Sermon,
Lucas Mix, Provincial Warden
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, US, 2020

How many of you have a beloved mystery,
a question that troubles and delights you
because it provokes insights without ever being fully answered?
To be clear, this is not a perverse resistance to an answer. I long with all my heart to know.
I just never seem to get there.
Nor is it just a poorly framed question like
“how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
Admittedly, that one may have had real value in the High Middle Ages, when modal logic and Platonic Realism had more currency
than materialist physics.
No. A beloved mystery must be a question sincerely meant and diligently pursued.
It is a quest.
My quest is this:
what is life, that I am mindful of it?
I am a biologist, so I’m concretely focused on the life we share with animals, plants, and fungi, even bacteria –
the life of our bodies,
or, if you like, our metabolism.
I can’t be sure that there is a rigorous,
analytic or empirical answer to the question, but I can’t avoid using the word, ‘life,’
so it must mean something to me.
Life has value.
And, I have come to suspect that life, metabolic life,
has serious theological implications as well. Not some abstract mental or spiritual life,
but the concrete life of flesh and blood, the bodily life Christ took on in Jesus, and shared in bread and wine.
It is an ancient mystery, asked around the world, not just by Christians.
Why must we eat other living things? Why can’t we, like plants, live off of light? Why must we kill to eat and live?
It takes on special significance for Christians
in the Incarnation – God with us,
in the Eucharist – Christ’s body and blood
and in Church – membership in the Body of Christ.
These are metaphors, of course, but they are not just metaphors. As with anything else in scripture,
it bears playing out literally before reaching too far into symbolism.
So, when we speak of the Body rooted in Christ,
and held together by the Spirit, the very breath of God, what did that mean to Paul,
and what might it mean to us?
I cannot pass over this question as a theologian without passing through it as a scientist.
The biological question turns out to be quite difficult to answer. What is life?
What makes a body a body, and not just a lump of matter? Every organism persists through time,
despite a constant turnover of matter,
cells and tissues, gained and lost,
formed and reformed.
It brings whole new meaning to Ecclesia semper reformanda est.
The body must ever be reformed.
The difference between living tissue and dead tissue
is not in its composition,
nor even in its origin,
but in its action and how it relates to other tissues.
The same is true, I think, of Christian life.
I do not live to myself or for myself.
I am not a Christian because my parents were Christians,
though my faith could not exist,
at least not in its present form,
had it not been passed to me through them. I am not a Christian because I have been baptized,
though that act planted a seed in me.
I am a Christian because of my faith, hope, and love,
because of curiosity and community. I did not make these things;
I was grafted onto them, and into them.

I was, quite literally, incorporated into the Body of Christ. As I am fueled by bread and wine,
So I am fuel for the church,
I am accepted, transformed, and put to use. It is an uncomfortable metaphor,
being so very common, so very material, so very… visceral. I shy away from the baseness of it.
And yet, the more I look at the question,
the more I ask about God’s metabolism,
the more I realize how fundamental this idea is scripture,
to faith, and to community. I am dead to self, but alive in Christ.
I am rooted in Christ, the living water.
I am grafted onto the tree which is Christ.
And the mystery of life in Christ is the same as the mystery of metabolism, because I am material and local,
just as God was material and local
and local bodily life is essential to who we are,
but they are not the fullness of who we are. My physical, temporal self lives,
being part of something dynamic, persistent, and transformative. My body lives because it is continually remade.
My church lives because is continually remade,
continually interacting with the world,
breathing in and breathing out.
It is not the frozen seed of isolationism, slowly consuming itself. Nor is it the gluttonous blob of colonialism,
consuming all it meets while resisting change. It is alive and real and,
though we cannot see it,
constantly changing into something new and wonderful. And we, all the while, are growing with it.

Sermon,
Lucas Mix, Provincial Warden
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, US, 2018

It can be hard to preach when you’re in the process of changing your mind.
Nick’s talks this week have me thinking and changing,
but that’s part of what I wanted to say today, so it’s fitting.
I’d like to share with you two dualisms and a monism:
that is two ways of dividing the world –
neither of which I entirely agree with –
and some thoughts about how to pull it all together.

