Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation (Prelude): Before We Begin (Ken Wilson)
Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation (Prelude): Before We Begin (Ken Wilson) :: September 2-3, 2006
Next week we're going to begin a new series here at the Vineyard entitled "Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation." This is one of the topics I've been wanting to get to. At least for a couple of years now, we surveyed the church a number of years ago online about the hard questions of faith. And this came up, I think, one or two, and I just really wasn't prepared to be able to speak to it at that time. So I've been working my little tushy off, and I hopefully in a better position to be of some value on the topic now. So I just want to say that I love science, like some people love baseball. I got a bachelor of science degree at the University of Michigan in nursing and enjoyed every minute of my studies. I took a sabbatical about six years ago, ten weeks in a row off, and I just had a ball reading back-to-back science books. I probably read 20 science books during my sabbatical. I love Jesus, and I love his book. I really love his book. I've been reading this book, the Bible, for going on 35 years. I love it more than ever, the way I love my wife and my kids. I probably ignore it, too, like I ignore my wife and kids sometimes, but God and I are working on that together. And, you know, it just seems to me, and this really grieves my heart, that it seems to me this so-called culture war, between science and faith, is much overblown, but worse, what really bothers me worse is the noise of this conflict. The noise of this conflict, I believe, has become a great obstacle to the spread of the gospel among those whose view of life is largely shaped by the story of science. The story of Jesus and the story of science are more compatible than commonly portrayed. I just don't believe that we as a church are going to be able to engage prophetically with science, which is our real task, until we drop the posture of protest that we've too often assumed toward the scientific enterprise. One of the places now where science and faith are thought to be in conflict is in their respective accounts of creation. Christians generally have fallen into four camps on this issue. One would be the young earth, creationist camp, another would be the old earth, creation camp, intelligent design, another perspective, and theistic evolution. So there's those four generally speaking camps. There would be a fifth that some of you may also be identified with. It's that I don't know and could care less perspective on this issue. Since I know and love and respect those who hold each of these points of view, I plan to speak to each one with respect when I get around to it in the series. You'll certainly know my leanings before the series is done. But one thing I want to affirm, I put it in the notes, I put it in caps, said this is important. What holds us together is our shared treasure in Jesus and not our particular views about how science and faith fit. In fact, if it weren't essential to address this issue of science and faith at the crossroads of creation because of our mission, the mission of our particular church, the Ann Arbor Vineyard, to reach the heart of Ann Arbor and surrounding communities, I wouldn't even bother with this topic, but we just don't have that luxury. We live in one of the science centers of the world. There are probably more subscribers to the popular science magazines than to the Oprah magazine and sports illustrated except once a month. There are so many subscribers to Scientific American or a magazine like Discover magazine. These are magazines you see in every single drug store in the Ann Arbor area. Nature would be another of these magazines or one of my favorites, National Geographic. The way we engage the story of science has a huge impact on the gospel gaining a voice in our culture. I hope that when we're finished with this series, you will not feel the slightest obligation to agree with my particular leanings on how science and faith intersect at the issue of creation. I do hope that you'll love Jesus more, that you'll appreciate his book more, and more than anything, you'll have a wider love for the world that Jesus is in pursuit of. So let's just begin our series with a prayer God. We just acknowledge at the get-go our dependence on you for wisdom, for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and for the work of the Holy Spirit in each of our hearts. I pray that you would empower me to speak with wisdom and with candor and with love. I pray that those who hear not only today but in the ensuing weeks would be given a spiritual discernment to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff of my words. I pray that the wheat would be abundant and the chaff would be as little as possible given the limitations that I bring to this equation. So I ask for your grace and mercy on us all in the name of Jesus men. Before we begin the series proper next week, I want to address by way of prelude this week, an underlying issue that has a potent impact on the question of science and faith. It's to do with the cultural conflict in our country that's been going on for decades, petting conservatives against liberals. The reason it affects this issue of science and faith that the crossroads of creation is this. On the whole, on the whole, those who lean conservative in our nation are more suspicious of mainstream science, things like the science behind climate change or the science behind evolution would be classic examples. And those who lean liberal on the whole are more accepting of mainstream science. This cultural divide generates a whole lot of background noise, a lot of static in our culture, the conversation about science and faith at the crossroads of creation. It's the source of great internal angst for many people, source of much bristling, much fear, much misunderstanding. I believe that before we can truly have a loving conversation about science and faith, we have to understand that the conservative, liberal, tribal loyalties are superseded or they ought to be by our loyalty to Jesus of Nazareth. Because of our loyalty to Jesus, we are to hold more lightly to these other labels, these other loyalties of ours. I'm not saying drop them entirely, that's certainly an option for some. I know devout Jesus people, though, who are actively conservative and who are actively liberal, and I think they walk that out with utmost integrity. What I'm speaking about here is a matter of the heart. It's something for each of us to examine in our own hearts between us and God more than our particular social or political alignments. The hardest sayings of Jesus in the gospel is this from Luke, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." General Jesus, meek and mild. He sure had a way with words. He sure knew how to speak a word that would offend practically everyone he spoke to. Now, we know that Jesus did not take his own advice literally because he loved his mom and he loved his dad, which is a hint that he meant this word "hate" in a special sense, a kind of a prophetic sense. And this special sense is reflected in Matthew, where Matthew records, "Anyone who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." In other words, it's in a loyalty issue. Our loyalty to him supersedes every other loyalty, including holy ones. Now, this is a big issue because we human beings are social critters to the core. We form loyalties without even thinking, don't we? We form loyalties to family, to church, to nation, to political parties, to ways of looking at the world. We like to think that our point of view loyalties, meaning our religious loyalties and maybe our political loyalties, are strictly objective. You know, we've just examined the evidence and we've made our choices based on reason, but that's not how human beings operate. And that's fine. That's the way human beings work. It's all mixed up together with us. But understand that the restructuring that begins when you call Jesus Lord is primarily a loyalty revolution. At the core, it's not a moral revolution, though the loyalty shift has profound moral consequences. At the heart, it's a loyalty shift. Every other attachment, holy or not, it matters not, must bow, must become subordinate to this attachment to him. Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. And every other thing and every other name and every other influence and every other loyalty and every other point of identification is not. And without all those is not, Jesus is not Lord. This is not a minor theme. This is a major, major effect of the gospel of Jesus. Now you understand, in the time of Jesus, there were pre-existing already, many different parties, many different religious, social, political groupings. And in the ancient world, I mean, to say there was a religious group was to say there was a political, religious, social group. All mixed up together, especially in that world, and in that world that Jesus came into, the pre-existing parties were these, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the zealots, the Essenes, and a new one, the followers of John the Baptist, the renewal movement in Israel at the time of Jesus. Each of these groups commanded their own loyalty. People were loyal to one or to the other, believing that this was the way to be loyal to God, because Israel, if anything, was a God-centered nation. But Jesus was never a card-carrying member of any of those pre-existent groups, not even the Baptists. He transcended all those loyalties. Paul speaks to this issue in one of the early Jesus movement churches, the church in Corinth, when he's chastising the Corinthians for their factions that they were forming. I'm reading from 1 Corinthians chapter 1, "I appeal to you brothers and sisters in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another, and what you say, and that there be no divisions among you. My brothers and sisters," here's where it should show up on the screen, "my brothers and sisters, some from Chloe's household, have informed me that there are quarrels among you." What I mean is this. One of you says, "I follow Paul. Another, I follow Apollos. Another, I follow Sephos, the name for Peter, the apostle. Still another, I follow Christ." And Paul is saying, "This is not the way it's meant to be, and he chastises the Corinthians for what's going on in the church there." It was very instructive, I think. I think, you know, no one, no one in the church in Corinth would have said, "I'm for Paul, not for Jesus." Paul was discerning something that was more subtle than that at work in the church, something in the spiritual climate of the church, if you will, and it was for each person receiving his letter to examine whether their own identification with Paul or their leaning toward Apollos was off kilter. Paul had a phrase for what he was trying to discern or speak of in the culture of the church. It's "party spirit." It doesn't mean what happens on Saturday night at the University of Michigan campus. It's talking about factions. And the party spirit was a work of the flesh according to Paul, meaning a human tendency rooted in that part of our humanity that is still in hiding from God. And he writes in Galatians 5 to this point, "Now the works of the flesh are plain; strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit. I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God, you can't drink from the cup of those things and simultaneously drink from the cup of the kingdom." Now, in the book of Acts, the Pharisees were referred to explicitly as a party. Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, "The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses." In other words, from the get-go, the church was afflicted with this partisan spirit. A party in this sense would be a group of people with a shared outlook, a shared set of convictions, and a shared agenda. And that, by the way, the Pharisees were a very godly group of people in the church, in the early Jesus movement. Now, here's the point. If you don't grant me this point, there's just no use of my going on. If Jesus felt the need to speak thus, those words in Matthew's Gospel, to our deepest, held, and most holy loyalties, to Father and Mother, to Kith and Kith. Wouldn't He speak to the loyalties that we call conservative and liberal in much the same fashion? As one well-known commentator on cable TV says, "Am I wrong?" If you don't grant me this point, there's no reason for me to go on because it's central to my thesis here. You know, 50 years ago, the mainline Protestant churches, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, the United Methodist Church, those were the dominant churches in American culture. I mean, the senators came from that group, the movers and the shakers. If you wanted to be seen at church, you wanted to be seen in one of the mainline Protestant churches in the 1950s. That whole family of churches went through a rediscovery phase regarding the social dimensions of the Gospel around that time and the concern for justice that is embedded in the Gospel of Jesus. In the society at large, they saw that this Gospel concern for justice was expressed more vividly in the left-leaning camp than in the right-leaning camp. And so loyalties were formed to the left-leaning camp that over time, I say in retrospect, and many from this communion of churches would say the same came perilously close to idolatry. Bowing before something as if it were God, though it is not. This amounted to something like a trademark infringement on the Jesus brain. If you know what I mean. Today, the dominant churches in American culture are not the mainline Protestant churches. They are what are called the evangelical churches. Vineyard is part of that larger mega tribe called Evangelical. The Evangelical churches certainly in the suburban realms where there's so much population growth, not so much in the urban, but in the suburban Evangelical churches generally feel more affinity to the conservative than the liberal camp. This is well known. But as Jesus people, we should be very, very nervous about this. Jesus is our man, but it's his brand, not ours. We are not at liberty to drag his brand under the banner of our loyalties. So we need to be willing to place our conservative and our liberal loyalties in open hands and bend the knee before our Lord Jesus and pray something like this. I think of it as a recovering partisans prayer. My deepest loyalty, sir, is to you and to you alone. If that offends the liberal agenda, so be it. If that offends the conservative agenda, so be it. And if these agendas are distorting in any way, my grasp of your agenda, help me, Lord, help me, Lord. Because as sure as Jesus is Lord, he transcends them both. And if you don't see that, if we don't see that, we've gotten too cozy with a cat who ain't aslin, so to speak. Now how might one discern the influence of the party spirit in our own perfectly balanced hearts? First, we need to admit that this is so much part of the spirit of the age that if we're not affecting us, it would be a miracle. This is something that just, I mean, I know I have imbibed this partisan spirit in my own walk with Jesus. Here are some signs. The party spirit makes it difficult for us to see how the other side might be closer to the heart of God on any issue, on any issue. So we were constantly giving our side the benefit of the doubt while we hold the other side to an exacting standard. It's like we engage in the institution of marriage so often. That's one discernment point. Another is this, the party spirit produces little or no sense of internal dissonance, discomfort with our chosen tribe. If we lean conservative, we may listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity and rarely cringe, that's not a good sign. Or if we're leaning liberal and we see a Michael Moore film, it just never occurs to us that it's not all gospel truth, that's not a good sign. If you never feel the wind, either the wind isn't blowing or you are blowing right along with it. When Jesus asserts his claim, there's a cost. We feel at home with God, but we're at least a little more feeling like a stranger in a strange land wherever we lay our heads in this world until the heavenly Jerusalem's our home. Third, and I think this is the definitive sign of party spirit. The party spirit thrives on contempt. Up on the screen, you'll see the seven basic facial expressions that are cross-cultural. These just go across every culture, every time, they mean the same thing everywhere. The one that's of interest to us is contempt. It's one of the seven. There are no others that have been identified, but these seven contempt is one of them. Interestingly, contempt is the only facial expression that involves an asymmetry of the face. Smiles both sides, brown is both sides, but contempt is that this lifting of the lip on one side. This is what we're talking about. If you find yourself slipping into contempt for the other side, I don't mean strong disagreement. I mean contempt, I mean an internal inclination to dismiss another human being out of hand than you are DUI, you are DUI, disciple under the influence of the party spirit. Contempt has always, come on, contempt has always been the guardian of the party line. Why do partisans on either side use it so much? Because it works, because it's powerful, and it's primal, and it keeps people in their place with a look, with a gesture, with an inflection, it says don't you dare do say or be that. You know, contempt has a payoff for us. Contempt makes us feel better about ourselves. If we experience self-loathing, or we experience our own brokenness, and we see the difference between our values and our actual behavior, that's naturally an unpleasant feeling that we go through. And one of the ways you can get rid of that feeling cheap is to project all that anguish, all that shame, all that revulsion you have toward yourself, projected outward on another group of people, and voila, you feel great. It's like instant sanctification without holiness, and we all do it. There's a payoff for contempt. But Jesus came down hard. Jesus came down. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, came down hard on contempt. I read from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, verse 21. You've heard that it was said to people long ago, you shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment, but I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to a brother or sister, "Raka," I'm looking to see if there's a footnote that tells me what that means, an aromatic term of contempt. An aromatic term of contempt, "Raka," is answerable to the Sanhedrin, the highest council of the land, and anyone who says you fool will be in the danger of the fire of hell. Why would he come down so hard on contempt? I mean, here's why. The Jesus movement is organized around love of enemy. Did you know that? The Jesus movement is organized around love of the enemy, because Jesus is. God's love for God's enemy in flesh appearing. We've all said ourselves in one way or another against God, but God in Jesus is for us, not against us. In fact, it's one of his names, Emmanuel, God with us, God for us, but, and this is another big one. To say God is for us means his fears and gentle and merciful and unrelenting love is for us. It doesn't mean he's on our side over and against their side. When Paul speaks of those various factions at work in Corinth, they include those who say, "I am for Paul," include those who say, "I am for Apollos," "I am for Safas," but there's another group that doesn't seem to fit in there. Those who say, "I am for Christ." What could that possibly be? Isn't that the group we're all supposed to claim? How could that be a faction to say, "I belong to Christ," perhaps, and this is just a theory. Perhaps there were people who felt so right, so correct, so theologically balanced, so orthodox, so Christian, that surely God was on their side over and against the other bozos in Corinth. That, my friend, is the party spirit. It's not a spirit of faith and the love of God for sinners, which is the only love we're privy to. It's a spirit of presumption because I'm with the right group. God is on my side. Let's end with a bedtime story from the Bible. The night was sick around Joshua, the leader of a pilgrim nation. Joshua was frightened and lonely. His mentor Moses had passed away, leaving him in charge of a nation that wasn't yet a nation because it didn't yet have a homeland. And it was the task of Joshua to lead his own nation into their homeland. Well, and good, except the homeland, was already occupied by fierce warriors who were bowing down before fierce gods, and they were nothing to mess with. Joshua had just led the people across the Jordan River, so there was no turning back. Everything in that era was solemn. The Lord had the men, all of them survivors of the wilderness, wanderings, all of them orphans. All of them orphans because their parents had died on the pilgrimage. And it was just this new generation, and Joshua and Caleb from the old. The Lord had them undergo the right of circumcision, nothing to mess with. And then he had them, men and women together, celebrate the solemn Passover meal with the sacrifice of a lamb for the members of each household, the eating of bitter herbs to remind them of their anguish, slaves in Egypt. What was next? What was next? What would come? Joshua didn't know. Except he knew it would take every ounce of courage he could muster. He knew it meant doing battle with those fierce warriors of Jericho who worshiped their fierce gods. These were people who were willing to offer their own children in sacrifice to their gods. There were stories that those children were at the foundation of the walls of Jericho because they were offered to the pagan gods when the walls were built. Walking alone at night, pondering what the morning would bring, Joshua sees a shadowy figure of a man in the distance. So he approaches, and then he shouts out in the words of the watchmen, "Are you for us or are you for our enemies?" That's when the man turned to face Joshua, and a dread came over Joshua that he'd never felt before the man replied, "Neither!" But as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come, Joshua fell face down to the ground in reverence, what message does my Lord have for his servant? Take off your sandals for the place where you are standing as holy ground, and Joshua did so. And then, and only then did Joshua get his orders about what came next, orders that led him and the people into the land of promise. And from that day on, Joshua understood that though the Lord was with him, the Lord was not on his side. The party spirit, it is the spirit of the age, and too much the spirit of the church at large in our own hearts is a spirit that will only be purged when we have an encounter with the holy god like Joshua did. Here's why I bring it up. Ours is a new day. Ours is a new day, Ours is a new generation, the times they are changing, but like Joshua's times they are perilous. The gospel is spreading through the developing world like wildfire. At a rate of expansion that defies historic precedents in Asia and Africa, in Latin America, but in Europe, in the United Kingdom, in North America, the gospel is not making inroads beyond the Bible belt, and even there it's demographically stuck all the surveys say it. Church attendance has remained more or less stagnant for decades, even though spiritual hunger is high, the reading of spiritual books is high, and there's a new generation here with spiritual cravings to beat the band that's bigger than the baby boom. Scholars from many different disciplines, scholars of religion, scholars of European history are suggesting that we may be in one of those epic times of transition that happened about once every 500 years. The last time was the era of the Reformation. There are serious suggestions from scholars that we are in a new reformation when it comes to religion and what's to come is not really clear, but it seems like we're in some kind of a hinge of history like that, according to some. We have been this way before. Those on the outside of faith, looking in, in our context, the United States of America, think that our religion is just a part of the background noise they hear on cable TV and talk radio hour after hour. People on the outside looking in have a clearer idea about what Christians are against than what they are for, and it's not all the media's fault. One of the things people assume that we're against, or that we fear, or that we hold suspect, or you can't bring the conversation up without our bristling, and not without evidence, do they believe this, is science. If you think science tells a pretty good story, if you love scientific America and discover nature, and national geographic, and one out of every four issues doesn't just make you rile because it's offending you in your religious convictions. If you think science tells a pretty good story, why listen to a story that too often in our culture is profiled in protest against the story that you think is a pretty good one, and has done a pretty good job, and has brought a lot of good. There's two reasons for us as the church to pay attention to this issue, science and faith at the crossroads of creation. First, we are affected and properly so by the story of science. I hope we're not living our lives like ostriches with our heads in the sand, and as people of faith, it's our job. It's not that biologists job per se, it's our job to integrate the story of science with our story. And the story of God in search of humanity, and I just don't think we've done that very well yet. The second reason to be concerned about this is this. Our task is to engage the culture as Jesus himself did, which means sympathetically. All of his protest was aimed at the religious establishment. Is that all of our protest in the United States of America? All aimed at the religious establishment, but not aimed at those who are on the outside looking in, who's our model? The reason Jesus did it that way is so that his prophetic and transformative voice could penetrate the culture from within. Is that the strategy we're taking? Here's what I hope, and with every fiber of my being, the old way of partisan politics and partisan religion, and especially that witch's brew of the two combined is fast losing its effectiveness. I'm not saying it won't draw a crowd. I don't say you can't organize a church around that that ties to beat the band. I'm saying it's losing its effectiveness in the gospel task in America. We've gone as far as we can go on that horse, or that donkey, or that elephant. The culture war between left and right is not or it is no longer if it ever was the war that we're called to fight in the name of Jesus. We are not going to receive the kingdom so long as we carry that partisan spirit along with us because it offends our master. Which does not mean that you can't be a Christian and a conservative with integrity. It doesn't mean you can't be a Christian and a liberal with integrity. Jesus needs a presence in both of those tribes. It just means that your loyalty to Jesus must supersede them both. So in a manner of speaking, the church is in a time like Joshua's time. We haven't been this way before, so the way forward is not clear, and we're pacing the night with Joshua, not knowing how to move into the territory that's been promised, but knowing that something's got to give and something's got to give soon, and because it's so dark, because everything's so murky, when we see the Lord in the distance, it's not always so clear who it is. And so we ask the Watchmen's question, are you for us or are you for our enemies? And like Joshua, we might expect that we might be surprised by the answer. Are you for us conservatives against those liberals? Are you for us liberals enlightened against those retro conservatives? Are you for us Christians against the rest of mankind? None of the above. Lord, I didn't know it was you. What shall I do? Take off your shoes. This is holy ground, and the shoes that got you here are not the shoes that will get you there. Unless we have an encounter like that that scares the party spirit out of our petty hearts, we're not getting any new orders from the Lord, and we're not going anywhere into the land of promise. But as soon, this is kind of ironic, as soon as we take off our shoes, as soon as we fall on our face, then we're on our way, which is his way. Amen. Our worship team could return. What I'd like us to do for communion is maybe just offer, first of all, right in our seats, a prayer to the Lord. You know, the partisan spirit is a noisy, noisy spirit, and I would just think it'd be fitting for us as a church to offer the Lord as we approach his table, a prayer of silence of quiet. The babies can coo, the building can creak, but we can be still and know that he's God. So let's just take a moment, about a minute, of silence as our opening prayers we approach the table. [BLANK_AUDIO]