Who is this intern who stands before you? You might be wondering about me. What am I like? Am I going to me the kind of minister you like having around? Will you, as a congregation, need to do a lot of work to get me ready for my own parish? Today, I want to share a little bit about myself, so you know a little about this new student minister in your fellowship.

I begin with a story. I remember one particularly fateful day in my religious development. I was at Reed College, as a biology major. I think the year was 1978 and I was in some upper division physiology lab. We were looking at a collection of slides of cellular structures and I said, to no one in particular, "Isn’t Mother Nature amazing". The lab assistant got a sour look on his face and said, "how can you study biology and still believe in Mother Nature?" I responded that, the more I study biology, the more I believe in Mother Nature. I guess that was when I began to figure out that, for me, my scientific study was somehow tied to my personal theology. That my pursuit of the 4^th Unitarian Universalist principle, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, was going to at least be partly a scientific search.

Now, as your student minister, there is something you should know about me. I think Gretchen already warned you last week. You see, I am a believer. That’s right, I believe in some kind of divine power. Call it God, Mother Nature, the Tao, The Force…whatever. It doesn’t really matter, all names for this kind of thing are symbolic anyway. But I am a Unitarian Universalist who is an actual theist. Now I want you to know that doesn’t mean I believe in the old white man with a beard who lives on cloud nine just down the road from the Easter Bunny. I don’t believe in a God who has to die for my sins or that God who my father was sure was going to send him to hell for not believing what the church of his childhood told him. But part of what I want to do this morning is tell you about what I do believe and why I believe it. I want to tell you all this, not to convince you that you should believe the same thing that I believe, but so that you will know who I am. As I serve you as intern minister this year, I want you to know where I am coming from. And OK, I admit it… maybe I do want to open the door of belief for you just a smidge, to expand your possible definitions of God a little bit.

Now, I don’t understand that thing which I call God very well. There are a lot of the big questions about the universe that I don’t have answers to. That is OK. I have a human mind and it is finite. The finite nature of the human mind is part of why I have never been able to get behind an anthropomorphic views of God, A God with human characteristics. God is not like people. The God I talk about is not "angry when we sin" or "disappointed when we do not pray". That is how humans behave, those are human feelings, not those of huge divine forces of the universe. As great as the human mind is, anything that is big enough for me to call it God is going to be too big for me to fully grasp and to fully understand. I actually take some comfort in that, interestingly enough. As a mother and a social worker I have often had a lot of responsibility, for other people and for their health and well being. I have a sneaking suspicion that as a minister I am not going to get out of feeling responsible. But I like the idea that there are things that are bigger than I am and that I don’t have to fully understand. It is not that I can blithely go around saying, "God will take care of it". Not at all. But I do have a sensation that I am not in charge of the universe and that does give me comfort. I didn’t make this universe. I can’t destroy it either. The cosmic universe and the laws of physics go on, no matter what I do. No matter what decisions I make. Like I said, for me, this is kind of comforting. This is one of the reasons I like being a believer. It gives me what I often refer to as "holy humility". I know that I am not Atlas, holding up the earth. It reminds me of my limitations and this, for someone who has a natural tendency to feel overly responsible, is a real relief.

To help explain about my personal beliefs, I want to call here upon the old story of the blind men and the elephant, dating back to the 13^th century in the area now called Afghanistan. The story goes that there were once a group of blind men and they were taken to describe an elephant. After examining the elephant thoroughly, they were asked to tell about the elephant. The one who had been near a leg said, "An elephant is like a tree. It is rounded and firm, like a pillar." The man who was at the ear said, "No, I have the answer. The elephant is large, flat, rough and wide. It is like a rug". The man who was at the trunk said, "I have the real facts. The elephant is like a long tube, it is flexible and filled with rushing air." None of these careful observers were wrong about the facts they were presented with. They described well the parts of the elephant they had access to. But their knowledge was incomplete. They did not have a grasp of the entire concept of elephant, matter how well they understood what they were given. This story is often used to talk about that way it is with people and understanding God. We just don’t have access to all the data and there is no way we can. We can learn some truth about what we can touch, but that is not the whole truth.

