“Quarks, Black Holes and Walking on Water”

7 August 2005

Scripture Reading:   Romans 10:5-15,  Matthew 14: 22-33

Dr. Peggy Dunn

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

Pablo Picasso once said, in answering a question about how he learned to draw, that he worked at taking out all but the most essential lines in a drawing. This sermon process was like that. This week was one of much reading, movie and video watching, with a variety of experiences coming together, which felt like good sermon material. I thought a lot, and wrote a lot. Then I started removing all but the essential lines – hopefully what is left is an essence with some clarity.

One day in June on the beach in New Jersey with my grandkids, we heard a funny horn, which reminded me of the sound in the movie CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. The kids hadn’t seen that movie, and we were finally able to watch it this past week. Seven-year-old Jake says before it began: “is it fiction?” There are some scary parts in this movie, and during one of those parts, Jake says, “this doesn’t seem like fiction to me”. Real people on the screen are non-fiction to him.

This movie is rated PG and it contains a fair amount of swearing – more than we are used to hearing in contemporary PG movies. Jake, who on rare occasions gets to see PG 13 movies, also says: “This doesn’t seem like a PG movie”.  One thing I realized in watching this movie, which was made in the 1970s, is how polarized our on-screen language usage become in these past 30 years. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS has a lot of what I would call garden variety swearing, which we don’t hear in movies for kids. But some of the more ‘adult’ films are full of the really vile swearing. In our on screen entertainment we have moved from garden variety curses to either no swearing or really crude and offensive language. This is a real example to me of how polarized we have become in this country in this time.

In addition to watching CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, this week I watched

THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, which was a Nova program on Public Television in 2003. Brian Greene, a physicist from, I think, Columbia University, describes string theory. Now I can’t, in a brief sermon, say much about string theory that would make any sense at all, even if I really understood it. But it is a field where a quite large number of theoretical physicists are working to uncover a unified ‘theory of everything’ – a single idea which Einstein sought in his later years- a theory which could explain both Einstein’s work with gravity and electromagnetism, theories which seem accurate and true on a cosmic scale, and quantum mechanics, which seems accurate and true on a sub-atomic scale. So the search is to find the deeper workings which explain both cosmic and sub-atomic observations. String theory is perhaps an answer – compelling enough to capture the energies of many young physicists. String theory says there are ‘pulsations of energy’, vibrating strands of energy that are common throughout creation. Like a kind of cosmic symphony. It is a most poetic image. Ed Whitten, one of the gurus in this field, has put forward a theory known as M. What does M stand for? Magic Mystery, according to Ed. Another comment: String theory could be completely wrong, and end up as a dead end – ‘but it makes so much sense – “that much elegance and mathematical beauty must be at least somewhat true”.

Now THAT is an intuitive statement.

There have been longstanding conflicts between science and religion, specifically Christianity in Western culture. Science validates itself by experiment and observation while Christianity expresses a certainty based on divine revelation. This is a set up for conflict if unchanging certainty is required because these are two different approaches to understanding our human experience.

Within most religious systems, including Christianity, there is a mystical thread, which depends on intuition and experience as well as scripture as sources of revelation about God’s workings.  Mysticism has sometimes been suspect, because it is inherently uncontrollable.  Mysticism has over the past several hundred years been relegated to the fringes of Christianity.

As a mystic, I have been interested in some of this theoretical scientific stuff for years. And one of the things I realized in the really very small amount of understanding I have gleaned is that theoretical physics is on the fringes of science.

So here are these two disciplines, two schools of thought, each of them with fringes.  But the fringes, these outer edges, seem to overlap.

In string theory, science depends on intuition and math, because this is not work which is provable by experiment. But it is compelling and beautiful and its theoreticians are seeking ‘truth’.

What caused me to bring this topic to you this morning was a description of the multiple dimensions, which are part of string theory. We are used to three observable dimensions of measurable space: height, width and depth. Einstein added the dimension of time. So we can describe anything observable in terms of its size and its duration. String theory says there are 10 or 11 dimensions. And the visual symbol of this is A PIECE OF BREAD. These higher dimensional spaces are like a loaf of bread, and we live and learn on one of the slices. What an image for a morning when we celebrate communion, where the physical symbol is bread.

In the context of a story of alien encounters with humans and theories of existence, which depend on strings of pulsating energy, somehow a story about Jesus walking on water doesn’t seem so farfetched. There are many different entrance points into this story. The one I took this week was Peter’s sinking attempt to follow Jesus. What an image this is for our own failed attempts, when our fear intercepts our courage. Can you relate? I can for sure. Jesus lived in a TRUSTABLE UNIVERSE because he was so grounded in God’s wisdom. Jesus was ‘out there’. He met life as life was in first century Israel. But he knew first century Israel as God’s territory.

Paul caught that same sense of a TRUSTABLE UNIVERSE from his encounter with the risen Christ. Paul’s background, like Jesus’ background, was the Laws of Moses. Paul SAW that following the law doesn’t get us to God. Truth is more that God gets to us – we are ENCOUNTERED by God, and then we behave in ‘right’ ways. That’s what the book of Romans says – and this is fundamental to Christian theology. It’s a question of where we start: does our understanding start with God, and God’s gracious hospitality and generosity towards creation (though God is not always a ‘warm and fuzzy’ God – Eugene Peterson says God is Kind but not Soft), or does it start with humans who must perform certain tasks in certain ways to earn God’s favor? Our hearts grow differently depending on how we understand this. This is a VERY deep issue. In our religious understandings, there is always the question of what is symbol, what is myth, what is fictional story, and how do we tell the difference? If our quest is for “TRUTH”, ultimate truth, whether things are physically true is less important than how we perceive the universe, and what happens to our hearts in the process. Do our understandings make us more kind? More generous and hospitable? More like God? More like Jesus, the one we describe as the embodied God? More Christ like?

In my best moments when I move beyond my fears, I deeply believe this IS a trustable universe. God can be trusted – God’s processes can be trusted in the long run, even when in the short run things don’t look so good. That is a lot of what Jesus taught. That’s the message of the crucifixion and the resurrection.

When we share in a communion meal, the words remind us of the joy of that bigger picture even as they remind us of the costs and grief of the short term. And they invite us to ‘take the bread, and drink the cup’ of the reality of our lives, trusting that God is present in these moments. Let us break this bread together. Amen.