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In a letter in the year 1754, Sir Robert Walpole coined the word “serendipity.” “I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip,” he wrote. “It is a tale in which, as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Such discoveries, the result of accident and sagacity, are what Walpole called “serendipity.” “The history of science and technology is littered with serendipity,” says Simon Singh in his recent book, Big Bang. For example, in 1948 George de Mestral went for a stroll in the Swiss countryside, saw some prickly seeds on his trousers, noticed that their spiny hooks had got caught on the loops of the fabric and was inspired to invent Velcro. In another example of sticky serendipity, Art Fry was trying to develop superglue when he accidentally concocted a glue that was so weak that two objects that had been stuck together could easily be pulled apart. Fry, a keen member of his local church choir, coated bits of paper with his failed superglue and used them to mark pages in his hymnbook, at which point the Post-it note was born. An example of medical serendipity is Viagra, which was initially developed as a treatment for heart problems. Researchers became suspicious that it might have a positive side-effect only when the patients who had taken part in a clinical trial steadfastly refused to hand back their unused pills, even though the drug seemed to have had no significant impact on their heart problems.” These people were not just lucky, says Singh. Their opportunities were not the products of mere chance. They were people whose previous work and preparation opened the way for their imagination to recognize scientific or technological possibilities when the opportunities to see the possibilities presented themselves. “As Louis Pasteur, who himself benefited from serendipity, put it: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind,’” which is what Walpole also meant when he described serendipity as the result of “accidents and sagacity.” Serendipity is what is recognized and experienced when a keen sense of perception based on acute discernment takes advantage of an opportunity that presents itself. Serendipity, I think, is what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Whoever has eyes to see, let him see; whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” In the spiritual life as, in science and technology, one sees and hears only what he is prepared to see and hear. One hears the voice of God, not by chance, as if by thunderbolt from the sky, but only when one is spiritually prepared to hear what God speaks. “Those who want to be touched by serendipity must be ready to embrace an opportunity when it presents itself,” Singh continues, “rather than merely brushing down their seed-covered trousers, [or] merely pouring their failed superglue down the sink or abandoning a failed medical trial. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin depended on a speck of penicillium mould floating in through the window, landing in a petri dish and killing off a bacterial culture. It is highly likely that many microbiologists had previously had their bacterial cultures contaminated by penicillium mould [as well], but they had all discarded their petri dishes in frustration instead of seeing the opportunity to discover an antibiotic that would save millions of lives. [As] Winston Churchill once observed: ‘Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.’” Because they do not have ears to hear or eyes to see. Stanley Hey did not hurry off as if nothing had happened. He did have ears to hear. During World War II, Hey, a school teacher, was drafted to work on radar research in Britain. The screens of Allied radar were being lit up by what appeared to be signals from enemy sources sent to jam Allied instruments to make it difficult for them to identify enemy aircraft. Finding the source of the enemy signals was Hey’s task, and other, innocent signals might easily have been ignored by Hey if he had not otherwise been interested in them. But Hey was acquainted with Big Bang research, and when his radio receiver picked up signals that clearly were not from enemy sources, but from extraterrestrial sources, he followed their trail as well and serendipitously discovered that the interfering radio waves were coming from the Sun, and his new discovery raised the possibility that all stars emit radio waves. This opened the ears of other scientists, and from there it was only a matter of time until Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, through their own experience of serendipity, discovered the echo of the background radiation of the Big Bang itself. The theorists and mathematicians George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman predicted the Big Bang echo in 1948, but no one was able to confirm it by observation at the time. In the 1950s, however, Penzias and Wilson were conducting a standard astronomical radio survey, and they were having trouble with static that was interfering with the reception of the radio waves they were interested in. But after they had carefully removed or accounted for every known source of static – which included a couple of pigeons that insisted on repeatedly roosting in the horn of their telescope – the mysterious background noise persisted, and they gradually realized that “something, somewhere, somehow was emitting radio waves all the time from all directions. Their primary objective had been to conduct a standard radio survey, but their scientific education, combined with their curiosity and persistence, serendipitously led them to observe directly what the theory of Gamow and Alpher and Herman had predicted in 1948 – the 13-billion-year-old cosmic microwave background radiation that echoes from a critical transition in the universe when it was only 300,000 years old! Loren Eiseley was a man with ears to hear and eyes to see. “What is man,” Eiseley asked in 1946, “but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?” What is man, we can now see – although this sentence will express it much more prosaically than Eiseley’s – what is man but a way that carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, those elements spun off from a cosmic event of creation over thirteen billion years ago, what are human beings but a way the elements have of going about as persons who are conscious of our origin, conscious of each