Hilton Head Island, SC – June 7, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 104:24-31; Genesis 1:20-27,31; Psalm 24:1-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. – Psalm 24:1 (RSV)
Fiddling While The World Burns
Let me begin with a deliberately provocative statement. We shall destroy our planet. Allow me to repeat it: We SHALL destroy the earth. There is no question that it will happen; the only question is when. Will it be in fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, or maybe a thousand years? Surely it won’t occur after that. However, at this point no one can accurately predict when the last cockroaches or one-celled animals and the last inanimate lichens or mosses shall disappear into oblivion. It will be well after all humans have become extinct, and all the other “lower” animals, if indeed there are any animals lower than the species Homo sapiens (“wise humans”: what a joke!). We in our vaunted wisdom are the only species capable of destroying the world in which we find ourselves. Lions and tigers and bears won’t do it; Oh, no. But human beings will destroy the planet; of that there can be almost no doubt.
Does it sound like I am a little pessimistic? I am profoundly pessimistic, and becoming more so with each passing year. But it doesn’t matter at all what I feel or think or believe. What matters is what all of us think about this issue, what the entire human race feels and believes. And as a species we have not even come close seriously to addressing this issue.
“This issue,” in case you are wondering, is climate change. It is not global warming per se, as used to be commonly postulated, because not everywhere on the surface of our planet is warming. Some places are actually getting cooler. But most localities are getting warmer, and Planet Earth in general is definitely getting warmer. Nevertheless, it is climate change due largely to air pollution that is killing us. Carbon dioxide is the world’s worst problem.
Of course there are many people who deny this. They are perhaps a bigger part of the problem than the rest of us who are convinced that climate change is not only occurring, but is increasing its rate as the years go on. Still, all of us are contributing at varying degrees to the inevitable extinction of the planet God created, the only one we shall ever be capable of inhabiting. We simply don’t care enough individually to do what must be done. No doubt other sentient beings live on other planets, but Earth is the one and only home any of us shall ever have. If we can’t survive here, we won’t survive anywhere else. This is the sole environment in which our species shall live or die. And because of the flawed nature of our nature (we are sinners), we shall most certainly soon send our species into extinction. However, I shall wait until the last part of this dreadful and dread-filled sermon to explain why that is inevitable.
Remember the Roman Emperor Nero? He was the deranged chap who purportedly set Rome on fire, and then, as we say, proceeded in his imperial madness “to fiddle while Rome burned.” Well, fellow citizens of the world’s worst-polluting nation in the past century, all of us are fiddling while the world burns, every one of us. It isn’t just Americans who are doing that, however. Everyone else in every advanced country is also doing it, and even those in undeveloped nations are contributing to the insoluble problem, but only a little.
A few weeks ago President Obama gave the convocation address at the US Coast Guard Academy. In it he stated that climate change ranks alongside terrorism as an equal threat to our national security. He declared, “I know there are some folks back in Washington who refuse to admit that climate change is real. Denying it or refusing to deal with it endangers our national security. It undermines the readiness of our forces.” I would respectfully disagree. Climate change is the greatest threat to national or world security that the world has ever faced. Terrorism can kill only a limited percentage of any people, but climate change will eventually kill everyone.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported recently that for the first time that records have been kept, going back to the 1950s, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher than 400 parts per million. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the figure was 280 parts per million. Pieter Tans, the chief greenhouse gas scientist of the NOAA, said, “It’s both disturbing and daunting, daunting from the standpoint of how hard it is to slow this down.” Too much carbon dioxide is simply too noxious for almost all forms of life. Most climatologists insist we are reaching or may already have passed the tipping point.
All three of our scripture passages for today and all three of our hymns clearly declare that the earth is the Lord’s. This planet belongs to God, not to us. We are God’s only stewards for God’s world. A steward never owns anything; stewards always act on behalf of the owner to get the best return on the investment of the owner. The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof (Ps. 24:1.) O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! (Ps. 104:24). And God saw that it was good (Gen. 1:9,12,18,21,25,31). For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies. Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature. This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres. We are the only creatures capable of being God’s stewards, and how are we doing? Not well. Poorly. Disastrously, in fact.
There are too many of us. And for the sake of succeeding generations, we’re living too long. I was born in 1939. Then there were about 2,600,000 people in the world. Now there are seven billion, give or take a hundred million. For a while we can sustain that many, but not for long. And at the rate we’re going, there will be ten or twelve billion in a few decades - - - except that there won’t be, because climate change will guarantee the numbers shall start to fall rapidly. If we had a one-child policy per family, like China has had for a few decades, we might slow the inevitable planetary demise, but that won’t happen, for reasons I shall address later.
In earthly time, the earth being four and a half billion years old or so, in less than the blink of an eye California and other parts of the American West will become uninhabitable. It won’t be because of earthquakes, although they may shake things up a bit all by themselves. It will be because there won’t be enough water. The West, especially California, is running out of water. And the primary reason that is happening is because of climate change. There are too many people living in too small a space with too little water. The main reason is that climate change has caused a 16-year drought which has depleted much of the ground water and surface water in the Golden State. Most of California would be a barren desert were it not for irrigation and by moving water from the Colorado River and the High Sierras and from underground, but there simply is no longer enough water to go around. Blood may soon be shed over western water. Snowpack in the Sierra Mountains of Nevada was at 6% of its normal level this past winter; 6%! Gov. Brown of California has mandated statewide water rationing, except for agricultural purposes. That’s economically understandable, but good luck in making it happen, Jerry!
Climate change and ecology are inextricably interrelated. If we don’t do better at curtailing climate change, we can’t do better at improving our ecology. And if we don’t improve our ecology, we will inevitably raise the speed of climate change. Our planet is amazingly resilient, for which we should thank God every day, or otherwise our race would long since have vanished from the earth. Nonetheless, there are limits beyond which even the grace of God cannot overcome human perversity without suspending the laws of nature, and it is not in God’s nature ever to do that. We might hope so, but it won’t happen. Not only did God create His planet, which we, not He, call “Earth,” but He also placed it in a solar system and galaxy and universe which operates on laws governed by something we call Nature, which is related to but is different from that Ultimate Being we call God. Not only can we not fool Mother Nature, but we also can’t change or misappropriate her laws. It’s unnatural to try to out-nature Nature.
Now let us delve more deeply into the nature of Nature, and also into human nature. There are trillions of stars in every galaxy, and there are apparently billions of galaxies. That means there is a lot of rock and gas out there. Astronomers tell us that every day stars or planets (mainly stars, because they can see very few planets) supernova themselves into oblivion. If you don’t understand what I just said, don’t worry; I don’t understand it either. The point is, the universe is very orderly in its seeming disorder.
Planet Earth would eventually go dead sometime in the distant geologic future anyway, quite apart from anything the human race might do to hasten its demise. But we shall kill it in what the geologists are now referring to as the Anthropocene. Remember how, in Geology 1 or Geology 101, depending on where you took geology, you learned that there were various geological epochs, the Pliocene, the Pleistocene, the Jurassic, and so on? Well, they are calling the time we are in “the Anthropocene,” the epoch created not by geology but by anthropos, humanity. And they are saying essentially that it is only the past five or six thousand years which comprise the Anthropocene, and really just the past three hundred years or so, since the time of the Industrial Revolution, when human beings began seriously to foul up the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Vast stretches of time were needed to establish each of the “scenes” of the “Cenes,” but people have unintentionally conspired to create our own earth-destroying epoch in just a few thousand years, but especially in the past three or four centuries.
Scientists tell us that sixty million years ago a huge meteor fell to earth in the eastern Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the western edge of the Caribbean Sea. It wiped out all the dinosaurs. We, you and I, are wiping out every living thing, in merely a nanosecond of geologic time. And it doesn’t seem to bother us at all. It really doesn’t. We ignore it.
