Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 13^th, Year of Our + Lord 2021
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, SD
Automatic Wheat and First Causes

Why does your heart keep on beating?
 
   Today we have the parable of the automatic wheat:  Jesus says, "The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. ^[27] He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. ^[28] The earth produces by itself, ‘automatically,’ first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. ^[29] But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come." 
 

   The Holy Spirit likes growing things, and so from Genesis to Revelation there are scores of parables, psalms, histories and allusions that connect farming and forestry and horticulture to saving faith and the Kingdom of God.  Which is great!  We live in the Black Hills, and so all of us have a daily visual and physical connection to a beautiful variety of plants and trees and growing things.  But the mystery of life is not just out there in front of us.   It is also within us, beating away, and we know not how.  Our life is a mystery. 
 
   Modern science has learned a great deal about life, and can tell us a lot about our heartbeat, our circulatory system, and our life, especially about what things can end it.  But the ongoing spark of life, how it started, and why it is that our hearts keep beating and we keep living, until we don’t, well, there is still profound mystery there. 
 

   Eli Urbaniak was my high school science teacher.  Isn’t that an excellent name for a
science teacher?  Eli Urbaniak just sounds like a slightly crazy scientist, puttering away in his lab, occasionally teaching his students something.  Well, Eli had some philosopher in him too.  One lesson he taught has stayed with me since 9^th grade.  We were sitting in class, early in the year, and Mr. Urbaniak was up at his overhead projector.  (For the younger members, an overhead projector is like a prehistoric smartboard.)  On the plate of the projector Mr. Urbaniak put a petri dish, in which were three or four ants.  He commented on their movement, which we watched up on the screen, movement which grew more and more frantic as the heat from the projector’s 300-watt bulb built up.  Then our esteemed teacher smushed an ant with his thumb.  He looked up at us and asked: “Where did the life go?” 

 
   His point, which I only sort of understood at the time, wasn’t about how the ant died.  Obviously, it was crushed, and its life processes ended.  Rather, Mr. Urbaniak was asking something deeper, namely, “What is life?  Where does it come from, and where does it go when it ends, however that end might come?” 
 
   For all our 21^st century knowledge and confidence about biology and life, about how a beating heart works, with the electrical signals from the brain that cause the various parts of the heart muscle to contract in just the perfect rhythm to move the blood in and out, and the chemical processes in the blood to carry oxygen from the lungs to the cells, which then use that oxygen to burn calories and put cells in motion, for all that we know, there is still an amazing array of mysteries in our physical and biological world. 
 
   For example, we all understand that gravity is a thing.  We can measure it and predict its effects quite precisely.  But how and why one mass pulls on every other mass around it, across space, without any physical connection, well, that’s still a mystery.  Kind of like the grain of wheat that sits in the ground and, with moisture and time and heat from the sun suddenly sprouts and grows into a plant. 
 
   We can describe, manipulate and even predict many physical and biological processes.  But where does the spark of life come from in the first place, and what causes it to go on and on, as long as it can?   Science has given us many blessings, and a great deal of knowledge.  But many befuddling mysteries about first causes remain. 
 
   First cause mysteries remain for modern, materialistic science, that is.  Christianity has its mysteries, to be sure, but it knows the First Cause.  Ironically, the Church provided the educational context in which modern science developed.  But where modern science today struggles in many areas to identify and explain first causes, the Christian faith knows the Lord God Almighty, the creator and the sustainer of the universe.  God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the First Cause, the Uncaused Cause, the Source of all light and life.  Modern science doesn’t like that explanation, because God can’t be measured with human instruments.  But just because God is beyond our ability to measure doesn’t mean He isn’t who He says He is.  And without God, without an almighty power, who exists outside the physical and biological world we live in, there remain a lot of unsolved mysteries for which modern materialistic science has no answer. 
 
    Materialists continue to try to argue these problems away, but without success.  God is the Source and the Sustainer of all things.  As St. Paul says: In Him we live and move and have our being.  I AM, says the Lord God, and all other things happen and exist because I make them. 
 
