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Sermons

All Things Considered

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Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, Tucson, USA, 10 June 2020

Driving through Tucson a few days ago, we switched on the car radio to listen to the late afternoon news on National Public Radio. The presenter announced the title of the programme as “All things Considered”. I joked to Tom that, given the diversity of opinion in the USA, there was probably a rival station whose drive time broadcast went by the name “Just go with your gut”, or possibly “Hold to your prejudice”.
I didn’t listen long enough to be able to judge whether the show lived up to its name, some of you probably know it far better and can tell me afterwards, but the aspiration seemed an honourable one – that everything should be taken into account, weighed carefully in the balance. Only then should a judgement be made. Moreover, if new evidence or additional perspectives come to light, fresh things not previously considered, then any and all previous judgements must be at least open to reassessment and revision.
One repeated research finding, including from some of my own studies, is that the deeper we go into our faith, the higher we score on the scale known as Quest Religiosity. Quest measures our willingness, and indeed desire, to live with uncertainty. It measures how much we enjoy the fact that our faith is not final and static but developing, as we continue to explore questions for which we have no simple answers. It’s another way of putting what Lucas has been referring to as curiosity in our talks here. As Questing, curious Christians, our conclusions remain subject to revision, as we seek to live a life of “all things considered”.
I suspect that members of the Society of Ordained Scientists all score high in terms of Quest. In your various scientific endeavours, as academics, industrialists, research workers and space explorers, you will have had to develop the desire to venture into the unknown, and to enjoy the process of discovery as much as the things eventually discovered. Part of the charism of the Society is, I believe, to be a cohort of men and women who not only do that with their science, but carry it over to what it means to be an ordained minister in one or another Christian denomination.
The mantra of “All things considered” also flies in the face of that pretence to balanced journalism which consists of getting a protagonist from each of the extreme poles of a debate, giving them equal airtime, and imagining that would cover all views in between. Indeed, the Society of Ordained Scientists began because the public interaction between science and religion was being dominated by the shrillest voices of militant atheism and fundamentalist Christianity.
That same call to holistic consideration also challenges the pattern of presenting, as though of equal worth, both the widespread mainstream informed consensus on some matter and a maverick position. To take a timely example, in my view the overwhelming evidence for the human impact on climate change, and the need to address it urgently, has gone far beyond the point where the views of climate deniers should be entitled to more than a cursory mention in a footnote of the debate. They matter politically because of the extent to which they continue to provide cover for those who choose to resist environmental policies on other grounds – as for example the Prime Minister of Australia, who sees his nation’s coal reserves as a vital economic asset, one which outweighs both the damage done by the fires that have ravaged his country in recent weeks, and the risk of future conflagrations.
Science fails most gravely in its responsibility when it fails to properly consider all things, to weigh the whole of the evidence and to offer that evidence for corroboration and contradiction from other experts in the field. For decades the tobacco companies, and their own research teams, suppressed the evidence that linked smoking to cancer. And this isn’t just an issue of the past. Hardly a year goes by without it coming to light that some major pharmaceutical company has
suppressed evidence in its possession that suggests some highly lucrative product might not, after all, be as safe as its widespread prescription and usage would necessitate. It does concern me that one of the greatest shifts in recent decades is that less and less scientific research is being carried out by wholly independent academics who are free to choose the areas they wish to study and to present and publish whatever findings they may evidence. The dependence of science, even at university level, on sponsorship and support from those with commercial interests in the field, puts the task of considering all things at great risk. Even if a particular project itself has no commercial funding, many academics would be wary, and their employing institutions perhaps even more wary, of doing work that might upset the vested interests who will be looked to in order to fund future programmes of work, or to endow laboratories and research centres. It’s a brave university in the UK that would open up any field of research that might cause concern to the government of China, since so many Chinese students are paying juicy fees into the academic coffers.
I would hope that part of the charism of this Society can be to provide ethical and pastoral support for all those engaged in science who feel they are being pressed to act in ways that undermine the integrity of the scientific process. Those who are being coerced to consider only part of the evidence or to consider only those things that help reach the conclusion their sponsors or employers want to hear.
Secondly, we can take that mantra of “all things considered” as a spur to considering both the scientific and theological aspects of any matter, and considering them together.
In my work chairing the Ethical Investment Advisory Group of the Church of England, we have become, over the last couple of years or so, world leaders in devising support for investor groups who want to use their influence to tackle climate change, or to improve the safety of tailings dams in the mining industry. We are turning our next investigation onto the field of big data, and the large corporations that tend to hold, control and commercially exploit it. In each area, we work the theology and the science closely together, it’s an integrationist approach . Our findings and our strategies should be consistent both with what we know about the science and what we know about God and the Church. What we have found is that our strongly Anglican basis provides not only a grounding for how we should use our own modest investments of between ten and twenty billion dollars, but attracts many who do not share our theology but agree with the conclusions it enables us to reach. Our Climate Change investment tool is supported by over 13 trillion dollars of assets under management and is now used by a group called Climate Action 100+ which had over 30trillion of dollars under management even before Blackrock signed up earlier this week. Our mining initiative has the backing of many of the world’s largest investors as well as some of the most influential mine owners and managers. I do believe we have moved on significantly from the days when a church report into any matter of public interest contained an obligatory introductory chapter on theology which was then pretty well entirely ignored for the rest of the document.
The investment work I’m involved in, which we knew was having impact when one of my staff won a vote at the Exxon Mobile Annual meeting, in the teeth of robust opposition from the company’s directors, is an example of trying to fit together science and theology, but it isn’t the only one. For me, my very understanding of basic theological doctrines or positions depends on a process of considering all things that draws on my scientific understanding too. For example, the fact that we live in a universe that hasn’t always been around, but came into being in a huge flash of energy, or Big Bang – a theory first set out by a Belgian monk – helps shape my understanding of how God works within the laws of his universe in order to produce life forms capable of responding to divine love. The increasing awareness that the four dimensions of space and time we commonly perceive, are probably only a minority of the dimensions that exist, helps me get my head around a God who exists both within and beyond the visible universe defined by those four directions. Scrödinger’s famous Uncertainty Principle, helps me understand how in a

