Category Archives: Sermons

Sermons

Science and Faith as Lenses

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Sermon by Lucas Mix, NA Provincial Warden, at the 2016 retreat (US)

C.S. Lewis wrote “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Today’s gospel and our reflections over the last week have led me to think more carefully
about this concept of seeing and believing.
I wanted to say something about our role as ordained scientists,
and return to two insights that were deeply moving to me
as we shared our pilgrimage together this week.
One was our dependence on a community of scholars,
and the way we form a focal point as leaders in science and religion,
for a much bigger community endeavor.
The other was our need to deal with unsolved problems in applied science and,
dare I say it, applied metaphysics – the concrete needs of the world.

Matthew quotes Isaiah, but what does this mean that Jesus “will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets”? How are we to understand evangelism in light of Jesus ordering his disciples to remain silent about him?
Here, and even more so in the Gospel of Mark, there is a suggestion that some things
should be shared and some things kept quiet.

And who are we in this Society?
I do not think we are any more mediators of God,
or truth, or reality than any other child of God.
And yet we are mediators of knowledge, both sacred and secular.
We are authority figures, for good and ill, regulating what it means
to be in community and share a common understanding of the world.
We are asked to reflect and refract the wisdom entrusted to us.

Priests and deacons wear stoles to show we represent the larger church,
the authority, both power and responsibility,
that comes from speaking for a greater cloud of witnesses.
Scientists, too,
though the lab coat does not, perhaps, garner the same respect it once did,
act as experts in our society.
They have the authority, both the power and the responsibility,
to speak the truths revealed by our searching,
to be the face of inquiry and discovery in a society that deeply values both.
Our education and experience gives us a deeper understanding
of how the world works.

Mark Richardson suggested in his talk that we cannot truly be Evangelists
in the modern world
unless we can navigate the languages of science and meaning
that move our congregations.
And I think this must be true, that the vernacular is increasingly a scientific vernacular – our challenges, our hopes, and our fears are all tinged by science.
So we must do more than solve the abstract problems.
We must bring all that we are and all that we have to finding our way in the world
as communities.

My own passion, as most of you know, has to do with how we act responsibly
with both kinds of authority –
how we exercise this trust,
to always represent the best wisdom of both worlds,
or perhaps the best insights of both perspectives,
in all our interactions.
How do we fulfill the trust placed in us,
through our education, our opportunities, and our relationships?
It’s not just about finding truth,
it’s about cultivating common understanding
about the things that matter most,
ourselves, our world, and our meaning.

During the talks, I was reflecting on two images:
First the telescope, so often iconic in science.
Lenses focus our perceptions,
allowing us to distinguish details
or see patterns, large and small,
that we would otherwise miss.
Second, stained glass, so often iconic in Christianity,
breaking the light into colored fragments,
to harmonize, beautify, and order the light,
which shining alone is too bright and too full
for us to appreciate its depth.
Perhaps, too, stained glass and prisms reminds us
of the ways God uses our brokenness
as individuals and communities
as an opportunity for grace.
The multiple reflections and refractions
in a proper stained glass window allow
us to see the subtleties of light
in a way we never would,
when blinded by the full spectrum brilliance of God.

And I wondered, as I often wonder,
whether these are competing images,
whether they pull us in different directions.
I must honestly admit that a stained glass telescope would be a poor instrument,
at least in terms of the initial metaphors.
It would distort the image while constraining our vision.
It would, I suppose, be a kaleidoscope,
a wonderful thing in and of itself, but neither fish nor fowl.

This seems to be the fear of many faith/science discussions,
that somehow we will lose the utility of both,
if we attempt to put them together.
Obviously, I don’t think that’s the case.
I think we must bring our scientific and religious authority together
in our applied science, our applied theology, and our applied community.
But it may mean re-working my metaphors.
It may mean doing a new thing.
So I want to share a new image with you.

Most of us agree, I think, that there is only one light,
but we have trouble agreeing on what kind of lens we want to be,
and what kind of lens we should be,
for ourselves and for others.