   Modern science over the last 200 years has allowed an atheistic principle, a “there is no God” idea to insinuate itself into the conversation, and this atheistic materialism has become quite dominant in the public square.  Those who propose a Creator are quite regularly ridiculed and rejected.  It is not unusual to hear materialists argue that parents who teach their children to believe in a Creator are committing child abuse, and should lose their parental rights.  We surely live in challenging times.  But we do not need to shy away or be afraid of confessing what the Holy Spirit through the creation and through the Word teaches us. 
 
   Today the tension between Christianity and modern science is often fraught.  Often it becomes a fight, because modern materialistic science has for many morphed into “scientism.” Scientism is to make a religion of science.  And modern secular scientism might seem invincible.  But there are many chinks in its armor.  Scientism struggles with many problems and mysteries that in public they try to hand wave away.  For 200 years scientism’s common response to these challenges has been “We’ll be able to explain that, soon.”  And yet the mysteries not only remain, they deepen.  Modern science long argued that the idea of a Creator was impossible because it would break many immutable or unchangeable rules of physics.  And scientism still argues that way.  But then along came quantum physics, physics at the subatomic, infinitesimally small level.  There, it turns out, the laws of physics that science thought were immutable don’t seem to apply.  Huh. How about that?  I wonder in what other contexts the laws of physics are changeable? 
 

   And of course DNA has long been hailed as the final proof for Darwinian evolution, except for the small problem that even in the simplest living creatures, DNA turns out to be an incredibly complex code, or language, like a computer program, but much more complex, and made from proteins.  Without DNA there is no life as we know it.  But how did such complex code or programming language first appear in a physical world that, by scientism’s definition, lacks an intelligent designer, a programmer, to write the code?  What is the mechanism for the random production of complex information? 
 
That silence you hear is the only answer that materialistic scientism has to offer.   
 
   So we can confess the Creator, not just within these walls, but everywhere.  It might get us in some trouble; but that’s o.k., the Lord has our back.  Even more, we can rejoice not only in His constant care for our physical lives, but we can also marvel and rejoice at His intimate and active role in our spiritual lives as well.  For the Creator made us physical/spiritual beings, body and soul united, physics and biology and faith, all working together. 
 
   Jesus is making that body and soul connection for us this morning with His parable of the automatic wheat.  Just as in physical, earthly life, where we understand a lot, but also know that there is no life without God’s ongoing care, so also in spiritual and eternal life:  everything depends entirely on the will and power of God. 
 
   Just as in farming, where we know the necessary steps and how to recognize and encourage growth and how to harvest, so also in the spiritual harvest of souls. We know a lot.  We have the Word, the Word of Christ, that promise of a tiny sprig of cedar that will grow into a great tree, or the mustard seed growing to provide shade and shelter for many birds.  We know that our role in the Kingdom of God has to do interacting with the Word of God, the story of salvation.  It has to do with learning and meditating upon and sharing the message.  We know that God will use that Word to save souls, ours souls, and the souls of others, just as He causes the seed to sprout and grow and provide a harvest of wheat.  We don’t know exactly how God does it, or when.  The internal action of the Holy Spirit, working on the soul through the ear, is invisible to us, even more invisible than the sprouting of a seed.  But we know God is in the midst of the work, and that we get to play a role, in planting, cultivating, and harvesting recreated souls, sinners snatched from death, redeemed and renewed to grow into new seed spouting believers, who speak the same Truth from which they received new life. 
 

   And of course the mystery is even greater.  This new life, received and experienced
today, is concretely connected to the New Life of Jesus, springing from the tomb.  His new life is our new life.  And that life is empowered by His once for all death, now almost 2000 years in the past, but still effective for forgiveness and salvation today, through the power of God’s Word.  The miracle of growing wheat or a beating human heart is tremendous.  But the miracle of God’s sacrificial and saving love is far greater; it is the greatest thing of all, the revelation of the very heart of the Creator, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in whom you have life, and peace and joy, today, and forever and ever, Amen.