This past week, the New York Times featured an article on the fascinating history of how messenger RNA vaccines were created. The article begins and ends with Dr. Barney Graham, a virus expert in Bethesda, Maryland, at the Vaccine Research Center. In 2013, when the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome—or MERS—virus was killing one out of three infected people, Dr. Graham wondered if one of his lab scientists had contracted MERS while abroad. It turns out that the scientist had only a common cold. But it led Dr. Graham to an insight: maybe studying the ordinary cold virus of the lab scientist could help him with the vexing problem of creating a vaccine for MERS.
The eventual fabrication of a messenger RNA vaccine to address COVID-19 drew together the work of Dr. Graham and three other major efforts spanning over 60 years. It all started when two Pennsylvania scientists explored what seemed to be a wild idea. Maybe messenger RNA could cause cells to produce bits of a virus. It turns out that they could. The other major scientific endeavor came out of gene therapy, as scientists looked for a way to protect genetic molecules with fatty membranes as they made their way to human cells. And finally, the third piece of this large puzzle, involved the U.S. government’s massive undertaking to find a vaccine for the AIDS virus.
When on December 31, 2019, Dr. Graham first saw a report of a new pneumonia that had originated in Wuhan, China, he contacted a colleague and noted that it was time. All the complex work hitherto accomplished—the three scientific efforts spanning over 60 years and including scientists from various countries—was now coming together and could possibly be used for this puzzling new virus from China. And at the center of this astounding story was something that seemed to be a fanciful bit of intuition. A lab scientist’s mundane cold proved to be helpful in the ultimate production of a vaccine to combat COVID-19.
Dr. Hadi Yassine was that scientist from Dr. Graham’s lab, and when recently asked about how his common cold virus sparked efforts to create a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, Dr. Yassine remarked: “You can consider it luck. . . or you can consider it a blessing.”[1]
For people of faith, to consider something as luck seems almost blasphemous. What seems to be mere luck to some can only be a blessing, even if in disguise, to those of us who believe in the power of God. Seeing something as just a bit of luck assumes that we inhabit a world of disparate pieces, randomly thrown together by fate. When the pieces align, it’s good luck. When they don’t, it’s bad luck.
But a universe governed by God, who can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine involves far more than luck. Such a universe radiates God’s blessing, even in what appear to be chance encounters. Diverse people are not disconnected from one another, duking it out in a competition for resources. The world that God has given us as our home is one where God, humanity, and all of creation are inextricably intertwined.
The apostle Paul’s metaphor of the human body to describe the living Body of Christ is so well-known in the Christian tradition that it seems almost banal. And yet I would venture to say that it’s the least understood of theological images. Isn’t it ironic that when the words of Holy Scripture cannot captivate our imaginations enough to illumine the bond of the human family, we must turn to science?
Science, which is so often unnecessarily used to combat religion, is one of the most powerful witnesses to a core precept of Christian faith: our undeniable relatedness and responsibility for one another. Look at the inseparable connections of the component parts of an ecosystem. If you can’t heed St. Paul’s words, just think of the last time your splitting headache was the result of eye strain. And if you’re still looking for evidence that none of us can exist as an isolated subject within creation, think about this horrible virus that has kept us in pandemic for nearly two years. At what point will the light bulb go on and will the human race realize that what is playing out in science is directly related to our moral cohesion as a society?
Or is it mere luck that a time of pandemic has brought into bold relief some of our societal sins? Is it just mere luck that the presence of a vaccine for the coronavirus has highlighted the gross social inequities among us, where parts of the world are heavily vaccinated and poorer parts cannot find enough shots to get into arms? Is there any connection between civil unrest and a raging pandemic that won’t leave us alone?
For those who think everything is just luck, there is no relation between the constitutive parts. These isolated incidents are simply random die thrown onto the gameboard of life. Their apparent lack of connection is just more evidence that we inhabit an aleatoric universe. The fact that there is so much chaos these days is simply another reminder that there is no cohesive meaning to our lives.
But let’s go back to the Christian view. None of this can be mere luck. There must somehow be a blessing in it all, even if it’s hidden. And if life is no more than a lucky game, then how is God working in the small details of life? Luck refuses to believe that the minor encounter of two people in the same place at the right time might be for a greater purpose. Luck could not comprehend something good or unifying coming out of a heated conversation between people with very different viewpoints. Luck has no time for the ordinary moments of life, where disparate pieces of a puzzle find their matching partners in surprising ways. Because luck is just luck. Luck has no higher purpose.
And St. Paul clearly understood this when he lectured the Church in Corinth. Paul knew that the assortment of random members, strong and weak, within the human body are not haphazardly put together. And Paul also knew that God has beaten us at our own game. God has always known that, because of human sin, we will give preference to the powerful members and ignore the weaker ones, and so God has inverted our values by bestowing dignity on those parts of the body that are most at risk of neglect.
You see, God has graced us with a built-in mechanism for looking out for one another. By linking us together as part of Christ’s living Body, God has handed us a supreme gift, if we can only recognize and accept it.
We can survey the social, medical, and environmental landscape around us and see it in one of two ways: as bad luck or as radiant with hidden blessings from God. It could appear blasphemous to expect to wring a blessing in the worst of times, but if God is truly at work among us, there is always a blessing to find.
And the blessing becomes more apparent when we realize that our ties to one another are not based on biology but on our constitution as Christ’s sacred Body on earth. If you think your presence here today is luck, think again. Have you considered that God has brought you to Good Shepherd for a very particular reason? Do you have any idea of how your own unique gifts are needed in this place for Christ’s gospel to flourish? Have you thought that refusing to share your gifts with this part of the Body of Christ can weaken the whole system? Are you thinking that you can just show up for Mass as an individual and leave afterwards as an individual? Or can you imagine that when someone in the pew across the church is hurting, you are, too? And if that person is hurting, maybe your sympathetic hurt is God’s way of healing the hurt. You see, in this interconnected universe we inhabit, nothing is random.
In such an interrelated world, science can teach us about our duty as members of Christ’s Body. In such a bound-up world, a common cold can spark insight to produce a vaccine for one of the world’s most traumatic viruses. In such a world, no person, no thing, no part of creation can say, “I have no need of you.” We all need one another. You are here today because of more than mere luck. It will take far more than luck to heal our deepest divisions. And just maybe in the most random encounters of your life, you will find, not luck, but God’s blessing.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 23, 2022
[1] “Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made,” Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times, January 15, 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/health/mrna-vaccine.html