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“A Star is Born”
Rev. Greg Ward and Mary Muehlbach
Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley
December 20, 2015
BEGINNING THE JOURNEY: <<Mary Muehlbach>>
In September, I began training in Applied Shamanism. After our first journey, our circle of participants
asked questions. “How do I know it’s not just my imagination?” The Shamanic journey can best be
described as a lucid waking dream.
In our first journey, we were asked to go to a place familiar to us, that we had visited in our past – not
a made up place. In my first journey I met my lower world guide.
After several more journeys that weekend and in workshops over the next three months, we worked
on Soul retrieval. We paired off and worked one on one with each other as Shamanic practitioner.
One would be the patient, one the Shaman. The group came back together then paired off again with
different partners so each of us would take a turn as Shaman and patient.
In my turn as Shaman, my patient described his symptoms, and stated his low expectation for the
outcome of this journey. My patient has studied Applied Shamanism with this teacher for the past five
years. His soul retrieval led me to the middle world where my guide led me to a bright light, larger
than our sun. There wasn’t room in my pouch, so we all traveled back together, my guide and I and
my patient’s sun, and returned this to him in the manner prescribed. I asked him to pay close
attention to his dreams that night. He said he never remembered his dreams. On day two of our
workshop I did not ask directly but waited. We were half way into our 2nd eight hour day when he told
me his dream.
The question asked and answered on our first day, was asked again, “How do I know it’s not just my
imagination?” our Shamanic teacher’s response, “Everything in this world is our imagination.”
Come, Let us worship together.
REFLECTION
<<Rev. Greg>>
We are a few days away from Christmas.
Christmas, of course, is many things to many people. But, at it’s core, it is story about beginnings.
Every religion has such a story. Christmas is Christianity’s central birth story. How it all began. And,
more importantly, how it’s possible to trace everything around us back to some inarguably sacred or
miraculous event.
When I was relatively young, I tried reading the Bible for myself to see if I could discover that sacred
source. Trace it back to it’s earliest roots. And I quickly came across both what I was looking for and
one of the most confusing and frustrating parts of the Bible: I’m speaking of all the ‘begats.’ Asa
begat Josaphat; Josaphat begat Joram; Joram begat Ozias and so on.
It wasn’t until seminary that someone explained to me that this was actually just what I was looking
for: various authors attempting to trace the whole story back to origins which they considered sacred.
Jesus’ origins, which is what the Christmas story is about, are traced back twice in the gospels. By
two different authors. And interestingly, those two versions contradict each other. Matthew, who is a
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Jew, traces back Jesus’ origins to Abraham, the father of the Jews. But a few chapters later, Luke
traces back Jesus’ origins even further: to Adam and Eve – the first human beings.
With that in mind, I became curious studying the Bible, why Jesus’ origins would go back only as far
as the first human being. It says in the book of Genesis that before God created Adam and Eve, that
He created creatures of the land. Before that He made the creatures of the sea. And the Sun, moon
and stars. And dry land. And before that, light.
In fact, the first words of the bible are, ‘in the beginning… darkness was on the face of the deep.’ It
seems to me, in this season of darkness, we would want to trace our origins back to that.
If we did, what sacred or holy thing would we find? And how would it better help us tap into our
Shamanic imagination but still be true to reality? And how would it help us make sense of Christmas?
SERMON <<Rev. Greg>> "A Star is Born"
I love Christmas. The stories. The music. The spirit. I like that it speaks of light at the darkest time
of the year. For me, I would go so far as to say “I believe” in Christmas.
That said, I know there is absolutely no evidence for the premise of Christmas – specifically, the idea
that Jesus was ever born on December 25th. That date was chosen nearly 350 years after Jesus’
birth by people clearly more interested in using their imagination to create associations between
Jesus and the already celebrated festivals of Mithras and Saturnalia.
Still, as a former scientist myself, I am fascinated by at least one piece of empirical evidence that sets
December 25th as an essential day to commemorate a holy birth.
My belief in Christmas as a day of birth comes from an interesting hypothesis within a new
cooperative and interdisciplinary branch of education known as “Big History”
“Big History” was a term coined by History Professor David Christian at the University in Sidney,
Australia when he began piecing together ideas from great thinkers over time from hundreds of
disciplinary fields. People like Darwin, Tielhard de Chardin, Huxley, Bronowski with later innovators
like Carl Sagen, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme.
What he noticed is that something interesting begins to emerge when you integrate a variety of fields
into one growing, multifaceted story. It’s a story that slowly reveals some purpose. Appears
meaningful. Becomes sacred. It’s the story of where we came from. Who we are. And if we pay
attention, where we’re going.
One great contributor to Big History is from a man you might know named Michael Dowd. About ten
years ago he stayed with me for a week in Monterey and told me about what he calls, “The Great
Story.” And he used a ‘cosmic timeline.’ In which he compressed our entire evolutionary history into a
single century. 100 years
Because I want to use his technique, I will explain that his cosmic timeline equates a 100 cosmic
timeline years into 14.4 Billion actual years. That means, every decade in the cosmic timeline = 1.44
billion actual years. Every cosmic year = 140 million actual years. Every cosmic day = 400 thousand
actual years. And every cosmic minute represents 250 actual years. The sad news is that this
means my sermon, this morning, will take nearly five millennia.
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In the beginning – zero hour – there was darkness. All matter and form in the universe was
condensed into infinite mass and zero volume. How all energy could be contained in that one point of
time and space IS the great mystery of our origin.
At exactly one second past midnight on January 1 of the year 0, an immense explosion dispersed
hydrogen gas all throughout the universe. The explosion was so powerful, it lasted clear into the next
cosmic day (nearly a million ‘actual’ years).
In various regions hydrogen gas localized together into intense gravitational fields, pressurizing to
temperatures between 1000 and 30,000 degrees Celsius – thus birthing stars. The bigger and
denser the stars, the hotter the temperature. This process occurred in countless places,
simultaneously throughout space. Stars emerged and clustered into gravitational regions on days 2
through 8. This was the birth of all the galaxies.
It was so hot and so pressurized in the belly of stars that hydrogen atoms were converted by a
process known as nuclear fusion into more complex elements. This is how all the elements in our
world were created: carbon, silicon, oxygen, gold, and on and on. Each element is simply
distinguished by the numbers of hydrogen atoms fused together in the belly of stars.
For the first 60 years on the cosmic timeline stars were continuously born, burned out, and new stars
came into being. Expiring stars often exploded, sending the elements at their core hurtling through
space. These molten masses of elements formed asteroids, planets or moons. Thus, everything that
has mass can trace its origin to star-stuff. In other words, we ourselves – having evolved from out of
the earth’s elements – are all literally made from star dust.
Stars explode. New stars form. Planets are made. A whole lot of begats were required to create the
universe.
Our solar system was formed in the 67th year of this cosmic timeline.
By some miracle, Earth falls into orbit with a small star at the exact distance required to maintain a
narrow band of atmospheric pressures and temperatures to allow water to exist in liquid form. In the
69th year of the cosmic timeline, Earth cooled below the boiling point of water.
While the temperature of earth cooled, the water vapor condensed and it rained constantly. This
lasted eons. Much worse than today. It is interesting to know that, with the exception of some icy
comets that struck the planet millions of years ago, all the water on earth today existed at the time of
earth’s formation. No water has been created since then, only recycled and filtered through the
atmosphere. Every glass of water you drink has trace atoms of dinosaurs. And atoms of Jesus. As
well as Hitler. And it is all star-dust.
Sometime in the 7th decade of the cosmic timeline, Earth reached its current temperature.
Under the pressure of the earth’s surface, different elements came together to form molecules.
Molecules begat linked molecules. Linked molecules eventually begat the first most primitive form of
bacteria – single cell prokaryotic bacteria – little cells of life without a nucleus.
It took another billion years – or 7 years on our cosmic timeline – for those prokaryotic cells to finally
find their way to the surface of water. But when they did, they begat a new evolutionary process:
harnessing energy from sunlight. And they birthed a new kind of cell – one capable of
photosynthesis.
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These new photosynthetic creatures used the sun’s energy to break down water into hydrogen and
oxygen. They integrated the hydrogen into their new molecular form and released the oxygen.
After a decade on the cosmic timeline - one and a half billion years in actual time – the atmosphere
became saturated with oxygen and bacteria all over the planet began dying.
Facing extinction, these formerly competitive prokaryotic bacteria begat an evolutionary process,
joining together to produce eukaryotic cells – or nucleated cells containing DNA. DNA provided a
blueprint of replication. This revealed one of the central truths of evolution - that cooperative entities
will always out-compete and out-survive non-cooperative entities.
All birth and evolution to this point took 13 billion years or nine of the ten decades on the cosmic
timeline.
The final decade began with a monumental leap in evolutionary complexity, when eukaryotic cells
combined to create Multicellularity. This is where different types of cells come together to form one
organism.
The next thing to come into play – around January ‘92 was the introduction of sex (I know we may
associate January ’92 with the inauguration of Bill Clinton – but that’s purely coincidence). The
development of sex was incredibly important, (not because it boosted movie sales). Sex meant that
there were now two sets of DNA involved in reproduction and replication. This meant diversity was
able to expand exponentially. And diversity always promotes faster and more stable evolution.
Another sidenote: when we look around our UU congregations and notice the lack of ‘diversity’ (by
which we often mean racial diversity), it is good to ask why we would want diversity. It is not so that
we could ‘feel better about ourselves.’ It is because “diversity always promotes faster and more
stable evolution.”
Around April of the 94th cosmic year we began to see heterotrophy – creatures eating other creatures.
If we pause to reflect on what occurred in the final chapter of Jesus’ life, we encounter his comments
about communion. “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you.” This – and heterotrophy in
general – may seem like cannibalism, but think of it from a larger perspective. This was the birth of
ecosystems. In religious terms it was the universe in a new communion with itself.
Around June of the year ‘95 – better late than never – brains came into existence. Nervous systems
developed at this time.
Shortly after that, around December of ‘95 – when brains were still very, very, very tiny, and not used
for very much, sexual organs came into existence. I’ll let you make your own joke about that.
From vertebrate creatures, back bones came into existence around January of ’96
Later that cosmic year animals began coming onto land (And remember when I say later that same
‘cosmic’ year, I’m still talking about a hundred million actual years later). Before animals came on
land, everything I talked about happened in the water.
Legs developed from amphibians in February of ‘98.
Dinosaurs came into being around March of ’98. They lasted until sometime in May of ‘99.
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In February of ’99 flowering plants and trees came into existence. This may seem benign with
respect to our human lineage, but have you ever stopped to consider why flowers evolved to be
beautiful and smell so alluring? Why they’re intentionally designed to entice an animal for one reason
or another? Think about fruit trees. Why would a plant surround it’s seeds – it’s children – with
sweet, juicy, delicious pulp? It’s because it is trying to entice some animal to come and eat them –
along with the pulp – and walk away so that it can deposit those seeds in a nice pre-fertilized mound!
It’s also important to understand that outside influences sometimes get thrown into the equation. In
May of ’99 – which is actually about 65 million years ago – an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest hit off
the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula going 50k miles/hour. It was estimated that it was going 9 M
miles/hr but was slowed down by the earth’s atmosphere. It hit the earth with such an impact that it
created at least 6 tsunamis, each over 300 ft tall. The crust of the earth rippled so that on the exact
opposite side of the planet there was a lava outpouring in the Deccan Traps of India.
To give you an idea of the sheer power of this event compared to, say, our power – if you took all the
nuclear weapons that we have ever made on earth and set them off all at the same place at the same
place all at once – the event which took out the dinosaurs was 1000 times as powerful as those
nuclear weapons.
The asteroid strike set off a deluge of sulfuric acid rain, and a huge cloud of dust that blocked the light
from the Sun for several cosmological months. There was a great wave of extinctions including
nearly every land animal whose adult form weighed more than 50 pounds. The impact also triggered
a global firestorm that incinerated a quarter of the living biomass, releasing an enormous amount of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that increased the average global temperature by 20 degrees for
2.5 cosmic days – or a million years.
When you compare this birth story to the ones in Luke or Matthew, it makes the threat of Herod seem
pretty insignificant, doesn’t it?
All that I’ve described so far happened by May of 99 on the cosmic timeline. By June – 12 million
years later – mammals were coming into being. The increasing size of brains also means that more
complex emotions came into play.
Animals with hands and opposable thumbs came into existence about October of ‘99.
So I want us to stop and notice that we’re in the last few months of this cosmic timeline and
‘civilization’ has not even shown up yet. If you actually trace it mathematically, Homo Habilis – or
what they call, ‘handy-man’ – the first beings to use stone tools – the first beings that could be
actually called ‘human’ evolved into being somewhere during the day of December 25th in the last
year of the cosmic timeline.
On December 25th! Humanity is born! So maybe those early Christian Bishops – or, more likely, the
Mithrians or Pagans before them – really had it right. December 25th really IS the right day to talk of
‘the birth of humanity.’
What can we glean from all of this? Several things.
The first thing is this: We do all religion and evolution a great injustice if we think of Jesus – or
ourselves – as the pinnacle of creation. None of us – not me or you or Jesus or even Donald Trump
was born to be idolized. None of us was designed to become the be-all, end-all. All of us were put
here to help shepherd those who come after us in wise and caring ways.
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Second, like Jesus’ birth story, ours includes omens of crisis. We are born into a troubled time and
much sacrifice is being asked of us.
Third, it is about time we human beings pay special attention to our birth narrative and recognize
something stunningly rare and important: We are the first species to break a 14 billion year old
evolutionary law: to make it possible and profitable for a subset to thrive at the expense of the whole.
And yet when we set up systems of racism, classism, sexism, etc. we are insanely depriving the
system of that beneficial diversity.
And finally, a question: What will save us? Carl Sagan said at the end of his Cosmos series that “We
are the local embodiment of a cosmos grown to self awareness. We’ve begun to contemplate our
origins. We are star-stuff pondering the stars.”
Teillard de Chardin said something similar years earlier: “The human person is the sum total of 15
billion years of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself. The scientist looking through a
telescope is literally the universe looking at itself.”
Before us all – this very day – is the task of tracing our origins. Whether we trace our lineage back to
Abraham, or Adam, dig up dinosaur bones, or peer through the Hubble telescope back at the
universe, we are engaging in an attempt to trace our origins back to one and the same magnificent
source. Our task is not to demand one path and denounce another. But to tap into our imagination
and cultivate wonder and awe… to summon appreciation and reverence for the variety of paths that
converge in this very moment. And to realize that each of us holds a key to evolution by how we
discover ways to weave our many paths together into a cooperative and collaborative whole.
Our story is sacred. Each thing that comes into existence will, like Carl Sagan predicts, eventually
turn around and contemplate it’s origins. How could we not discover, like Jesus, that ‘The Kingdom is
within you.”? How could we look back in time at this sacred source behind us and not also recognize
the sacred path before us?
To the Glory of Life.
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