universe governed by certain basic laws, both human free will and divine Providence are liberated from the bonds of a narrow Calvinistic determinism.
Lastly, I want to commend the way in which Ordained Scientists serve as an example of what it means to cross tribal boundaries in our society, and to suggest that what we learn from our dual membership, and in particular from our responsibilities within the science tribe and Christian tribe, can be applied more generally to how we both transcend other tribal boundaries ourselves and the ways we can support others whose different dual memberships enable them to be boundary crossers too.
So, for example, in Manchester, I look to my many LGBT+ clergy to refute the accusation that Christianity is inherently homophobic. I can’t do their work, but I can back them in it, and see that they can progress their ministries to the most senior levels, including as bishops. I look to my senior clergy of other ethnic heritages (my Asian Dean, Caribbean Archdeacon, Latina canon) to live out the truth that to be Christian and Anglican doesn’t mean you have to adopt white British ways of thinking and believing. I can’t do their job but I can make sure that every major service in my Cathedral is led by a team who show visible ethnic diversity. Among those exploring vocation, I can ensure that lack of proficiency in English is not the bar to training for ordination that it is in many other dioceses. All in all, I can play my part to ensure the church for which I have responsibility under God is one that embraces and nurtures its boundary crossers.
So my final challenge to you would be to seek out where else in your particular church there are people with the gifts and experience brought from widely different contexts, and especially those who have most been rejected or marginalised within the church; to seek them out and to offer the aid you can from your own life journey and experience of dual membership as an Ordained Scientist. If each of us could find one person we could support in that way, we would be making a real impact.
I haven’t linked this sermon to some particular piece of scripture. I could readily have done so if I had felt it necessary. But all too often such links can be simply brought in after the fact, as loosely connected as those theology chapters of church reports I referred to earlier. To consider all things is to allow God to motivate and stir us by whatever in his creation happens to inspire. And whilst that might on some occasion be the most profound verse of the bible, it can also be a chance remark, overheard one January afternoon whilst travelling through the Tucson rush hour, on a National Public Radio broadcast.

Sermons

Beloved Mystery

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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.

Sermons

Language to Engage

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Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

Not surprisingly, since our first session on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about stories. I’m sorry I missed much of yesterday, and apologise if anything I say repeats (or worse, contradicts) what was said then. But then we’re scientists, so we’re used to having to handle corroborating and conflicting data – numbers that fit nicely onto the graph and numbers that are literally way off line.

But we’re more than scientists, we are theologians too. As such we work with the two basic, but separate, building blocks – numbers and words. Our numbers we fashion into formulae and theories, designs and products. Our words we aggregate into sermons and stories, doctrinal teachings and moral imperatives.

I wonder whether that makes the members of this society particularly useful, to both church and science, on those occasions when words and numbers clash and collide.

Last week I was sent a copy of a report on diocesan safeguarding statistics that was shortly to become a press release from the Church of England. It was well set out in a familiar academic style. Each section began with a very brief introduction, leading into a series of tables and figures, and was then followed by a few lines of text analysing what the numbers might mean. I was invited to comment on it, as the nearest to a statistician among those who have to field media enquiries on behalf of the Church. They numbers made sense, the textual description fitted them, but the overall effect wasn’t quite right. Bluntly, they lacked a story, or the story came too late. By the time a journalist had glanced at a few of the statistics, they would be writing their own narrative around them, with greater regard for what made good copy than for the truth of their assertions. Better, earlier narrative would make it harder (though I’m sure not impossible) for the numbers to be pressed into the service of some hostile agenda.

The suggestions I made were little more than probably any of us here today could have done. The paper just needed someone confident enough with both numbers and words to see how the two could be assembled into a coherent message.

As I mentioned to my small group on Wednesday, I learned how easily numbers lose out to words some years ago. Well over a decade ago, at a parliamentary launch event I was given a series of credit card sized pieces of paper that statistically demolished the ten most popular myths about migration. I thought it was a great piece of research, and bound to change minds. It had no impact whatsoever. A third hand story about someone’s daughter being denied a council house, and then seeing a family assumed to be foreigners moving into such a property the next week, carries far more weight, even if it is wildly inaccurate, than any well evidenced argument that migration has very little impact on housing waiting lists.

