Author Archives
Scripture includes veiled faces and countless expressions of emotion. The most famous smile comes in the priestly blessing from Numbers 6: “The Lord make his face to shine upon you.”… It penetrates through the masks that separate us from God and now from one another.
Nature titled their video summary of this research, “Less is More.” It is in this consideration of less and more that I find connections to Scripture. How often does God do more with less? Think of Jesus feeding thousands with just five loaves and two fish. Or how the church that today is a global movement of a couple billion persons began with twelve disciples.
Of course, history reminds us that for every abolitionist like cousin Emily, there is at least one story of a slave owner who was also motivated by faith. The history of Christianity, like any family history, is terribly complex with examples that make us proud and others that remind us of the need for confession and forgiveness. This, of course, is also true of the history of Christianity and science.
St. Augustine famously defined a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of inward and invisible grace.” This definition could be applied to much more than baptism and communion—perhaps even to tulips and sea slugs.