One of My Personal Heroes: Dr. Francis Collins, Md., PhD.

Before I begin, I should say that the posts on this blog do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and beliefs of the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Washington Court House, Ohio. They are my thoughts and my beliefs.

I won’t give you a full biography of Dr. Francis Collins. You can read that in his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which I wholeheartedly recommend. All you really need to know at this point is that he is the director of the National Institutes of Health, he was the director of the Human Genome Project, and he led the studies that discovered the genetic abnormalities that cause Cystic Fibrosis and Huntington’s Disease. He is one of the top medical scientists in the United States and the entire world. He is also a Christian. He even calls himself an Evangelical Christian. Because he is a top scientist and a Christian he is very interested and involved in trying to build bridges between serious modern Science and the Christian faith.

Because Dr. Collins is a Christian, he believes that human beings are sinful and that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord and Savior through whom reconciliation with God has come. He believes in repentance and forgiveness and that the Scriptures are the inspired Word of God. However, because he is a scientist and because he helped discover much of the genetic evidence for it, he knows better than anyone that the evidence for evolution is so incredibly overwhelming that for anyone to deny the strong likelihood of the truth of it is like a child covering her eyes and actually believing that because she cannot see the people around her anymore that they are no longer there. Dr. Collins is able to hold his strong orthodox Christian faith and his brilliant scientific mind and the overwhelming evidence for evolution together, and he feels it makes his faith even stronger. This is why Dr. Francis Collins is one of my heroes.

If you don’t already know this, I’m sorry to break it to you but the scientific evidence that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old is overwhelming. In fact, the Big Bang Theory that helps explain this was developed and championed by a Christian physicist, the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre. The geological evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time is also overwhelming. The genetic evidence, especially after the mapping of the human genome, is incredibly overwhelming in favor of evolution. The fossil record, species distribution, comparative anatomy, developmental similarities, and comparative biochemistry/physiology all show overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution. To deny this is really to reject the validity of science. Dr. Collins’s good friend, the physicist Dr. Karl Giberson (who is also a Christian) in his book Saving Darwin: How to be Christian and Believe in Evolution, writes, “Absent evolution, thousands of patterns in nature become completely mysterious, without explanation. Creationism offers virtually no alternative explanations, and most of its ‘evidence’ is nothing more than a catalog of small details that don’t fit neatly into the standard evolutionary scenario. Rejecting evolution on the basis of these small details, however, would be like abandoning modern medicine because it can’t cure every illness or declaring that meteorology is not a science because weather forecasts are sometimes unrealiable.” Many creationist and Intelligent Design arguments are based off of 19th century information and even the most modern ones have trouble dealing with the scientific findings of the last 10-20 years.

Dr. Collins has taken it upon himself to stand in the gap between the extremists in the world of atheistic science (like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) and the extremists in the world of strict Biblical literalism. Dr. Collins has founded an organization called Biologos. Through Biologos, Dr. Collins and a large number of serious scientists who are also faithful Christians and theologians who also accept the evidence for evolution, are trying to give a new option to those who think that in order to respect modern science that you have to be an atheist or agnostic and to those who say that in order to be a faithful Christian you have to believe in a literal reading (what many biblical scholars would call “misreading”) of the first chapters of Genesis, which means you must reject modern science. Dr. Collins and the other scientists and theologians at Biologos say, “That is not true! You can accept all the overwhelming scientific evidence for common descent and species changing over time and still have a relationship with Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. These are not mutually exclusive categories!" That’s why he’s one of my heroes. I encourage you to go to www.biologos.org to explore this amazing website.

