Playing in Traffic
L33
Isa. 9:2-4, 6-7
Ps. 96:1-4,11-2
Titus 2:11-14
Lk. 2:1-14 (15-20)
Two weeks ago I was paddling a surfboard over warm blue green waters at an outer reef off Maui’s north shore, oblivious to the danger I was in. No, I understood the risk, but the beauty of the scene made me ignore it. The island looked so small in the distance as heavy winds and a sizeable swell bore down from the north, but that wasn’t the problem.
It was the traffic. Brightly colored windsurfing rigs that looked so beautiful from our family’s house eight miles away were everywhere. Windsurfers raced past me from all directions with only a few feet to spare. They were using waves the size of my house as ramps. They launched themselves doing mid-air flips and didn’t seem too conscious of the fact that they couldn’t see the other side of the wave where they hoped to land.
If this were not enough, the reef is right at the border of kite surfing territory. These daredevils are even more spectacular. Pulled by giant kites attached to sixty-foot lines they jump off waves and are held aloft twenty feet in air as they travel through the sky. There were so many people at this remote place, it seemed impossible that they weren’t constantly running over each other, tangling their lines and masts and sails.
I floated by a giant sea turtle. I told him, “this isn’t a safe place for you.” Then I realized that he is a smaller target with a hard shell and he travels mostly underwater. I remembered that our bishop once described me as someone, “who likes to play in traffic.” I didn’t know whether that was a criticism or a compliment, but now I know it is true.
This is why I love living in Santa Clara Valley so much. At some level everybody here likes to play in traffic. If you grow up here and don’t like to play in traffic you move out along with everyone else who tires of the intensity of this life. Perhaps realizing this will help me come to terms with the fact that my closest friends seem to be constantly moving out to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina and New England.
We are the ones who are left, people who like to play in traffic (and those who love them). We’re competitive, pragmatic, realistic but visionary, grounded and hopeful. We’re attracted to challenge and the myth of the entrepreneur. We care about making a difference. We’re not afraid of change. We are curious. We have little time for abstractions or nostalgia. At the same time we play too hard and drive too fast. (Have you ever noticed that the only people who drive below the speed limit here are doing so because they’re dialing their cell phone or sending an email message. I wrote this while driving along El Camino Real). We’re impatient and hurried. In fact under most circumstances by now a voice inside you would be telling me to get to my point.
But tonight is Christmas. Now that the rushing has stopped perhaps even we can hear the angels sing. Tonight we gather as friends who have time to talk about eternity.
Did you know that only half of this country believes in evolution? In other regions they argue about whether we should teach evolution or intelligent design in school. In Silicon Valley we don’t have too much time for that issue. We accept the idea of natural selection occurring through genetically inherited variation that increases the survivability or reproducibility of individuals. It makes sense scientifically. But this doesn’t stop me from wondering why it is so hard for some Christians to accept this.
Perhaps it is because natural selection makes human beings seem less special than before. Maybe this picture of the world makes it harder to imagine how something formed by all the accidents and chances of this life could have a place in the eternity which is God. I have a hunch that the idea of evolution leads some people to question their own immortality.
You probably already realize that I don’t see a necessary conflict between believing in God and evolution. This has led me to wonder what it would take to bring these two kinds of people together. Since it’s Christmas Eve and we have time on our hands let’s try a thought experiment. First imagine a sign that proved definitively that there was no God. Since any kind of message like this would have to come from someone, or something which seemed godlike to us, this is hard to picture. I guess not believing in God is a kind of faith too.
What about a sign that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a God? What if George Crane and the scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center discovered a particle which when smashed in a certain way sprayed particles that said, “God exists.” Better yet imagine a kind of celestial crop circle, that the stars in Orion, the Pleiades and the neighboring constellations all spelled out the same message for everyone to read.
That first night people would turn off their televisions and stream out of their homes to see this heavenly message – “God Exists.” A man about to commit suicide would see this and change his mind. A woman who lost her childhood faith would decide that she could believe again. An elderly person who trusted Jesus all her life, but was now dying of cancer might find great hope in the message. For a while at least crime would drop and people would promise to reform their lives.