Entire chunks of UK welfare benefits policy have been based on the power of the narrative around the tiny numbers who seriously abuse the system, even if eradicating their abuses can only be done at the cost of catching many more innocent people in a poverty trap. I suspect every single family with ten or more children reliant on state benefits, and there are only a few dozen at most in the land, has had its day on the front page of at least one tabloid paper. Stories trump numbers, especially when those stories chime well with what we want to believe to be true. Confirmation bias is alive and doing very well, thank you.

Many of us here are people who are comfortable around numbers. We calculate and calibrate with them. We see them as our friends, and we treat them with the respect that friends deserve. Yet we ourselves fall victim to confirmation bias if we assume that others share that perspective. My wife Sue, who will be ordained as a Self Supporting Priest later this month, did some of her research into maths anxiety. In Western society to be illiterate is shameful, to be functionally innumerate is almost seen as a badge to be worn with pride. Outside the scientific community, and in the church as much as anywhere else, numbers are feared, misunderstood, shunned. Within science, words are often awkward, poorly delivered. We’ve all sat in the lecture theatre whilst the wonders of nature are rendered banal and boring by the limitations of the speaker’s language. The force and delight of discovery is often diminished or deflected by the weakness of how it is expressed.

So, are there ways that we can serve the church and society as those who have had to prove ourselves in both fields? Let me offer just two examples. You can think up your own later.
Challenging narratives that twist the evidence with ones that are equally, if not better, stories, yet are grounded in reality and can, when called upon, be supported by the data. When I was asked, following a lecture given whist I was in the USA for the Society’s retreat there, to turn my PhD into a book, I knew I would have to replace the statistical tables, much though I loved hem, with example. At the publisher’s request I’ve recently turned the same theory into a series of daily devotional readings for Lent, to be published later this year. A lot of my broadcasting work is grounded in the belief that there is no such thing as effective prose, only poetry that is travelling incognito.

Explaining scientific theories and technological advances in well-crafted prose. It can be done. Few people understand the equations that underlie quantum mechanics but far more think Schrödinger had a cat. The popularity of black holes is probably 75% because they were given such an evocative name. How can we, who are required by our ordination to be wordsmiths, help science find its language more reliably?

Sermons

The story I tell myself

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Sermon from Stig Graham,
Warden of the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

