Confession: I’m a quote loser. Do you know how some people always seem to have the right quote for the right occasion—right on the spot? “I think Hezekiah Worthington put it best when he said ‘blah blah blah….’” Well I don’t know how people do that, but it’s just not me. If there’s a particular quote I like, I’d darn well better write it down, or I’ll lose it forever.

Of course writing it down is no guarantee that I won’t misplace it. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve stumbled across some tidbit I’d scribble down on a scrap of paper—a torn index card, perhaps, or a napkin—buried in a pile of other things. Really good stuff, too. Words of wisdom from some of the great minds I’ve had the pleasure of being exposed to. Those quotes are sometimes like vitamins, though. I often find they’ve lost a bit of their potency from sitting around for so long.

But the most embarrassing way to lose a quote—and perhaps some of you have done this—is when you read some spectacular passage or sentence or phrase and rather than getting up from your comfy chair and going over to the desk and picking up the pencil that’s right there, you convince yourself that it’s just too good to forget, and that by some miracle you’ll always be able to remember exactly where it is, say, about halfway down a right hand page, somewhere near the middle of the book.

So my confession is I’ve lost one really wonderful quote that way…not once, but twice. Two times I’ve had to go through this book by Maria Harris (Teaching & Religious Imagination) to find a quote that was so meaningful to me that you’d think I would have taken the time to write it down. Fortunately, what once was lost now is found. Here it is—a quote so good that even I couldn’t lose it forever:

Every weaver of fairy tales, every psychologist, every shaman, rabbi, and guru knows that if you pick up even one thread of reality and follow it to its end, it will take you to the heart of the universe.

Hmmm. That’s a good one, isn’t? Especially for us liberal religious folk. Let me read it again (who knows…I might even memorize it): [REPEAT].

I think this quote is particularly appropriate for us today (and that’s why I did, indeed, go through Maria Harris’s book last week page by page to find it again), because the story we’ll be talking about for the next few days, the Great Story of the 14 billion year history of creation, is the one thread of reality that is absolutely guaranteed to lead each and every one of us directly to the heart of the universe.

I can remember exactly what I was doing the first time I became curious enough to actually pick up this thread and start following it. I was watching television…public television, of course. Now it’s not that this thread hadn’t been dangled in front of me before. I grew up hearing the religious take on this story over and over again in Sunday school at the Methodist church our family attended: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth….” And I remember being told something of the scientific approach to the same material in Junior High and High School, but I’m sure I wasn’t paying much attention.

One day, however, back in the early Eighties, I tuned into an episode of a program on PBS that had caught my eye. Some of you might remember it: Cosmos? Carl Sagan? “Billions and billions of stars….?” I remember hearing people talk about how good the program was, and even though I had missed a few episodes, I gave it a try. And what I saw changed my life forever.

To be honest, my life was ready for a change. I was back at school after a couple of false starts, getting serious about studying English, and I had just run across Ralph Waldo Emerson. These words from his essay “Nature” were probably somewhere in my mind at the time.

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

I loved the idea of beholding God and nature face to face. Forget those stuffy Sunday school classes or those boring science labs. Emerson had given me permission to explore religion and science on my own terms (and converted me to Unitarianism in the process!). So with that in mind, I thought I’d give Cosmos a try.

I’ll never forget what I saw…or at least this is how I remember it (and I could probably go to the library and actually see this segment again, but I’m not sure I want to spoil the memory). Sagan, in that nerdy and engaging style of his, was doing a recap of everything he had presented. I think there was some baroque music in the background—not boring music, but lively and persistent…unflagging rhythm they call it. And the screen was filled with brightly colored images of the things he was describing. Words, music, images—suddenly the whole story of creation came alive for me in a way it had never been before, or at least, not since I was a child. I’d like to share that passage with you now, if I could. It’s a long quote, and if I were doing this in front of a congregation on a Sunday morning, I’m sure someone would make a note of how much I was relying on another person’s words. But I think it’s worth it:

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing—hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was first kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements, the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building materials of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generations of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form the planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth.

Congealing and warming, the Earth released the methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightening and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together again into more and more complex forms, which dissolved in the early oceans. After a time the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clays. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self-replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self-replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun.

Single-celled plants evolved, and life began to generate its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free-living forms banded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One-celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through the steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early oceans coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

It has the sound of epic myth, and rightly.

It does have the sound of epic myth for me, and from time to time I go back to that passage and read it over and kind of marvel at where this little thread has taken me. Because I saw that snippet of Cosmos, I’ve read dozens of (admittedly popular) books on the physics and science of things small and large. And it gave me a new appreciation for the way humans have tried to explain this story throughout history, from the passage of the Rig-Veda* we heard earlier to the opening lines of Genesis…and beyond.

And the further and further I follow this thread, the firmer I am in my liberal religious faith and in my calling. I love that this story has such an integral part in our tradition, and that we are free to explore it both as science and as religion. Here’s another quote, one that I actually have memorized. It’s from Wilfred Cantwell Smith: “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe.”

That’s where it all comes together for me…having an original relation to the universe, following a single thread of reality to the heart of the universe, feeling at home in the universe. It’s what our faith is all about, collectively, as a tradition; and it’s what our faith can provide for each and every of us individually, as a spiritual resource.

And that’s why I’m so thrilled—as I’m sure you are—about this year’s Institute and our presenters, Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd. I’m pleased to see that so many of us have taken time out of our busy lives to learn more about this Great Story of creation and evolution. Fortunately, we live in an abundant universe, and if you’re like me, this isn’t the only thread of reality you’ve got in your hands right at the moment. What I’d like for you to do now is take a look at the thread attached to your order of service.

[For the final part of the sermon, I had folks consider a piece of crochet thread I had tied to each order of service. The thread had two strands. I told them that one strand represented a thread of reality that was weighing on their minds and that might keep them from being totally present for the conference. I asked them to consider laying the thread aside and letting go of whatever it was that might distract them for the next couple of days so they could be fully present. The other strand represented the thread of reality that the Great Story represents for them, perhaps the first time they had heard the story told in such a way that it captured their imagination. I told them that if they wanted to, they could use the thread as a reminder of how much this story means to them as the attended the sessions of the conference.]

*Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.

There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then a cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

Then there was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.

In the beginning desire descended on it—
that was the primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom
know that which is, is kin to that which is not.

…But, after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
that One, who may have fashioned it, or may not,
that One, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
that One knows—or maybe even that One does not know.

--The Rev. Phillip Lund