that lead to new ways of being.
This morning we heard a version of an ancient creation story well known to many of us.
“In the beginning…” I have to tell you, as I have been studying this passage
over the past couple of weeks, I must have seen at least five billboards with these words: “In the beginning, God created…” On 91, on 95, on the Boston Post Road.
Perhaps you’ve seen them too? The board has a beautiful picture of the earth from space and a little graphic of the “march of progress:” an ape, a hunched over proto-humanoid form, and a man standing tall. This, David told us last week, is a massively overly simplistic view of the complicated process of over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that led to, well, us. But nevertheless, on these billboards, there is a red circle around the graphic with a line through it.
I don’t know if I just haven’t been looking, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen an anti-evolution billboard before this summer. Not until I got a refresher in the majesty and beauty of evolution. Not until I was neck-deep in studying Genesis again.
Go figure. The universe works is mysterious ways.
~
This morning we read a slightly different translation of the first words of this familiar story. You see, biblical scholars differ as to whether the first verse of Genesis should read “In the beginning, God created,” or whether this verse was a “temporal phrase” describing what things were like when God started casting verbal orders around.
Something like: “In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and earth...” Or: “In the beginning when God set out to create…”
Does it matter? Perhaps not, but it does give us an example of the nuance of this text and what a difference a translation can make. And this little translation study
tells us that perhaps the ancients had no intention of saying that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing.
There was nothing, but there was also something. My favorite part of this passage is the description of what ancient story tellers imagined was present before anything else: “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
The Hebrew word for wind here is ruach, same as the word for breath,
same as the word for spirit. We are the breath of our ancestors. We are the spirit of God. There is poetry in this wind.
In numerous ancient creation stories, life springs forth from a primordial sea:
From Mesopotamia, the Enuma Elish has distinctive parallels to the ancient Israelite story. It begins with two watery beings, Apsu and Tiamat, whose salty and sweet waters mingle together in darkness and chaos.
Egyptian mythology also begins “in the beginning” when there was only Nun,
the great celestial waters of the Unmanifest.
So, life springs forth from the oceans. Uncanny sometimes, how ancient stories echo truth. Astrophysist Niel deGrass Tyson, in his book on the beginning of the universe entitled Origins, writes that after the Big Bang, for hundreds of millennia,
matter and energy cohabitated in a kind of thick soup…” in other words:
“the great celestial waters of the Unmanifest.”
And, as it turns out, a much shorter time ago, only between 385 million and 275 million years ago, the first four legged creatures made their first steps on land. Strange looking terapods, ancestors of modern amphibians are thought to have crawled out of the water, filling an entirely new evolutionary niche.
They became all the “creeping things and wild animals of the earth.”
Anthropologists and natural historians can trace the origins of the many species that populate our planet as far back as single celled organisms. And astronomers and astrophysicists have looked back into time through the night sky and theorized that the origin of our universe was the Big Bang.
But, as we heard this morning, the jury is still out on what, if anything, came before that beginning. It could be a black hole, it could be a multiverse with multiple universes. The singularity that caused the Big Bang could simply have appeared, ex nilio. As much as we know, we still do not, ultimately, know the origin of our universe. As much as we know, there is still part of us that is connected to the people thousands of years ago who told the story we heard today.
I love creation stories because they are just that, stories. Marvelous imaginings about how it all came to be. We think of ancient peoples staring up at the sky
making sense, the best they can, of the lights they see there, of the diversity of flora and fauna, of the opposable thumbs and thought that allowed them to create, to fish and farm, to live and love. It all had to come from somewhere. Why not a formless void? Perhaps it is only coincidence that that part comes close to the truth.
~
Charles Darwin waited until he was engaged in 1838 to tell his beloved future wife Emma that he no longer believed this particular story. His developing theories about evolution had eroded his belief in the Creation story, which ended his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, which made him question the truth of the Christian Revelation. It all came tumbling down.