We have a reading from Genesis about the First day,
and that has me thinking about Philo,
who may have been the first to suggest a dual creation.
The first day was, for him, a creation in light of ideal forms.
The other days, the material creation, began to work out the details
of concrete physical things.
This dual creation inspired similar schemes in Augustine and Aquinas
and eventually the familiar mind and matter of Descartes.
I think it also lies behind the line in the Nicene Creed about God
creating all that is, seen and unseen,
the invisible order and the visible stuff of creation.
I do not think there are two kinds of substances – mind and matter –
but I do think we live at the boundary between the two.
I think we live at the intersection of the mental and the physical.
I also think that we, especially as ordained scientists,
live at the boundary of the known and the unknown,
the seen and the unseen.

Our readings from Acts and Mark also provide a dualism
with two kinds of baptism:
the baptism of John and baptism of Jesus,
the baptism of water and the baptism of spirit,
the baptism of repentance and the baptism of new life.
I’m not sure how best to interpret these passages
and I don’t want to suggest that I have the best way,
but I’d like to share my own thoughts on the two baptisms.
I see John’s baptism as reactive.
It brings repentance and forgiveness.
John’s baptism is all about turning away from what is evil.
But that is not enough.
It is not enough to turn away from the evil;
we must turn toward the good.
We must orient ourselves in God and Christ.
Jesus’ baptism is proactive.
It brings adoption and inspiration.
It leads to growth.
It does more than save us from the evil;
it empowers us in the good.

The two can never be fully separated,
but I think it’s useful, in both science and theology,
to think about renewal in both ways.
We do more than falsify bad theories;
in some mysterious way, we find good ones.
With C. S. Lewis, I think that there are infinitely more ways of being right
than there are of being wrong.
When we focus too much on atonement, repentance, and salvation,
we develop an anemic faith,
one that can resist the bad,
but cannot embrace the good,
one that can deny the past,
but not reach forward into the future.
Atonement, repentance, and salvation are crucially important;
they are not the full end of baptism.
There must be more.
There must be a movement of the Holy Spirit in us.

And once again, we, particularly as ordained scientists,
live at the boundary,
where we are rejecting the bad, but also embracing the good,
turning away from bad ways of looking at the world,
but also promoting good ways.
Skepticism is not enough.

Some of you may be familiar with a book by Bill Countryman,
Living on the Border of the Holy.
It speaks of our calling as Christians to live on the borderlands
between the secular and the sacred,
between life as we experience it and life fully in the presence of God.
We cannot cover the ground for people,
nor can we act as an intermediary between them and God,
but we can be guides for others as they travel unfamiliar territory.
We can reorient them when they get lost,
help them up when they stumble,
and point out some areas where it’s easy to get bogged down
or stopped altogether.

There is only one world,
and all of us struggle to find our way in it.
Science and faith can be valuable tools for that,
when we use them rightly.
Ordained Scientists have a calling to help people in that process.

What do you do when you find yourself in sudden darkness?
Call out?
Light a match or turn on a flashlight?
In my mind, science is like a flashlight.
It is this wonderful tool for dealing with darkness.
We should always carry it with us and try it out.
And sometimes, a flashlight just doesn’t help.
It shines over the edge of a cliff, or onto a black surface, or the battery runs out.
Sometimes we need other tools and other strategies.
We need to be prepared when our flashlight is not enough.
After all, sometimes the best response to the darkness
is to let our eyes adjust.
And sometimes we can only lie down and sleep until the dawn.

The borderlands can be like that,
the strange region between seen and unseen, visible and invisible, secular and holy.
They require patience and clear thinking and a variety of tools.
I think ordained scientists can help people use their flashlights,
but I also think we are here to help people when the flashlight
isn’t enough.
Science is narrow.
Faith must be broad enough to encompass the whole world.

I love God and I love the world that God has made.
This love keeps me looking.
It motivates my science and my theology as I try to understand,
and nothing could stop me from my investigation.
Would you stop from following your beloved?

We know about relationships.
We know that they require both curiosity and commitment.
A relationship with curiosity but no commitment, cannot grow.
It lacks the bonds that hold people together.
It lacks the shared responsibility and care
that make two people one.
A relationship with commitment, but no curiosity, grows brittle and frail.
How can we say we truly love someone when we no longer know who they are?
Our relationship with God and creation must be like this:
committed to curiosity
and curious about commitment.
We must be always looking and listening to hear.
We must be always responding and sharing what we have.

So, I would commend to you both curiosity and commitment,
as you negotiate the borders of seen and unseen,
and as you help others along the way.