other, and conscious of what is good, and who possess the ability to make judgments and to love? Which brings us to the more recent cosmic event of Pentecost, to more serendipity and to the Gospel, and to Peter, another man with eyes to see and ears to hear. On the Day of Pentecost, St. Luke tells us, the disciples were all together in one place. They were all of them men who were conscious of their origin, conscious of each other, and conscious of what is good, and they all possessed the ability to make judgments and to love. “And suddenly,” Luke says, “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Now there were staying in Jerusalem other men as well, “God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven,” and when they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard the disciples declaring the wonders of God in his own tongue, in the language of the land he had come from. “Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’” And some of them had no ears to hear; they experienced no serendipity at all. To them it was just an unusual event with an ordinary explanation. “Aw,” they said, “those guys have just had too much wine.” But for Peter it was a moment of grand serendipity, and he made a discovery which he was not in quest of at all. Peter, you see, was spiritually prepared for the moment. He had spent three long years with Jesus, he had listened when Jesus had taught the Scriptures, he had himself failed the test of love when he denied his friend and left him alone in the hands of the high priests and the soldiers, and he had experienced the forgiveness of his risen Lord. So, although to those without Peter’s sagacity and experience what happened on Pentecost seemed no more than an ordinary event that was easily explained by too much to drink, it was no event with an ordinary explanation to Peter, whose mind was prepared for the moment. “These men are not drunk, as you suppose,” said Peter. “It is only nine o’clock in the morning. Today’s events are what was spoken of by the prophet Joel. Do you not remember what Joel said? Do you not remember how God promised that the day will come when “their young men will see visions and their old men will dream dreams, and men and women alike will prophesy? Do you not remember how God promised that “there will be wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below and that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will live?” And do you not remember how, just a short time ago, God raised the Lord Jesus? “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear,” Peter added. “This is an event of cosmic significance, and this is what it means – that Jesus of Nazareth, who was put to death by wicked men who nailed him to the cross, but who was raised to life by God, this man Jesus is both Lord and Christ. And the Holy Spirit has now made it known that the Good News of God in Jesus is available to all who would hear that news – available to people from every land and nation, not just those from Israel, available to those who speak any language, not just to those who speak Hebrew or Aramaic. And with this the Church of God experienced a cosmic expansion, moving beyond the boundaries of parochial Israel, the land of its birth. G. K. Chesterton said that “we make our own friends and we make our own enemies, but God makes our next door neighbors.” If the current Big Bang timetable is correct, then God started making our neighbors, and us, a very long time ago indeed. And Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, describes how it was done through the mystery of stellar alchemy: “In order that we might live,” he says, “stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath – all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired [billions of years ago,] long before the Earth was born.” And this, says Singh, provides us with two possible ways of looking at life, because “the romantics among us might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust,” while “cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.” These two ways of looking at life were present at Pentecost. Some explained the event as so much nuclear waste. “They’ve just had too much wine,” they said. But Peter explained it as stardust, as the echo of the voice of God himself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.... The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.... For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” All this Peter, with eyes to see and ears to hear, saw and heard and spoke on Pentecost. Who are we, he asked – those of us here in Jerusalem and those from beyond Israel as well – who are we but creatures related to our Creator, and therefore to each other, through the alchemy of an ancient ancestry of the Word, all of us equally loved by our Creator? The Good News of God in Jesus is a Word for us all. The primary miracle of Pentecost is not a miracle of speaking, but a miracle of hearing. The primary miracle of Pentecost is not that the disciples were empowered to speak in other languages, but that people of every land were enabled to hear the Good News in their own languages. God’s Good News in Jesus was not just for Israel, but for all peoples. The story of Pentecost is a story of language, but it is a story of the language, not of men and women, but of God. It is the story of the echo of the eternal Word of God that was heard by men and women with ears to hear, a Word who affirms that God does not belong to any human language or nation or tribe – not to Latin or Greek, not to English or Welsh or French or Spanish – not to the Medes or the Persians, not to the Iraqis or the Americans, not to Jews or Muslims or Christians. The echo of the ancient Word of God at Pentecost, picked up by Peter and interpreted to the world, is that we belong to God, and that because we all belong to God, we all belong to each other as well. This is the truth God speaks to those whose hearts and minds are prepared to receive it on the Day of Pentecost. We come here today to claim the gift of the Spirit of God, to claim the gift of ears. We come to hear the echo of the Word who was with God in the beginning, the Word of creation through whom all things were made that have been made and the Word who became flesh and lived among us, the Word of reconciliation and love spoken to all of us, to each in his own native tongue. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |