This is the first week in the season of creation in United Churches in Canada. Today I would like to talk about the creation that is inside us.
In January of this year, the vaccine company Moderna applied to the Canadian government to approve a new kind of flu vaccine. It is called a mRNA vaccine, and it uses the same technique that was used in the Covid vaccines that were developed so quickly in 2020. The Covid mRNA virus used a method that mimicks one of our body’s own processes, and can be produced much quicker than traditional vaccines.
Dolly Parton, God bless her soul, heard about this experimental process in 2020, and gave them Moderna one million dollars when they really needed it before they could pitch their idea to the US government for their covid vaccine.
Indirectly, Dolly Parton helped save millions of lives.
The reason mRNA vaccines work is because they use a process which is happening in your body every single second. Our bodies are composed of cells, squishy little balls of liquid, proteins and enzymes. Inside every cell, there is a little factory that makes chemicals. Some of these chemicals, like proteins and enzymes, are needed inside the cell. Others are exported out of the cell.
In the very centre of our cells lies our body’s blueprint, our DNA. It is that twisted ladder of four molecules that stores all the information needed to create every part of our bodies. It’s like the cookbook of the body. When a cell wants to make a protein, it needs the recipe for making that chemical. That’s where MRNA comes in. It goes to a section of the DNA cookbook, copies the recipe, then travels out of the nucleus to the kitchen where the chemicals are made. The MRNA is the messenger, the courier which delivers the recipe.
mRNA vaccines mimic this process. They are made of a messenger RNA recipe for making a small part of the virus that you want to be immune to. When you get a shot in the arm, those instructions go into your blood stream, where the mRNA gets into some of your immune system’s cells. Those cells start making part of the virus, so your body gets some practice fighting it. When you get exposed to the virus in real life, your body already knows how to recognize and attack the virus. This is what saved millions from dying from of Covid, and it may be used again in Canadian flu vaccines.
Now, I know that is all a lot of technical information. There are so many names to remember, and it is all incredibly complex. All true. But here’s the thing: our body is doing complex things every single second. In the space of one minute, 60 million chemical reactions will take place in your cells involving Mrna and other molecules. 60 million a minute. Each of them is critical to your health. Fortunately, for most of our lives, everything works very well. If you are able to hear this sermon, that means your body is doing utterly amazing things every second.
And, you don’t need to understand how any of it works. For most of human history, no one knew anything about DNA or RNA or cells. RNA was only discovered in the 1960s. It has existed for 4 billion years, doing its job in every animal that ever lived, all without us needing to know anything about it to be healthy.
So, how should we feel about this? That’s a question science doesn’t address. Science avoids value questions. It can explain things like cells and exploding stars without ever addressing the question of how we should feel about these amazing processes. Was the Big Bang good or bad? Should we feel grateful or resentful,or something else? Science has no opinion on this, it is officially value neutral.
But we humans usually do have opinions about things. We have opinions about politics. We have opinions about the economy, our neighbours and friends. We have an opinion about that dog that won’t stop barking. We always have opinions. So what should our opinion be when we consider our inner creation? Science may be neutral, but we don’t have to be.
In our society, when we think about the value of something, we often think about it in terms of money. So how much is our body and all its complex processes worth?
Imagine this scenario, which I admit is not realistic, but it may help us think about how much our inner creation is worth to us.
You’re at your computer, and you get an email with a subject line, saying “this could save your life.” Somehow it got through your spam filter. You open it, and there’s a pitch for selling you heart insurance. For a dollar a day, this insurance company will guarantee that every cell in your heart will operate flawlessly. No heart attacks, no hardening of the arteries, no need to worry about bypass surgery. Something may kill you eventually, but it won’t be your heart. Heart disease is the second most common cause of death in Canada, so with this insurance, you could be sure that something else might eventually kill you, but it wouldn’t be heart disease.
For the purposes of my argument today, let’s assume that the offer is legit. A dollar a day doesn’t sound like much to avoid heart problems, so you sign up.
