I begin with a story I heard growing up. A story my family told for generations about one of our ancestors who learned a lesson and wanted everyone to learn from his mistake. Uncle Jake saved his money for months and months until he could afford to buy passage for himself on a steamboat to go from Chattahooche down the Apalachicola River in Florida all the way to the port of Apalachicola on the Gulf of Mexico. In those days there were no roads, few railroads, mostly horses and buggies, no bridges across the rivers, and you depended upon the steamboats on the large rivers to get from one town to another.

Uncle Jake saves his money and gets his precious ticket for the cheapest bunk bed on the steamboat John V. Callahan. Uncle Jake arrives in Apalachicola and meets up with friends who ask how he liked the three days on the steamboat. "How was the food?" they ask, because the boat was famous for its cuisine. "Oh, I could not afford to eat in the dining room. I had my own in my bunk," Uncle Jake replies. His friends begin to snicker. "Didn’t you know the dining room is included in your ticket?" Poor Uncle Jake turns red. So embarrassed. He had stored some crackers and cheese to eat in private, not knowing his ticket included every meal in the dining room. Later, he told and retold this story on himself, willing to be laughed at, giving a lesson for others to learn from his ignorance.

When it’s already paid for, accept it. Don’t let your ignorance make a fool of you. We passed this story on Uncle Jake down in our family to teach ignorance is a poor excuse for missing a blessing when it’s already yours. And Uncle Jake shows us our lesson for today.

Jesus’ parable puts it this way. When the king finally rounds up a banquet hall full of guests to celebrate his son’s wedding, one poor guest is speechless, gets thrown out, because he does not wear the proper wedding garment. He did not know anything about a proper wedding outfit. "Many are called, but few are chosen," our text concludes. What it means is this: God calls everyone, but not everyone gets equipped to benefit from God’s calling. God loves everyone, but some remain ignorant of God’s love, unprepared, unable to receive and to benefit from God’s love.

Uncle Jake missed out on the captain’s banquet on his steamboat, ignorant, miss-informed, nursing himself alone in his lonely corner with his meager crackers and cheese, missing the celebration already bought and paid for, rightly belonging also to him.

The good news is God’s grace and love is for everyone, but you and I need to wake up and take advantage of every opportunity to respond not with ignorance, but knowing how to equip ourselves to enjoy and to thank God with our service and love for one another.

Jesus tells us how. "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and body, and your neighbor as yourself,"(Mark 12:30-31) is how Jesus commands us. Today we call this holistic thinking. Jesus was a holistic commander, way ahead of us who are trying to catch up with him. Take yourself seriously, Jesus commands, and learn to develop yourself. Wake up and use your mind to love God so that in your love you develop to fulfillment every potential God creates in you. And God gives us great resources to work with. As if the Bible were not enough, God reaches out in history to include the Humanism of the Greeks and Romans, the Gentiles. God chooses the Greek and Latin languages and cultures to teach us how to equip ourselves, how to dispel our ignorance and clothe ourselves with love, knowledge, obedience and service. We don’t accept Humanism’s original maxim, "Man is the measure of all things," because the Bible insists we are made in our creator’s image and likeness, and God is surely the measure of all things. But God gives us Greek and Roman Humanism so we can learn to follow Jesus’ command and through God’s Spirit develop Theistic or Christian Humanism.

To help us love God with all our physical strength, to take good care of our bodies, the Greeks and Romans give us the world of athletics. Today every church worth its salt has a gymnasium and sports teams, aerobic exercises, maybe yoga, and certainly blood pressure testing. And this cultivation of strength and healthy bodies, and the origin of medicine, come to us from the Greeks, not from the Bible.

The Bible frowns on Gentile Humanism, especially the arts, but we Christians have adopted the arts--music, drama, dance, literature, architecture--from the Greeks in order to worship God with all our heart and soul.

