In the November 2006 issue of Time Magazine there is a transcript of a debate which took place between two scientists.
The first is Richard Dawkins. Some of you will recognize the name is belonging to the Oxford University evolutionary biologist and author of the recent best selling book, The God Delusion.
He is, you hardly need me to tell you, an atheist.
The other participant in the debate is Francis Collins, who like Dawkins, is a scientist, a geneticist to be precise.
But Collins, who is the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, heading a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honoured in a White House ceremony, is a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27
and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science’s largely agnostic upper reaches.
He also wrote a book which became a best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
The debate began with Dawkins stating that the question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God,
is one of the most important that we have to answer.
I think that it is a scientific question, says Dawkins, and my answer is no. Collins responds, Yes, God’s existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God’s existence is outside of science’s ability to really weigh in. (Time Magazine, November 5, 2006. God verses Science.)

Reading the article it was hard to know who won the debate without bringing one’s own biases to the argument, and certainly I have mine. Interestingly enough, when Dawkins recently appeared as a guest on the satirical comedy programme The Colbert Report and insisted that there could be no such thing as God, he was roundly booed by the normally irreverent audience.
Essentially the argument turns on whether or not one accepts the assumption that the questions of science are applicable to the notion of God.
How we answer that question may very well dictate whether we would say that we are created in God’s image or that any notion of god would be a god who is created in our image. This is a critical question for us as it relates to matters of faith.
And it’s a question which has been asked, whether knowingly or not, for many centuries. Last week Reverend Walker preached on Jesus’ visit to the synagogue at Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up. This morning we continue in that account as recorded in Luke’s gospel. Having read from the prophet Isaiah, that the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good new to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, Jesus then announced to the worshippers in the synagogue at Nazareth that, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The reaction to his declaration was definitely mixed. At first it is recorded that all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. You could take those words to be a compliment.
Isn’t this Joseph’s son, the son of a carpenter, and look at how he’s made good.

Can you believe that we knew him when he was just a little boy, that our child played with him and went to school with him? But those words also can have a more nefarious implication.Isn’t this Joseph’s son? We watched him grow up.
How dare he now tell us that he is the one Isaiah spoke of? Don’t get too big for your britches Jesus, you might be able to get away saying that kind of stuff to those people in Capernaum who don’t know you, but you can’t get away with it here.
Now if we we’re in Jesus’ situation perhaps what we would do would be to try to smooth things over.Listen friends, I don’t mean to offend you and I thank you for your support.Will you continue to help me and pray for me as I grow into this ministry?
Jesus could have said something like that. But he doesn’t. In fact Jesus says something quite shocking, almost like he was looking for a fight. Turning to the congregation Jesus says, I suppose you’re going to quote the proverb, Doctor, go heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what we heard you did in Capernaum. Well, let me tell you something, no prophet is ever welcomed in his hometown. Isn’t it a fact that there were many widows in Israel at the time of Elijah during that three and a half years of drought when famine devastated the land, but the only widow to whom Elijah was sent lived in Sidon, in Gentile territory?And there were many lepers in Israel at the time of the prophet Elisha but the only one cleansed was Naaman the Syrian, a foreigner, a pagan.
(Translation from Eugene Peterson’s, The Message) When a bit of sugar might have done the trick, Jesus seems to pour salt on the wound. You kind of have to know the people of Nazareth in order to fully understand the level of impact of Jesus’ words. Remember in the gospel according to John, when Philip finds Nathaniel and says to him, we have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law and about whom the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
Nathaniel’s answer is to ask, Nazareth! Can anything good come from there? It might be fair to say that the people of Nazareth had an inferiority complex. They weren’t all that highly thought of by their neighbours. So when Jesus comes along and begins to make a splash in the region with his miracles and healings, there’s a glimmer of hope for the people of Nazareth. Local kid makes the big time. No longer will Nazareth be known only as the butt of jokes. They could claim Jesus as their own. But rather than letting the people have their day in the sun, Jesus seems to go out of his way to make a point
which not only robs them of their pride but insults what little pride and status they think they had to begin with.
You think that I should do for you what I did in Capernaum but I won’t. You want me to do miracles and healings
like somehow I owe you that because I grew up here. But you’re wrong. In fact, you’re wrong about a lot of things.
You think that God has specially chosen you, but remember that Elijah bypassed all the widows of Israel to go to the home of a gentile widow and remember that of all the people who needed healing from their leprosy, only Naaman the Syrian, the commander of the army of your enemies, was ever healed during Elisha’s time. It was an insult.

