What a Wonderful World

Sermon

You have standing before you this morning the biggest, lamest science groupie ever. Why the lamest science groupie? Growing up, in school, I hated the hard sciences – all of them. I was that child in Ivan’s poem this morning, watching that clock tick, trying to memorize incomprehensible codes for things that I didn’t really understand the purpose of. Social science was my cup of tea, for sure, but hard sciences, to my mind, meant memorizing, foreign terms, and lots and lots of math. So I grew up knowing next to nothing about how the world works and, worse yet, I didn’t care.

How did I become the biggest lamest science groupie? Two ways. The first happened in college. I spent four years studying psychology and politics. Having avoided my science requirement for absolutely as long as possible, I enrolled in a course in Oceanography my last semester of college, and that course rocked my world. The most interesting part of Oceanography, to me, is actually geology, and when you’re talking geology on a global scale you’re talking plate tectonics, you’re talking about the rise and fall of mountain ranges, you’re talking about volcanoes and earthquakes – in short, you’re talking about how our earth was born and how it lives. I was hooked.

The second reason why I’m a huge science groupie is because of Bill Bryson, the author of the book that I read from this morning. Bill Bryson, as some of you may know, has become famous for his travel writings, most notably his books A Walk in the Woods and I’m a Stranger Here Myself. He is funny, he is observant, he is interested in world cultures and American culture but he is not, by his own admission, any kind of hard scientist. Yet his fascination with the world led him to start a project where he went around asking the world’s scientists to please, please explain how the planet works until even he could understand the answer. And he wrote those answers down in this funny, incredible book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. This, at last, is science that I can understand.

Sometimes, though, it gives me nightmares: Did you know that Yellowstone National Park is part of the crater of a huge underground volcano that is long overdue to blow? And sometimes I’m puzzled: If the original Big Bang turned a microscopic speck into something as big as the universe in a fraction of a second, why on earth would we be trying to recreate the Big Bang in a laboratory?

This is more than science, to me. It’s more than those boring classes I had to sign up for in high school. This is our world, this is our universe. This is where we come from, this is what we belong to! As a person of faith, fascinated by questions of who and why we are, I’ve never found more compelling mystery than exists right now in the world around us. The link, in my mind, between our natural world and my faith is so strong that whenever I read on one topic, the other is informed. When I want to access religious mystery, I often do it by reflecting on scientific mystery. And I’d like to offer you one example where these two – religion and science – are for me inextricably linked. That example, believe it or not, is what Bryson calls “the mighty atom,” the building block of all the earth’s matter.

To look at matter from the science side is really, really complicated. So much so that when German physicist Werner Heisenberg was asked in the 1920s how one could envision an atom, he responded, "Don’t try." Atoms are baffling tiny little things that are extremely hard to see and who don’t act the way that the larger, visible world acts at all. To describe atoms at a basic level, I’ll quote from Bryson: “They are everywhere and they constitute everything. Look around you. It is all atoms. Not just the solid things like walls and tables and sofas, but the air in between.” (p. 133)

Obviously, in order to form things that we can actually see, there must be a vast number of atoms. You probably already knew that, because in your own high school science classes, you were told just that: There are a vast number of atoms. Bill Bryson reminds us that “the basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule…two or more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement. [For example,] Add two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen and you have one molecule of water” (p. 133-134).

Okay, so at sea level at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, at freezing, a piece of air the size of a sugar cube will contain 45 billion billion molecules. I’ll say that again: A sugar cube size of air contains 45 billion billion molecules. Think of a billion billions. There’s 45 of those in the cube. Now take a moment to think about all the air in this room. Now think about all the space in the Universe.

You just had a religious moment.

Contemplating What Is is religious practice.

If you’ve listened to some recent debates in our country, you would assume that science and religion are in two separate camps. Science would be the study of those things we can see and understand and experience, and religion would be the study of the mysterious, the awesome, the ineffable, that which perhaps we believe but perhaps don’t have proof for.
I would like us to take a moment and think about whether that distinction between science and religion is really so. What could be more ineffable, more mysterious, than the atom? What could be more awe-inspiring than the vastness of space, or than the evolutionary process that allows each individual here to be in this room at one time? What could be more miraculous than the heating system that keeps us comfortable here, or the lights that enable us to see each other?

I have a seven- year-old friend who says that when he thinks about what lies at the edge of the Universe, it makes him feel "funny." I’d like to suggest that that "funny" feeling, ever so present in the study of science and our natural world, is also precisely the sort of religious contemplative space that many different faiths invite us to enter. Let us look at the nature of matter again, this time from a religious perspective, that of Thich Naht Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness. He writes:
Consider the example of a table. The table’s existence is possible due to the existence of things which we might call "the non-table world": the forest where the wood grew and was cut, the carpenter, the iron ore which became the nails and screws, and countless other things which have relation to the table, the parents and ancestors of the carpenter, the sun and rain which made it possible for the trees to grow.

If you grasp the table’s reality then you see that in the table itself are present all those things which we normally think of as the non-table world. If you took away any of those non-table elements and returned them to their sources – the nails back to the iron ore, the wood to the forest, the carpenter to his parents – the table would no longer exist (p.47).

The table would no longer exist! If you took away any of the part of it, not only the wood and the nails, but the forest and the carpenter too, the table we are contemplating would cease to be. Another way of contemplating What Is, this time from a faith-based perspective!

I am struck by how similar these explorations are for me, how that "funny" feeling that I feel is largely the same, whether I am ostensibly studying science or learning to meditate on interconnectedness. Science and religion can be very, very similar. But what religion offers us, which perhaps science does not, is not only the opportunity to study and reflect on What Is, What Exists, but also a road forward from that reflection. In other words, religion gives us the chance to make meaning of our understanding of reality. To continue with our example from Thich Nhat Hanh, I offer his next words:

The person who looks at the table and can see the Universe is a person who can see the way…We have to strip away all the barriers in order to live as part of the universal life. A person isn’t some private entity traveling unaffected through time and space as if sealed off from the world by a thick shell…In our lives are present a multitude of phenomena, just as we ourselves are present in many different phenomena. We are life, and life is limitless.

Religion is the arena where we change what we know into what we can do, and why we should do it. You can see this trend in many faiths – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and our own Unitarian Universalism – where the understanding of reality is used as a springboard for discovering a path, a course of action, for human beings to follow. What path becomes revealed to you as you think about the universe? What would you feel compelled to do?

What would happen to us as people, to us as a faith, if we devoted more time to the study of our natural world? If I spend time learning how I am related to this pulpit, how much more connected will I feel to another human being? If I learn about the origins and fate of our universe, how much more will I want to work with instead of against other human beings? How will my worldview be affected by learning that we are all family, not in the earthy-crunchy kumbaya sense, but literally?
I would like to propose that we work towards this goal of faith through science. Those of us who fear science, like me, could make an effort to learn something about it that inspires them. Those of us who understand science well or work in the field could take time away from the facts and the data to absorb and appreciate the mystery and wonder that surrounds them. We can all spend more time feeling “funny” when confronted with the vastness and mystery that is our universe. We can all spend more time remembering that for all its enormity this planet is small, and interconnected in ways that we can see and appreciate and also in ways that we will never know or understand. We can ponder, along with Thich Nhat Hanh and Bill Bryson, what it means for us to be made of the same stuff as every other particle of matter in the universe, and what that suggests for the work of our lives and for our journeys together.

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