One of the joys of being Warden is that I get to share with my brothers and sisters in this Society my favourite Bible passages. Last year I was able to share with you the courage of Thomas, Thomas the Doubter, and this year it is the story of the Syrophoenician woman which, like Thomas, has been a pivotal one for me. The joy for you is that you can sit and listen to me.
Or is that just the story I tell myself. That may not be the story you tell one another in the bar or over dinner this evening.
We do like stories. As children, as adults, through all kinds of media, verbal, textual, digital, movies or theatre we flock to have the world explained to us. It really isn’t surprising that Jesus told parables, acted out his drama, drew on contextual symbols to try and communicate his Good News.
The week before last, here in the UK, the very last episode of The Big Bang Theory was televised. The essential theme was simple; over several years it followed four very geeky young men and scientists through their love lives, (which most of the time, until recent years, was defined more by its absence than its presence) and their careers. And it has to be said that young women in their lives were much more savvy than the boys were. The series concluded with a strong feel good ending with professional recognition, and the Nobel prize, but most all the recognition of the importance of friendship and the responsibilities it entails.
Sheldon (the Nobel prize winner)(in the interests of parity observing en passant that he won it with his wife with their joint paper on super asymmetry)(and yes, I know you are scientists but it’s a comedy so just go with it), Sheldon had a very clearly structured hierarchy of people in his head. Top of the pile are the theoretical physicists (just like him in fact), then come the experimental physicists followed by the lowly engineers. On being challenged that his wife is also an eminent neuroscientist he smiles condescendingly and observes that, well, yes but after all, it is only biology. And as for those who haven’t what it takes to be scientist, well… Certainly, that is the story Sheldon likes to tell himself.
And yes, it is funny – except it is a trope which has been around in science for a very long time. I am sure we have all had the experience of hearing someone joking about it, and we laugh and then think, ‘You know, you believe that, just a little bit, perhaps a little bit too much’. Have a listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast with Professor Brian Cox (and I am sorry Sharon, but somehow I can’t achieve the same level of passion in my voice as you when saying his name – perhaps it’s my lack of any kind of hair) and Robin Ince. A witty fun programme, but now and again, just a little too fervent. Or is that the story I like to tell myself?
And, by the by, in tomorrow’s Admissions Eucharist, the eucharistic prayer contains the line, ‘In the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation’. Us, the crown of all creation? Or is that the story we like to tell ourselves?
The story of the Syrophoenician woman is a case in point. Generally, in my experience, people don’t like this story. That was true in even my youth when we were much less aware or sensitive to issues of abuse but in this age of the #metoo generation it seems even more unacceptable. ‘Why does Jesus ignore her? That’s not very Christian’ is the popular cry. Part of the problem is that the reading we have just heard is normally split over two Sundays, by which time most people have forgotten the first half, assuming they were there to hear it in the first place.
But taken together, there are only two verses between Jesus saying, ‘For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person’ and then us being told that Jesus did not respond.
As a chaplain I would call it ‘holding the silence’. Creating a sound space to afford an opportunity for it to be filled. The disciples don’t need a question, nor even an invitation; they pile on in, sharing with the world what is in their hearts. ‘Send her away she is noisy, she is foreign, she is a woman’. Technically, of course this passage only specifies that she is shouting at them but as we know elsewhere the disciples become greatly exorcised when Jesus is talking with women, children and Gentiles; all those people who are clearly beneath him, and probably unclean – the story which is in their hearts, the story they tell themselves. And, remarkably, being ritually unclean is what they have just been accused of by the Pharisees.
For the record, I don’t believe for one moment that the Jesus was rude or abusive. I believe he knew exactly what he was doing: testing the disciples. It is possible that the Canaanite woman, surrounded by equally noisy men, was a woman of such great courage, fortitude and determination, not to mention desperation, that she still pursued her claim. I find it much more likely that in Jesus she saw someone who would not abuse her but would help her, finding in herself the confidence to block his way, kneeling before him, and engaging in witty if brief dialogue. Shades of the scandalous woman at the well, and an echo of Jesus’ own mother ignoring his response, overriding him, and simply saying to the servants, ‘Just do what he says’.
But more importantly today, I want to draw out what Jesus said about it being what comes out of our mouths which defiles us.
There are many examples in life of abusive behaviour, diminishing and demeaning others, because it aggrandizes ourselves. It is the self-affirming story we like to tell ourselves, because we are the ones who know better.
But let’s stay with the women – they are at the heart this Gospel story. We may shake our heads at the disciples. What narratives were running through their heads as they sought to send her away? We may condemn movie moguls exploiting young women for sexual favours – didn’t we just mention evil intentions and fornication. ‘No, not at all,’ is their cry, ‘I was merely helping these willing young women to develop their careers’. Well, that’s the story they keep telling themselves and, if they have the chance, tell the world too.
Thank goodness that doesn’t happen in the Church or Science…
Except of course it is horribly well documented what has happened in the Church. We even have our own designated form of abuse, spiritual abuse. And sadly, it is very real. And in Science too, people with power and authority abuse the vulnerable in all kinds of ways, sometimes indistinguishably from movie moguls. And I suspect we can’t begin to imagine the story they tell themselves to justify their actions.
But at least Science, the pure institutional concept, is safe, based as it is on reason, objective thought and empirical evidence. Sadly not. At present, there is a campaign for drug doses to be recalibrated for women because of their physiological differences. The proponents aver that present dosages are predicated are experiments which were mainly conducted by men on men and very often with diseases that afflict men. They also point to how little money has been spent on research on women’s ailments. And the history of science shows how often women have been dismissed, demeaned and denigrated just because they are women – and science has been used to justify the stereotypes. Women dying after childbirth because doctors cannot believe that they are the harbingers of death, ignoring the evidence about cleanliness and the washing of hands. The science around breast feeding does not bear review, as the poor delicate wee things, that is – the mothers, clearly don’t have the strength or capacity to breast feed their babies for any length of time. And as a woman scientist observed only last week on Radio 4, ‘If men suffered from endometriosis rather than erectile dysfunction, I wonder where the money would have been spent’. Even as late as the 1950’s scientists at Harvard studying menstruation were still talking about ‘meno-toxins’, supporting the work of Bela Schick who in the 1920’s had published anecdotal evidence that contact with menstruating women caused bread to fail to rise, flowers to wilt and animals to die.
So what? What can we do? As priests and as scientists we can call out poor theology, poor science, poor ethics, especially when it impacts the vulnerable and disempowered. As Christians we are called to stand with the poor and oppressed, those in need. As scientists and priests, we have opportunities that others don’t to fulfil that call. But as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth we are also called to examine ourselves, our own motivations, to challenge the stories we tell ourselves too. To ask ourselves the question, and believe me standing here before you, I feel the irony deeply, to ask ourselves the question, ‘What is coming out my mouth that defiles me and the image of God that is within me?
Just as well I believe in a God who knows what it is to be human.
Just as well I believe in a God who knows how to forgive the unforgivable.
It may be the story I tell myself, but it is the myth and reality by which I try to live my life.

Sermons

Learning from Change

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Sermon from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2018

I’m very much in “proud dad” mode at the moment. A few days ago, my daughter got the final results from her university exams; she will shortly graduate from Exeter with a First in Biology. Within hours she had started job hunting for research based work. Half my age, she now uses statistical modelling techniques that blow my own achievements completely out of the water. What fascinates her, and where she hopes to make a career in scientific research, is how species and their Ecosystems respond to changes in the wider environment. She’s come a long way from simply protesting about the dangers of climate change, to wanting to understand where the risks lie, and what opportunities we have to do something about them. Her science, like much of the scientific task, is about how, where and why things change.
Theology can present itself as almost the very opposite discipline. It can be characterised as being primarily about delving deeper into the unchanging truths that lie at the heart of faith. The previous Bishop of London famously, but jokingly, said, ” You want change? Don’t you think things are bad enough already?” So I believe, that one of the gifts those with both a scientific and theological training can bring to the latter, is a willingness to engage with change creatively and positively. A generation or two ago, the Process Theology championed by the likes of Whitehead and Norman Pittenger (who I knew in my Cambridge undergraduate days) sought to do just that. By I suspect there’s a new task, for a current generation of thinkers, which may build on different foundations. Indeed, it would be wonderfully ironic if the only way to think about change was the way that earlier generations had developed.
So let me suggest three areas where a scientist’s willingness to engage with change might impact for good on our theology.

