And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.

Luke 9:29

Mr. Lewis preached his sermon, The Weight of Glory , in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Oxford, on June 8, 1942. He preached it largely in response to the materialism that had begun to dominate European thought and culture in the middle of the last century.

And by materialism, I don't mean that in the way it's used here, to describe Americans' insatiable lust for new consumer goods. I mean it in the philosophical sense - the belief that the world we can see, feel and touch is the only world there is. And the corollary assumption that a belief in anything beyond this world is silly and sentimental.

It is fitting that Mr. Lewis preached the sermon in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. For the very name embodies the point of view Lewis espoused in his sermon; namely that people of faith, by definition, remain anchored in the belief in a reality, a belief in possibilities, beyond those which science can explain.

The dialogue, the conversation, the argument between science and faith has waxed and waned for many years. It began long before Lewis preached his sermon, of course. And it continues in our day.

In fairness, it must be noted that the conversation did not really begin until science wrested itself from the confining grasp of faith; the heavy-handed grip that essentially grabbed Galileo by the throat and forced him into a kind of reverse confession of faith--insisting not that he affirm things he cannot see, but that he deny things he could plainly see and measure with his telescope.

Given religion's harsh and domineering response to the claims of science through the centuries, it is no surprise that science has lately begun to fight back. A spate of books has appeared in the last year or so whose primary purpose seems to be to discredit not just Christianity but religious practice and belief of all kinds.

The Atheist Manifesto; God, the Failed Hypothesis; The God Gene, The End of Faith, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon , are all titles currently gracing the shelves at Barnes and Nobel.

In the latter book, Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett makes the startling claim that, as he puts it, "I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion . . . in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will not longer command the awe it does today" (quoted on The World Question Center website, http://edge.org/q2007/q07_1.html .)

I always smile when I read of religion's predicted demise. It's as though a voice from a burning bush had whispered this astonishing revelation into the ear of the prognosticator. 

I smile because if one is going to predict religion's end, one may as well predict humanity's end.  For whether anyone likes this characteristic or not, human beings are essentially religious creatures. We have a taste for awe, a longing for the transcendent glory described here in Luke; we share a hunger for the sacred that will never disappear as long as there are human beings with beating hearts alive on the earth.

Of all the aforementioned books, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is perhaps the most ambitious and critical. Like C. S. Lewis, Dawkins also calls Oxford home. But unlike Lewis, it's fair to say that Dawkins is an enemy of religion. He sees it as a source of great evil in the world, and goes so far as to say that parents who raise their children in a faith-filled environment are guilty of child abuse.

We all know that religion has a mixed record and that parts of Christian history in particular are very dark. But still, that's strong stuff, and probably pretty offensive to most of us here in this room--it's impossible to imagine that the children of our congregation are somehow being abused. So much so that it's tempting to dismiss Dawkins as a bit of a scientific fanatic, the secular equivalent of the intolerant fundamentalists he so abhors.

But the truth is that his book is selling at a pretty rapid clip. And, indeed, this conversation is making its way down to the popular level. I have been engaged for some weeks now with a good friend of mine who teaches middle school science.

If I seek truth, he wrote to me in an email, I can find intellectual truth through the process and content of science and the majority of scientist will agree on this truth. The question is, can spiritual truth be found, and if so, how? 

It's an excellent question, one that should be asked. But I also think it uncovers a basic misunderstanding about the ends of science and faith; a misunderstanding that in my view fuels the perennial antagonism between these two great branches of human inquiry and experience.

And that is that science and faith are about truth, or at least the same kind of truth. At their best, science and faith are not trying to explain the same things, or answer the same questions. At least not in the same way.

Science is about certainty, and well it should be. I want any airplane I'm in to take off every single time it heads down the runway. And though my life is at stake every time it does, I trust that the plane will take off because science tells me with certainty that when a particular airplane hits a certain speed it can't do anything but fly.

That is exactly what we want from science: certainty. And it is exactly the opposite of what you want from faith. On the side of religion when you start trafficking in certainty you've just entered the domain of fundamentalism. 

And if someone tells you that faith is about certainty, and insists that you share that view, and believe everything they believe in exactly the same way they believe it; and if they tell you that religion tells us more about the origins of the physical world than science does, well, run from this person, cause they're likely wearing a literal or a figurative bomb vest and they're just waiting for the right time to set it off.

Like all religions, the Christian faith is not finally about certainty. Nor is it ultimately about history, as such, or biology or geology or physics or any branch of scientific inquiry.

Our faith, rather, is about experiencing the holy, or the divine, or the sacred; that is why we are here this morning. And it's about loving and serving God and loving and serving our neighbors and learning to love ourselves, a discipline that can take years to master and with which we need each other's help.

