Byerley finds the call “to do justice, and to love kind-
ness, and to walk humbly with [our] God” in Micah 6:8 especially relevant. “I am able to work through this lens and model these actions to my students,” he said. And acquiring the broad knowledge he needs to teach
enriches his spiritual journey. “My awe at God’s amazing power to create physical and natural systems that we even can attempt to explain with logic, reasoning and math- ematics is central to my personal faith,” he said. Charles Austerberry’s experiences indicate that Byer-
ley’s work can bear much fruit. Austerberry, a member of Augustana Lutheran Church in Omaha, Neb., serves as an assistant biology professor and teaches a “Science and Religion” course at Creighton University. Growing up, Austerberry first saw faith and science
interact in the life of his public school biology teacher, a member of his congregation. He still remembers an early research experience of being “the first person to ever know some—very little—truth about the natural world that my experiments had revealed.” He added, “One of the feelings is tremendous humil-
ity. No human created the microbe I was studying. Tat microbe is part of an evolutionary lineage tracing back to the beginnings of life on planet Earth. All humans are intimately connected, evolutionarily and ecologically, with all of creation. We humans also bear God’s ‘image.’ Perhaps part of what that image means is to know things about the natural world and recognize, as Genesis 1 says, that God’s creation is good.”
A scientific world Geologist Karl Evans helps lead discussions of faith and science at Bethany Lutheran Church, Cherry Hills Vil- lage, Colo. He is also active in the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology (
www.luthscitech.org). “Te church doesn’t have the option of living in or not
living in a scientific world,” he observed. “It already is a scientific world—we are all geeks! Te question is how the church will live in a scientific world.” His passion for geological science carried Evans
through a 31-year career with the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado. His work has involved geologic mapping, investigating the formation of mineral deposits and their environmental effects, and conducting geochronologic studies (rock dating). Evans said his vocation as a geologist has been about
“seeing how God has and is accomplishing the work of his creating. It’s a way of recognizing what Luther called the ‘larvae Dei’—the masks of God. “In John 1 we learn that ‘in the beginning was the
Word [Logos]. … All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’ Logos also carries the implication of ‘reason’ and ‘order.’ … We can be confident that God’s creation follows laws and has a built-in order which allows us to investigate this world and expect to find cogent explanations.”
Hearing God’s call Tomas Vedvick’s faith grounds him in his work, yet he has been routinely called upon to defend and explain his faith. Te member of Calvary Lutheran Church, Federal Way, Wash., is a vaccinologist and vice presi- dent of formulation and process development at the Infectious Disease Research Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit. Vedvick and his team develop vaccines to treat such global illnesses as leprosy and tuberculosis. From the early stages of his career, Vedvick said, “I
believed in doing the things I wanted to do in science to benefit mankind … to help peoples’ lives be better.” He has acquired 28 U.S. patents for diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics of infectious diseases and cancer. His scientific background informs other realms, such
as his congregation’s council, where he said he can bring “linear thinking to an environment where that’s not nec- essarily present.” People serve God best when those with different skills work together, Vedick explained. Ida Hakkarinen, a meteorologist with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also serves on the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology. She is a member of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church and Student Center in College Park, Md. As part of a team developing the first of NOAA’s
highly accurate next-generation geostationary satellites, she is working on a component that will provide detailed images of potentially deadly weather events, including tornadoes and hurricanes, every 30 seconds instead of the current system’s almost eight-minute intervals. Hakkarinen’s interest in meteorology began in child-
hood. But she observes that her “vocation” is something much broader—“one’s call from God” in all aspects of life. Luther’s teachings about life in community are a
reminder that “in my professional and personal interac- tions at work, and the particular ways in which faith may—or may not— arise in the work- place arena, the very act of listening to someone is a holy calling,” Hakkar- inen said.
Author bio: Gifford, a historian and writer, is a member of Joyful Servant Lutheran Church, Newberg, Ore.
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