Liturgy and Change

Leading a church that contained charismatics and traditional Anglicans. It’s not whether you have both change and stability, it’s about where you locate them, eg hymns or liturgy. Most of us find other people’s preferred places of change and stability at best odd, at worst disturbing.
How far can we do change in our liturgy so that it helps us cope with change in wider life rather than being an impediment? Can change done well in liturgy help. Or is it better to make liturgy the locus of the deeply fixed?
Division 2 performances in a Premier League world.
How do new arrivals in our churches cope with the fact we do some things not that well? What can we change in order not to look like we don’t really care very much about our God?

Evangelism and Change

What does commitment to Christ mean in a society where the notion of commitment has changed hugely in a lifespan?
A society where for most there is no permanent career, life partners are changed, and we love in communities that don’t look like what we joined.
What do we do when a gospel rooted in God’s face to face engagement with humanity in Christ, confronts a society where proximity and presence is overtaken by social media?
What does salvation mean in a world that has lost a sense of sin? And where church pronouncements about morals are seen as toxic to our brand?

Pastoral Care and change

Has the home become a place of privacy not of gathering and welcoming? Can home visits still work beyond the Elderly?
Can home groups survive?
Can pastoral care still be an appealing prospect in a society struggling with the safeguarding agenda?
What is the role of the vicar or lay visitor in a context of highly professionalised interventions for our wellbeing?

Concluding Remarks

I don’t believe that change is ultimately a threat to the propagation and practice of the Christian Faith. I do believe that failing to grapple with the nature of change is the real threat.
I also believe that we inhabit church structures that were built more to sustain stability than to engage creatively with change. A church more Benedictine than Franciscan.
But I am an inveterate Franciscan. And I believe those of us with scientific know how can help the church to find the right responses to the big questions around change that face us.
Amen.

Sermons

Changing Minds

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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.

Sermons

Orienting Ourselves

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Sermon by Keith Suckling, Warden, at Annual, Sneaton Castle, June 2016

This sermon was greatly influenced by very recent events. The UK referendum on membership of the European Union had only a few days before the Gathering resulted in a small ‘Leave’ majority. This was a shock to many and very quickly became a major topic of discussion amongst UK-based members. Whether one supported the remain or the leave side, most of us were very disturbed at the tone of the debate that h ad taken place over the past weeks. Uniquely, it was necessary for the Gathering at Sneaton Castle to provide space for us to begin to come to terms with the new very uncertain situation we found ourselves in.

Almost as soon as I had arrived at Sneaton Castle I realised that I was going to have to re-cast my thoughts for my address at this closing Eucharist. Many of us are still in the process of re-orienting ourselves to the reality of a vote to leave the European Union and this has been accompanied by very intense feelings.
Over the past few days we’ve been hearing about the lives of the Northern Saints – people from around here who lived in very uncertain times and showed a leadership that offers encouragement today. So I’m going to try to follow a train of thought that will take us from where we find ourselves now back to the saints of the sixth and seventh centuries and perhaps give us a different vantage point from which to view the recent events.
So to start in the present. Even before the referendum vote a few days ago I, like many others, had been almost in despair about the conduct of the campaign. Politicians on both sides of the debate had been making definitive statements about things that could never be said with any degree of certainty. It’s not unique to the UK. There is a similar sense across the Atlantic as the Presidential Election approaches in the USA. Politicians everywhere seem to feel an imperative to show certainty even when it is clearly impossible. They can’t, daren’t, admit that they do not really know. As scientists, who understand data and how it is interpreted, we are immediately uneasy. For example, we know that economic models are just that, models and not the reality, and that their output depends upon their structure and parameterisation. As ordained scientists (unlike some other kinds) I would suggest that we are more sensitive to the distinctions between what we know, how much we know, and further we are able to sense how much we can know. It may not be easy to accept this all the time, but we need to resist the demand for certainty, required by a public driven by the appetite of the media for a new story every day (at the least).
Theologically we may note a similar pattern. Many of us are as uncomfortable with the over-definitive statements of some branches of Christianity as we are with those of over-ambitious scientists. As I’ve said before at these meetings, we need a degree of humility about what we can say scientifically and theologically. As we do this, we can make our journey into the past and find ourselves comfortably linked with the sixth century, this time with the Irish missionary, St Columbanus (543-21 November 615). He was a key figure in the Irish missionary activity in the early medieval period, founding a number of abbeys (e.g. Luxeuil in France and Bobbio in Italy). I’m always struck by how much some historical figures seem to have achieved. Apart from his travelling ministry, Columbanus left many writings and a few paragraphs seem to be exceptionally relevant 1500 years later. Here’s how he offers an understanding of God, and importantly for us, he relates it to our understanding of the natural world.
From the Instructions of St Columbanus, abbot
God is everywhere. He is immeasurably vast and yet everywhere he is close at hand, as he himself bears witness: I am a God close at hand, and not a God who is distant. It is not a God who is far away that we are seeking, since (if we deserve it) he is within us. For he lives in us as the soul lives in the body – if only we are healthy limbs of his, if we are dead to sin. Then indeed he lives within us, he who has said: And I will live in them and walk among them. If we are worthy for him to be in us then in truth he gives us life, makes us his living limbs. As St Paul says, In him we live and move and have our being.
Given his indescribable and incomprehensible essence, who will explore the Most High? Who can examine the depths of God? Who will take pride in knowing the infinite God who fills all things and surrounds all things, who pervades all things and transcends all things, who takes possession of all things but is not himself possessed by any thing? The infinite God whom no-one has seen as he is? Therefore let no-one try to penetrate the secrets of God, what he was, how he was, who he was. These things cannot be described,
examined, explored. Simply – simply but strongly – believe that God is as God was, that God will be as God has always been, for God cannot be changed.
So who is God? God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God. Do not demand to know more of God. Those who want to see into the depths must first consider the natural world, for knowledge of the Trinity is rightly compared to knowledge of the depths of the sea: as Ecclesiastes says, And the great depths, who shall fathom them? Just as the depths of the sea are invisible to human sight, so the godhead of the Trinity is beyond human sense and understanding. Thus, I say, if anyone wants to know what he should believe, let him not think that he will understand better through speech than through belief: if he does that, the wisdom of God will be further from him than before.
Therefore, seek the highest knowledge not by words and arguments but by perfect and right action. Not with the tongue, gathering arguments from God-free theories, but by faith, which proceeds from purity and simplicity of heart. If you seek the ineffable by means of argument, it will be further from you than it was before; if you seek it by faith, wisdom will be in her proper place at the gateway to knowledge, and you will seeherthere,atleastinpart.Wisdomisinacertainsenseattainedwhenyoubelieveintheinvisible without first demanding to understand it. God must be believed in as he is, that is, as being invisible; even though he can be partly seen by a pure heart.
Columbanus was a link between Britain and Ireland and continental Europe 1500 years ago. Since then the links have sometimes been closer, sometimes more at a distance. No doubt that process will continue its ebb and flow. We have heard in Rosalind’s talks of the many uncertainties of those earlier times. Now, similarly, we have the instabilities and uncertainties of our own time, ones of which we are particularly conscious at the moment. But look at what we have in common with those earlier times. The thought world is different in many ways, but it is also the same. Columbanus cautions us against trying to pin God down with too much certainty. That is an essential theological insight, supported by scripture and the early church. As scientists we may not always be at ease with uncertainty but at least it is part of our regular way of dealing with the world. As ministers of the church we gladly accept the ambiguities and are not trapped by the demand of the political and media communities for certainty. That is, as Columbanus says, because we do not ‘gather arguments from God-free theories, but by faith’. So as scientists and ministers we are in a unique position to understand the nature of the complex and contradictory situation we find ourselves in. ‘Complex’, ‘contradictory’, ‘ambiguity’ – all these words carry with them potential overtones of anxiety. I believe that reading the words of Columbanus, and others of his time, all these negatives are erased by the sense of the beauty of the creation which reflects the character of its Creator. It’s in that context, which has its own constancy and consistency, its own certainty, that we will be able to hold out a hand to accompany those we minister to through the many steps ahead which still have to be identified and negotiated.
Peace be with us all.