Now, does this cause some problems for biblical interpretation and theology? Sure it does, but so did finding out that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. It causes us to look at the Word of God a little differently in parts, but evolution doesn’t really negate anything that someone would believe who’d been reading the Scriptures in ways that allow the Scriptures to say what they want to say instead of what we want them to say. Biblical scholar and theologian Peter Enns is extraordinarily helpful in this area. Accepting the overwhelming evidence for evolution doesn’t negate the fact that people still sin and that people still die. It doesn’t negate human uniqueness, the image of God, or the existence of a soul. It doesn’t negate our need for God or our need to be reconciled with God through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As Pope John Paul II declared in 1996, "New findings lead us toward recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis... If the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." C.S. Lewis also addresses this in his book The Problem of Pain in the chapter entitled “The Fall of Man.” C.S. Lewis, the hero of many Evangelical Christians, a man who lived and died decades before the strongest evidence of evolution had ever been found, had no problem with holding evolution and Christian faith together. Also, my favorite contemporary theologians like N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, and Alister McGrath have no problem with evolution and Christian faith going together. Evolution doesn’t tell us who created us, why we exist, or what happens after we die. It just describes what the overwhelming evidence shows and says, “According to the evidence, this is how we got here.” Evolution, when properly understood is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Way before C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, who lived in the 400’s, warned against overly literal interpretations of the beginning of Genesis and chastised his contemporaries for using the Bible to embarrass the Church by opposing scientific knowledge supported by ample evidence. Also, Dr. Collins, in The Language of God, tells us about how “Benjamin Warfield, a conservative Protestant theologian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century… wrote, 'We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, and more loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads.'”

We need to note, however, that whether or not we believe in a literal six-day creation, in some version of the Intelligent Design idea, or in what is called Theistic Evolution (Collins calls it "Biologos"), this is not a “salvation issue.” As Paul writes in Romans,

"The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

However, while I do not think that views held on the origins of the universe and humanity have any bearing on the salvation of the person holding that view, I do feel, along with St. Augustine, Francis Collins, and I would imagine many of the scientists and theologians with BioLogos that a stubborn unwillingness to accept the overwhelming evidence of every pertinent branch of science in favor of the views of the movements known as Creationism or Intelligent Design does actually endanger the salvation of others because for many non-Christians it causes an unnecessary barrier between an intelligent informed person and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I firmly believe that creationism and places like the Creation Museum in Kentucky with its exhibits of dinosaurs and human beings living together do not hurt science one bit because no one who knows anything about science takes them seriously. What it does hurt, however, is the Christian faith. Because of that I want nothing to do with Creationism and the Creation Museum or Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute.

Here’s what St. Augustine wrote 1,600 years ago,

“Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [non-Christian] to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [he’s been writing about the natural sciences]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books on matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in light of reason?”

But what happens if evolution is proved wrong? That's a very important question. First of all, I think we do need to admit that with evolution we're not talking about simple observational evidence like there was for the sun orbiting the earth or a flat earth; with evolution we're talking about a hard independently verified scientific consensus that continues to be strengthened with every new finding in many different areas of science. Since the evidence is so overwhelming, evolution being proved wrong is pretty unlikely so don't get your hopes up. But even if evolution was proved wrong then that wouldn’t affect my Christian faith one bit. My faith isn’t in evolution. My faith isn't in science. My faith isn't in religion either. My faith isn't in a literalistic interpretation of the God-inspired ancient liturgical poem known as Genesis 1 either. My faith is in the Triune God, revealed to us most fully in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and through the inspired Word of God, even in the parts that shouldn't be interpreted literally. I have a relationship with this God. As mentioned earlier, evolution doesn’t tell us the who, the why, or the what now. The Scriptures do tell us these things and so does our Lord Jesus. I just think, like Dr. Collins, that it doesn’t make sense for Christians to put their heads in the sand when the evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time, when it is looked at thoroughly, scientifically, and with a realization that wherever the evidence leads cannot disprove the essentials of the Christian faith, is so incredibly overwhelming in its description of how we got here that it should not be denied. This isn't something worth being stubborn about. I am very stubborn about the who, the why, and the what now, but to me, in being stubborn about the how (the mechanism used for human origins) it just makes us look ignorant in ways that St. Augustine warned us about 1,600 years ago. If someone wants to think I'm ignorant because I believe in Jesus' resurrection then that's fine. According to the Scriptures, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is both a salvation issue and (unlike the mechanics for human origins) something that is outside the realm of what can be studied and described by science. Even though Biblical interpretation and theology would be easier if it wasn't so, I just think that the evidence for evolution is way too overwhelming to deny anymore. We simply have to deal with it. Dr. Collins has been a great help to me in that.