And it's about loving mercy and doing justice and making peace and building community. And finally faith is about mining our sacred stories for meaning and insights that will help us understand our lives and make sense of the wild journey we're all on. 
Here's a simpler way of putting it. Science is what we do with our intellect. Religion and spirituality - those are what we do with our souls. I think it really is that simple.
Or as my trusted friend Barbara Brown Taylor put it.

Christian faith depends on beholding things that are beyond belief . . .

"Behold, I bring you good news of great joy."

"Behold the Lamb of God."

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . ." ( Leaving Church, pg. 109).

As usual, she's right. But faith is not just about the "beholds." It is also about those things that we cannot behold, things we cannot see and experiences we cannot explain.

For example, Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Dennett and others have tried to debunk those accounts of people who have died and have been brought back. You know the ones who later report a feeling of great peace and the sense that they were moving toward the light. It's all a function of brain chemistry, they say.

Perhaps it is. But I look to my faith and not to science to explain why every time I've been present with someone who has died--and I'll bet you've had this experience too--I feel like I need to take my shoes off because the room is flooded with a sense of holiness, awash in light I cannot see but which I feel as certainly as I feel the sun shining down on me in the light of day.

In this same way, respectable scientific journals have recently done blind studies on the efficacy of prayer. And they have concluded that a patient in Cleveland is not measurably helped by having someone in Boston praying for their well-being.

Again, perhaps so. But that's not the point. It seems to me the point is much more about what it's like to be on the receiving end of those prayers when someone is good enough to come to the hospital and pray them with you.

I look to faith and not to science to explain why it is that people who are waiting for surgery, who may not believe in much of anything at all, will clutch your hand and say "Yes" with tears in their eyes when you ask them if you might pray with them.

There is no doubt that science answers a great many questions - particularly the "how" questions. And it answers them better than religion will ever do.

And that is the way it should be. That, I believe, is the way God intended things to be.

But for me, I can't imagine trying to understand my life, I can't imagine trying to understand the world, I can't imagine trying to understand the "why" questions, without my faith.

I can't imagine trying to understand family rivalries without reference to Cain and Abel's early, archetypal rivalry. I can't imagine trying to understand the geopolitical realities of the Middle East without reference to Isaac and Ishmael.

I can't imagine trying to understand the arc of life, my sojourn through the world, without the aid and the benefit of Abraham and Sarah's archetypal, foundational spiritual journey, or without the aid and illumination of the Israelites' sojourn through the wilderness; without stories about parting seas and burning bushes and manna sent from heaven, stories that give me hope when I am hungry and tired and trapped in my own kind of Egypt--hope that I will someday be liberated, hope that I shall someday be fed, hope that I shall someday find my home.

I shudder to think how impoverished my life would be without the stories of Daniel's courage in the face of imperial threats, or Jonah's reluctance to embrace his destiny and do what God was calling him to do. Without Peter's enthusiasm or without Thomas's doubt--spiritual tendencies, which, I might point out, will no doubt come into play for a congregation fixin' to enter a capital campaign. These stories are for us and for the world and they are good news to anyone who will listen to them and learn from them.

So to Mr. Dennett and Mr. Dawkins and to their cohorts, I would say only this: I am immeasurably grateful for the advancements of science. We all benefit from them daily. Every time I go to the dentist and benefit from anesthesia, or go to the drug store and benefit from antibiotics I give thanks for science. And I hope Mr. Dennett and his cohorts will always find enough funding to build their stellar observatories and particle accelerators and research laboratories.

But I would also say this: Get your hands off our faith! And let us build our churches and renovate our building, cause we've been to the mountaintop and many of those experiences happened right here, in this Chapel. We've stood with Peter on mountaintops and in hospital rooms during births and deaths, and in sanctuaries just like this one; stood in the presence of mysteries we could not understand, mysteries that can't be explained, when the presence of God was so palpable we wanted to build a temple right there on the spot and never leave. When the glory of God carried such weight it nearly pressed us into the ground, when the only language to describe this experience is "Alleluia!" And, "Glory be to God!"

C.S. Lewis put it this way: I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because, by it, I see everything else (quoted from the essay, "Is Theology Poetry?")

That is true for many of us here today, hopefully most of us. It's also true that when the weight of glory lifts, when you're back down in the lowlands and life suddenly gets hard and you need some answers, these stories will still be here, waiting for you. And when the scientific textbooks fail you, and medicine fails you, and technology fails you, as they inevitably will someday, and you need some answers, these stories will still be here, waiting for you, now and evermore.