Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist

“We Are Made of Star Dust”

Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris

March 11, 2007

Meditation:

I invite you into a reflection to close your eyes and imagine someplace vast. Someplace large. The largest and most expansive place you can picture. Space. An ocean. Picture what it feels like to be in that space, the room you have to grow and change.

Now, imagine a feeling of being connected, of being linked, of being held. Within that great vastness and connection, imagine that you are being held in an embrace of the deepest intimacy, feel that touch. The comfort of a parent. The sympathy of a fellow traveler.

Within that space, within that touch, become aware of your own ability to move, to create, to be, to sing, to swim. To be the artist, the builder, the shaper, the creator.

You have the gift of space. You have the gift of connection. You hold the power of creation. You are free. You are held. You are a part of creation and a creator.

Take a moment to reflect, to marvel, at this, to feel its power.

Sermon:

As we begin this morning, I want to invite you to imagine that to my left is a screen displaying a religious image. Not a chalice or a cross or a six-pointed star or any of those displayed across the balcony rail. Not even a metaphoric dove or flame or mountain or waterfall. Instead, I invite you to picture…. The Periodic Table of Elements. Yes, the Periodic Table, that oddly stacked display of numbered boxes science teachers have asked students to memorize for decades. That chart, you may recall, if you have not, like me, tried to repress such things, has a very irregular shape, sort of like a Legos creation gone bad. Yet on each side, one solo box sits on top—Hydrogen on one side and Helium on the other. Despite all the efforts of the good people who tried to teach me science when I was a teenager, I did not retain the significance of why they were placed where they were placed instead of some more logical way—such as alphabetical. It makes a whole lot more sense to realize that hydrogen and helium are placed in those locations because they are the most basic elements of the universe, formed from the explosion of stars eons ago and still the basic stuff of all the matter in the world.

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme says: “It’s really simple. Here’s the whole story in one line. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.”

And, it seems, it turns into religion too. For today, Unitarian Universalists and others, call us to reexamine that chart and those elements and the history of science as we know it—to think of that growing body of knowledge as part of an amazing, riveting, creation story. Though we have come to see science and religion as almost opposite poles, Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd, two in our movement who name themselves to be “evolutionary evangelists” believe these poles are naturally attracted. Connie, a biologist and UU humanist who has published three books popularizing concepts in evolution and Michael Dowd, a former Pentecostal preacher, now a UU minister, have traveled around this country as itinerant teacher/preachers bringing the saving message of evolution to churches and children across the country. They tell what they call “The Great Story” which they define as “a way of telling the history of everyone and everything that honors and embraces all religious traditions and creation stories….the sacred narrative of an evolving Universe of emergent complexity and breathtaking creativity and cooperation.” Living in their van and on the generosity of strangers since 2002, they pursue their calling to convey the Universe’s cosmic story.

Feeling a little suspect? I certainly did. As a person who sometimes describes my religious origins as “scientific fundamentalism,” I was very wary of what I perceived as an attempt to dress science up in religious garb. When one’s father and one’s maternal grandfather are both scientists, one does not communicate one’s disinterest in science the same way that many of you tell stories about being unable to communicate disinterest with the religions of your childhood. When I learned that Connie and Michael were to be the guests at our fall minister’s retreat this year, I was not thrilled. And yet, the more I listened, the more I became intrigued. The basic message made sense—that the story of evolution is part of our heritage that can give meaning to our lives and to the lives of our children and grandchildren, and, that it is, in some way, the grandparent of all creation narratives.

To see the cosmic story as a religious narrative, one starts with the idea that human beings seek to make meaning. And we struggle to connect our own day-to-day minutiae and our own moments of great joy and sorrow with something larger than ourselves. A created and evolving universe does contain vastness, that sort of expandable space that seems to be an essential ingredient in religious enterprise. All of us who have looked up at an evening sky to feel connection with the infinity contained in a speck of pulsing light know what I mean.

Part of that vastness is the presence of change as a constant. The story of evolution teaches that change is not to be feared. Reflecting on the 14 billion year history of our solar system turns one’s mind to the vast. Michael Dowd has converted this inconceivable stretch of time into a 100-year period so that every decade represents 1.4 billion years. In this “Cosmic Century Timeline,” you start with what scientists often call the Big Bang. If you do this:

1 All the hydrogen in the world is formed on day 2,

2 All galaxies in days 2 through 8,

3 The solar system cools around year 69,

4 Multicellular life doesn’t come about until after the 90^th year,

5 Dinosaurs don’t even show up until after the 98th,

6 And on December 31, during the last 24 hours, human beings come into the picture.

This is humbling, if nothing else. As Michael says, “If we showed up on the last day of a 100 year process, maybe, just maybe, it indicates that the whole thing wasn’t meant for us.” This may be something many of us already believe and so it doesn’t seem that dramatic. Yet remember that Michael Dowd is carrying this message into conservative Christian arenas, seeking to provide a treaty ground for the continued war between religion and science that has erupted time and time again in human history, this last time with almost a century-long resistance to the ideas of Charles Darwin that still fuel our media outlets today.

