As we saw, today's gospel is the miracle of the loaves and fishes. My first thought was that God or Tonya had a wicked sense of humor. As a high school physics teacher, I am constantly reminding my students that according to the laws of physics, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. I also teach that these laws have always applied and will always apply. In fact to deny this would result in wrong answers on a test. Oh, I can here them now. Wait a minute, how can 5 loaves and 2 fish feed five thousand men their wives and children and still leave 12 baskets of leftovers? The original loaves and fish probably didn’t fill even one basket. Where did the matter in the other 11 baskets come from? Were you lying to us in class Mr. H or are you lying to us now? “Come on Mr. H which do you REALLY believe?” Boy, am I glad none of my students go to Saint Matthew’s.
If I were to take their questions at face value, I would have to say “I may be lying in church and I am definitely lying in class. I can’t say if I’m lying about the loaves and fish because I was not there and as a former lawyer, I can tell you that even under oath, second-hand knowledge would not be admissible in a court of law. In the classroom, I know I’m lying. When I tell them matter can be neither created nor destroyed, that is an exaggeration. OH, it is accurate enough to form the foundation of the entire field of chemistry. But we have known for almost 100 years that matter can be created or destroyed in an atomic reaction. It is happening constantly in the sun. But even that is a simplification because the calculations that allow for the atomic bomb also say a very, very, very small amount of matter is either created or destroyed in every chemical reaction. So little that we cannot detect it, but for atomic energy to work, it has to be happening. So if I answer the question literally, yes, I am lying to them in class.
But to answer their question in this way is about as useful as a husband giving a literal answer to the question “Do I look fat in these jeans?” The real questions being asked are why should I listen in class and why should I listen in church.
It is easy to see why many people think this is an either or question. We live in a culture that often says only that which can be proven scientifically is true, but scientific thought is fairly new to mankind. Although elements such as formal logic have existed since the ancient Greeks, scientific thought as we know it is only about 450 years old. What we call science did not even exist when Columbus first sighted the new world. Yet in this short period of time it has changed the shape of our cities, our genetic make up and the very reach of human influence. The scientific method as it has been applied over the last 450 years has led to an unparalleled increase in the physical well being of mankind. In just about any terms most of us live a life Julius Caesar could only dream about. Julius would have loved air conditioning, electric lighting …. toilet paper. This is why the students should listen in science class. Science works.
Until the renaissance most explanations were religious. They provided an answer to the question of why. The mechanism of how was the hand of God. Then, during the renaissance, science evolved from the observation of how the physical world operated. Facts were collected and theories developed. The purpose of a theory was to best approximate reality and few of the founders of science questioned whether God was part of that reality. The test of any theory was whether or not it could predict results. As time went on scientific explanations crowded out religious explanations and our modern world emerged.
Science was and is an incredible tool in the hands of mankind. But we all know what a man is like when he gets his hands on a new tool….. That’s right; he wanders around the house trying to find a use for it.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, pretty much every problem looks like a nail. So it is not surprising that when science proved so successful in explaining physical phenomena, some people began trying to apply this new tool to religion. As science provided more and more explanations of the physical world that did not require the ever present hand of God, a search was made for other facts to support God’s existence. A movement developed to find these facts in the Bible. We call this movement fundamentalism. This approach says that every statement in the Bible is a fact and that these facts prove the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus.
The trouble with this approach is it reminds me of the line from the old Dragnet TV show where the detective tells the eye witness “Just the facts mam, only the facts.” Even scientists understand that imagery is often a more effective way to convey an idea.
When I was recycling myself from Lawyer to teacher I attended Ball State University. In my chemistry class we were taught electron orbitals. I can still remember my professor telling a class of over 300 students, “I’m about to tell you a fairy tale. We know it is a fairly tale and that there is no such thing as an orbital. But acting as if this fairy tale is true allows us to predict more behavior than any other explanation we have come up with. If you can come up with a fairy tale that predicts more behavior, you too can win a Nobel Prize.”
A literal interpretation of the Bible assumes the writers of the Gospels were simply reporters, or stenographers, taking down only the facts as given to them. It assumes that the writers did not process in anyway the facts they observed to come up with theories or imagery to better convey the experience to those who where not there.
Last week on NPR, a story was told that I think applies. In it a book is dropped on Mars. The Martians come out to examine the book. They measure its size, its weight, its color, the texture of the cover and run numerous tests on the physical properties of the book. They then report their results indicating they know all there is to be known about a book.
The scientific method is a marvelous tool, an awesome hammer, but it is pretty darn useless when what you need is a saw. Science and logic are not the only tools God put in our tool box, there is also discernment. Science complements intuition, it does not replace it.
When I read the Bible not as a text book, but as a diary of the Jewish peoples relationship with God and the Early churches relationship with the Christ, the over arching theme I perceive is of God’s love for each and every one of us as if we were his own children. When I read the passages of the miracle of the loaves and fishes with this theme in mind, the message I receive is “Do not be afraid”, specifically “Do not be afraid to share.”
We Episcopalians believe in a living God, The facts to support this are in our world and in our hearts. He is as present today as he was at the time of Jesus. The Bible contains theories and explanations of the effect of God’s presence in biblical time. It provides us tools to recognize and react to God’s presence in our time.
In the loaves and fishes we have a model of how to share when God is present in our lives. We must determine how to apply this model to the here and now.
Jesus tells us else were in the Bible that we will know the true teaching by its fruits. This story tells us that proper sharing will result in a surplus of wealth. If the result is not greater wealth, but greater poverty it does not mean we should not share. It means that we are not sharing in a proper way. Science is silent as to how we should treat one another. The Bible provides us the tools to live with one another as God’s children. That is why the students should listen in church.
So if my students ask me, “what do you believe about this passage”, I can say: I believe that a large crowd followed Jesus and the Disciples, that while they had food for themselves neither Jesus nor the disciples believed that they alone had the resources to feed the crowd. That Jesus knew that without God’s help they could not feed the crowd. That Jesus knew that only by sharing what he and the Disciples had, would the crowd be fed. That this generosity resulted not only in the crowd being fed, but with more left over than the Disciples started with.
And that all this occurred without requiring that the laws of physics be violated. Amen