Our church was pretty full after September 11th, imagine how crowded churches would be after this. We would fill the Shark Tank, PacBell Stadium and Candlestick Park. The largest public gathering places would be sponsored by churches instead of technology companies. Imagine how smug all those intelligent design advocates would be (they’d be even worse than Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). Pastors of megachurches would be all over television. Of course the scientists would still repeat their correct assertions that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a theory of evolution.
But what if this continued night after night, year after year? God could even do it in different languages, with exploding nebulae to make the point more colorful. I don’t mean to sound cynical on Christmas but my guess is that it wouldn’t take long before we all went back to business as usual.
My point is that the kind of distant God that the intelligent design crowd hope for, and that the over-zealous scientists deny, is the same. It is a God that over the long run doesn’t make very much of a difference. If God is that far away, he just does not matter. We don’t need proof that God exists, what we crave is an experience of God.
God may not write “I exist” in stars, but I believe that we experience God, that we know more about God than we usually realize. God speaks to us more often than we are ready to listen.
This might sound crazy but over the years I’ve learned something about where I am likely to find God. I know that if I go to Rancho San Antonio or to Hidden Villa for an afternoon walk that I will experience something that will lift me out of myself and into the holy. I don’t know what it will be, maybe the deer grazing on the lower pastures, or the way the path is framed by an ancient coast live oak or the smell of the Bay Tree leaves in winter or the lights of the city spread out below me as I look out from the upper ridge. But I meet God there.
You are my Silicon Valley neighbors so you might be saying to yourselves, “That’s subjective, you are just one person.” Every week and tonight, together as a whole community we experience God’s presence in Holy Communion. I know that usually it is hard for God to get through to most of us. But sometimes we even pay enough attention to realize what it means to ourselves and to the people next to us. A man sitting a few pews ahead of me ahs been meeting God at church for nine decades, others are just beginning to learn the good news of Jesus Christ.
People who don’t even believe in God hear God. When an elderly person comes on a bus a little voice speaks in the deepest part of us and tells us to give up our seat. That voice tries to interrupt our dishonesty. When your children are part of a group of kids who are teasing one of the Spanish speaking children you can bet they hear the voice of God telling them not to go along with the bullying.
Often this voice of God does not tell us what we want to hear. I don’t talk about him too much, but I deeply admire my father. He had a long career working for the state. When he was in his fifties his boss left and my father took over that position in a long-term interim capacity. I think he was relieved when the new boss arrived. Initially they worked well together. But it wasn’t long before the boss began making cutting and rude remarks about a woman on their team. He seemed to enjoy humiliating her in front of everyone. My father surely didn’t choose it, but he began to hear that voice of God. He stood up for her and was cruelly punished for doing so. He retired before he was ready and felt disgraced.
But this is Christmas, the holy feast of the incarnation, the season when we celebrate the intimacy of God. There have been times in the history of Christianity when there was no Christmas. In the earliest years the church was so severely persecuted by the Roman Empire that we focused mostly on the resurrection of Jesus. In the fourth century, some people inspired by Greek philosophy declared that Jesus was pure spirit, that he had never been born. Christmas was instituted in response to assert the mystery of Jesus’ humanity.
Then again in the sixteenth century puritans felt so strongly about the overwhelming power of God that they banned Christmas as superstition. This struggle between the god of the philosophers and the god of our experience will always be with us. Like the intelligent design enthusiasts and the overzealous biologists there will always be people whose picture of God is too big and too precise to fit into our lives.
Brothers and sisters, my friends who like to play in traffic, it is such a blessing for me to be with you on this holy night. You are busy and I am grateful for the gift of this time together. As risk-takers you can have faith in the challenging proposition that God is nearer to us than our next breath, or in St. Augustine’s words, nearer to us than ourselves. As people who are not afraid of change, I pray that you will welcome the transforming power of Jesus. As pragmatic individualists I pray that you will embrace the power that you find in God’s presence. If we can slow down enough to listen I am confident that God will be born in our hearts again and again and again.