Why? There is no calamity facing us that is greater than climate change, but as a species we are doing far too little to stem its tide, but why? Here is where I shall try to explain my profound pessimism. It has to do with human nature, as compared to the nature of other animals. (I say “other animals,” because whatever else Home sapiens may be, we are also animals.) Other animals go about their business mainly on the basis of instincts, but I was told in both Sociology 1 and Psychology 1 (or 101) that humans have no instincts. What we have instead is learned behavior. And tragically we have not learned the wisdom of putting the good of all of us ahead of the good of each of us. In other words, we all are too self-centered and too little group- or species- or world-centered. And that will kill us.
Charles Darwin described this phenomenon but he didn’t really explain it. “Survival of the fittest” is as true for rocket scientists as it is for garden snails. Self-preservation is written into the DNA of every species that ever existed. But for human beings, for Homo sapiens, for us, it becomes a vastly more cosmic issue, because we have it in our power both to save and to destroy the planet as well as ourselves. Elephants or rhinoceroses or turtles can’t do that. All they can do is to keep their particular species going, if they can even manage that over time. But we can keep the planet going indefinitely (up to a point) or we can kill it, which, as I said, we shall do.
We are using far, far, far too much non-renewable energy, especially energy produced from fossil fuels. Coal is terrible for the ecosphere, oil is only slightly less terrible, and natural gas somewhat less than that. If all of us really believed we were killing the planet, we would tax ourselves ten or twenty dollars for a gallon of gas, and we would tax our electric bills by five to ten times what we currently are paying. Then we would see a huge reduction in the megatons of carbon dioxide which rise into the atmosphere every day. Hit us in the bank account and we will start conserving to a fine fare-thee-well. And then we would take all the extra revenue raised by those draconian taxes and we would put it into scientific research for how better to utilize renewable sources of energy: hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, etc..
But we won’t do that. And why? Because we are too self-centered. We are unwilling to pay the necessary price to forego our own creature comforts on behalf not only of the entire human race but the entire natural world. Besides, if I do it, can I count on everyone else doing it? Unless we take these draconian measures, you and I will go on destroying the earth. It may already be too late, but we aren’t going to save the earth anyway, because there are too many of us already, and we are not nearly politically organized enough to pull it off.
What we need is a very benevolent but also very authoritarian world dictator to force everyone to do what we don’t want to do. And that isn’t going to happen either. The world’s politicians have no courage at all. There might possibly have been a time when the United Nations could have accomplished it, but I doubt it, and in any case few if any nations want a truly United Nations organization to do anything. Nations are usually as self-centered as individual selves. If China ruled the whole world Xi Jinpeng might be politically strong enough to do it, but China had surpassed the USA as the world’s No. 1 Polluter, so that wouldn’t happen either.
Despite all my doom and gloom, each of us still can do a few small things to keep the world going a fraction of a second longer. Use as few lights as possible. Turn up the air conditioning in the summer and turn down the heat in the winter. Don’t drive anywhere unless absolutely necessary, and then do it in a car that gets at least 40 miles to the gallon. And recycle. Besides, even if there is no truth at all to the theory of climate change, we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels anyway, so let’s do it sooner rather than later. Or are we too foolish to do what’s right?
People who deny climate change are merely whistling in the dark. They are trying to be optimistic for cockamamie capitalistic or libertarian or individualistic reasons. But unless they change their attitude, and quickly, they shall only add to the imminent death of the planet.
So we’re stuck. We truly are. The world shall soon end, no matter how much or little any of us might do to prolong our agony. This is not God’s apocalypse; this is humanity’s self-annihilation. And it is so horribly sinful, because the earth is the Lord’s, and on our stewardship watch, yours and mine, we have despoiled it. At the end, when it all collapses and we all stand before the God who created the world and created it good, our nation shall be held accountable, our world shall be held accountable, and you and I shall be held accountable. And if we feel guilty, we should, because this is our problem, not someone else’s, and it is certainly not God’s, except that we have made it God’s problem, because it is His earth, and we failed it by our faulty stewardship. God help us; we seem incapable of helping ourselves.
Oh, and have a nice day.