Jesus not only claimed for himself the prophecy of Isaiah, he also told the people that God’s favour wasn’t only intended for them. No wonder the crowds became so enraged that they threw him out of the town and drove him up a hill in order to hurl him off the cliff. But he gave them the slip and went on his way. The townsfolk of Nazareth thought that they knew Jesus. They remembered the little boy that grew up among them and came to the conclusion that yes, even if he had become famous and successful, he was still one of them. They had an image of Jesus which they had become comfortable with in their minds. And don’t we do the same? But as the townsfolk of Nazareth found out, Jesus doesn’t merely do our bidding, and neither does God. They wanted Jesus to somehow validate who they were but Jesus speaks of rejection and foreshadows the rejection he would encounter which would lead him to the cross. Jesus not only stretches the boundaries of God’s grace, but seems to intentionally shatter the carefully constructed conventions of what and who are acceptable to God and are able to receive God’s care and grace.
What frustrates us is when God won’t conform to our expectations of what God should be like. Don’t we get frustrated when God won’t limit the reach of his grace and the scope of his saving plan to those who we think warrant God’s favour,
but includes those with whom we have great difficulty getting our minds around?
God sometimes seems to go out of his way to welcome the modern day equivalent of the gentiles and pagans. And sometimes we get frustrated because God defies our attempts to categorize him. We find that God doesn’t neatly fit into our scientific method or rational thought patterns. And so we find ourselves watering down God until we are satisfied that we can explain God or we entirely reject the whole idea altogether.
In the Time magazine debate, when Dr. Collins argues that for him God is the answer to those unanswered questions
of how all things must have come into being in the first place, Professor Dawkins counters by saying, I think that’s the mother and father of all cop-outs.
Dawkins charges that it’s a cop out to say, well, God did it, and God needs no explanation because God is outside all this.
Dawkins contends that scientists don’t do that. Scientists say, we’re working on it, we’re struggling to understand.
Collins responds, that certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence that might explain
why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object, says Collins, to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation.
That’s an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as ‘Why am I here?’, ‘What happens after we die?’, ‘Is there a God?’ If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn’t convince you on a proof basis.
But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion. If our minds are open about whether God might exist, then we must confess that we can’t worship a God made in our image, there’s a word for that – idolatry. Rather, we are forced to concede that if God might exist,
then God might just be profound enough to defy our logic, our scientific method, our desires or our expectations, as if we were so singularly significant in this massive universe that God must somehow conform to the capacity of our logical understanding or sense of reasonability.
There’s no doubt that science and the scientific method is critically important to how we live our lives and to the understanding of life in many ways.
But it seems quite the contradiction to say that we don’t know everything, that we’re struggling to understand, but that our very human scientific method, despite our lack of understanding and knowledge, must still be good enough to rule out completely even the idea of God! For people of faith the formula is simple, God has created us in his image, God is not created in our image. The fact is that there are fundamental differences between people who disagree about God’s existence because they start with different assumptions and biases. But if we do start with an open mind about God’s existence, then at least let us have the integrity to allow the God who wishes to communicate with his creation by the methods he has chosen to do so unfettered by our desire to make it completely understandable or acceptable to us.
Listen to what Jesus claims for himself, not what we would like to claim about Jesus.
The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
This is not the messiah that the Jews expected, this is not the Jesus all of us would necessarily want. And yet this is who he is, not just a very good human being, no mere compassionate teacher and rabbi, no socialist revolutionary, but the Son of God, God become man, who won’t be reigned in by our desires or expectations, who won’t be made in our image,
but who invites us to recognize in whose image we are created and to join him in defying the preset conventions
of who’s in and who’s out in the eyes of God.
The temptation remains to get so fed up with this Jesus who won’t conform to our desires, that we would just like to get rid of him, either by taking him to the nearest cliff so that we can throw him off, or in a modern sense, to throw him off the metaphorical cliff of reasonability, rationality and science.
But Jesus just walked through the crowds who tried to get rid of him at Nazareth and I don’t know that we would be any more successful in our attempts.
Jesus won’t be stopped by our discomfort so we might as well get used to it and maybe even get on board.
But pure science alone won’t ever get us to where we need to be for us to be disciples of Jesus, we only get there by the grace of God.
Do you want to know what that grace might look like? In this week’s edition of the National Post, Jonathan Kay writes of the story of James Waller, a black American who was falsely convicted of a heinous crime. Though the intruder was described as black, 5’ 8” and 150 pounds and Waller is 6’ 4” and heavy-set, in a trumped up judgment carrying the stench of Klan-era racism, Waller was convicted by a jury deliberating for a mere 46 minutes. He spent more than a decade picking cotton in a Texas chain gang before being paroled in 1993.
Even once released, Waller was branded a pedophile and registered sex offender.A few years later, things got worse.
While driving to the airport, Waller crashed his car, killing his wife and their unborn daughter.
‘I don’t want to live no more,’ he remembers thinking. And yet Waller’s Christian faith stayed strong throughout,
and he never gave in to his agonies. With assistance from the New York-based Innocence Project, which has helped free almost 200 falsely convicted criminals over the last 15 years, Waller’s lawyers produced DNA evidence showing he couldn’t have committed the 1982 crime.
Last week, a Texas court formally declared the man innocent. How did Waller respond? By lashing out at a legal system that had ruined his life and treated him like a 19th century slave? No. Last Wednesday, he told the court he wasn’t angry –
‘because the Lord has given me so much.’ Despite everything he’s gone through, James Waller is at peace with the world.
(Jonathan Kay, The National Post. Thy Rod and Thy Staff. January 23, 2007) It doesn’t happen all the time, in fact it’s a shame how rare a story like this really is, but still it speaks volumes about what life can look like when we stop trying to make God in our image and live in the full knowledge of what it means for us to be made in God’s image.
And may it be for you and for me as well.