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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC Mystic,
Connecticut Sermon
from August 13, 2006 “Stained
Glass Under the Microscope” Christopher
S. Jones
Scriptures: Psalm
130 John
6:35, 41-51 Wow!
The next time I agree to give a sermon remind me to check on the
scripture reading for that day first! These
verses in John Chapter 6 can be hard to understand.
I mean, we all understand the concept of Jesus being the “bread of
life”, don’t we? We celebrated
communion here in this sanctuary just last Sunday.
We all took and ate the bread that represents Jesus’ body; then we took
the cup of Welch’s grape juice that represents Jesus’ blood, the blood of
the new covenant that was shed so that our sins could be forgiven. But we have
an advantage over Jesus’ listeners in John 6.
We know what will happen at the last supper, and on Good Friday, and
finally on Easter Sunday. Those
listening in John 6 including the disciples hear Jesus say, “I am the bread of
Life” but they had not yet experienced these things and then to top it off
Jesus claims to have come down from Heaven when everybody knew Joseph and Mary
were his parents. How strange it
must have been to be standing there listening to something you are certain
cannot not be true. Can we blame
the ones who grumbled? Can we blame
the ones who up and left? It is one
thing to believe in something you can’t see but quite another to not believe
in something you can see …
I am not a minister. I am a
scientist by training, trade, and title. I
majored in Biology & Chemistry in college and studied Medicinal Chemistry in
Graduate School. Now I am a
synthetic organic medicinal chemist. I
design and synthesize new chemical molecules that hopefully will help treat
patients suffering from cancer some day. I
literally build molecules from pieces, just like a carpenter builds a house.
I react molecule A with molecule B to make a new molecule, molecule C.
I like to think of myself as a molecular carpenter. It makes me feel a kinship with another carpenter we all know
and love. No, not Bob Villa, the carpenter from Nazareth.
But unlike a carpenter who can see the house or table or cabinet he is
building, I cannot “see” the molecules I create in the laboratory.
Oh, I can see the powder or the oil that zillions upon zillions of the
molecules appear as together in a flask or vial, but I cannot SEE
the actual molecules to differentiate them from slightly different molecules or
even from altogether different molecules, at least not with my eyes. The disciplines of physics and analytical chemistry provide
us synthetic chemists with fancy tools such as the ones you see on those TV
crime lab shows like CSI. We have
mass spectrometers, x-ray diffractometers, nuclear magnetic resonance
spectrometers, ultraviolet and infrared spectrophotometers—all of which we use
in the research labs to verify the identity of molecule C.
Remember molecule C—the one we get once we react molecule A with
molecule B?
Why am I telling you this? Oh
yeah, because I was raised Roman Catholic.
Stay with me. We make the
connection here soon. So I was
raised Catholic. You know, mass
every Sunday, meatless Fridays, Holy Days of Obligation, and Catechism. Being a very good student, I aced Catechism, straight A’s
all the way through confirmation class (which I had to postpone because I
attended science classes at Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon, at the same
time Catechism was held). One of
the many things I had to learn about was the consecration of the host during the
Eucharistic prayer which is when the bread wafer, called the Host, literally
became the body of Christ and the wine literally became His blood.
That’s why, during that part of the mass, we had to kneel.
There were 4 variations of
the Eucharistic Prayer, each with it’s own introductory line.
Number 2 was the quickie; #1 and #3 were much, much, much, longer.
You knew when the priest started the first line, which prayer it was
going to be and let me tell you, a quiet moan could be heard among the pews if
it was # 1 or # 3. So I was a good catholic boy through high school and until my
senior year in college which is when I took classes in instrumental analysis and
learned about spectrometers and spectrophotometers.
There was this one mass where it happened.
I remember it so well. It
was a normal enough mass until it came time for the Eucharistic prayer and I am
thinking, “Come on #2!!!” But
the priest said he wouldn’t start until everyone was kneeling. I looked
around. The only person not
kneeling was the friend whom I had brought to mass.
You see, she was in a cast from her hip to her ankle and the cast stuck
out of the pew and into the aisle as unobtrusively as possible.
Surely, he couldn’t be talking about my friend.
Again, he announced that he could not begin the Eucharistic prayer until
everyone in the sanctuary was kneeling and he then singled out my friend, “You
in the cast”, and with that he sent her out of the sanctuary.
I was very embarrassed for my friend as she hobbled out of the sanctuary
on her crutches. When the doors
closed loudly behind her, breaking
the intense silence the priest began reading Eucharistic prayer # 1.
This gave my embarrassment time to turn to anger.
It was then, while I knelt for Eucharistic prayer #1 that I realized that
if I were to take that host, before the Eucharistic prayer and conduct a
spectrophotometric analysis upon it I would prove that the chemical make up of
the host was starch, derived from wheat. And
if I did the same analysis of the host after the Eucharistic prayer, the
instrument would reveal that the host was still composed of starch, derived from
wheat, not protein, fat, and keratin derived from human flesh.
