Sermon

God After... VI: God After Einstein

June 30, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • John 1:1–4

When Einstein toured the United States, he was always surrounded by adoring hordes. He was always signing autographs and posing for the paparazzi before the paparazzi was a thing; it was the greatest mob of groupies until Elvis and the Beatles came along later. All because he changed the world just by thinking about it. When he was 16 years old, he asked himself, “What would a beam of light look like if I were running alongside it? Would it stand still? Could you see little bits and pieces and particles of light?” Ten years later, he wrote down his answer as the theory of special relativity, which is simple to state but almost impossible to understand. Simple to state: The speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to the light source. 

God After... V: God After Darwin

June 23, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Genesis 1:20–25

While island-hopping in the Galapagos, he noticed that the finches on each island had beaks of different shape and size, longer or broader, depending on the type of indigenous seeds available to them on their respective islands. The tortoises had shells of different shape and configuration; their necks were longer or shorter, and Charles Darwin surmised that this was so because of the type of foliage and calories available to them in their respective environments.   And so he starts coming up with this odd theory called “natural selection.” It may be the hugest and most cataclysmic scientific idea of all time, but it is ridiculously simple. Darwin surmised that all forms of life on earth descended from a common ancestor, and the stunning variety of living things as we know them results from five simple facts that are represented by the mnemonic acronym VISTA.  

God After... IV: God After Smith and Hutton

June 16, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Psalm 121, Isaiah 40

What happens when you see the earth, not as a univocal creation, created all at once but instead as forming over a timescale we can hardly comprehend? For one it opens up the timescale so that Darwin can begin to imagine the possibilities of species developing over an infinitely broad timescale. But there’s something more about this geological breaking open of time—toward what is called Deep Time—that makes Hutton and then Smith lifelong though often unnoticed partners in our understanding of the very foundations of the world. And it makes me wonder if in part, the ancient prophet Isaiah saw a kind of Deep Time, a geologic process unfolding such that, “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground level, the rugged places a plain.”#_ftn1 Geologists too like Isaiah, see valleys raised up to mountains by earthquake and tectonic plate, and rough ground made plain by the weathering of wind and water. There is they say, “a sermon in stone.” Or as Jesus says “even the stones cry out.”#_ftn2 #_ftnref1 Isaiah 40 #_ftnref2 Luke 19:40

God After... III: God After Copernicus

June 9, 2024 • Christine V. Hides • Psalm 8

Psalm 8 is a poem that sings of a relationship with God in which humility and inquiry go hand in hand. Yes, we are lower than God but, also given responsibility for things here on earth. We are given the gift of reason that enables us to ask the question that echoes through history: “What is humanity’s place in the universe?”   In the sixteenth century the church said “earth” and therefore humanity is at the center. Don’t you see the sun rising, moving across the sky, and setting each day? Nicolaus Copernicus was a priest who outlined a heliocentric theory of the universe in 1515. Though he was not the first to propose a sun-centered astronomical system, he developed mathematical techniques that made it substantially equivalent to the geocentric model that dated back to Aristotle. Perhaps because he was still working out the math, or perhaps because he feared the church’s response, he delayed publication of his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until 1543, which happens to be the year of his death.

God After... II: God After Gutenberg

June 2, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Romans 10:13–17, Mark 14:22–25

And that almost instantaneous communication by junk-mail flier was only possible because 60 years before Halloween, 1517 a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, had come up with a moveable-type printing press capable of mass-producing books and other written communication. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation.

God After...I: The God Who Is and Who Was and Who Is to Come

May 26, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Genesis 1:1–5, Revelation 1:8

It’s Trinity Sunday. It’s not as theatrical as other church holidays—like the fire, wind and ruddy paraments of last week’s Pentecost, for example.  It’s the only festival of the Church Year that is devoted to a doctrine, rather than to a person or an event, like Christmas or Easter. But once a year, the Christian Church pauses for a day to remind itself about the nature of our God. And what it says is that God is Three.

