May the Peace of the Sabbath Be with You

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.                                                                       Genesis 2:1-3

On the Sabbath day, Jesus went to the Synagogue, 

as he always did.                                                                Luke 4:16

This past Sunday during the Children’s Moment I talked with the kids about Sabbath and summer. When I asked if anyone knew why there was a Sabbath, Evan was quick to answer, “Because in Genesis God rested on the seventh day.”

Exactly right!

  

Someone once asked a rabbi, “Why did God give us this mighty poem of Creation? The Rabbi answered, “To teach us to rest on the Sabbath.” 

Jesus kept the Sabbath, as did his disciples. 

Even on that darkest of days, on the day after the crucifixion, they kept the Sabbath. Keeping Sabbath is at the center of our spiritual practice.

One of the most memorable experiences of my life was observing Sabbath in Jerusalem. With some rabbi friends I went to three different synagogues (Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday evening). The Saturday evening service, at the close of Shabbat, was at a tiny ultra-orthodox Synagogue which seemed to have been transported, unchanged, from eighteenth century Eastern Europe.  We had Shabbat dinner at the elegant King David Hotel. And throughout the day there was fellowship and conversation.

The most significant part of the experience was the sense of peace I felt. That feeling is brought back in the traditional Sabbath greeting, "Shabbat Shalom." It means, "Sabbath peace." It is a short way of saying, "the peace of the Sabbath be with you." 

The refreshing gift of Shabbat is not that work is forbidden, but that rest is permitted. For one day, we are reminded that life does not depend on us; that we can trust God; that we do not have to be busy every moment; that God provides.

At its best, summer in New England is a kind of Shabbat. My prayer for you this summer is that you will have a sense of Shabbat. Resist the temptation to turn leisure into work. Just say "no" to the cultural pressure to fill the summer with so many fun activities that it feels like a part time job.

In the summer, at the United Methodist Church in East Greenwich we make a special effort to create a time of refreshment and renewal in our worship services. We will have childcare for infants and toddlers, and our “one room Sunday School” for older children. And summer, with its more informal atmosphere, is a wonderful time for children to attend worship with their parents and learn what it’s like to experience the whole service.



Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Pope Francis and Evolution

The heavens are telling the glory of God; 

and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
Psalm 19:1-4

In an editorial today, The Providence Journal notes that “Pope Francis, unlike many of his predecessors, is more than willing to share his personal opinions on a wide variety of controversial issues.” According to the Journal, the most recent example of his willingness to speak out on controversial issues came at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City, where he spoke out a few days ago on “the evolution-versus-creation debate.”

Essentially, what he said was that there was no inherent conflict between evolution and Christian faith.

One assumes this must have come as a great relief to the biology professors teaching evolution at Catholic Universities around the world, as well as to the thousands of teachers in Catholic high schools.

This is not news.

To be fair, the editorial acknowledges that Pope Francis is not the first pope to positively about evolution. The Journal quotes Josephine McKenna of Religion News Service as observing that “In 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed there was no opposition between evolution and Catholic doctrine. [And] In 1996, St. John Paul II endorsed Pius’ statement.”

According to the Journal, “it was the direct and remarkably straightforward manner of the pope’s response that caught more than a few observers off guard. He strongly defended the long-held position of the Roman Catholic Church and, most importantly, established a modern link between evolution and creation.”

The only reason anyone could have been caught off guard is because over the last several decades the news media have focused on the most anti-scientific members of the Christian community and made it seem like they spoke for everyone. Over the last five hundred years, faith and science have had few quarrels until these last few decades. And even now, the conflict does not exist for mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics. And it does not exist for many evangelicals.

I appreciate the willingness of Pope Francis to say things that need to be said. “When we read about Creation in Genesis,” he said, “we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so. He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.”

True enough. The book of Genesis is not a scientific treatise. And it is not a history book. It is symbolic language. It is about meaning and relationships. It is about who we are and whose we are.

Climate Change and Hurricane Sandy

The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; ²⁰the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

Genesis 7:19-20

Roger Boisjoly died suddenly last winter in his sleep. He had been diagnosed with cancer a few weeks before that, but his death was unexpected. In 1986 he was an engineer working for Morton Thiokol, a major contractor for the Space Shuttle Challenger. He had argued vociferously against the launch in January of 1986 because his research showed that the seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets were subject to failure in cold temperatures. With launch temperatures predicted to be around thirty degrees Fahrenheit, Boisjoly believed it was not safe to launch. Tragically, he was right. Boisjoly spent the last decades of his life addressing engineering students on ethical decision-making.

Dan Miller, an engineer and climate change expert has compared climate change to the Challenger disaster. In their eagerness to keep the launch on schedule, NASA managers asked Boisjoly and a small number of other engineers at Thiokol to prove that the shuttle would blow up before they would be willing to cancel the launch. Miller points out that they were asking the wrong question. “They should have asked for assurance that the flight would be safe in order to launch.”