Isa. 9:2-4, 6-7
Ps. 96:1-4,11-2
Titus 2:11-14
Lk. 2:1-14 (15-20)
Two weeks ago I was paddling a surfboard over warm blue green waters at an outer reef off Maui’s north shore, oblivious to the danger I was in. No, I understood the risk, but the beauty of the scene made me ignore it. The island looked so small in the distance as heavy winds and a sizeable swell bore down from the north, but that wasn’t the problem.
It was the traffic. Brightly colored windsurfing rigs that looked so beautiful from our family’s house eight miles away were everywhere. Windsurfers raced past me from all directions with only a few feet to spare. They were using waves the size of my house as ramps. They launched themselves doing mid-air flips and didn’t seem too conscious of the fact that they couldn’t see the other side of the wave where they hoped to land.
If this were not enough, the reef is right at the border of kite surfing territory. These daredevils are even more spectacular. Pulled by giant kites attached to sixty-foot lines they jump off waves and are held aloft twenty feet in air as they travel through the sky. There were so many people at this remote place, it seemed impossible that they weren’t constantly running over each other, tangling their lines and masts and sails.
I floated by a giant sea turtle. I told him, “this isn’t a safe place for you.” Then I realized that he is a smaller target with a hard shell and he travels mostly underwater. I remembered that our bishop once described me as someone, “who likes to play in traffic.” I didn’t know whether that was a criticism or a compliment, but now I know it is true.
This is why I love living in Santa Clara Valley so much. At some level everybody here likes to play in traffic. If you grow up here and don’t like to play in traffic you move out along with everyone else who tires of the intensity of this life. Perhaps realizing this will help me come to terms with the fact that my closest friends seem to be constantly moving out to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina and New England.
We are the ones who are left, people who like to play in traffic (and those who love them). We’re competitive, pragmatic, realistic but visionary, grounded and hopeful. We’re attracted to challenge and the myth of the entrepreneur. We care about making a difference. We’re not afraid of change. We are curious. We have little time for abstractions or nostalgia. At the same time we play too hard and drive too fast. (Have you ever noticed that the only people who drive below the speed limit here are doing so because they’re dialing their cell phone or sending an email message. I wrote this while driving along El Camino Real). We’re impatient and hurried. In fact under most circumstances by now a voice inside you would be telling me to get to my point.
But tonight is Christmas. Now that the rushing has stopped perhaps even we can hear the angels sing. Tonight we gather as friends who have time to talk about eternity.
Did you know that only half of this country believes in evolution? In other regions they argue about whether we should teach evolution or intelligent design in school. In Silicon Valley we don’t have too much time for that issue. We accept the idea of natural selection occurring through genetically inherited variation that increases the survivability or reproducibility of individuals. It makes sense scientifically. But this doesn’t stop me from wondering why it is so hard for some Christians to accept this.
Perhaps it is because natural selection makes human beings seem less special than before. Maybe this picture of the world makes it harder to imagine how something formed by all the accidents and chances of this life could have a place in the eternity which is God. I have a hunch that the idea of evolution leads some people to question their own immortality.
You probably already realize that I don’t see a necessary conflict between believing in God and evolution. This has led me to wonder what it would take to bring these two kinds of people together. Since it’s Christmas Eve and we have time on our hands let’s try a thought experiment. First imagine a sign that proved definitively that there was no God. Since any kind of message like this would have to come from someone, or something which seemed godlike to us, this is hard to picture. I guess not believing in God is a kind of faith too.
What about a sign that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a God? What if George Crane and the scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center discovered a particle which when smashed in a certain way sprayed particles that said, “God exists.” Better yet imagine a kind of celestial crop circle, that the stars in Orion, the Pleiades and the neighboring constellations all spelled out the same message for everyone to read.
That first night people would turn off their televisions and stream out of their homes to see this heavenly message – “God Exists.” A man about to commit suicide would see this and change his mind. A woman who lost her childhood faith would decide that she could believe again. An elderly person who trusted Jesus all her life, but was now dying of cancer might find great hope in the message. For a while at least crime would drop and people would promise to reform their lives.
