Barney S. Graham was born in 1953 in the great state of Kansas. His father was a dentist and his mother was a teacher. For part of his childhood, his family lived on a hog farm where he and his brother learned a lot about veterinary medicine through working with animals. Being the valedictorian of his high school class, Graham attended Rice University where he majored in biology. Graham then applied to medical school at the University of Kansas and earned his medical degree in 1979.

It was at Kansas, where he met his wife, Cynthia, who was studying to become psychiatrist. They wanted to do their residencies in the same geographic location, but what complicated this scenario for them was that Graham was white and Cynthia was black. Cynthia suggested Nashville: Graham could apply to the Vanderbilt School of Medicine and she to Meharry Medical College, a historically Black institution. Keep in mind that in 1979, Tennessee had only recently repealed a ban on interracial marriage.

On Christmas Eve, Graham was driving cross country and stopped in at Vanderbilt. To his surprise, the director of the residency program was in his office and willing to meet with him. When the interview was over, Graham told the director, “I know this is the South. I’m going to marry a Black woman, and if that makes a difference I can’t come here.” The director said, “Close the door.” He welcomed Graham on the spot. Cynthia was accepted at Meharry and they moved to Nashville.

By 1982, Graham had become the chief resident at Nashville General Hospital. That same year, Graham had a patient who was admitted to the hospital and was suffering from five simultaneous infections, including cryptococcal meningitis and herpes simplex. Graham realized that he was treating Tennessee’s first AIDS patient. Graham was able to keep him alive for three weeks before he passed away.

Graham was on the front lines of the HIV fight and offered to run vaccine trials on HIV patients. Because of his work in running these trials in Nashville, in 2000, the National Institute for Health recruited Graham to create a vaccine-evaluation clinic. His lab focused on three categories of respiratory viruses: influenza, a highly contagious virus called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes pneumonia in children, and coronaviruses. His primary focus when he came to the lab in 2000 was to create a vaccine for RSV because of how deadly it could be.

Graham spent much of next decade trying to solve the riddle of what causes RSV, but the technology he needed was still being developed. However, what changed the tide in his efforts to find the vaccine was in 2008, when Jason McLellan, a postdoc studying H.I.V., ended up losing his spot in a biology lab in the same building where Graham worked. Graham swooped McLellan up and asked him to apply his immense knowledge of HIV towards the RSV vaccine.

McLellan had been using new imaging technology to capture photographs of HIV. When they applied this imaging technology to RSV, they noticed there was protein covering the top of the virus that looked like spike. When this spike was activated, RSV became invisible to the body’s immune system. This spike protein was like an invisibility cloak that hid the virus. What they realized was that if they were going make an effective vaccine for RSV, they would need to neutralize the spike protein so the body could locate and destroy the virus.

By 2013, Graham and McLellan had done just that and determined that their vaccine could be given to a pregnant woman and provide enough antibodies to her baby to last for its first six months—the critical period. This discovery was hailed as one of the greatest breakthroughs in the world of infectious disease in a decade. Many were anticipating a new “era of precision vaccinology.”

Graham and McLellan’s next target was the mers coronavirus. You might remember when mers emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Thankfully, mers burned itself out before it became a global pandemic, because it was extremely dangerous: a third of infected people died. However, because mers has a spike protein, they could test their new methodology to try to suppress it so the immune system could find it.

Graham and McLellan modified the mers spike protein, creating a vaccine that worked well in mice. Unfortunately, because the virus was no longer a threat to humans, the research funding petered out. Graham was dismayed, because he felt it was shortsighted, but they had learned valuable information about how to vaccinate against coronaviruses and knew that if a new virus ever emerged, they could develop a vaccine.

Over the next several years, the technology took a massive leap forward, particularly in the area of microscopy. Using what is called cryogenic electron microscopy, scientists could now visualize microbes down to one ten-billionth of a meter, allowing them to see spike proteins with crystal clarity. Then in December of 2019, Graham heard the news from Wuhan. He suspected that China’s cases of atypical pneumonia were caused by a new coronavirus. He was hurriedly trying to obtain the genomic sequence. Graham called McLellan, who had been recruited to a research position at the University of Texas at Austin and asked if he would help Graham create the vaccine.

McLellan said, “Of course, I’ll help.” China sent the sequences of COVID-19 on Friday night, the 10^th of January. They woke up on the 11^th and immediately started designing modified proteins that would neutralize the spike protein. By January 13^th, they turned their scheme over to Moderna for manufacturing, seven days before the first case of COVID-19 appeared in the US. Six weeks later, Moderna began shipping vials of vaccine for clinical trials.

Typically, it takes years, if not decades, to go from formulating a vaccine to making a product ready to be tested. The development process was “an all-time record,” because of all the decades of work Graham and McLellan had put into working on RSV and coronaviruses. After the vaccine was tested in animals, it became clear that Graham’s design choices had been sound. The first human trial began on March 16th. A week later, Moderna began scaling up production to a million doses per month.

Now why have I told you this story? Partly because it is the story of how the vaccine that has saved millions of lives came to be and many people do not know it. But the other reason is something much simpler: I often heard the question during the middle of the pandemic: “How is it possible that scientists could have developed a vaccine for COVID so quickly? How do they know it’s safe?”  

