Karl Frank 4/24/2022
Welcome. Welcome to this, our Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church. All are welcome here, I am Karl Frank, not the minister, but a member of the congregation, leading the service today in the temporary absence of Reverend Janet Parsons, who is preparing for a sabbatical.
This church to which I welcome you was founded in the same decade with the foundation of our nation, and based on the philosophy of human freedom characteristic of the European enlightenment, the philosophical movement which inspired the words of our national Declaration of Independence. The founders of this church split off from the established Puritan church of Massachusetts because they saw the doctrine of Hell and eternal punishment as inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, and taught instead that salvation was possible for all.
Consequently, we do not have a fixed creed but take the practice of forgiveness and love as our foundation.
In the 1770s, there was a lot published in the newspapers of Europe and the American colonies about Enlightenment. A newspaper in Europe published a call for an Op/Ed article to explain to the public what this was all about. The philosopher Immanuel Kant responded with a now famous essay entitled What is Enlightenment.
His answer is relevant to us here, in so far as it explains why this church does not demand agreement with any creed: Kant wrote:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use your own understanding without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! — That is the motto of enlightenment.
Many Stories of Creation – Sermon
Karl Frank 4/24/2022
Creation is not a one-time six day performance possible only for the God of Abraham and Isaac. .And there are more stories of creation in the Hebrew bible than the one in Genesis One Chapter One. Indeed, there is quite a different story in Genesis Chapter Two.
Creation goes on in big and little ways all the time, both among things and stories.
Every Indian Nation has its creation story, some are sisters to one another, so obviously stories are being created, again and again, some newer than others
On a windowsill at our house, as I begin writing these Earth-Day thoughts, you would find 16 tiny brown flower pots, formed from peat moss, for starting seeds, In each pot stands a seedling tomato. The tallest amongst them sits on the desk as I write. One of them is on the altar as I speak.
This pot is 2 1/2 inches tall, and the plant stands another 2 1/2 inches, with paired blade-shaped seed leaves spreading 2 and a half wide, in a gesture imitating the wings of bird in liftoff. Nestled in the cleft between the seed-eaves is the first pair of “true” tomato leaves. A few random lobes of a darker green, with the microscopically fine fuzz typical of tomato plants. These true leaves should be measured in millimeters, not inches,
Today, on the Saturday after EarthDay, as I continue what I began, the tray of seedlings is outdoors in the sunlight for their first encounter with the outdoors and direct sunlight. In the 16 tiny flower pots you would see plants now 4 inches tall, but growth in size is not the point: You would see well-articulated true leaves and, in the cleft between them, a tiny point of growth from which more leaves, then branches, flowers, and fruit will appear. This not mere growth in size, but the emergence of things that did not exist before. The seed has not grown into a bigger seed, just as the earth in its 4 billion years did not grow into a bigger version of itself. The seed and the earth have come altogether new things.
The seed leaves are already beginning to look weary. By Memorial Day, when this plant will be outdoors in a garden, no trace of of seed leaves will remain.
Where did these seedling tomatoes come from? Not from Market Basket, Shaws, Stop & Shop, Not from Common Crow either. It didn’t come from anywhere, the question assumes that everything comes from someplace. It did grew from a seed. The seed from which it has emerged was planted a quarter inch deep in this pot, it was watered regularly. Critically important to its germination and growth, i kept the seed warm: tomatoes won’t sprout unless their soil is warm. The little pot, and the peat from which it was formed, played their part too.
This little plant did not make itself, neither did I make it, It looks to me as if there has been a process playing itself out in the short life of this plant.
Why were its first leaves shaped like blades of grass?
Why do they fall off as the tomato-shaped leaves grow. A Taoist might say the Tao just works that way. Actually, there is an important discovery in 20th century botany that is part of that story: the alternation of generations in the evolution of plants that reproduce by means of seeds.
The warm sunlight shining in the window, the moist soil in which the seed found itself, And if we trace this process back, it has been at play for billions of years of earth, water and sun, that brought forth the seed I planted, and which brought forth me, who bought it from Johnny’s Seeds, a business incorporated in the state of Maine, who engaged the USPS to bring it to Gloucester.
Some of us would have said, long ago, following the lead of Joyce Kilmer’s poem about the Tree, that God made this little tomato plant. I respond “Yes, if you insist, let’s say God made this little tomato plant. But how did God do it? By means of the sun, the earth, Johnny’s Seed Company, and even the US Postal Service, in a Billion Year Process.
To understand how this came about, we must consider the earth, sun, and galaxy and their multi- billion year circle-dance (a process, not a thing) and how online purchases are made, paid for, and delivered, and what motivates a fellow in Gloucester to plant seeds on his windowsill.
I turn to my bible to see what the Book of Genesis has to say about – well, about genesis. I rather liked the Ojibway story of Turtle Island. If you do not know that one, I’m sure you will find it with little trouble.
Creation of new individuals occurs at the lowest level of nature: the quantum level of quarks and photons. This comes to you from an unreliable source, but here is another story:
Albert Einstein honored Max Planck above all the other physicists of his era, either because of, or despite the fact, that Planck founded the quantum theories that challenged Einstein’s ideas about physics. Einstein and Planck each discovered a fundamental physical constant, the two most fundamental results of physics in the 20th century..
Einstein’s theories of relativity established the speed of light as a universal constant of nature, relating amongst other things to the conversion of energy to matter and vice versa: the C in E = MCsquared.
Planck’s theories established the laws whereby a beam of energy, as for example of light, will break up into a stream of quanta, units of energy that behave as “things”. In the case of light, photons.
Planck’s constant determines the minimal possible sizes of thing, the smallest unit of space itself, which Einstein’s theories represent as a continuum, not atomic in nature.
And so, the creation of new “things” photons of light, occurs around us all the time, when light interacts with matter, in discrete units, units that are created from pure energy in the interaction. And at the other end of the scale, there are new planets formed around new stars.
This one universe in which we all share, from photons to galaxies, is abuzz with new things all the time.
