May I speak in the name of God, Giver, Forgiver and Lover. Amen.
One of the things I love is the sadly now complete television series Battlestar Galactica, BSG for short. In a world of cheap, poorly made television you have to search hard for the pearl of great price. When it does come along the last thing you want to do is let go of it.
In the 1970s Battlestar Galactica was a cheap, poorly made television series that could be best described as the Sci-Fi equivalent of the A-Team. And if you don't know what the A-Team is then all I can say is that your knowledge of the great classics of Western civilization is profoundly impoverished. Suffice it to say the original Battlestar was slightly self-important, but more often cheesy and what we British call camp. Between the Lycra costumes and the clunky robots it was hard to take seriously.
Contrasting that with what has been airing on the Sci-Fi channel over the last three years is a little like contrasting a quite ordinary French red wine with a product that is also called wine and that has been grown in England. They may have the same name, but there is no comparison. We English don't grow good wine. And with notable exceptions the ‘70s didn't grow much good television.
If you are of an intellectual bent, as I assume everyone here is, you simply have to adore the new BSG. For beneath the disguise of a space opera, it is really an extended meditation on the possibilities and limitations of human nature. In literary terms BSG is a riff on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Thomas More's Utopia and George Orwell's 1984. And yet while dystopian and tragic, it is simultaneously optimistic and full of hope.
Some of you are no doubt wondering where all this is going. Indeed. We have all been tempted to wonder that. And from time to time we allow ourselves to think the unthinkable and actually allow our minds to push at the frontiers of received opinion and acceptable academic discourse. Which is why, contrary to popular belief, you can learn a lot more from a season of Battlestar Galactica than you might ever learn at college.
And the reason that you might learn more from BSG is that sci-fi can go where college cannot. BSG will play with your head and make you question whether you are a human being or a cybernetic organism who just happens to look, feel and touch like a human being. And then it will ask you even if there is a difference whether that difference even matters.
BSG will also teach you about one of the most potent and dangerous forces imaginable, love. And not just ordinary love, but the kind of love that crosses technological boundaries between human and cyborg. Making love in BSG is avoids both the Scylla of tawdry voyeurism and the Charybdis of sentimental nonsense. Instead BSG teaches that love and those who make love are the only ones who can end the violence that has scarred creation for millennia.
At its heart Battlestar is not a series about humans fighting cylons and looking for the promised land. At its heart BSG is a meditation on the human need to find meaning and intimacy in a world that was best described by the French mystic Simone Weil as noisy and cold.
There are of course many religious metaphors and images that bombard the viewer with the ultimate significance of the new BSG. From resurrection experiences to prophets, from monotheist automota to polytheist colonials, from sacred scriptures to miracles, BSG is replete with the language of religion.
Which brings it back to us. Today is the feast of St Matthias, the one chosen by lot. Not elected or hired by a well briefed search committee, but chosen by a game of chance, the random drawer of a short straw. Its tempting to critique this early example of Christian human resource practices. But that would miss the point.
Time and again the church has proclaimed that God works in God's own way. And time after time the most impressive achievements of the Christian church have been amateurish accidents, lucky breaks and chance encounters.
The thread that unites St Mathias with Battlestar Galactica is this fundamental randomness. Too often in academe we try, quite rightly, to neatly pin everything down. We verify our sources, and we correct our hypotheses in the light of fresh or contradictory evidence. We also do this with our faith. We Episcopalians are often judged as being worshippers of buildings. And we do have a lot of beautiful buildings to worship. But the truth of the matter is that we are actually worshippers of order. We worship our plans, strategies, committees, and a whole plethora of organizational paraphernalia. It helps us feel in control. When quite clearly we aren't. Luckily for us life is not so neatly ordered.
The story of St Matthias, like the story of Adama, commander of Galactica, is a much better template for us. Each was quite literally thrown into an unexpected leadership role through no fault and no particular merit of their own. They just happened to be there. Just like us. And each, without any preparation and without any appropriate training, became responsible for leading and loving their communities.
We hear a lot about leadership at Dartmouth, but it strikes me that unless you have learned to love, there is really no point to leadership. The point of leadership in Christianity is to make love a reality and to unveil the hidden God in the visibility of love. If we would call ourselves Christian, and it is something that I sometimes shudder to do, then we have to be willing to make the love of God a constant in our lives. In turn that means challenging many of the systems, processes and social realities that so often make infertile ground for love.
But remember, making love is never a systematic endeavor. Fabricating divine love is an act of artistry and futility, one that has no reward outside of itself. It is both supreme creativity and absolute nothingness. But if like Matthias you would call yourself Christian you too have no choice about whether to love or withhold love. Scientifically entropy always wins, and all that gives us vitality will pass. But in love we learn there is no "I" before there is a "we", no "me" until first a "you", and nothing at all before a (w)hol(l)y unseen Other. Amen.