Our church was pretty full after September 11th, imagine how crowded churches would be after this. We would fill the Shark Tank, PacBell Stadium and Candlestick Park. The largest public gathering places would be sponsored by churches instead of technology companies. Imagine how smug all those intelligent design advocates would be (they’d be even worse than Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). Pastors of megachurches would be all over television. Of course the scientists would still repeat their correct assertions that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a theory of evolution.
But what if this continued night after night, year after year? God could even do it in different languages, with exploding nebulae to make the point more colorful. I don’t mean to sound cynical on Christmas but my guess is that it wouldn’t take long before we all went back to business as usual.
My point is that the kind of distant God that the intelligent design crowd hope for, and that the over-zealous scientists deny, is the same. It is a God that over the long run doesn’t make very much of a difference. If God is that far away, he just does not matter. We don’t need proof that God exists, what we crave is an experience of God.
God may not write “I exist” in stars, but I believe that we experience God, that we know more about God than we usually realize. God speaks to us more often than we are ready to listen.
This might sound crazy but over the years I’ve learned something about where I am likely to find God. I know that if I go to Rancho San Antonio or to Hidden Villa for an afternoon walk that I will experience something that will lift me out of myself and into the holy. I don’t know what it will be, maybe the deer grazing on the lower pastures, or the way the path is framed by an ancient coast live oak or the smell of the Bay Tree leaves in winter or the lights of the city spread out below me as I look out from the upper ridge. But I meet God there.
You are my Silicon Valley neighbors so you might be saying to yourselves, “That’s subjective, you are just one person.” Every week and tonight, together as a whole community we experience God’s presence in Holy Communion. I know that usually it is hard for God to get through to most of us. But sometimes we even pay enough attention to realize what it means to ourselves and to the people next to us. A man sitting a few pews ahead of me ahs been meeting God at church for nine decades, others are just beginning to learn the good news of Jesus Christ.
People who don’t even believe in God hear God. When an elderly person comes on a bus a little voice speaks in the deepest part of us and tells us to give up our seat. That voice tries to interrupt our dishonesty. When your children are part of a group of kids who are teasing one of the Spanish speaking children you can bet they hear the voice of God telling them not to go along with the bullying.
Often this voice of God does not tell us what we want to hear. I don’t talk about him too much, but I deeply admire my father. He had a long career working for the state. When he was in his fifties his boss left and my father took over that position in a long-term interim capacity. I think he was relieved when the new boss arrived. Initially they worked well together. But it wasn’t long before the boss began making cutting and rude remarks about a woman on their team. He seemed to enjoy humiliating her in front of everyone. My father surely didn’t choose it, but he began to hear that voice of God. He stood up for her and was cruelly punished for doing so. He retired before he was ready and felt disgraced.
But this is Christmas, the holy feast of the incarnation, the season when we celebrate the intimacy of God. There have been times in the history of Christianity when there was no Christmas. In the earliest years the church was so severely persecuted by the Roman Empire that we focused mostly on the resurrection of Jesus. In the fourth century, some people inspired by Greek philosophy declared that Jesus was pure spirit, that he had never been born. Christmas was instituted in response to assert the mystery of Jesus’ humanity.
Then again in the sixteenth century puritans felt so strongly about the overwhelming power of God that they banned Christmas as superstition. This struggle between the god of the philosophers and the god of our experience will always be with us. Like the intelligent design enthusiasts and the overzealous biologists there will always be people whose picture of God is too big and too precise to fit into our lives.
Brothers and sisters, my friends who like to play in traffic, it is such a blessing for me to be with you on this holy night. You are busy and I am grateful for the gift of this time together. As risk-takers you can have faith in the challenging proposition that God is nearer to us than our next breath, or in St. Augustine’s words, nearer to us than ourselves. As people who are not afraid of change, I pray that you will welcome the transforming power of Jesus. As pragmatic individualists I pray that you will embrace the power that you find in God’s presence. If we can slow down enough to listen I am confident that God will be born in our hearts again and again and again.
posted by Unknown at 2:39 PM
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