But the next day, you get another email. This time it is offering you Brain insurance. Same deal, a dollar a day to protect your neurons. No one wants their brain to have a stroke or tumour, so you sign up for that, too. Two dollars a day is a small price to pay. But the next day, you get ten emails like this for other organs in your body. And the next day another 20. It appears the algorithm has figured out you like emails like these. And you start signing up for these offers to save your eyes and your ears and you fingers - need those to type and touch your loved ones - and your knees, and then your blood. You had no idea so many things could go wrong.And there’s no offer to just prevent cancer all at once. You’d have to insure every kind of cell that could become cancerous - pancreatic cells, skin cells, liver cells. Each a dollar a day.
Pretty soon, you realize you will never have enough money to pay to keep all of your body healthy. It’s too much. There are too many cells, too many organs to pay for. You would never have enough money to pay for it all.
That, my friends, was how the ancient Christians saw it, too. Even without knowing much about biology, they realized that each of us could never have enough money to pay for the life we have been given. Of course, they believed that God has given us this precious gift of life. It is so extraordinary, we could never pay God back for it. So, they spoke of human beings as being indebted to God.
And then, they asked a second question. Once we know we have inherited a life from God we can never pay back, how should we feel about that? How should we feel about God? How should we feel about our lives and other people, knowing that we have been given this incredible gift of life that we can never repay?
That is what today’s parable is about. Jesus tells a story about a man who is called before a king. He has amassed a debt of ten thousand bags of gold. An impossible amount. That’s our clue that this is a story about something else, it is not really about economics. So this man owes the king more than he can ever repay, like we all do to God. The king demands he pay it all back, but the man says he can’t. The king in his compassion says ok, your debt has been forgiven. So that would be God’s relationship with us. We can’t ever repay God for the life we have received. God lets us live without expecting to be paid back for our lives.
But then the man, whose debt has been forgiven, meets someone who owes him money, but not nearly as much. A few months’ wages, but still, hard to pay back. Now, you might think the man who had been forgiven all his debts might be feeling magnanimous at this point. But not this guy. He decides a debt is a debt, so rather than forgive the man, he demands it all in full. He has him thrown into debtor’s prison until he can pay.
The king finds out, and hauls the man back for a confrontation. I forgave all of your debt, ten thousand bags of gold, and you couldn’t forgive this man just a few silver coins? The king is outraged, and he throws the man into debtor’s prison where he will be tortured until he can pay up. The same punishment this man imposed on his debtor who owed much less.
Jesus tells this parable when someone asks him how often should we forgive someone if they sin against us. His answer is seven times seventy times, which means basically, all the time. We should always be forgiving. And he offers this parable to explain why. All of us are in debt to God for our existence. Just for the simple fact of existing. We can’t pay for every good thing that happens in our body, and we can’t pay for every good thing that happens to us outside us - the free sunlight, the earth beneath our feet, the plants that grow our food. We are always massively in debt to God.
So how should we act, knowing that? In our age, we are encouraged to not even give it a thought. We should just take it all for granted. But, our religious tradition suggests we must take a position. It is part of our being as humans to have an emotional and ethical orientation to the world. This parable suggests that our debt to God should inspire humility and gratitude. The idea we are self made is a delusion, not even remotely true. That’s clear even in scientific terms. But if we are in such debt, and God forgives us our debts, then God expects us to do the same with others. It is a small price to pay to be forgiving. Not easy, but if we thought about all we had been given, our hearts can soften.
We are invited to have a life where we do not get hung up on every insult, on every sin enacted against us. None of it compares to the gift of life we have received from God. We have been forgiven our debts and what God expects in return is for us to be grateful and forgiving. We don’t have to pay God back for our DNA or RNA or any part of our amazing bodies. That would never work. We honour God’s gift to us by being giving and forgiving. By being more like God.
Now, that’s hard when you think you own your life, and others owe you. It is much easier when you can feel in your bones that your life is a gift. That whatever people take away from you is very small compared to what you have been given. It can take a long time to feel that way. It starts with counting our blessings, and seeing that they outnumber our challenges. It helps to be in nature, to remind ourselves of the enormous gift of life that surrounds us, and that lies inside us. None of which we created, and yet is given to us . Like a hundred thousand
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