Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's February 12, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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My wife’s family likes to remember the time she was visiting with her sister when her sister was a doctoral student in biology at Kent State University, and my sister-in-law and her husband had a party at their home for many of the university scientists and grad students. It seems the conversation turned to the question of genes, and the role genes played in whether one was short or tall, and the comment was made, when Melanie and her sister stood side-by-side, that there must be short genes in their family. To which, Melanie, I suppose not completely following the conversation, responded: that’s right, we always had to cut our jeans off so they would fit! Moral of the story: who needs designer jeans when all that is necessary is that you be born with tall genes!

A different kind of design, intelligent design, has, of course, been in the news lately, and it has become the latest flash point in the clash of America’s culture wars, particularly controversy over what should be taught in public schools about the origins of the universe and the human species. School boards, educators, parents fight over what to teach our children: evolution? Natural selection? Random development? Incremental genetic enhancement? Creationism, the idea that God made it all in seven days? Or, intelligent design, a kind of creationism lite – similar idea but without any overt mention of God?

You may have followed, for instance, the decision made last year by the members of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, a small community near Harrisburg, which required students to read a short statement concerning intelligent design before studying 9^th grade biology.

That decision, since overturned, was, many commentators would agree, a resurrection of old debates about the authority of religion vs. science in the public arena, or, more exactly, the relative value of teaching of creationism alongside of evolution in public schools. If you were to push supporters of intelligent design – who I believe want to elevate it to the status of scientific theory on par with evolution, and if you were to ask them to explain, “just why is such a theory finally more credible than scientific theories of evolution,” – I strongly suspect defenders of intelligent design might fall back on the opening chapters of Genesis, seeing there, not only holy writ and the divine authorship of scripture but a quasi scientific explanation for how the world and our universe came into being.

I, for one, affirm God as an intelligent and intentional creator (and unless you are crossing your fingers when you recite the Apostles or Nicene Creed, you do, too!) but I don’t believe that means we necessarily need to supplement the findings of paleontologists and evolutionists with other theories about the real religious origins of the universe. I have a sharp discomfort with those who feel compelled to read the Bible literally, who try to force the Bible to answer the “how” question, which is a scientific question, and instead, should, I believe, recognize that the Bible is intended not to answer the “how” questions but rather the Bible answers the religious question of “why”.

These current debates are nothing new, of course. Ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 on through the famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, so-called Scopes Monkey trial in Deyton, TN, in 1925, the arguments and the debates have persisted. To me, as a Christian, it boils down both to the way we see that scientific methodology and faith affirmations can relate to one another but also to what kind of authority we will ascribe to scripture. As no less a figure than John Calvin once said in his commentary on the book of Genesis: “To my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy and other arts, let him go elsewhere.” And, in fact, the General Assembly of one of our predecessor denominations, the PCUS, in 1969, repudiated the teachings of a literal view of creationism.

I read this joke the other day. A zookeeper came across an orangutan reading two books. One was the Bible; the other was Darwin’s Origin of Species. “Why are you reading such opposite books?” the zookeeper asked. The orangutan replied, “Well, I’m trying to figure out if I’m supposed to be my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”

Perhaps we don’t share confusion over this particular keeper question, or even care what goes on in terms of public discussions on things like Intelligent Design, but I would hope we would always be searching for ways to take the Bible seriously without taking the Bible literally.

Take, for instance, the opening chapters of Genesis. Just like Jesus who told parables about prodigal sons and good Samaritans without intending that a prodigal son or a good Samaritan really had to exist, so the creation stories are parables or reverent images that proclaim a great truth without needing to be classified as actual, documented historical events.

Thus, the ancient Hebrew storyteller describes the creation of earth and sky, then the separation of the water, followed by the emergence of fish, and then birds and then land animals, and finally the creation of humanity. That doesn’t sound unlike the way the theory of evolution works, with lower forms of life evolving into higher forms, with all of life, at some point in the distant past, coming out of the sea. Why see evolution as contradicting a religious trust that all things have come from the hand of God, though the mystery of that creation’s time and sequence we can never fully fathom?

Probably, the opening creation story of Genesis is best seen as a litany of worship, a hymn of praise, an affirmation of faith. Ancient people of faith declared: there is a creative process at work in the universe taking us somewhere, and there is a loving intelligence underlying it all.