In Philippians 4:8, the Apostle Paul writes, “Finally, brothers [and sisters], whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” Please consider reading The Language of God by my hero Francis Collins and please check out www.biologos.org to see if you find this synthesis between contemporary science and orthodox Christian faith to be as true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy as I do.

Grace and Peace to You in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Pastor Everett

Wonderful Words of Life: Holy Scripture

As you will be able to tell, this is something I wrote several years ago, in 2008 actually. I was then the pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Newkirk, Oklahoma. I share this with you mainly because I am about to leave to go to Cleveland for a continuing education event but I didn't want to go two weeks in a row without a blog post. Although it is a few years old, the message is really timeless and I think you will find some value in it.

This past Thursday morning I was all alone in our sanctuary, and I sat down in the first pew. As a break from the busy day, I decided to sit for ten minutes in silence. At first all kinds of thoughts came to mind: the dried poinsettia leaves on the carpet, the e-mail I’d forgotten to send to a colleague. Then after three or four minutes my mind had quieted and I was just sitting there, being. All morning I’d been thinking about how I was so frazzled and stressed. The bad thing about taking vacation is that while you are gone little elves don’t break into your office and do all of your work for you. It is always waiting for you when you get back. So I had four days of work to complete in less than two days. I had presbytery business which I needed to finish and Sunday worship to plan. To top it off my office is so messy and disorganized that I can’t find anything when I need it. Everybody has gone on vacation and come back to that. Surely you’ve had one of those days when you feel like you are being drawn and quartered by all the different directions you are being pulled.

As I was sitting in the silence, the scripture passage I had been reading earlier in the day in preparation for this Sunday’s sermon came to mind, Jesus’ response to Satan’s first temptation in the desert. “Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” I said that over and over again as I breathed in and out. Then I realized that I was so frazzled not necessarily because I had a lot to do, but because I was living “on bread alone.” I’d been on vacation for over a week, and I hadn’t kept up on my praying and scripture reading like I should. I rested but I guess you could say that I didn’t recharge. I was just living on the surface, so when I returned to the church office I just kept on going that way. I was living on bread alone, meaning that I was not gaining my strength from God. Do you ever find yourself trying to live on bread alone?

It is inevitable. When I live on bread alone my life gets out of whack. And one of the ways that I have tried to re-center myself when my life gets out of whack, is to hike. I’ve only had the opportunity a couple of times but I like to hike the trails at the Chaplin Nature Center just west of Arkansas City. There is something about being out in the woods all by myself, listening to the wind blowing through the trees, feeling the sun on my face as it peeks through. I feel relaxed and happy. I feel close to the earth and in a way I feel close to God as though God and I have finally been able to slip away from the crowds to take a walk together. There is a sacredness to my hikes. Some of you may have had that type of experience at the beach or in the mountains. But although those hikes tend to help immensely, usually what I need when the edges begin to fray is sitting on a bookshelf collecting dust.

I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas or Angel Falls, but I’ve seen enough of nature to know that a person can come away from the majesty of nature with at least an idea that there must be a God and that this God must be good and wise and powerful. But no matter how sacred my hikes seem to be, they are not enough to give the knowledge of God that is really needed, the knowledge of God that Jesus was referring to when he said that we should live “by every word that comes from God’s mouth.”

