You know the old joke ‘how many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’ And then there’s the joke that if you put 10 monkeys with 10 typewriters into a room for eternity they would recreate all the great literature. Indeed, I think the Search Committee is looking into this method to help create the Church Profile for potential ministerial candidates to read.

So, how many monkeys does it take to make a human being?

Today is “Evolution Sunday”, sponsored by The Clergy Letter Project, founded by Dr. Michael Zimmerman of Butler University in 2004, after school boards began creating policies that forbid the teaching of evolution in public schools. Today, we participate with 785 other religious congregations across the country in addressing this issue.

The science of evolution tells us that it took a whole lot of monkeys to make the human species – that we are descended from the apes. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book Origin of the Species. He provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors. Through the process of natural selection, individuals who survive long enough to reproduce pass along their favorable characteristics, thus improving and adapting the species, or creating a new species altogether. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

At face value, this creation story is in scandalous opposition to the story of Creation in Genesis which had been a bedrock for western civilization for millennia. There are actually two stories of creation in Genesis. The first says: [On the sixth day] “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Gen. 1:26a, 27) The second story says: “…the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”

Science and religion have never been separate realms for me. The National Academy of Sciences booklet, which will be out at coffee hour, says that “Religion and science offer different understandings of the world.” I offer that they are different lenses through which to try to understand humanity, all creatures, the earth and cosmos, all of which emanate from the Source of Life, which we believe is God.

Let’s go back into the Genesis story where God created the heavens and earth in seven days. How do we know that this means seven human days? We know that amongst the different species on earth, a day represents a different amount of life lived. For example, the complete lifespan of a Mayfly – birth, maturation, reproduction, and death – begins and ends in one earth day. For a human being, an earth day is but one out of 26,000 days, should you live to be about 70.

And so I ask you, What is one ‘day’ in the life of the Eternal God who made all the celestial bodies – all the suns around which rotate all the planets which all take different amounts of time to turn on their axes to make a day? I suspect that one “day” for God consists of eons upon eons.

Now let’s look at how God created ‘man’ in Genesis. In the first story, God created man – male and female – in His image, his likeness. This is a puzzle that I’ve carried in my heart ever since I first heard it. I never thought that the reverse was true – that God is in our likeness. In the second story, man is created from the dust of the earth, into which God breathes the breath of life, transforming him into a living being. Somehow we come from God, and carry God within, but our knowledge is hazy – we see through a glass darkly. What is it about ourselves that is of God? Are death, suffering, and evil parts of God’s creation?

I know that death, small “d” and capital “D” are indeed a part of God’s creation. The death and resurrection of Christ is a central event, concept or metaphor for Christianity. Christ suffered enormously in his death – first to have made the moral choice to live according to God’s will and not to Caesar’s, second his physical torture, and third, his mental and spiritual torture of feeling forsaken by God before he died. This is also true for all the small ‘deaths’ in life, where we leave an old way of being because it has run its course – one must choose to say goodbye to a life or an identity once held dear – and it must die in order for a new life to be born. – We know from experience that in each stage of life and in each generation, we try to improve on the previous stage or generation.

So, if a day in God’s life is longer than we can imagine, and that each stage or generation of life seeks to improve, generate new ideas and adaptations as well as pass along the accumulated knowledge, then the concept of evolution is not so far-fetched. And from scripture we know what God had or has in mind for creation – for the lion and the lamb to lie down together, for our swords to be beaten into plowshares, for us to live in mercy, justice and compassion and to walk humbly with our God. If this is true, I daresay it’s still morning in God’s day. God has not finished creating us or the heavens and earth. God is still breathing life into us – God is still speaking.

Just as an expanded Biblical perspective shows that the science isn’t heresy, so does an expanded science show that believers aren’t naïve and delusional. The more refined modern physics and cosmology becomes, the more it starts to describe how people have previously described the workings of God.