Similarly, the climate change skeptics argue that the vast body of data showing evidence of manmade climate change is not conclusive “proof.”

The computer models produced by climate change scientists have predicted an increase in extreme weather events as a result of global warming. The devastation of Hurricane Sandy is consistent with this pattern. That doesn’t “prove” that the largest storm in recorded history was caused by climate change, but it does make one wonder.

In an exchange with Andrew Revkin in the New York Times on line, Miller writes:

“Extremely Hot Summers (“3-sigma” events) have increased 50X (5000%) in the past 50 years. There is 4% more water vapor in the atmosphere than 50 years ago. Average ocean temperatures have increased (90% of global warming energy goes into the ocean). The Arctic sea ice just reached its lowest level in thousands of years and in a few years you will be able to sail a boat to the North Pole for the first time in human history.

“These documented impacts all affected the strength, scale, and direction of Hurricane Sandy. No one is saying that a Hurricane Sandy would not have happened if not for climate change. But I believe there is little doubt that the record-breaking scale and potential destructiveness of Sandy is due in large part to the amplifying effects of warmer ocean temperatures, higher atmospheric moisture content, and unusual Arctic weather patterns.

“Like the Space Shuttle Challenger’s NASA managers, waiting for scientific “proof” of disaster, rather than taking prudent (and economically beneficial) steps to avert disaster, only guarantees that our children will face catastrophic consequences.”

Climate change was one of many topics ignored in the presidential debates. But it is something we cannot ignore. One of the meteorologists predicting the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy reported on a conversation he had with a coastal resident as the storm was approaching. The man complained that the meteorologists were always hyping the next big storm and he saw no need to evacuate his home. The meteorologist said his response was approximately, “Do what the emergency management people are telling you to do, and if they are wrong you can call up and yell at me on Tuesday.”

We only have one planet. We don’t have a place to go if this one becomes uninhabitable. Maybe the 99% of scientists who believe that global warming is real are mistaken. Maybe the effects of global warming have been exaggerated. But their predictions have been accurate up to this point, and it is long past time for us to do something about it.

What Do You See?

Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;

you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.

⁹You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it;

the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain,

for so you have prepared it.

¹⁰You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges,

softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

¹¹You crown the year with your bounty;

your wagon tracks overflow with richness.

¹²The pastures of the wilderness overflow,

the hills gird themselves with joy,

¹³the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,

the valleys deck themselves with grain,

they shout and sing together for joy.

Psalm 65:8-13

Every once in a while I receive an email that ends with the instruction, “Forward if you believe in GOD!” Sometimes there are several exclamation points. Occasionally, there is a note warning me that “this is a test.” A few promise rewards for forwarding and penalties for failing to forward.

I never forward any of them. But they often provide occasions for reflection.

One of those emails tells the unlikely story of a teacher preparing to teach a classroom of six year-olds about evolution. The implicit assumption is that believing in God and evolution are mutually exclusive, which is nonsense, but that’s really not relevant to the story.

The teacher asks a little boy if he can see the grass outside and then asks him to go outside and look up at the sky and then come back and tell the class what he saw. (I know, you’re thinking that if you send a 6 year-old boy outside on a nice day there is no way he’s going to just look up at the sky and then run right back to the classroom. But I already said that it’s an unlikely story. You’ll just have to pretend that he would come right back.) When he gets back, she asks if he saw the sky, which he did. Then she asks if he saw God in the sky, and he says that he didn’t. “Well,” says the teacher, “maybe the reason you didn’t see God is because he isn’t there. Maybe he doesn’t exist.”

At this point a little girl raises her hand and asks if she can ask the little boy some questions. First, she asks him if he can see the teacher, and he says that he can. Then she asks him if he can see the teacher’s brain, and he says that he can’t. “Then,” says the little girl, “according to what we were just taught, maybe that’s because she doesn’t have one!”

The story is smug and offensive on several different levels. And the point, of course, is that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But my reflections took me in the opposite direction.

For some of us, when we look at the sky, we do see God. We don’t see God “in the sky,” and we don’t believe that the sky is God, but when we look at the sky we see God. When I was growing up on Cape Cod, I would look at the ocean, vast and mysterious, serene and powerful, and I wondered if I could ever have the same spiritual experience away from the shore. Later I was surprised to hear that other people felt that way about the mountains, or the forest. When I went to Israel with a group of rabbis I marveled that they felt the same way about the desert wilderness that I did about the ocean. And then I went to the wilderness and I understood. On a clear summer night in those places where there is not too much light pollution, I am amazed to see the Milky Way stretching out almost beyond imagination.

Thomas Altizer said that God is present “in every human hand and face.” I don’t know whether this looking and seeing comes naturally to some people and not to others. Some of my more spiritually gifted friends speak of the practice of “mindfulness,” an active open attention to the present moment and an intentional awakening to that experience.

What do you see when you look at the world around you?