A few hundred years ago, the folks who wrote the Westminster Confession called this the “knowledge of God and God’s will that is necessary for salvation.” In other words, the general revelation of God in creation, as beautiful and sacred as it is, or really any aspect of life as a whole, needs to be informed and transformed by something more specific: the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the unique and authoritative witness to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To look only to creation without looking to the scriptures in a quest to learn about and encounter God is living only on the surface. It is like living on bread alone.
If you think that a sunrise over the Smoky Mountains or a sunset in the desert is stunning, try looking at it again after reading in the scriptures that the One who created that sunrise and sunset also created you and loves you. It takes the beauty of that moment to a whole new level. God’s self-revelation in creation may be able to bring us to awe, but it won’t bring us into relationship with our creator. Maybe that is why my hikes seem so sacred, because I look at the woods through the lens of the Bible. I walk through the forest in relationship with the One who formed the universe. I guess that is one way to describe a Christian: someone who walks through the forest of life in relationship with the One who formed the universe. And the way we come into that relationship is through encountering God in the Scriptures. The Bible is not just an accessory to Christian faith. It is absolutely essential.

This Tuesday I am going to start teaching an undergraduate class, Introduction to the New Testament, at Southwestern College, which is a Methodist college in Winfield. The other day I had coffee with the head of the Philosophy and Religion Department. I asked if I should assume that all of the students in the class are Christians. He looked at the class roster and said, “I’m pretty sure they are all Christians.” Then just a couple of minutes later I asked for advice in my preparations and teaching. He said, “You should also assume that they no almost nothing about the Bible.” In my mind I thought, “Christians who know almost nothing about the Bible?” After getting over the initial shock I thought about how wonderful it will be to help these students encounter God’s Word and to help them realize that they may have been trying to live on bread alone. Hopefully they will come to see that life can be so much better than that. But surely many of them will come to class on the first day wondering, “Why is the Bible so important?”

As followers of Jesus Christ, we go to the scriptures because the Bible is where we learn of our Lord, of his teachings, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead. It is the Word through which the Holy Spirit teaches us what to believe and how to live. But if any of those students become convinced of scripture’s power to transform I will not be able to take the credit for that. It will have been the Holy Spirit working in their hearts. Those students, just like all of us, must be open to the Holy Spirit working in our lives through scripture, which as I will say on the first day of class, begins with our opening the Bible. The Bible isn’t just important; it is essential for the person of faith. It does not merely inform us like a history book or an encyclopedia, but God uses it to transform us. When we let God in, the scriptures are not just a book but a place where we meet God.

So as Christians, whether we have been a Christian for eighty-five years or if we just came to faith this morning, we can’t neglect the Bible, thinking that hearing the preacher’s sermon on Sunday is enough. As I have found many times, and most recently this past week after I returned from vacation and found myself sitting in that front pew for ten minutes, it is pretty safe to say that the Holy Spirit won’t work through the Bible if it is collecting dust on a shelf all the time. Instead, we must turn to the scriptures, prayerfully asking the Spirit to open us up to God’s transforming work, working through those ancient words to conform us not to the expectations of our culture but to the likeness of Christ Jesus. We do this both as individuals in personal devotional time, but with our families, and in communities like informal study groups or church bible studies or in Sunday School.

This is Lent, a time for getting back to the basics. It is a time to decide that when the world and your busy life tries to keep you living on the surface, that you will respond, both in word and action, with “I do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Lent is a time to decide that this will be the time when you experience God’s wonderful words of life.

Kids and Ash Wednesday

Is Ash Wednesday appropriate for children? This is a legitimate question. Ash Wednesday is a very heavy day. On Ash Wednesday we are reminded of our sinfulness. We are also reminded that we are going to die. Every single one of us will someday stop breathing and our hearts will stop beating and this body will shut down and begin to turn to dust. According to traditional Reformed theology, that is all we can do on our own—sin and die. Like I said, Ash Wednesday is a heavy day. However, on Ash Wednesday we are also reminded of God’s forgiveness and the fact that “whether we live or whether we die we belong to the Lord.” Because of God we can repent, turning toward God, and moving forward in life as forgiven people. Because of God we do not have to fear death because God offers eternal life, granted through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So really we boil it down to the main meaning of the day--Ash Wednesday is a day to be reminded of our utter dependence on God.