Religion shrinks the huge to a comprehensible size while writing the miniscule large in our consciousness—in this sense, the Cosmic story also served to contract and expand our perceptions.

And Dowd, a theist, believes one must think of the story as Cosmic, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, which encompassed all reality. God, for Dowd, is the ultimate creative reality including and transcending all other levels of reality. God is a part of creation, the whole of creation, not outside of it and humans are nested within its divine whole. As one Great Story enthusiast put it, “We were not plunked here by a maker separate from us. Nor is our existence a meaningless evolutionary fluke. The basic elements that make up our bodies—carbon, calcium, iron—were forged inside supernovas, dying stars, and are billions of years old. We are, in fact, made of stardust. We are intimately related to the universe. As early-twentieth-century British biologist Julian Huxley put it, ‘We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.’”

Religion is that which binds. This great story of an evolving creation also offers connection. “We didn’t come into the world,” Connie says, “we grew out of it.”

Her favorite definition of evolution is “conversation” because a conversation is simply two or more people in relationship and that is how she sees evolution. That idea of conversation captures the feelings of intimate connection that the tellers of this story seek to evoke. The words of our opening hymn this morning captured an alternative vision, penned by St. Francis of Assisi, a visionary with a special mission for the dispossessed. Yet the prevailing religious vision has been one seeking conquest over nature and literal mastery of the animals and other beings of the natural world. How different it is to see your dog as your cousin, a rock as a great grandfather, a bird as an aunt, the very soil a relative—all of us sharing the same elemental heritage of stardust. Connie Barlow writes, “Perhaps the deepest spiritual connection to the vast Universe that science has given us is an awareness that ancestral stars are part of our genealogy. We can now know and feel our connection to the heavens, for stars are among our ancestors. Every atom in our bodies, other than hydrogen, was forged in the fiery belly of a star who lived and died before our own star, the Sun, was born.”

The naturalistic religions of all cultures have always known this, returning again and returning again to the ancestry of water, earth, air, fire. Geologist Thomas Berry, who describes himself as an “Earth Scholar,” puts it this way: “The universe is a community of subjects, not a collection of objects. It is intimate. Every aspect is intimately present to all other aspects.” And at the deepest level, evolutionary evangelism offers connection to a sense of ordering and hope, another function of religion. Life is connected to life and death, as we saw in the story of Startull, has a place, for new life is formed from old. “If it weren’t for the death of stars, there would be no life,” Michael Dowd says.

And some see hope even in the role of the late-breaking role of the one who came in the last hour of the last year of the Cosmic Century—the human in the story. In the story of Adam and Eve, at least as traditionally taught, the role of the human being is to bring about loss and devastation and that is how humans are traditionally seen in the ecological epic too. Yet this new story suggests that humans are the one who recover the memory of matter. Humans, its proponents point out, are the ones who seek to recover knowledge of the life that came before. After the dinosaurs died out, only the humans have sought to recreate them. (Let me tell you the news that dinosaur DNA had been found made it through the playgrounds of elementary schools this winter faster than Instant Messaging.) No other creature has sought this deep level connection with its past or has this capacity for molding its future.

Why? I know some of you are asking why. Why do we need to talk about evolution in the language of religion? Why do we have to mix up our largest, cosmic questions with the annoying details of facts and figures and chemical elements? Would thinking of the Periodic Table as a catechism have helped me memorize it? Probably not. Is this an over-simplification of a complex story? Maybe. Is it an important part of our inheritance as liberal religious people who invite many sources of truth and meaning, something our children and grandchildren should be hearing fresh from us in a world more likely to be talking about intelligent design? Yes. Is it something that might help at least some of us further understand what it means to live and die as human beings. Yes, I believe it can.

This sense of connection is one that goes beyond the intellect, the traditional home of the scientific narrative. This work seeks to connect these amazing truths with emotional truths such as our need to understand ourselves as part of a bigger whole, our need for touch and connection, and our need to understand some sense of meaning in our existence and our vital need to comprehend our unique role within the larger frame.

Thomas Berry puts it this way: "History is governed by those over-arching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe.  Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people…The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner….”

So as I close today, I invite you to consider another picture. That picture of the earth as the “Big Blue Marble” taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 where the blues and the greens dance together against the blackness of eternity. Michael and Connie are each fond of pointing out that it is extraordinary that life on this swirling planet has evolved to such an extent that it can send out a part of itself to gaze upon itself and say “Whoa. This is who I am.” Or, as Brian Swimme says, “Planet Earth, once molten rock, now sings opera."

We inherit a great and unfolding story, the Universal story of matter. We, who come out of the stars, are made of stardust. We are the bearers of a great and cosmic memory. The wide universe is the ocean we travel. May we know it to be so. May we hold that knowledge as a sacred trust. Amen.

Benediction

U.S. astronomer, writer and popularizing scientist Carl Sagan has written that “we are the local embodiment of a cosmos. Star stuff contemplating the stars.” May we go forward inspired by this heritage, and in peace.