We need to see creation as a marvelous and mysterious gift, especially we moderns who have de-sacralized nature and forgotten the words of the Psalmist: “the heavens are telling the glory of God.” We need more reverence, less political posturing, and greater care in the way we all treat nature and the whole created order.

And so, I, for one, affirm the reality of some divine design or plan that represents the mysterious intentions of God for the universe, but I don’t feel compelled to force that belief in the public school arena or upon those who have different beliefs. It’s not an either/or but a both/and: Evolution and Christianity, I believe, can both be true without contradicting one’s faith.

A further point is this: there are deeper truths that lie beneath a surface reading of scripture, and faith always seeks understanding of those deeper truths. As we seek understanding, we do well to approach questions about our existence in this vast universe with a healthy dose of humility.

Humility was one of the lessons Job learned. The book of Job represents some of the most sublime poetry and expresses some of the most profound truths in all of scripture. Job’s story was that terrible story of undeserved suffering and his predicament as an innocent victim under the hand of Satan whom God had allowed to torment him. Job lost his family and possessions on what seems like a divine whim. Satan has permission to wreak havoc upon Job-- but without taking away Job’s life. There is a wager between God and Satan that Job will not curse God even though Job should lose everything. It seems, to modern ears, grossly unfair, a tragic story in which God comes across as capricious and arbitrary, if not downright mean and uncaring.

But the poetic response Job utters, a portion of which we heard from chapter 28, is a classic affirmation of God’s ultimate justice and the divine prerogative. “Where is the place of understanding?” asks Job as he struggles to make sense of his sorrowful plight and the fact that he can find no comfort in the traditional religious answers offered to him by his friends who have come trying to console him. Where do you go to get your answers to life’s really hard and deeply troubling problems?

Job’s response to his own rhetorical question is, of course, that only God knows. “God knows the way to that place of understanding . . . for God looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens. He gave to the wind its height, and apportioned out the waters by measure; he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt.”

Who can presume to speak for God or to fathom God’s ways? Job realizes that no one can. But today, however, there are many in our own nation who presume to be able to do exactly that, to read the mind of God, to determine who God is for and who God is against. We seem to have forgotten the words of our greatest public theologian, whose birthday we remember today, Abraham Lincoln, who exhorted our nation in the hour of our greatest crisis, the Civil War, not to claim God for our side but, rather, to pray earnestly that we might be on God’s side. Humility, Lincoln knew, is the key as we participate in public life and seek to resolve differences peacefully and amicably and for the common good.

Well, back to the start of the sermon and those designer genes, the kind of genes we associate with DNA, those 35,000 or so molecules within each person, which neurobiologists and behavioral geneticists say go a long way in determining who we are, what makes us unique and what makes us uniquely different from others. For whatever reason, God has implanted within each of us a different set of genes, a genetic make-up that has fostered different abilities, different kinds of thirst for knowledge, different personalities and different ways of relating to one another and to others in those larger communities of which we are a part.

Whether there is a particular God-gene, as some geneticists have argued, a God gene which gives us a certain predisposition towards spirituality or faith characteristics, I can’t say for sure. (The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes). But, however or whenever we have heard or hear the call of God, whether we come to be installed or ordained as elders today, whether we have said “yes” to God in the past, or whether we are still waiting even yet for greater clarity about what the call of God might mean, God has created us, dare I say designed us, for a purpose and for a destiny that it might well take us a lifetime to discover.

We have been given intellects to seek to know God, and so I challenge the elders to find ways in your own life and in the life of this community to probe, to be honest about doubts, to “bless the questions,” to know that faith is always, “faith seeking understanding.”

We live at a time when we have great confidence in our collective human capacity to solve mysteries. But I challenge elders to recall the experience of Job who realized that it was, at times, better to be reverent than it was to have knowledge.

And finally, the practice that will redeem the world of all of the world’s pride and problems is the practice of spiritual humility. Humility builds bridges instead of barriers, and it helps us to see that we need to be grateful for what we have instead of wishing for what we have not.

Faith asks not for certainty but for courage, the courage to trust and hope and love. And that is the kind of faith that we need from elders today. Amen.