Sin, repentance, death—sounds like a great time for kids! Okay, maybe it isn’t fun and it isn’t sunny, but that wasn’t the question. The question was whether or not Ash Wednesday is appropriate for children. My answer is yes… but it requires some preparation on the part of the parents. I think children who are just brought to an Ash Wednesday service without having been prepared beforehand will either be confused or frightened. As parents it is our responsibility to tell our kids what is going to happen in the Ash Wednesday service. Just knowing what to expect can alleviate a lot of anxiety. The songs are not usually upbeat happy songs. The tone is usually somber. Everybody lines up and has black ashes put on their foreheads and the pastor says, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” Then we have communion. It can be pretty confusing for a kid… but it can also be quite powerful for a kid as well. It just takes a little time from the parent.

Here is what I’m going to tell Wyatt, who will be in the worship service. I will spread this out over a few conversations:

“Ash Wednesday is the first day of a church season called Lent. Do you remember the season of Advent, the season that leads up to Christmas? Well, Lent is the season that leads up to Easter. The cloths on the pulpit and communion table, as well as the stole that I [Pastor Everett] wear during Lent will be purple. Lent is about 40 days long and it is a time of year when we pay extra special attention to how we are living our lives and we ask God to help us to keep following Jesus. To begin the season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday we think about how much we need God. We need to be reminded that we are to love God and love others, but that we can never do this without God's help. You will come forward with mommy and I [the pastor] will draw a cross on everybody’s foreheads with ashes. I [the pastor] will say, ‘From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.’ Those words come from the Bible and I am [he is] saying them to you as a reminder that we are human beings and we need God and that God has come to be with us through Jesus and that human beings and God come together through Jesus. There is nothing to be worried about. Everyone will be getting the cross on our foreheads, kids and grownups, because we are all human beings and we all need God.”

Through these or similar words I will have introduced the themes of sin, repentance, reconciliation, and death. The first three are pretty obvious, but death is merely implied in these words in a way that a kid can understand and that won’t cause the fears that can often come to kids when death is mentioned unnecessarily. They might even think that everyone at the Ash Wednesday service is going to die… at the Ash Wednesday service! You never know what connections will be made in our minds when we are kids. So I don’t think death, although it is a major theme of Ash Wednesday, needs to be addressed with younger children. Because Wyatt is a pastor’s child and because I’ve done ten funerals in my short time here, Wyatt knows way more about death than most six-year-olds. We’ve talked about it a great deal and in fairly great detail. However, in preparation for Ash Wednesday, I don’t think that I really need to get into the subject of death with him. I’ve told him that we get the ashes in order to remind us that we are human beings. Death is a part of being a human being, so I’ll just leave it with us being reminded that we are human beings and because of that we need God.

Here are also some other words that might be used a lot during worship that you might want to touch on with your kids. “Sin” is what we call it when we live in ways that are against what God wants for us—when we treat other people badly or when we are greedy and so on and so forth. We all sin but because God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for us on the cross, God is willing to forgive us and wants us to try to sin less and start living more the way God wants us to live. But we can’t do that by ourselves. We need God’s help. “Repentance” means when you decide that you’re going to stop doing the wrong thing, say you are sorry, and then start doing the right thing. “Reconciliation” is a long word that just means “to bring back together.” When two people get in a fight and then they make up they are coming back together; they are reconciling. Through Jesus, God brings us together with God and brings us together with each other. That’s why we have communion a little while after we get the ashes on our foreheads. Communion helps us to remember that through Jesus we have been brought back together with God and with each other.

Those are just some ideas. Like I said, Wyatt will be in the worship service. Josselyn, since she is only three-years-old will be in the nursery. I will, however, spend some time with Wyatt preparing him beforehand. I will be at the church early on Wednesday evening and I would be willing to spend a little time with any children to supplement their parents’ preparation by walking them through some things and letting them see the bowl of ashes and other things to disarm any anxiety or confusion they might have. Also, if there are

a few kids in the worship service, I have a children’s sermon prepared just in case that might help them to feel at ease and a part of the service. In addition, starting this Wednesday, families can pick up the daily devotion and sticker activity for the season of Lent. This year it is based on the story of Jonah and the first reading and sticker begins on Ash Wednesday.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help prepare our kids for Ash Wednesday.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett