Letter from Florida (2) Politics and Preaching

While we are in Florida, we gather at a chapel with a number of Reformed brothers and sisters for Sunday worship and are led by a variety of retired CRC and RCA pastors--so one never knows what to expect. Yesterday morning, the sermon was from Genesis 1 and the central thesis was that the creation was the marvelous act of our all powerful God. Now this is a fundamental truth of Christianity and a worthly subject for a sermon; however, most of the time and energy of the sermon was devoted to a debunking of evolution--and in a rather sarcastic tone. This raised a couple of problems for me.

First of all, the word evolution, like communism or socialism, is a word that makes a certain number of religious people automatically see red. To use it indiscriminantly as a synonym for atheism, that is, to suggest it represents a belief that denies the existence of a creator God, is to do a huge injustice to those who believe in some form of theistic evolution. And further, it denies the fact of evolution within species, for which there is all kinds of factual evidence. But that is what this preacher did.

And at the conclusion of it all, he said it didn't really matter whether we believed in a young earth or an old earth: the important thing was to recognize the creator God. Well, if that's the case, why spend all that time ridiculing evolution which is linked inextricably to an old earth.

There was no nuance: God was the creator and evolution was evil.

Then he got to the second main point: humans are called to be stewards of the earth. Ah, I thought, this is what we need to hear in this assembly of elders.(Have you ever noticed that most "over sixties" are not particularly environmentally aware?) He even said Christians ought to be the leaders of the environmental movement! Amen, brother!

But he followed this up immediately by saying, "Of course most of may not agree with Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth;" in fact, many of us may think it is based on convenient lies."

And that was that.

I don't suppose I need to say that my worship was severely compromised. More and more I wonder what it means to worship. Is a lecture on the evils of evolution or the evils of Al Gore conducive to worship in anyone?

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