How many of you are familiar with gravitational micro-lensing?
It sounds very complicated, but it’s a beautifully simple concept,
increasingly useful in astronomy.
For the most part, we can only see stars and planets in the sky
when they are exceptionally bright.
Mars is, on average, 225 million kilometers away from us,
but if you hook up a giant flashlight,
take 2 times 10 to the 30th kilograms of hydrogen and helium and set it on fire
– That would be the Sun –
and flash it at Mars, the light that comes back is bright enough to see.
Similarly, the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away,
shows up because of the light of a trillion Suns’ worth of mass
all merrily burning in the night.
Other objects,
for example the light of tiny planets orbiting distant stars in the Milky Way
of the light of galaxies farther out than Andromeda,
may not be bright enough for us to see them,
even with our best telescopes.
They are too dim.

Yet we care about them.
We care about Orion and Pleiedes and the vast expanse of interstellar space.
We care enough to ask what they are made of and where they are
and whether they, like we, travel through the night.
And we have discovered,
that when the stars align,
the light from a distant star will bend around a star passing in between us and it
and that light passes on all sides of the passing star and focuses back upon us,
with much greater intensity
for a moment in cosmic time.
As it does so, we learn something profound about the distant source of light,
for we see it much more brightly,
and about the passing star,
for the way it passes the light onto us.
The gravity of the passing star, or even galaxy, forms a lens, a gravitational micro-lens.
And if we watch the distant star closely, and observe how the image changes
as is passes into focus
we can also learn about the lens itself,
the mass and properties of the star that passes in between.

Lensing around galaxies, when we let one galaxy to magnify a more distant galaxy,
has allowed us to calculate galactic mass and understand dark matter –
or more properly understand how we don’t understand dark matter.
That is, it shows us galaxies far more massive than we would have guessed
Based in brightness alone.
Lensing around star-systems,
when we are lucky enough to watch a star and its planets
pass between us and a distant object,
has allowed us to find extra-solar planets, otherwise invisible.
As of last night, 43 planets had been discovered and reported on the basis of micro-lensing,
including some of the smallest and most Earth-like currently known.
The details are more complicated than I could hope to capture here,
but hopefully I’ve given you a taste of this wonderful insight,
I hesitate even to call it a technology,
for we have no power to align the stars ourselves
but we have this glorious curiosity that allowed
micro-lensing to be revealed to us
and allowed micro-lensing to reveal things we couldn’t have imagined.
And it is, very much, both a telescope and a stained glass window,
depending on your focus,
a great kaleidoscope that reveals and fractures a heavenly image.

And here I have waxed too poetic even for my own sensibilities.
Let me bring this digression back to the very concrete biblical exegesis,
and daily morality
that it has sparked in me.
Perhaps I can worry less about what kind of lens I am,
when I magnify and when I refract,
when I give a true image and when I break an image into it’s components.
Instead, I shall worry more about how God has placed me
between the light of Christ and the observer.
I shall think about how my life and my actions bend the world around me
in a way that can reveal a more distant light
a more distant truth,
and, for many, a brightness they had only dreamed of.
It is not so different a metaphor than that used by the Orthodox
speaking of icons as windows to divinity,
or Augustine speaking of the finger pointing at the moon.
Jesus may have taken the focus off himself,
precisely because he, as the incarnate Christ,
was the focus of a yet more glorious light,
a lens, through which, was focused the full intensity of God.

I don’t have that kind of intensity.
I don’t have that kind of mass.
But, returning to Marilyn’s insight from our very first reflection,
the community gathered together,
possesses a power
greater than its parts.
We are something when we gather here, at this table,
in prayer, in service, and in love.
Each of our ministries can be this,
and I truly believe each of our ministries is this,
a gathering of people through our authority as leaders in science and faith,
whether or not we wear a stole,
whether or not we wear a lab coat,
we have this power,
to gather light and mass around us,
to gather a community of knowledge and wisdom,
that bends the very fabric of the world,
and lets the light shine through.

Taken from Lucas’ Blog.

Sermons

World Views on the Macro and Micro Scale

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A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Keith Suckling, Warden at the Society’s Gathering at Scargill, July 2015

I was glad to hear in David Gosling’s talks at this Gathering his experience of aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam which he shared from his periods of time in South Asia. It should not have been a surprise, but it was still very striking to see the differences in the world view of these cultures almost at first hand. We are of course familiar with the concept of world views and the conflicts that can arise when they come in close contact. The readings we have heard this morning give us a scriptural context. The story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) can be seen as the point at which world views began to diverge. More significantly, Jesus points out to his disciples that the world view which he represents is fundamentally different from that held by the wider society in which we live (John 14.22-15.1).