He had been advised that he would do well not to tell his wife at all of his
“honest and conscientious doubts” as it might upset her to think that they would not be reunited after death. But honesty was crucial for Darwin, and so he told his beloved that he “fully accepted the Christian morality, and wanted to believe in an afterlife and the promise of salvation, but [that he] could not persuade himself
with the arguments that others found satisfactory.”
Emma was upset. She was a Unitarian. She believed in the tradition of Rational Dissent, and that it was one’s direct experience rather than doctrine that determined faith, but she still believed strongly in “Christ’s promise of salvation through faith.” And so when Charles shared his doubts, she feared she would not see him again in the next world, and this did indeed deeply sadden her.
Questions of religion and faith remained difficult for the Darwins. Especially after the death of their daughter, Annie at 10 years old in 1851. Emma found some comfort in her beliefs, but Charles “set the Christian faith firmly behind him.”
His writings betrayed his grief and his struggles with the “cruelty in natural life.”
Biographer Lyanda Haupt writes that Darwin “knew so deeply and so personally and viscerally what death was now after Annie's loss.” And yet what emerged in his writing was the affirmation “over and over [of] this circle, the endless unfolding of life."
It wasn’t until 1859 that Darwin would publically release the theories he had developed nearly 20 years earlier. He had discovered what we now know:
it is the cycle of life, the pain of death and the beauty of new life that create the astonishing array of creation’s diversity. All from the humblest of origins.
Darwin himself affirmed the mystery and majesty of the evolutionary process.
A process that deserves as much or more reverence as any creation story from old:
"There is grandeur in this view of life ...” he wrote, “from so simple a beginning,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
He no longer believed the biblical story, but he never lost his wonder,
his reverence or his awe, and indeed, his belief in a God that got it all started and then left life to its own devises. “When I wrote The Origin of Species,” he would later write, “my faith in God was as strong as that of a bishop.”
Through his work, he gained a deeper admiration for the astounding beauty of our world. And truly, is there a more marvelous a story than the true story of our planet? A story of survival, of adaptation, of becoming and newness, the story of the creative unfurling of each leaf on the tree of life.
Whether or not we believe in God, however we may define God, we are the spiritual inheritors of the wonder that drove Darwin in his work. For so many of us, the beauty of the natural world is the truest expression of the divine.
And we find in ancient stories yet another expression of ultimate mystery. So let us take the poetry of wind, spirit, breath And ask what new life is being breathed into us? What spirit is at work in the watery chaos of our lives?
Now, I do not believe that human beings are the culmination of the evolutionary process. And I learned from David last week that evolution is never “goal oriented.” So, with apologies to the poet, we are not the result, not the outcome of millions of years of creation. You and I were certainly not the objective
of the expansion of the universe.
But I do know that we are made of star stuff. And I believe that there is still time to evolve. So let us ask who we are becoming. What has been your evolution this summer? What variations have you made in your life, that are leading to an evolution of spirit? These may be tiny changes; they may be big. Either way, as we make our way toward fall, what is leading you to an evolution into a new way of being, a new way of living?
These are questions I am asking for myself and also for USNH here at the beginning of this congregational year. How will we evolve together to be as relevant in the twenty first century as we were in the twentieth?
What changes do we need to make in order to adapt to new ways of doing ministry together?
How will we survive and grow and thrive with new generations?
What kind of wind is blowing in this special, sacred place?
What kind of new way will we build together?
Because, friends, the arc of the universe is long, and we still have time…we still have time to be who and what we need to be.
May it be so.
Resources
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes. Riverhead Books. 2002.
“Death Of Child May Have Influenced Darwin's Work” heard on Morning Edition February 12, 2009.
Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. W.W. Norton, 2005.
“Ruach,” Strongs Concordance 7307 http://biblehub.com/hebrew/7307.htm
“What is the Big Bang Theory” Universe Today. http://www.universetoday.com/54756/what-is-the-big-bang-theory/
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