Sermons

Scientific Epiphany

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Sermon by our Bp. David Walker, Visitor, at the 2016 retreat (US)

Today is probably the most auspicious date in the liturgical calendar for us to have our admissions and renewals Eucharist. The feast of the Epiphany could be said to be the moment when science and religion meet and greet.

The wise travellers from the East, using whatever mixture of astronomical and astrological calculation was current, have found and followed a star and arrived at Bethlehem. Not only that but they have the wisdom to know what gifts to bring with them, to offer to the infant Christ. All of that without any grounding in the Hebrew Scriptures. Their brief, one might even go as far as to call it diversionary, visit to Jerusalem only confirms what the star was already leading them towards.

There’s a lot of things to see up there in the sky. Even without telescopes, the lack of light pollution 2000 years ago would have given these stargazers plenty to look at. Their skill, the same skill needed by their descendants today, such as those who are seeking out new subatomic particles or observing the different constituents of a human gene, is to turn a massive amount of data into a much smaller amount of knowledge. Wisdom lies in being able to discern the value of the knowledge produced.

Both the scientist and the theologian work in a similar way. Existing theory is studied and tested. Patterns are observed in the world around us. Concepts and hypotheses are proposed and tested. Those that best fit reality survive long enough. So that in turn they become the progenitors of subsequent developments. You could say both science and theology are evolutionary processes. Which, as with modern evolutionary theories, have their moments of rapid breakthrough, as well as long periods of much slower change.

Both science and faith provide the means for producing practical benefits for human living. Whether it’s cellphones or support for refugees, both make a difference. And both are equally capable of being distorted in ways that damage the creation. The emergence of ISIS in the last couple of years has as much to do with their effectiveness in putting technology, such as social media, to evil use as it does to their warping and misusing one of the world’s great religions. When Donald Trump calls for blocking both Muslims and the Internet, he at least has cottoned on to the fact that both faith and science are being abused. Not that this would make me at all easy at the thought that you guys might elect him as your next president.

So let me, by way of evidence and example, suggest three particular areas where science and religion have overlapping and compatible concerns: one where there’s already plenty of good work, one that needs some attention, and one that we don’t seem to be tackling, yet in my view very much need to. Please excuse me for drawing much of my examples from the UK.