I think of God as including, but not limited to, the culmination of all the laws of physics known and unknown to us. We have great discussions at our family dinner table. In scientific discussions around my dinner table, I often, somewhat in jest, refer to, "God’s holy law of gravity" or "God’s sacred laws of thermodynamics". I believe that which I call God is involved somehow with the grand order of the universe. God is somehow inclusive of strong and weak forces in an atom. And the incredible miracle of the double helix and the genetic code, with the production of amino acids, building proteins, building us. My gosh, that is truly the word being made flesh isn’t it? When I think of this stuff, I am in awe. It feels to me like a religious kind of awe, like some people feel when they walk into a Cathedral. I also feel a drive to learn more, so I can understand just a little bit more of the nature of the universe. It is a way to understand this miracle just a little more.

You see, for me, science is a tiny piece of the elephant. In its discipline, I can access some knowledge of the universe and that thing that I call God… through my study of the natural world. Accessing God through the natural world is not new to our Unitarian Universalist faith. The Transcendentalist Unitarians, Emerson and Thoreau, were all about accessing the divine through nature and observation.

The truths I can learn in the field or laboratory are as real as we can achieve with our current methods. They are important. I remember as a kid seeing an advertisement in a souvenir copy of the program from the Worlds Fair. It was for an unfamiliar religion called Unitarianism. It said, "do you believe that scientific truth can not be contrary to any other truth, including religious truth?" I have never forgotten that and I think that was the beginning of my conversion to Unitarian Universalism. I also resonate with this interesting quote from the writer, Tom Mahon. He says, "Instead of picturing God as a medieval monarch on a marble throne, imagine God as the living awareness in the space between the atoms, the ‘empty’ space that makes up about 99.99 percent of the universe. Thinking of God that ways gets us past some of the great theological divides of the past. Is God immanent or transcendent, internal or external, composed or compassionate? Like the question of whether the atom is a wave or particle, the answer is: yes."

I think of God as including but not limited to the source of feelings of love and care we hold for each other as well as the spark of life in all beings. As a student of biology and psychology, I believe that love is basically a neurochemical event. I believe life is an elaborate biochemical activity involving a lot of carbon atoms. But that does not mean that I love my husband and children with any less devotion. It does not mean I am not very thankful and appreciative of my life and the lives of the people I meet. Just because it is chemistry, doesn’t mean it is not wonderful. It doesn’t mean I can’t think of it as a miracle. It doesn’t mean I can’t be thankful, thanking some organizing force in the universe that somehow involves a system where a bunch of chemicals turn into my wonderful children, who I adore.

And somehow, I see this thing I call God as a benevolent force. For this I have no scientific evidence – no hard data. I think it is because I love my life and see the universe as a miraculous and wonderful place. It works best for me when I think of the universe as wonderful and the organizing forces as somehow good. But what about when bad things happen. They do, they happen all the time and that thing which I call God does not seem to stop them. The war continues in Iraq. Genocide continues in Darfur. Loved ones get sick and die. I do not even pretend to know the answer to this one. The sum of cosmic truth is a really big elephant and I have access to only a tiny bit of the toenail. But I find some wisdom in the writings of the scholars of Process Theology. Process Theology is a system of belief, originating with the mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead believed that the laws of science and mathematics and the laws of God had to be, somehow, the same laws. Whitehead said the Universe is on some kind of trajectory, like a kind of cosmic vector, and yet each of us have choices every minute of how we will behave. Our choices will ultimately impact the trajectory of our lives, the lives of others, and the trajectory of the universe. A stream flowing in the woods runs along its downhill path, following the natural laws of physics. If I move a stone into the stream, or take one out, the flow will change somewhat, though it will still follow the same natural laws in doing so. Human action paired with the laws of nature can change the trajectory, the outcome, of events that we experience. They impact the path of our lives and the lives of others. Charles Hartshorne, another Process theologian, talks of how we can think of the God that is behind the cosmos as still being worthy of trust and love in the face of human tragedy. Hartshorne makes this analogy. He says, "The engineer has a duty to start the train about on time, although he may know that some individual is thereby doomed to bitter tears because the train leaves without him. The trains of nature perhaps cannot be permitted to forget their schedules- not because individuals do not matter, but precisely because individuals do matter, and because they cannot well exist if there are no schedules which are faithfully observed". I think Hartshorne means that we need to live in a predictable universe where the laws of physics and chemistry do not change to meet our individual needs and desires. Our universe needs to be more stable than that.