I realized right there and then that I didn’t believe in the
Transfiguration. I
couldn’t be Catholic any more, at least that’s what one priest said.
I got a second opinion. The
second priest was more apathetic. He
waved his hands and said it was okay so long as I didn’t go around professing
this fact to others. But in my mind
I knew, that if I didn’t believe in this particular tenant of my faith, I
could not in good faith remain a Roman Catholic. Yet, as a scientist, I could
not ignore a chemical truth. Imagine
how Galileo must have felt, discovering the scientific proof of the Copernican
cosmos; that the earth and planets revolved around the sun and that the Earth
(and, by association, MAN) was not the center of the universe as had been
accepted by the church.. Galileo
was a scientist but also a man of faith. Therefore,
he found no inconsistencies with the scientific truth he discovered and the
spiritual truth of the Bible, but the Holy Roman Catholic Church of his day sure
did. The church was steeped in
tradition—tradition which it mistakenly valued to the same degree as the Holy
Bible itself. Galileo’s valiant
attempt to change the church cost him dearly, both personally and
professionally, and although the change did occur, it was painfully slow in
coming. I, on the other hand, opted
for finding a Protestant Church home that believed Holy Communion to be a
beautiful remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice for us and not a literal
transfiguration. I guess I wasn’t
up for trying to fight the Pope on the Transfiguration. You
see, Science, my vocation, has a long history of shedding light on the mysteries
of the physical world from understanding the biochemistry of photosynthesis, to
understanding weather, geology, oceanography, nuclear physics, and even
medicinal chemistry. But science is
limited to the physical world. Human
beings are physical beings but we are also spiritual beings. And that is where religious truth reigns, in the spiritual
world. I am often asked by non
scientist friends if it is difficult to be a Christian and a scientist.
I don’t think it is any harder to be a Christian and a scientist than
it is to be a Christian and a banker, or administrative assistant, or teacher,
or minister. If
anything, being a scientist who studies the intricacies of the biological
mechanisms of life and disease, as well as the physical nature of molecules and
their reactivity, makes me appreciate just how well designed, how complicated,
how diverse, how fragile yet robust life is, you know that mystical WOW
experience. Have you ever had that
experience? It often comes to us in
nature, at the seashore, on a quiet lake, or a barren dessert. I experienced it again just about 2 weeks ago.
My family and I went on a whale watch off of Provincetown.
We were blessed to be among a dozen or more humpback whales as well as a
few finback whales and Minke whales. They
are so magnificent, so large yet so graceful, the way their backs rise up out of
the water and then their large flukes follow, extend upwards and then slip back
into the depths. We even got to see
a calf show off a full spinning breach. It
was amazing—amazing to see, amazing to share with my wife and daughters, and
amazing that God in his infinite wisdom put these beautiful creatures in the
oceans. People
sometimes ask me how I can reconcile the inconsistencies between religion and
science? And my answer is,
“It’s easy. Science is literal.
It sheds light on the mysteries of our physical life in the physical
world. My faith, my religion, my
Christianity, sheds light on the mysteries of our spiritual lives as they occur
in both the physical world and in the spiritual world.
The two complement each other. Einstein
once said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion, without science,
is blind”. I don’t want to be
lame or blind! Einstein saw that as
people of faith we need to be aware of and understand both science and religion.
For
me, the two intermingle frequently. At
work, I am on an e-mail prayer chain that has a global reach among fellow
Christian Employees, many of them scientists.
It is a daily habit to receive the e-mail and take a few moments to pray
for those who have asked for prayers from our global prayer ministry.
We call ourselves prayer warriors. We
rejoice when we get word that our prayers have been answered, and are accepting
when we find out our requests were not God’s will.
I often feel quite religious in the lab as well.
Just the other day, I was re-crystalizing a new molecule and looking at
the crystals under the microscope in my lab and this is what I saw …
I
immediately thought of the stained glass windows in a church.
I felt like I was standing on Holy Ground, right there in my laboratory,
working at a vocation I felt called to, using my science to try to help people
who are suffering, and I felt as if, at least in that moment, all was right with
my physical and spiritual worlds. The
passage in John’s scripture is not literal but rather spiritual.
Jesus’ body did not arrive by coming down from Heaven; His spirit did.
Jesus IS the Bread of Life but He does
not want us to take a bite out of His arm and taste pumpernickel.
He wants us to ingest His words and his teachings, He wants us to make
them a part of us, a part of our physical lives by following His example so that
we may share with Him in the riches of His Father’s kingdom in heaven and live
forever. And you know, communion is
a wonderful symbol of the sacrifice Jesus made for us.
By eating bread together and drinking that Welch’s grape juice we
remember that Jesus is the Bread of Life. Amen. |