It is a familiar picture, but sometimes small events bring the real situation into closer focus. Early in 2014 I received a completely unexpected invitation from the Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney to come to Fraserburgh in north-east Aberdeenshire as Priest in Charge of St Peter’s Church. It was the kind of email which demanded taking very seriously and after a period of discernment and the necessary visits Helen and I moved to Fraserburgh in October. There was a very strong sense of being led by the Holy Spirit, of which more towards the end.

Shortly after arriving I made contact with some local schools and some weeks later this was followed up by a request for a discussion with a sixth year student who was working on a project on assisted dying. Legislation was in progress in the Scottish Parliament at the time (although it subsequently failed). I had a good discussion with the student and she was grateful to hear a point of view which was new to her. She had carefully gathered views from her own circle, family and friends, and it seemed that most of the opinions she had heard came from a utilitarian and pragmatic perspective. We are familiar of the idea of a conflict model between religious world views and secular ones, but on the basis of this and related experiences, I think we need to replace it with the ignorance model. It may not be too extreme to suggest that in the Venn diagram of these world views there is practically no overlap.

And still the regular traffic of confused debate continues. The challenges of natural disasters and suffering remain, God is accused and answers are demanded, but we can only have a debate when there is some common ground to work on. Fundamentalist atheism is no longer respectable intellectually but still dominates media discourse. All these factors and developments suggest that the ground in which we operate has slowly been shifting and now is quite different from what it was 30 years ago when the ideas of forming SOSc were taking shape. If people don’t know what Christianity is they are not going to be particularly bothered about the subtleties of the science/religion debate. But the fact that some people pop up here and there who obstinately try to live fully within the

world view of a religion but who also accept and indeed celebrate the kind of data that the secular world needs to rely on sometimes stops the secularist short. Yes, amongst others, we are those people.

Christianity has to recover by people wanting to be part of it. You join a club, a sport or a society because it seems attractive to you. You don’t know everything about it at the time but you are prepared to give it a try. But it’s got to be attractive enough – to raise interest and curiosity. To those who follow a different world view, we are, using the word in a different way, curious people, but maybe we are ones who raise enough interest so that it gets to be followed up at some time in the future.

This continues to be our role in SOSc, and it is exactly as the aims of the Society were conceived 30 years ago. Perhaps some of the wider church is beginning to pay more attention. We continue to be, as I said two years ago, the data and the evidence. Or, put a little differently, we are and we inhabit and we have to remain the common ground, the more visible the better. In fact, we are getting some response to our publicity. In the past six months there have been more email requests for information about the Society with a view to membership than ever before. There is the unmeasurable but real trickle effect of people who have come into contact with our members telling others about us. Those of us who use social media can have an encouragingly wider impact.

Having made a major and unexpected move in the past year, and starting off with an agenda in mind containing far more things that could be done than are possible, I’m quite clear that we as a Society also have to continue to expect to be led. It’s that peculiar partly proactive and partly reactive state where we try, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to synthesise all sorts of inputs, some specific and defined, some vague and hardly sensed. It’s one that sees opportunities as they appear and, after appropriate discernment, takes them and manages to make progress without needing to have all the milestones defined in the way that we did for the kind of drug discovery programme I used to lead. Fuzzy. Often challenging to the scientific mind.

We can only be effective in taking the opportunities that offer themselves to us if our primary response is to God and to God in creation. This is what we share today as we celebrate the Eucharist with a eucharistic prayer from Operation Noah. I’ve talked mostly about the outward role of the Society, about our world view and others. But now as we worship together, this is the internal strength of our community. The real sense of community is never stronger than at this point in the Gathering. All that we stand for is enhanced and deepened and as always, I feel warmed and greatly encouraged by our time together.

Sermons

Believing in Evidence

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Sermon by Bp. David Walker (visitor) at the North American SOSc retreat, 2014

Nine months ago I was summoned to be interviewed for the post of Bishop of Manchester. It was quite an exercise. First I had to preach for five minutes on the readings of the day. Next I was required to produce a ten minute presentation on a subject chosen by the panel; which happened to be the theology of William Temple and its relevance for Manchester today. Finally, I was submitted to an hour of questions from sixteen people arranged in a large horseshoe. A few days later, by which stage I had been told informally that I was the preferred candidate, I bumped into one of the bishops who had been part of the panel. “You’re different from the rest of us, David” he said. “You really believe in evidence”. It’s possibly one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. And I think he did intend it as a compliment.