Let’s take Jesus’ command to love God with all our mind. This means we have to learn from the Greeks who give us the first academy. The Jewish synagogue gives us reading and writing of the Hebrew law and wisdom. And the Bible prepares us for science. All creation is good and all nature reveals the glory of God. And the Bible teaches us not to worship the natural creation, but to admire it and learn from it. And god puts curiosity in our minds, the beginning of science. But the ancient Greeks invent the academy, the practice of reason and  philosophy, and in the academy the Greeks pioneer scientific method and we adopt it from them and we believe good science is our faithful way to obey Jesus’ command to love God with all our mind. If ignorance is sometimes our problem, for Uncle Jake and for the unprepared wedding guest, then disciplined learning is how Greek Humanism helps us to love God with all our mind. I repeat, God gives us athletics, the arts, and science through our involvement with Greek and Roman Humanism, so that we may obey Jesus’ commandment.

This means we can have no opposition between scientific knowledge and faith, when each is properly understood and applied. We cannot play science and religion off against one another as appears to happen all too often today. If we do that we are guilty of what God’s people do when Moses is out of sight. Aaron takes their gold and silver and fashions a golden calf, an idol to distract them from worship of God. Better to follow Jesus’ command and love God with all our mind. As one philosopher puts it, "Today science without faith is blind, and religion without science quickly deteriorates into superstition." There can be no conflict between Religion and Science when each is properly understood, practiced and applied. For each is a gift of God. Faith enables us to love God with all our heart and soul. Science enables us take this motivation and learn to love God with all our mind.

Christ Jesus will not accept less from us. God gets angry when his people choose a quick fix, the security of a man-made god, an idol, rather than patiently trust the promises of God sent through Moses who is temporarily out of sight. God is ready to cast them into outer darkness, like the speechless guest without a wedding garment, but Moses rallies to remind God these people are God’s chosen. The most important words in our Old Testament lesson are these: "God changed his mind."

God is greatly disappointed with many of us in our generation, and maybe God gets a little angry, when we choose safety and shrink from exercising our minds, when we are lazy about cultivating scientific method, loving God with all our intellectual potential. For when we split science and faith apart and make them enemies, because we find the challenge difficult, then we fail to equip ourselves, to love God with all our mind, to take advantage of God’s own resources for clothing ourselves with wedding garments suitable for the heavenly banquet. Our failure produces more ignorance, and although we have been called to the wedding banquet, we must accept and cultivate the resources God provides, we must develop ourselves as faithful scientists and faithful theologians so that we may become chosen. Many are called, but few are chosen. Let’s make sure we find ourselves among the chosen.

To preach this good news means not only to underline the warning this parable gives us, but also to recognize and celebrate the hard work of those whom God has blessed and used to make sure we are both called and chosen. If you have learned the disciplines of theoretical and applied science and serve God in such professions as education, health care, social services, the law, engineering, natural resource industries, finance, business, communications, or government service, pat yourself on the back. Or rather, let God pat you on your back. And hear God say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." Indeed, in this cybernetic age how could we even begin to count the ways all of us benefit from the blessings of science and technology. As we sing in our favorite hymn, "Great is thy faithfulness, O Lord, our Savior," because we have inherited and benefit so greatly from good Science.

And so we once again announce the fall schedule for our Lay Academy of Faith and Religion. The word academy means we come together to study, using the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord," (Isaiah 1:18) and following the example of the philosopher Plato’s academy founded in Athens. The word "lay" means this is education for everyone, for all God’s people, so that together we may learn better how to love the Lord our God with all our mind. This fall our topic is "Called to Hope: Living as People of Faith in a Violent Age." The dates have been announced and we meet here on Monday evenings 6:30 pm beginning Oct. 24, so its good for all ages on a school night. And we include speakers from Judaism, the India Center, and Islam, as well as Christianity, because we want to learn how to love our neighbors as ourselves and even our enemies as ourselves, as Jesus teaches us. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

This afternoon at 3:00 pm we begin a new one time, elective class for adults on the relationship of our faith and Science, using the book Quantum Theology by theologian Diarmuid O’Murchu who will lead a workshop for us on the weekend of Nov. 4-6. You are invited to all these activities, and too all of our Christian Education events, if you wish to exercise your mind, to love God with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

Let us work together to show ourselves disciples of Christ who both calls us and who chooses us when we take advantage of the many teachers and learning opportunities

God’s Spirit provides for us. Let us work to change the words of Jesus to read, "Many are called, and many are also chosen."