Climate change

I want to cite as a good example, response to climate change. Dean Mark Richardson drew our attention to his own experience of the Paris Summit this morning, and to the excellent encyclical produced last year by Pope Francis. Well, last summer the Ethical Investment Advisory Committee of the Church of England, of which I am a member, published, with the advance endorsement of the main church investing bodies, a policy paper on how to use our institutional shareholder power to press the energy supply industry towards a greener future. The paper behind the policy statement contained both theological and scientific argument. Not every scientist or theologian would necessarily agree with either part, but it worked with the broad consensus of both scientific and theological enquiry into the topic, and it gained very widespread and favourable report in the secular media as well as in church circles. It’s already making a difference. The main church investors, with about $15B at their disposal, have withdrawn from companies with more than 10% of their assets in tar sands and thermal coal, judging these to be the dirtiest forms of energy, and the companies to be those with little likelihood that they would diversify away. Pressure is now being put on oil producers, to become the kind of energy suppliers we will need in a much lower carbon consuming world.

Human genetics

To me that’s a good example of running the theology and science hand in hand in order to deliver a robust answer to a pressing issue. The advantage we had of course was that the work was ours. We could produce and refine it and only let it out into the public domain when we were confident it would stand up to any challenge

Last night Ted Peters spoke to us of his own work on issues of human genetics and especially stem cell research. It was good to hear of how a group had got together and been able to analyse the issues and arguments in advance of political decisions having to be made. However, my next example, from the UK last summer, shows how much harder it is when the requirement is to respond to somebody else’s initiative, with relatively little warning.

It came about when a group of British medical researchers issued a press release calling for permission to be given to produce embryos using DNA from more than two people. When a staff officer for the Church of England suggested that there might be significant ethical questions and that this wasn’t a matter to be left entirely to be decided by what was scientifically possible, it was immediately reported as evil religion attacking kind scientists who were simply trying to help couples have a healthy baby. It was an example, in Ted’s scheme, of the argument from beneficence. One of our Society members, Bishop Lee Rayfield, found himself having to explain the church’s position on the BBC, in particular to speak about unintended consequences. He made a good fist of it, and that aspect of the story fairly quickly died away. But damage had been done. The story had spread far wider than the rebuttal ever would.

It’s not that the churches in the UK hadn’t been thinking about human embryology issues. The problem lay elsewhere.

First, the story was always going to be about how medical science wants to help parents have babies. That’s how the group asking for change in the law were promoting it, and it ran much better in the media as a story about childlessness than one about academic science or ethical problems.

Second, we really do need to make sure that the first voice heard from the churches in such a debate is a positive one. As many of you know, Lee had been recovering after a period of serious illness, and I suspect someone thought it not necessary to put him up as spokesperson.

Finally, every journalist knows that a story is sharper if you can put up a contrary opinion. We fell into the trap of letting ourselves become that aunt Sally.

In future we need to be a lot sharper, to be clear about what a media story will look like and respond to it with a strong speaker and in ways that avoid a polarisation that puts us in the wrong corner. But let’s note, this wasn’t about science being always good and religion always bad. It was never really a science story, it was a “right to have healthy children” story. We missed the central point.

Fighting the memes

It’s been said once or twice over this last two days that the “science versus religion” polarisation is passé. Maybe it is among most professionals in both fields, but nobody seems to have told wider society, and that’s where it continues to live and replicate itself as a meme.

Several UK newspapers ran a story last week that originated from Colorado. Most ran with the headline “Religion has been causing conflict for over 2000 years, say scientists”. The headline did, in fairness, largely replicate that of the university press release, which was about as far as most of the media went in trying to research the story. The one paper that did bother to ring one of the researchers involved discovered that a team of anthropologists had studied two ancient societies. One of them had been unstable, the other had formed a long lasting stable state. In both cases they had argued that religion was at the core.

I presume that US universities, like their British counterparts, all have Public Relations departments dedicated to getting the institution noticed, so that more students will be attracted. I guess most researchers grimace at the headlines they write, just as much as many journalists despair over what subeditors do to their stories. And certainly a headline that read “anthropologists find religion sometimes made ancient societies more stable, and sometimes less” is not going to get much coverage.

But never mind the inaccuracy of the way in which the findings were reported. What inevitably struck me, just as I was doing my packing to come here, was that both the original press release and the subsequent reporting of it went for the “science attacks religion” meme. It’s just possible that the University of Colorado has a marketing policy that has identified it will best thrive by attracting students who themselves have negative attitudes towards religion. In a competitive market place for American higher education there must be room for that. What really frustrates me is that the headline so chimed with a conventional view among UK journalists that only one of them thought it worth a phone call to check the story out. More cynically, perhaps the others took the same line that one otherwise highly respected British Religious correspondent did a few years ago with a story. It was getting late in the evening. Her editor wanted her copy immediately. She had worked out that if she checked it, it would probably fall apart. So she submitted it unchecked. The editor was happy. And she got to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

“Science attacks religion” is the dominant version of the meme, but it also has an occasional converse side, “religion attacks science”, and not just over the stale issues of creationism versus volition.

The meme about science and religion being at war with each other, constantly launching attacks on the opposition, is one that this society has a prime aim in combatting. Our Members are men and women who have good standing in both the scientific and faith communities, through their academic qualifications, their practice and their ordination to the ministry of their individual denominations. We support each other in that task, uniting in a community that is mostly lived in dispersed mode, but where as many of us as can come together here and in the UK to pray, reflect and have a depth of fellowship that will sustain us for the lonelier tasks in our churches, universities and cities. Those being admitted today, and those renewing their promises, are making a serious commitment.