Does my scientific view of God mean I have never experienced the unexplainable, those things that seem to defy the logic of a scientific interpretation? I have indeed. I expect some of you have as well. I remember as a child of twelve waking up in the middle of the night with a strange sense of calm, knowing very clearly that my very aged cat had just died, but that it was her time and that everything was OK. When my mother broke the news of her death to me at the breakfast table all I could do was look at my plate and say, "I know". I have had a few other unexplainable experiences like this. My science and logic can’t make sense out of them. I just have to chalk them up to things I do not understand and cannot deny. I guess they have to do with the other side of the elephant. The part I don’t have access to.

Now some of you might be chafing a bit at my language. I use the word "God" pretty freely. And also use words like "holy" and "miracle" and "sacred". Heck, and this is just my first sermon with you folks. Why do I use these words? These are old words that are used by more orthodox religious people. Can’t I find different words? To tell the truth, I don’t want to use different words. I kind of like to use these words, when I can. I have two reasons for this. One reason that I don’t feel the need for different words in that I had a good experience with my religious upbringing. Though my theology evolved away from the Lutheran teachings of my childhood, I have no hard feelings about the church where I grew up. My life has changed over the years, but I feel no great need to leave behind language that has meaning for me. For example, I could call the woman who gave birth to me "Dorothea" or "the maternal unit", but it feels comfortable for me to call her "Mom", like I did when I was young. It evokes a familiar and warm feeling. Now I no longer see my mother the way I did as a child, and our relationship has changed a great deal over the decades. But I still care for her. That is how I feel about the big and unexplainable forces of the universe. I grew up hearing about how God created the world and how the life of a new baby was a miraculous gift. I may understand these processes differently now that I am an adult thinking of the big bang and prenatal development, but the old familiar names still feels good on some level.

The other reason I use these words is that I feel a duty to reclaim them in our liberal faith. They really are a part of our Unitarian and Universalist religious heritage. I strongly feel that religious liberals should not let these religious words become the exclusive property of the far right. If only those with a vengeful view of God ever use the word God, God will automatically become just a word of fear and intimidation. If only those who believe in a question-less faith can use the word miracle, then we have lost a lovely, poetic, and sometimes instinctive description of the first spring flowers or a beautiful sunset over the ocean. These are words that were regularly used by our Unitarian and Universalist religious ancestors, people we owe so much to. Michael Servetus was burned at the stake, not for his significant breakthroughs in medical research, but for his for his radical writings about the nature of God. Origun was called a heretic for his writings about Salvation, not politics. I will not let these traditional religious words go out of the Unitarian Universalist vocabulary out of respect for those who gave so much to claim their liberal use. I will not let these words go out of the Unitarian Universalist vocabulary because these are words our own scholars have used for hundreds of years to write about our history and our beliefs. And I will not let these words go out of the Unitarian Universalist vocabulary because I want us to understand the broad and various meanings they can have when we are in dialog about life’s big questions with our neighbors of another faiths.

I want to offer you another analogy about God, I think even better than the elephant story. It comes from Clayton Burgess, my husband’s uncle who is a Methodist minister and theologian. He says he thinks of a huge desert, with sand going in all directions as far as the eye can see. Someone stands at the edge of the desert and picks up a handful of sand. Most of the sand runs through their fingers, but a few grains stick to the moisture of the human hand. Clayton says that the desert is like God, infinite and unfathomable. The few grains of sand that stick to his hand…that is the part of God that he can learn about and understand. For Clayton, the sand that sticks to his had is the love of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus he has learned. He knows that God is much more, but that is the part he has access to in his finite capacity. As I stand on the edge of this desert, different sand has been stuck to my hand. I have a few grains of scientific inquiry and some human experience of love. I too have only a tiny fraction of the entire desert in my hand. But I can gain insight and wisdom from what I can study of this thing that I call God.

I wonder about each of you. If you can follow me along this path of allegory for a moment... What would be the sand on your hand? How do you learn about the greater truths of the universe. Are you like the Buddha with inner peace and avoidance of attachment in your sand? Are you like the original inhabitants of this region, with the sand in your hand containing your relationship with the fish and the trees? No one is capable of holding all of the desert in their hand, even for a moment. But it can be very rewarding to study the tiny grains that stick to your palm.

So now you know. You know some anyway. This intern who stands before you… this theist and former scientist and a lover of religious words…. I have shared with you some of my deep and ever evolving beliefs. I have talked with you about things I don’t often talk about with people in casual conversation. I hope, in these eight months with you, for chances to be in dialog with you about these important things, these beliefs, theses things you don’t talk about on the bus or in the line a the supermarket. Thank you for listening to me today. I look forward to listening to you.

May it be so, my friends.