I also think that it’s a particularly appropriate compliment to pay to the Visitor of this society, because as ordained scientists, the members of SoSc are called to be people who weigh evidence and, along with that evidence and powerfully influenced by it, believe. So let me simply, for all of us here today and especially for those to be admitted to the society, offer some thoughts on what it may mean to be those who “believe in evidence”.

Painting with a full palette

The definition of an expert, as I imagine you are all aware, is that it is somebody who knows almost everything about almost nothing. Specialisation, particularly in science, leads to ever finer divisions into fields that can become so arcane as to be impossible even to state to an outsider. At the turn of the twentieth century, the great David Hilbert listed the top ten unsolved mathematical problems of the day. By and large they were all at least explicable in language an educated non specialist could understand: Fermat’s last theorem and the four colour problem being perhaps the best known. My recollection is that just one remains unsolved. Yet when another nine were added to it to create a top ten for the new millennium, most of them require a considerable amount of prior mathematical specialisation to even begin to understand what the problem means. The days of the generalist scientist, of whom so many were ordained, are long past.

Yet within this ever increasing specialisation are two countervailing forces. Firstly, we can note a dawning awareness that often the solutions to problems couched in the language of one particular field lie at least partially in another area of study entirely. The paradox is that to be fully effective within it, researchers need to engage outside their immediate zone of expertise. Secondly, once we pull back from the frontiers of knowledge and seek to live coherently within the world, we are immediately compelled to construct our attitudes and activities from theory and evidence drawn from many different disciplines.

For you and me there is a very sound reason for applauding this. When we read the gospels we see immediately how, for example, Jesus brings together deep knowledge of the Jewish scriptures, profound observation of nature, acute understanding of human psychology, all in order to address a specific subject. To the people who heard him it would appear to be this ability to synthesise that rooted his teaching in a holistic reality and gave it an authority that contrasted with that of his contemporaries.

The call to us then is to be like the good rabbi of whom Jesus speaks, who can bring out and put together the old and the new. It is to be those who are prepared to paint with the whole available palette of human wisdom. In particular, as a society we have the locus to offer our shared theological training and our very diverse scientific disciplines in order to address the issues of the day. And I do believe this takes us beyond the initial vision of our founders. We are more than a third force in a fruitless culture war between fundamentalist belief and reductionist science. We are a society of those who can individually and corporately make a powerful contribution in the public square. And whilst it is always a little invidious to single any of our members out, for the sake of examples (always important to a scientist) I would draw attention to the writing on environmental issues of David Atkinson, of Lee Rayfield on issues in medical

ethics, and the collection of essays on human sexuality submitted as evidence to the Church of England’s recently published report on the topic. In each case it is the ability to speak from a solid theological and scientific grounding, a belief in the evidence drawn from both, that makes the impact.

The measure of doubt

I was privileged as a young undergraduate to be on friendly terms with a then elderly philosopher, among whose claims to fame was that in his rooms at college a fierce debate had once taken place on the subject of belief and evidence. He described vividly the moment, late in the evening, when Popper refused to accept the existence of the fire poker and Wittgenstein threatened to strike him with it.

I am always amazed at the mental gymnastics employed by some atheist friends in the scientific world who spend their lives not believing they have any free will and yet act constantly as though they did. Those with a sense of humour smile and say they have no choice in the matter. I am equally amazed at those religious fundamentalists for whom it seems to be precisely that their beliefs clash with the entirety of the evidence available and require equally implausible mental gymnastics such as imagining God creating the fossil record to fool us, which attracts them to their faith.

You and I are called to have evidence and to believe. Just as there are different standards of proof for a criminal trial and a civil lawsuit, so we are required to weigh the evidence and determine what an appropriate threshold for belief might be in any particular instance. As in the legal example, an important factor is what the practical consequences of belief or disbelief might be. We need to be far more sure before sentencing someone to years in prison than we need to be before deciding which of two protagonists to believe in a dispute over a commercial contract.

You and I, trained in the scientific method, do not believe lightly. The fact that we believe, and believe enough to base our lives on acting in accordance with our beliefs, stands witness to the plausibility of our faith under challenge. Especially it witnesses to the enduring plausibility of faith under scientific challenge. Faith asserts that we must all live by unproven hypotheses, but hypotheses that remain reasonable in the light of all we know.

Worshiping through the wonderful

For my final point I want to go back to the impact on us of being those who grapple with scientific evidence.

The story is told of two astronomers at a Cambridge college who, every time they felt they were thinking too highly of themselves, would go out into the main court at night, look up at the stars, recite a litany of how small humans are in comparison with the visible universe, and then return duly humbled to their port and Stilton.

Whatever our individual disciplines, whether we study the very large or the very small, the very concrete or the very abstract, we are those who have been privileged to glimpse something more than most people can of the sheer size and complexity of the universe. Like those college dons we are drawn to a profound humility. What then distinguishes us from them though is that as “believers in evidence” we are also drawn into a profound wonder that expresses itself in worship. Like Job, at the end of the book which bears his name, we see the glory of creation, and fall on our knees.

Yet what distinguishes the members of this society even further is that we are also those set apart to be leaders of worship among communities who are not scientifically trained or scientific practitioners. In our society liturgies we express a more profound engagement with the creation than is common in standard church services. That is right and proper. But I hope we can also take something of the spirit of worshipping through the wonderful back into our home churches. I’ve witnessed too many Christian communities for whom worship is about escape from the realities of daily life. For those who experience

daily living as oppressive and rejecting, that is to some extent understandable. But how much better it would be to enable them to worship in a way that by its very connectedness with creation calls up a more profound awareness of a God who is so greater than their oppressors that in his strength they can refuse to accept their oppression. Maybe that is a work for this society, and especially for those being admitted

Sermons

BICEP

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Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Barbara Smith-Moran, SOSc, Annual Retreat, 26 June 2014, Whitby

Almost 100 years ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his Theory of General Relativity. His equations showed how gravity waves are generated by highly energetic events such as the explosion of supernovae or the collision of neutron stars. Einstein also thought that gravitational waves of cosmic origin would be so weak by the time they reached Earth that they would be undetectable. Now thereʼs a challenge, and from Einstein, no less! But, in 40-odd years of searching, direct observation of gravity waves has proven elusive. But the theory is robust, so physicists persist in the search, the way they do, and keep themselves hopeful with successive generations of ever more sensitive detectors.

Meanwhile, though, a team of astronomers have been searching for indirect observation of cosmic gravitational waves. Theyʼve been looking for the effects of the gravitational waves that accompanied the inflationary period of exponential expansion of the universe in the blink after the Big Bang. And last week, the much-heralded paper was published announcing the discovery of what theyʼve been looking for. The interpretation is controversial and awaits confirmation, as always.

So how did the astronomers do that? Well, they built a special microwave telescope at the South Poleʼs Amundsen-Scott Research Station. They built it there because the very cold air is very dry, minimizing microwave emission from water vapor. That first telescope was called BICEP, an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. Its detectors were sensitive to the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the 3-degree remnant of the light from the Big Bang.

Quantum theory says that by the time that Big Bangʼs light became observable (after 380,000 yrs), it had been imprinted by the gravitational waves of the faster-than-light cosmic inflation and polarized in a particular way. BICEP was designed specifically to pick up the so-called B-mode polarization, a signature of inflation in the super-early universe (10-32 sec). I canʼt possibly explain what the B-mode is, and I refer you to Garth Barber or Cyril Challice or another physicist.

So BICEP stared into space for 3 winter seasons, beginning in 2006, and it found—well, not much of anything, nothing to make headlines. But the theory is robust—or at least tantalizing—so the physicists persisted in the search, the way they do, keeping themselves hopeful with ever more sensitive detectors.

They built a second generation BICEP. So by 2010, they had BICEP2, a bulked-up version of BICEP1, with a bigger aperture and 10 times the sensors at 150 GHz.

After three seasons of observations, the results from BICEP2 really were something to write home about. The research team, led by Harvardʼs John Kovac, made big headlines last March when they announced their results. Their paper came out last week. The polarization effect is only 1 part in 108, incredibly, incredibly subtle.

I want to know why BICEP1 didnʼt see the signal that BICEP2 saw. The answer is that it did see it, but it just didnʼt recognize it in all the background noise it picked up. BICEP1 needed some “tutelage” from BICEP2 in order to know what it was seeing. The astronomers took the BICEP1 spectral data and mathematically correlated it with the BICEP2 data to produce a third, called the cross-correlation, and there it was—out of the noise jumped something similar to the signal seen by BICEP2. Cross-correlation did the trick. Itʼs a really powerful technique.

…………

So, that very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. We know that our Gospels contain two kinds of parables: parables told by Jesus, and parables told about Jesus. Todayʼs story of the Road to Emmaus is one of the latter; itʼs a parable about Jesus. It works on two levels, as parables do. And to press cross- correlation into service as a scientific metaphor, let me retell the Road to Emmaus story this way.

Cleopas and his friend were walking together, traveling away from Jerusalem on the Sunday after the Passover. Both of them had been in the company of other Jewish followers of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. They had heard and seen something of the things that were being reported about Jesus: especially that he was dead on Friday and alive again on Sunday. Both of them had experienced something of the energy that began to polarize the Jews into resurrection believers and resurrection deniers, into Jesus-is-Lord believers and Jesus-is-Lord deniers.

So on their way out of the center of Passover activity, on their way home, perhaps, to Emmaus, these two are talking. Letʼs suppose that Cleopas was rather animated. Perhaps he had been calling himself a disciple of Jesus ever since he had heard him preaching his own compassionate take on the Law and the Prophets. Cleopas heard Jesusʼs words as a refreshing rain, and he yearned to hear more. But then those insistent kill-joys, the Roman authorities, had killed Jesus right at holiday time. That was only last Friday; and today, Sunday, the most incredible news had been spreading through Jerusalem: the news that many had seen Jesus alive again, and walking among them, talking and eating with them. Cleopas is confident that the reports are true. He understands the excitement of many of the disciples, and he thinks, cautiously and privately, that he may have seen his own evidence of the Risen Jesus. He felt uncomfortable in the company of those others who had thrown caution to the winds, so he and his friend leave the excitement and confusion of Jerusalem behind and head out.

Walking toward Emmaus now, Cleopas, the more extroverted, does most of the talking. Both of them have been through the same Jerusalem Passover and post-Passover experiences. His friend—letʼs call her BICEP—isnʼt so sure. BICEP is skeptical about the eye-witness reports she heard. She is not easily carried away. She maintains that God has never answered any of her prayers, though she keeps praying. Influenced by Cleopas, BICEP wants to believe, she wants and needs Jesus to be Lord, but she doesnʼt see it, not yet.

As they go over and over their shared Jerusalem experience, Cleopas interprets it in such a way that he, at least, is convinced he can see the hand of God at work. Reviewing the words of the prophets about the coming Messiah, it dawns on both of them, as never before, the relevance of these words to Jesus. The signal just pops out of the noise—and there is

Jesus himself, walking beside them. Both of them see him, walking and talking with them.

BICEP is positively aghast at what she now sees in front of her eyes. How did she miss that before? Apparently, it was there all along, but she couldnʼt see it on her own. It was buried in the noise of coincidence. She needed to be tutored in order to see it. She needed the fellowship of Cleopas. She needed that cross-correlation so the Risen-Lord truth could pop out of the noise of random circumstance in her life. I believe thatʼs how the Counselor, the Holy Spirit often works to guide us into all truth, and tutor us all things, as Jesus says in Johnʼs Gospel, and remind us of all that Jesus has taught us.

When they get to Emmaus, they invite Jesus in and break bread with him to celebrate their experience of his living presence. Then, exhilarated by their discovery, Cleopas and BICEP have no choice, no choice at all, but to turn around and head right back to Jerusalem to hold their own press conference about their experience of the Risen Lord. As the Epistle lesson says, “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us, . . . with the Father and with his

Son Jesus Christ.”
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Cross-correlator. Amen.

Sermons

“Show me the Data”

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Sermon by Warden Keith Suckling at the SOSc retreat 2013, Scargill House

I had a colleague based in the USA who ran a department similar to mine. I would visit him every so often and I was always amused to read the slogan over the door of his office which proclaimed ‘show me the data’. He wanted to slow down the natural enthusiasm of his colleagues who would come to him with exciting and significant conclusions (as they thought), very often the ones they wanted, but his prime question was – do the data support the conclusion?

I think we would all agree that we should look at the data first, but this obvious and rigorous approach is not practiced as widely as it should be. It is easy to jump to conclusions before absorbing the data, even being selective with the data themselves, neglecting sources of error or ignoring ‘unhelpful’ statistics. Often the conclusions end up reflecting our own preconceptions and prejudices. That is serious enough just for one dataset from one experiment but if we want to construct a wider description, theory, model or narrative, it is important that the data hold together and provide a coherent picture.

So when we come to try to provide a basis for a coherent world view, in our case a theistic one, it is particularly important that we are able to make clear what the data are before applying the conclusion. In our case as ordained scientists we have a conclusion that is hard to appreciate and understand without reference to the basic data, and of course others may choose to interpret the same data in different ways. What data do we have available? Let’s look at some of it.

Over the last couple of days, Ruth has provided us with a fascinating and inspiring overview of that sense of wonder and awe which unites science with a sense of the divine. The data are indisputable. They are the shared experiences of us all. These natural experiences we all have directly from nature and from life provide an agreed starting point from which we can begin to develop our interpretation.

But in our worldview we have sources of data which take us further, beyond the observation of the natural. Taking the lead from Ruth’s synopsis, our readings this morning illustrate how scripture enriches our sense of wonder. Curiously, beauty in the wide sense we understand it now does not seem to be a major strand in the Bible. The sense of awe or even fear is much stronger, but hidden away in the book of Wisdom (Wisdom 13.1-9), we find the broad sense of beauty being referred and related directly to God, almost as a correction to the more fearful interpretation. It is curious that the more contemporary romantic-derived sense of the beauty of nature coincides historically with the beginnings of the historical-critical approach to scripture.

There is always a great sense of beauty, wonder and peace when we read the passage from Revelation (Revelation 21.1-4). For many it is one of the most comforting and beautiful in all scripture. Coming after the chaos of the last battles it offers us a sense of peace, beauty, comfort, wonder, care and love all at once. It reaffirms the goodness of creation with which the Bible begins.

Ruth talked about Jesus’ parables being an example of creativity, the mark of a good teacher. Here (Matthew 13.44-50) we see a number of very concise examples with different images to illustrate the same thing. At least one image, the pearl of great price, is intrinsically beautiful as well as valuable. The robustness of the parables to telling in many different ways emphasises the power of the images and of imagination.

Much of what we have shared over the past couple of days relates to experiences that everyone has access to, so these are excellent data for us to build on. But I’d like to add one further element to the dataset which we partially referred to in our discussion yesterday when we talked about presenting science and religion in the church community and wider. The further element in the data is ourselves and our Society. It is an inspiring thought for us that for many people we are part of the data, part of the evidence. People say when they hear about SOSc that they did not realise such a thing was possible. It means that those who have

divided their minds so that science and religion are kept safely apart may now find themselves able to be conceptually integrated people. Then they can’t stop telling others about us.

Let me tell you a story of how this works. We have friends in the North East of Scotland and on one visit I was introduced to a very charming family. The father was a very experienced teacher with a strong Christian faith. He was curious but wary about my position as an ordained scientist. I can’t say anything more about his views because we did not discuss it. I think he was, like many people who hear about us, impressed that we exist but cautious about the potential challenge to his position. So we had a delightful visit but did not discuss any theology.

Quite recently a friend of the teacher was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The friend had a technological career but no background of faith and was clearly desperately trying to find a meaning that gave his condition a context he could accept. Our teacher friend thought of us and asked if he could have a copy of the SOSc Anniversary Collection book for his friend. He had seen the book on one of our visits. I posted one to him right away.

I don’t know how the story has progressed, but I am moved and impressed that someone who has a theological position that we probably would not agree with has been sufficiently struck by our existence to be willing to offer our perspective to help in a case of deep pastoral need. This is perhaps the strongest example I have come across, but I know of many similar situations where just our existence has been significant point. No detailed debate was necessary.

This is why I think we need to be as aggressive as we can in making people aware that we exist. I don’t mean going out recruiting, though we do need to keep that going. I mean simply saying clearly ‘here we are’. We know we don’t have a final and definitive model based on all the data that we have access to. We don’t all express the model in the same way. Some of us, including me, would want to say that the limitations of our language and intellect prevent us from getting a anywhere beyond a deep sense of longing. Yet that too is coherent with scripture and so can be part of the overall story.

As we drive away this afternoon there will be many things we will be thinking about from what we have shared together, and no doubt we will share them with others when we get home. I hope it is not too fanciful for us also to amuse ourselves with this thought: we are the data. We as individual people and as a Society support the model. When we show the data, which is ourselves, to others we hope and pray that they will come to the right conclusion.