For a long time, modern physics has sought for an integrated understanding of all the forces of the universe. They call this the Grand Unified Theory or G.U.T. – an acronym that is surprisingly similar to the German word for God – GOTT. Cosmologists (studiers of the Cosmos) believe that our universe was created 15 billion years ago in a “Big Bang”, an explosion of energy and light (brilliant ‘glory’ that will kill you if you got too close) from a great Singularity – oneness. Our universe is still expanding – still being created. Perhaps this reflects our longing for that oneness? Cosmologists propose a possible end for the universe – a “Big Crunch”, where all space and matter will collapse to form – or to return to – the great Singularity. Can you hear the similarities between the Great Singularity, the GUT and Gott, our God?

I looked at Stephen Hawking’s book The Universe in a Nutshell for this sermon. In it he says that science calls our universe a “brane” (mind of God) which is like an expanding bubble. The cartoon next to this explanation actually showed “God” blowing this bubble of our universe into life – breathing the breath of life. He calls this “bubble” of our universe a “nutshell”, and thus the title for the book. This concept is strikingly similar to the ancient Hebrew and Near Eastern concept of creation as an oval sphere in which sky, ground, below the ground is contained.

Hawking also says that we may exist as holograms within our universe. Anyone who’s been to The Haunted House at Disneyworld has seen holograms – real-looking 3-dimensional images. In the first Star Wars movie, the robot R2D2 projected a holographic image of Princess Leia who brought an important message.

I researched the Hebrew meanings of “selem” – image. The word refers to God making a model out of clay. But where people can only create flickering images, it is the Spirit – the breath – of God that truly creates living beings. The holograms in Star Wars and at Disneyworld are a very good representation of this concept.

I think this may be one of the points of the story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. “Make bread out of stones? I’m not that desperate – it is God who gives me life by every word/breath that comes from God’s mouth. // Throw myself off a building to show the power of God’s angels? I am saved by God’s will, not by my own. // Rule all the nations on the earth? God is in charge, not kings. I serve God, not you. Be gone, before someone drops a house on you!”

Creation and re-creation do not happen by our will, or our tight control. It happens with a curious combination of letting go – of serving God and yet doing our part to co-create with God the world that He has in mind - for the lion and the lamb to lie down together, for our swords to be beaten into plowshares, for us to live in mercy, justice and compassion and to walk humbly with our God. God has not finished creating us or the heavens and earth. God is still breathing life into us – God is still speaking.

This Thursday and Friday, both I and Marilyn Rossier will be attending a training at Andover Newton Theological School with Diana Butler-Bass on what is known as the “Emerging Church”. As I have told some of you, Butler-Bass has completed a three-year study of thriving main-line Protestant churches of all shapes, sizes and denominations in America. She has found that churches which cohere around traditional Christian spiritual practices and their passions for ministry have “emerged” from slow decline into fresh, new life.

She has articulated something that most of us have known or experienced – the fragmentation of peoples’ time and of the entire social fabric. In modern American life, it’s now up to every family, every individual, to fend for themselves – making choice after choice – where to live, who to live with, how to make a living, how to raise money for retirement, how to choose a refrigerator or an automobile, what lessons and activities to send your kids to, how to find God – if it’s even possible. We must make this list of endless choices mostly on our own – we’re lucky to have a spouse or a friend to talk with or the ability to pay for expert advice. As I recently heard on the radio: “The price of autonomy is loneliness.”

Diana Butler-Bass reminds us that this is the heartache of our time: America is full of “spiritual nomads” who are seeking a sense of home in the world and with a community of others grounded in practice, history, values, and in God. This is the ‘spiritual homelessness’ that I spoke of last summer when we sang songs from the Wizard of Oz. The churches that have done well have used the ancient practice of discernment to find the workings of the Spirit within them and to see each other and the stranger, hospitality to make room for and welcome the Spirit, each other and the stranger, and worship and communal practice to provide connection to each other and God.

The passage from Exodus is from the story when the Israelites had left their former life of captivity in Egypt and were wandering in the desert in search of the Promised Land. God had been leading Moses and the people in a pillar of cloud and fire. In this scene the cloud and fire stopped over Mt. Sinai and Moses was called to the mountaintop for more instructions from God.

This week, I looked at the story from the perspective of the Israelites. Their leader, who was to take them to the Promised Land, went into the cloud on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, which means a really long time. Aaron and Hur were left in charge.

What was that like for the people? Their progress stopped and their leader disappeared. This is not so unlike modern American life where so many are in search, wandering without a compass, unsure, and so in need of something meaningful around which to build their lives.

Later in the story, “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us [lead us]; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” (Ex. 32:1) So Aaron asked everyone to bring him their gold which was melted down into the image of a calf. An altar was built before it and the people said, “These are your gods O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt”. And the people made sacrifices to the golden calf, ate, and celebrated.

How hard it was for them to be with their uncertainty – to live without that structure and direction – to wait to see how God would work through them again.

The reason Moses was on the mountain for such a long time (13 pages! 7 chapters!) was that God was teaching him, in extraordinary detail, how the people could build the tabernacle – a tangible, portable religious core that was portable – a tent for the ark of the covenant that would go with them wherever they went. God told Moses exactly how to build the ark – a portable gold-leafed, acacia wood box. God told Moses how to prepare a place into which would be placed the covenant God would give to the people.

2 Peter tells us that “no prophecy from scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation” (v.1:20) or as my Bible notes say – ‘it is not up to the prophets to interpret their own visions’. “Because no prophecy ever came by human will, but [by] men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke[n] from God.” (v. 21). I believe that the writer of this epistle is telling us that the prophetic visions in Scripture are laid out for us as they are. It is up to us to gather in the Spirit to seek the meaning of the prophecies for our own time and place and to let God’s power inspire us. One human mind cannot even begin to grasp the Great One-ness of the Universe. But many minds gathered as one body in Christ co-create a field of wisdom, a cloud of God’s spirit in their midst which will inspire to new purpose.

We can’t will the promises of the Prophets in scripture or our own resurrection of the Spirit by implementing programs and techniques. We must die to the old life as Christ was willing to do; we must wait in corporate discernment and in faith for the new life that God will bring.

Jesus, too, went into the bright cloud on the holy mountain with three of his disciples, and there met Moses and Elijah. Those five witnessed Jesus’ dazzling transfiguration and heard God’s voice say, “This is my Son, the beloved; with him I am well pleased.” – sentiments once expressed for Moses, again expressed for Jesus. Now we can follow Jesus through the wilderness towards a world that God wishes for all of us.

“So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed… Be attentive to this as to a lamp – [a beacon] – shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star [the star of the East] rises in your hearts.

Times of transition - the in-between times - in modern life are doubly difficult. Not only are there particular losses and changes, but there is also an absence of the larger social fabric with its inherent history and future to hold us in place. Interim times for churches are also doubly difficult. Not only is there the loss of the former pastor, but there is the loss of the old ways of being a church and of society’s implicit support. It is difficult to sit with this uncertainty without trying to build our own certainty as the Israelites did in building a golden calf. Not only are you looking for a new pastor, but you are looking for a re-newed internal Life force – a core of Life/of God that travels with you.

Though today’s scripture tells how the individuals Moses and Jesus went into God’s cloud on the holy mountain, while the people waited and lost their way in the absence of that particular person – the scriptures actually pull all of us into the bright cloud on the mountaintop. This seemingly rarified holy encounter is something each one of us can witness and participate in. We travel in and out of the cloud with Moses and Jesus, learning something elemental and life-giving each time. This is something you began doing as a church in the recent small group meetings and that we will continue in the Tuesday evening Lenten series.

For Dorothy Gale of Kansas, spiritual nomad of the silver screen – home wasn’t a person, place or thing, but something you carry in your heart – your ark – in which you can make room for God’s covenant – in which you can make room for the leadings and teachings of God, the Spirit, Moses, and Christ Jesus. You can also make room for your true selves, for each other, and for the stranger – all both lovable and fallible.

I ask you to believe that God’s Life and covenant is within each of you. The Psalms say it is written in your heart. This life within is activated when you gather together. Instead of “add water and stir”, the prescription might be to “gather together to seek the stirrings of the Spirit”. The more you come together, sharing/knowing your authentic/true selves; celebrating/mourning together; being in God’s presence together; co-creating your vision of a new church, the more God’s life will be re-born amongst you.