Mark 10:17-31: What Matters Eternally – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 3

When you woke up today, what did you notice about the natural world around you? What’s the weather like? What animals and plants have you seen? What has changed since yesterday? Many of us likely start with the “news” about disasters, wars, and violence around the world. Even the weather tends to be reported with a whiff of danger and discomfort, and you probably know if thunderstorms, hurricanes, or tornadoes are forecast where you live. All of it’s important, but how does it change the way we live?

That’s really what Jesus is talking about in Mark’s gospel about eternal life. He’s not speaking about life that lasts for ever and ever so much as he is about life that transcends time, what in other places he calls abundant life, what Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.”[1] He answers the man who asks how to find it by repeating the commandments about loving neighbors by treating them honorably and respectfully. The fellow retorts that he’s done that his whole life, and Jesus drives the point home by telling him to share his abundance and then come and follow him.

The whole of the Bible, Jewish and Christian parts alike, is about living that kind of holy life–getting out of selfish mode and caring for neighbors in the same way we want to be cared for. The creation story that opens the biblical narrative tells of God bringing all that is into being, and calling it good and blessed. The second story is about human beings who can’t seem to get the hang of balancing and tending relationships. They do what they want to do without considering the impact on others. It’s basically about the reality of selfishness. In some traditions that’s called “original sin,” and it’s been held up by theologians for centuries as the central human problem, particularly in the broad sense of self-centeredness or vaunting pride. The biblical cure is to love God with all we are and have, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The great arc of the biblical narrative sheds light on how human beings can build healthier and holier relationships with all that is, and with the source of all that is. There are plenty of stories about what goes wrong–how we’d rather live in servitude to something or someone who can’t offer the abundant life that comes of right relationships–what we call justice–or how we’d rather run off to some new and glittering attraction rather than find our abiding home in those right relationships. Yet the thrust of each part of the narrative leads us back toward our home in the One who has made all that is, and loves it all. We know that reality as God, whom we call love–the force and lure underlying all we see and experience, who desires only that life be more. That MORE results from what we often call justice, or right relationship, when we love our neighbors as ourselves, and when we honor the other parts of creation because they reflect that loving MORE.

We live in a season of human existence when we are becoming painfully aware of the ways we have failed to love the planetary systems on which our lives depend. A growing number of congregations celebrate September and the beginning of October as “creation season,” culminating in the Feast of St. Francis.[2] Special attention is given to the ways in which human beings are interconnected with the other parts of the natural order, and especially how we might live in right relationship–so that there will be more abundant life for all.

One of the gifts of creation that Episcopalians regularly celebrate at baptism is the reality that human beings have reason and skill and “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.” We were created curious–and that’s part of how Adam and Eve get into trouble. Curiosity led the guy in the gospel to ask how to find more life. All creatures have the ability to learn from the environment and change their activity as a result. That’s how babies learn to speak, it’s how adults learn to build loving life-long relationships, and when we think about the lifespan of a community or a species, it contributes to evolutionary success. Over time, creatures that can’t adapt to changing conditions eventually die out, to be replaced by species that are better suited to those environments. The deteriorating condition of our planet is an evolutionary crisis like that. It may end in being a major extinction event, or we may learn enough unselfish behavior to love this Earth and its inhabitants into more abundant life.

We talk about having been created with free will, the ability to choose how we interact with others. We can choose loving ways or selfish ways, each with consequences. Rarely are our motives entirely unselfish–they probably can’t be, this side of the grave–but if we lean in the direction of more abundant life for others, we soon discover that our own life possibilities are expanded as well. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, if you want to hang on to your life in a self-focused way, you’re only going to lose it, but if you let go of that self-centeredness, you will find more than you knew before.[3] Jesus continues to lure and encourage us toward that vision of more life for all creation, but he doesn’t demand or require it.

That freedom to choose is part of the nature of creation. Human beings seem to have more ability to change their environment than other creatures do, but it’s something of an illusion, of which we tend to be very fond. ‘I don’t have to conserve water in a drought–I’ll just use what I want and not worry about it.’ Well, there are short-term and longer-term consequences: a higher water bill, or in some communities, having your water shut off; as well as a diminished quality or possibility of life for my neighbors–the ones I know and the ones I haven’t yet met. Eventually, behavior that ignores the challenge means no one will be able to live in that place where there is little or no water–life will be less abundant. The biblical definition for that result is the consequence of sin; the biological definition is extinction.

Both sin and the possibility of extinction are part of the nature of creation. Some readers of the Bible want to see the Genesis stories only as myth, in the popular understanding as a story that’s not historically true. Myth is actually a technical term for stories about a people’s origins–in the case of Genesis, that we were created good and blessed, and that part of our created nature is the ability to choose and learn. Others want to see those creation stories as a very particular description of how God put together what we see and know of the physical world around us–often, that creation happened in six 24-hour periods a few thousand years ago. The differences between the two stories, and the order in which things are created, are often ignored. There is another way to see those stories–as profoundly true in their description of God’s love for all that is, and profoundly true of human behavior, both thousands of years ago and today, and probably long into the future.

Think for a moment about evolution. It’s a theory about how biological life evolved on this planet. In scientific terms a theory is the best description of how a particular aspect of physical reality works. It represents the consensus of a large collection of investigations, experiments, and arguments by generations of scientists. Yet the popular understanding of a theory is something that might “theoretically” be true.

The creation stories of Genesis are actually quite similar–the consensus of a collection of questions and explorations and arguments by generations of people, about what it means to live in right relationship with all that is.

I believe three creation stories: the two in Genesis and the great creation story of cosmology and evolution. None of the three can tell us anything about what was before. All three tell us that there is a force in the universe that seems to keep creating more life or complexity. The Genesis accounts tell us that there is something, particularly about human self-centeredness, that wants to limit the abundance of other forms of life. The scientific account of creation sees chaos and stochastic processes as essential to the ongoing unfolding of what is; theologians talk about that as contingency or free will in creation.

When we’re willing to read these stories together, we just might do something about what we heard on the news this morning. Bringing heart and mind and soul and will together can help limit our own behavior for the sake of the whole world. That is what Jesus was telling the questioner–stop hoarding, and share. If you want to enjoy a fruitful and abundant life, make sure that others can as well.

Amen.

Note: The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori’s sermon is part 3 of 8 in a series on Faith & Science from Day1. For more information about the series and a transcription of a conversation between Rev. Schori and Peter Wallace of Day1, see this link.