What’s Saving Your Life Right Now? VII: The Practice of Living with Purpose: Vocation

May 19, 2024 • Christine V. Hides • Matthew 22:34–40

Kenilworth Union Church roots its mission in two verses: Micah 6:8 and the Greatest Commandment from Matthew’s gospel we just heard. These are carved in stone over the cloister walk. When Jesus was asked this trick question, he knew the answer because he grew up learning scripture. Maybe his youth leaders said something like what we say every Wednesday night at youth group: here in this church we have one rule and it is the only rule we need. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.   Love God. Love neighbor. So simple and easy to remember. Barbara Brown Taylor isn’t the first person to point out that we can love God and love our neighbor no matter what we are doing: playing soccer, taking out the trash, having recess on the playground, going to school, or working as an investment banker or making milkshakes at Dairy Queen.

What's Been Saving Your Life? VI: The Practice of Walking on the Earth: Groundedness

May 12, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Exodus 3:1–12

This message might have just as easily been received elsewhere. Maybe Moses didn’t have to go into the wilderness to hear, to see, to take off his shoes, and receive what was holy. Maybe he didn’t have to go beyond the mountains with a herd of sheep, into a wilderness beyond the wilderness in order to meet God.   This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the one who numbered the stars. The one who ordered the planets. The one spoke the words “let there be light” and there was light. This is not a God of the margins, but of the center, a God about whom this whole story is written.   But Moses isn’t paying attention. And it takes a burning bush to turn him toward God.  

What's Saving Your Life Right Now? V: The Practice of Paying Attention : Reverence

May 5, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Revelation 4

We know that reverence is one of the things that is saving our lives right now. We know what makes us flourish. We know what’s good for us. We know what we need, because every day as we scroll through our media, we encounter a swollen, grotesque, vainglorious ego scowling out at us from the screen, reverencing nothing and respecting no one, and we know instinctively that that is exactly what we don’t want to be.   It’s ironic: to live large, to live up to the towering stature of our full humanity, we remind ourselves now and then that we are in fact small, contingent, unnecessary creatures, living only by the grace of that Crafty Wizard who threw a hundred billion galaxies across vast eons of emptiness.   And so now and then we pause from our daily round to hear something like George Frideric Handel’s "Dettingen Te Deum", a staggering paeon to the matchless majesty of God Godself, the “luminous deep being a lofty light,” as Dante puts.#_ftn1 #_ftnref1Dante Alighieri, Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, ll. 115ff.

The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings: Benediction

April 28, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Numbers 6:22–26

In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating the funeral site of Ketef Hinnom in West Jerusalem, and came across a small piece of silver amid the debris pottery and other artifacts. He describes them as about the size of a filter on a cigarette, it being the tobacco heyday of the 1970s and all. Two pieces of silver about the size of a pencil eraser, the size of a tic tac, the size of a ladybug. It wasn’t solid silver, but instead, a silver scroll. Unroll it and in tiny script are the words of the blessing I read to you today. It is from 600 BCE.   Think of the artistry. Who pounded the silver? Who chose which blessing to include? Who took a small carving tool to write the text? Who rolled the silver into a small amulet? Who wore the amulet with its holy blessing?   The blessing of the wilderness was held dear, embraced, honored, retained, remembered, condensed, and passed on. The blessing of the wilderness, or rather the blessing in the wilderness, was transmitted, entrusted, bestowed generation to generation, so that we might hear it. “May YHWH bless you and keep you.”

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What's Saving Your Life Right Now? III: The Practice of Encountering Others: Community

April 21, 2024 • Sarah Champlin • Matthew 25:24–40

Each community I’ve been a part of has helped me uncover a little more of that secret. I expect this gradual uncovering will turn out to be a lifelong journey but here’s what I’ve learned so far: when we offer space that invites people to be fully, freely themselves—they show us God. Jesus tells us clearly when we feed the hungry—we feed him. When we welcome the stranger—we welcome him. Within every person lies the spark of the divine. Our practice of welcome, of community, helps us draw it out of each other. Christine Pohl another community connoisseur, believes that hospitality is at the heart of Christian Life, drawing from God’s grace. She says that we respond to the welcome that God has offered us and replicate that welcome in the world. When we replicate that welcome, we can’t help but see God everywhere.

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