Well, the answer to that question is two guys who spent their lives researching these viruses saved all of us. They didn’t just make it up out of thin air. Through endless blood, sweat and tears, they knew exactly what was required to neutralize a very deadly virus. And thank God for those two guys because without them millions more people would have died.

It goes without saying that these two men are incredibly intelligent. Graham went to school for 12 years to gain his medical training; McLellan for 10 to get his PhD in Biophysics. I could count on one hand the number of people in this church who could even come close to understanding the detail of what they understand about science (and, trust me, I am not one of them). And yet, when you type into a Google search about the Coronavirus vaccine, you will find countless people who claim they know that the vaccine is ineffective or the vaccine will kill you or that the vaccine has a tracking microchip in it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a free country and you can make your own choices, but unless you happen to be one of Graham’s or McLellan’s colleagues, I’m not going to listen to a word you have to say. Do you know why? Because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not an expert. You’ve not spent years in a lab studying the science, so your opinion means nothing. But thanks to the internet, now, everybody is an expert in everything, which is why doctors have to fight with their patients over diagnoses because their patient has read an article on WebMD and believes they know more about what’s happening with them than the doctor does who has been studying medicine for decades.

This is not to say that doctors are always right. I’ve witnessed several situations where doctors have made bad calls. Indeed, I have known people who, like Solomon in our scripture reading, had an innate sense of wisdom about what was wrong in their body and kept advocating for themselves until the doctors finally figured out what was wrong. Doctors are humans just like everyone else and can make mistakes and, sometimes, we do know better.

That being said, what many people do not realize is that our educations allow us to interpret information in a way that someone without that education cannot. A good example of this is what we’re doing here in the church. I know most of you in here have grown up in the church. I also know that most of you have spent time over the decades reading the Bible and doing Bible studies. But what I think many people get confused about is that a Bible study is not the same as getting a degree in religion and religious history.

Judy and I have a very wide array of religious knowledge that the vast majority of the people in this congregation don’t have access to. When you and I read something from the Bible or we hear someone talk about religion, I can tell you we are hearing it in two very different ways because of my decades of background reading academic books and journals. This is not to say my opinion is always the right opinion, but when it comes to interpreting the Bible, I can tell you that 9 times out of 10, my interpretation will be more accurate than any article you read on the internet.

This is one of the problems with the internet, it’s given us easy access to information, but without the appropriate foundation, you may not be able to accurately interpret what it is you’re reading. And here we come to another element of how education informs your understanding of the world: education makes you realize how much you don’t know. As much as I know about religion, I am quick to admit there are whole areas I know nothing about and I look to the experts in those fields as my compass.

For instance, our Clerk of Session, Laura Carlson, has a PhD in constitutional law. Now I can get online and read the constitution. I can read articles about what it means and doesn’t mean, but unless I went to school like she did, I can tell you, I am like a preschooler compared to her. Some of you might be more well read and have an elementary, middle or high school knowledge of the constitution. If you’re a lawyer, you might have a college level knowledge. But when it comes to the constitution, there are only a handful of people like her in the country and when an issue about the constitution comes up, I would never tell her my opinion. I would say, “What do you think?” Because she’s an expert and I’m not.

And here we come to the crux of the issue: that term expert has lost its meaning in our current world because everyone believes they’re an expert. Just give me a Google search engine and I’ll put my expert hat on. And here’s our come to Jesus moment for the day: part of the reason our world is in so much turmoil is because we are not humble enough to recognize what we don’t know. Jesus says that if you want to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, you have to become humble like a child.

I think when people outside the faith read this text, they misinterpret it to mean that you should never question what you are told. But have you ever met a child before? They question everything. They will ask you “Why?” a million times because they want to learn. A child acknowledges that they don’t know everything and they are open to learning from adults who have more wisdom and life experience.

The problem with adults is that we often get to a point where we stop being open to new information because we have formed our perspective on the world and we fear that perspective might be undermined. I saw that when I first arrived here when I was 33 years old. As I started preaching and bringing new information to you in my sermons from my education, I could tell many people were struggling because I was shaking the foundations of your belief system. It takes a certain level of humility to allow a kid less than half your age to tear up what you’ve known your entire life. Some refused to listen, but those of you did became humble like children.

We need to take that same attitude and apply it to other areas of our lives. We need to admit that our knowledge is limited. We need defer to actual experts who have spent years invested in studying topics about which we only have a superficial knowledge. And in a world where education seems to be under attack more than ever, we need to value experts, like Barney Graham and Jason McLellan, whose dedication to their field has literally changed our world and saved our lives.

I want to end my sermon by telling you about the day that Graham received the news about the Pfizer vaccine trials. You might remember how they had been doing clinical trials for most of 2020 and they didn’t know if the vaccine was going to work. The president of Pfizer called Graham told him it was breathtakingly effective—far better than could have been hoped for.

Graham walked into the kitchen and told his wife. He could barely get the words out that it worked. All the stress that had been building up over the last ten months just came out. He was so relieved that he sat at his desk in his study and wept. His family gathered around him. He hadn’t cried that hard since his father died. On top of that, he signed his rights to the patent over to the federal government. He had spent all this time doing all this research not to get rich. He did it for the benefit of society. He did all of this for you and for me and, for that, we should all be eternally grateful. Amen