But let me suggest that in one sense the particular meme is not the problem. The problem is that of living in a society all too vulnerable to memes of all descriptions. Other memes have other victims. “Muslims are not loyal citizens” runs one. “Refugees are almost all young male economic migrants runs another”. “LGBTQ people are likely to prey on our children ” still gets an airing in the UK, I don’t know about over here. There’s a famous statement often attributed to the German pastor Martin Neimoller…..

Maybe our true task, is not to focus on one particular meme, but to be associate prepared to stand up to all who are the victims of memes. It may even encourage them to stand up for us.

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Scientists and Sceptics

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Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Dr. David Walker, Visitor at the Annual Retreat of the Society of Ordained Scientists 1 June 2015, Scargill House

There are probably as many wildly inaccurate myths about scientists as there are about people of religious faith. As priests we are seen as only one step away from those who would walk into a seaside resort and fire bullets at the tourists. As scientists we are only the press of a button from blowing up our planet through a nuclear apocalypse or submerging it beneath a sea of grey goo. All such myths need to have some anchor in a small part of the truth, which is then distorted and expanded so as to assume itself to be the whole of the picture, but most of them are sufficiently laughable as to not impact on the way that we see ourselves. The danger comes when some part of the religious or the scientific community takes on board one of these exaggerations and distortions, and begins to define itself along the lines the myth sets out.

One of those myths is the notion that science must be rooted in scepticism. I was ordained on St Thomas’s day and I rejoice at having that connection with him. But Thomas is not primarily a sceptic, he simply wants the best available evidence, evidence his fellow apostles have already had, before his own eyes. We often forget that the encounter between Jesus and Thomas concludes with the Lord saying, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe”.

If scientists were sceptics, scientific progress would be much slower than it is. The charism of a scientist is not to be one who doubts and distrusts, we can leave that to the most abstract of philosophers. It is to be a person who spots the recurrent patterns in the natural order, and then studies them. Sometimes that results in finding that a particular pattern has no apparent meaning or no discernible consequences, but it is through the developing and testing of apparent patterns that science, in all its many forms, progresses; because patterns provide predictability.

One of the great marvels of creation is that so much of it is comprehensible, and hence predictable. Why is it that the universe largely obeys some fairly simply written (if sometimes much harder to solve) mathematical equations? How is it that my brain recognises the sounds you are making, and finds enough similarity in the patterns of sound waves others have created to be able to abstract from them a series of words to which common meanings have been assigned? That sometimes we find we are misunderstanding each other because a particular word carries different connotations to us both, or because a concept is not easily translated from one language to another is not. Surprising. What is amazing is how little that happens. The great early twentieth century Christian apologist GK Chesterton marvelled at the fact that when he took his ride on the London Underground, not only did his train always pass through the same stations, but it passed through them each day in exactly the same order. A true sceptic would never dare ride the tube, for fear of arriving in some different and random destination every time.

Jesus again and again invites people to recognise the patterns in things. He reminds his hearers that they are accustomed to looking at the sky and predicting what the weather will be, but are hopeless at recognising the signs of God’s Kingdom coming among them. He describes patterns of human behaviour, such as that a man let off a huge sum of money owed will love the one who has remitted his debts more than one released from a far smaller sum. And he invites people to see humanity as made in God’s pattern, so that his stories tell us not only of how you and I behave but how God himself is too.

When I first moved from being a mathematician to a theologian and priest I was often asked if it wasn’t a very radical change. My early response was to say that I could now count the number of angels balancing on a pinhead from two different theoretical systems. Once I got immersed into public ministry though it was the experience of recognising patterns that stood me in good stead, it proved even more helpful than having learned the Greek alphabet in my previous career.

As a parish priest my work was grounded in the pastoral contacts and engagements I undertook. But meeting with people in their moment of need isn’t the full call of the ordained. I’ve become very fond of a saying coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “When we’ve fished enough bodies out of the water it becomes time to take a trip upstream and see who’s throwing them in.” After a number of pastoral engagements repeated patterns begin to emerge, these can be identified and the pattern itself addressed rather than simply the individual circumstances.

Working repeatedly with young people unable to find accommodation we found that there were particular obstacles to landlords taking them on as tenants. We set up a local ecumenical organisation that was able to provide financial guarantees and tenancy support which made the prospective tea ants much more attractive give. We saved the landlords paying agents’ fee and we ensured the quality of the accommodation was up to standard. We addressed the pattern not just the particularity.

When we’ve heard a selection of stories we can also lay them alongside the narratives in our scriptures and church traditions. In another place we found that the coal mine, for 75 years the main source of employment for young adults, had ceased recruiting. This left many young people effectively rejected by society. We set this alongside the prophesy in Isaiah 65, that in God’s Kingdom people can build for themselves, not just for others. We trained ten young adults in the necessary skills, organisational as well as construction. They formed themselves into a cooperative and built a terrace of houses they could live in.

There’s a method of working here, which I hope any minister would be able to adopt. But for those of us who also have a scientific training, who are trained in this recognition of patterns from a discipline outside of theology, I think there is a particular role we can play in being exemplars of it. For, at the end of the day, to be a good priest and to be a good scientist is to spot the patterns in the world we are engaging with, and to act on them.

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.