Hilton Head Island, SC – November 20, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 1:27-31; Isaiah 24:1-6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. – Isaiah 24:5 (RSV)
The first chapter of the first book in the Bible, as nearly everyone knows, is an account of the creation of the universe and the planet earth. Since this colossal topic is addressed in only one chapter which has 31 verses, it obviously cannot be a very thorough presentation of the grand design of creation. Nor was it intended to be. What it did intend to declare is that it was God who created everything that exists, including the planet that we call Earth.
But why did God create the world? That is a very important question. For at least three thousand years most people who believed the Bible is generally the word of God said that Gen. 1:26 through 1:29 answered that question. Speaking to the first two humans to be created, it says, “So God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the face of the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit.’” Then God told us that He also gave us the animals to benefit us and to provide food for us. And that was why God created the world: for us, for Homo sapiens, for people. And that notion was almost universally adopted by all Jews and Christians up until the middle of the 20th century or so, when its thesis began to be questioned.
Let us use a fancy word to describe what the creation story in Genesis is. It is highly anthropocentric. That means it is very human-centered. God created the entire universe and everything in it, including Planet Earth, and He did it, says Genesis, on behalf of human beings. Until the last century, most people accepted and affirmed that idea.
But then some folks started to question that notion. It is too anthropocentric, they said; it puts human beings too much at the focal point of creation. It came to be claimed that everything in creation has its own place in the created order, quite apart from humanity. And that includes great and majestic things, like elephants and whales and giant sequoia trees, but also small and seemingly insignificant things like field mice and moles and voles and ants and even mosquitoes and leeches and bacteria. Plants and animals don’t exist solely for the sake of the human race; they exist for their own sake, the new thinking decreed.
Whether you believe the Genesis explanation for why God created the universe and our planet in particular or you believe that every species of every animal or plant in the world is important in and of itself, we are all brought back to one key phrase in Genesis 1:28: we humans are intended by God to have dominion over the earth. We are in charge! God put us in charge. No other species is capable of having dominion. We are God’s stewards on behalf of God’s Earth!
A steward is someone given responsibility to care for the possessions of someone else. Bankers are stewards of our money. Publicly-held corporations are stewards of the funds people invest in them. Government officials are stewards of the taxes people pay into the government. And, according to Genesis 1, we are the stewards of Planet Earth. God gave us that responsibility.
So how are we doing? Every year, 20,000 species of plants or animals become extinct: 20,000. Do we cause all of that to happen? No, but we are far more culpable than any other species for the species-demise that is growing at an increasing rate every year. Ecologists and environmentalists are gravely concerned about that, but most of us aren’t even aware it is happening. And that’s a problem. That’s a huge problem. Millions of the stewards of the Earth seem to be oblivious to the damage humans are inflicting on the Earth.
Some of those species would have become extinct apart from any human involvement in their collective demise. But most of them have died out because of human involvement and climate change. “Climate change” used to be called “global warming,” but that is a misnomer. While most parts of the Earth are becoming warmer, some are becoming cooler, so “climate change” has become the preferred designation by climatologists for what is happening.
As you are probably aware, there is a vocal but, we hope, slowly shrinking percentage of Americans who believe that the climate is not changing and the world in general is not warming. Nearly all scientists who are expert in climatology insist it is occurring and nearly all of them agree that humans are primarily responsible for the relatively rapid worldwide temperature increase over the past two or three centuries. If we believe that God did intentionally put human beings as caretakers of this planet, which I do believe and I hope you do as well, it appears that we are failing in one of the primary responsibilities of our species.
I won’t take time to try to explain the hypotheses which have been put forward for why the Earth’s climate is reaching dangerous levels. You know them as well as I do: too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, too many chemicals which have penetrated the atmosphere, too many planes, trains, and automobiles, etc., etc, etc. Climate change deniers charge that the very concept is a hoax. Nevertheless polls show that 80+% of Americans want Congress to pass legislation promoting alternative forms of renewable energy: solar, wind, water, and geothermal. Some measures have been taken, but not nearly enough, and not nearly fast enough. There is little doubt among those who devote their lives to the study of this matter that we are coming close to the place where, if we do not take many more steps to reverse the ill-effects of climate change, it will be too late, and our planet will die. We have now reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a level even the most pessimistic of climatologists said we would not reach for several decades.
Elon Musk is a relatively young man who is a billionaire businessman and visionary. He owns the corporation that makes Tesla cars, which are very expensive but also very energy-efficient automobiles. In addition he owns SpaceX, a company wanting to become a major player in space exploration. Mr. Musk is constructing rockets which he says will take people to Mars by 2024. He wants not only to put people on the Red Planet, but to establish colonies there which will have many thousands of permanent inhabitants. Seekers in space suits they will be.
Shakespeare wrote, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”
Psalm 8 exclaims to God, “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established, what is man that thou art mindful or him, or the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands” (8:3-6).
There is something very inspiring about attempting to start human colonies on Mars. What a magnificent idea! And yet there is something that is also very alarming and discouraging about it. What gives us the right to send some of our species to another planet when we may turn out to be the very ones who destroy this planet? And whose planet is Earth, anyway? Ours? Surely not! This is our Father’s world! It is not ours! We are but its stewards, its caretakers, the ones entrusted by God to maintain the natural order which sustains the Earth. There is an element of arrogance and irresponsibility to escape the world we may have doomed by our own excesses while we go to another world where we may do the same thing, only much, much faster.
There was little talk of climate change by either candidate in the presidential campaign. Apparently political operatives believe such a discussion is guaranteed to lose the votes of certain people, and it is further assumed it does not win enough votes to offset the political damage such talk may engender. So we keep on fiddling while our earthly home keeps on burning.
In a recent issue of The New Yorker (Oct. 24, 2016), there was a story about how astonishingly quickly the Greenland ice cap is melting. For most of the past eight thousand years, the Jakobshavn Glacier has completely filled a huge Greenland fjord with ice. By the mid-nineteenth century, with all the carbon dioxide the Industrial Revolution had poured into the atmosphere, the glacier retreated ten miles from where it had been for thousands of years. In the next 150 years, it retreated another twelve miles. From 2001 to 2006, the Jakobshavn lost nine more miles of ice that was hundreds of feet thick.
Just by itself, Greenland is likely to turn Hilton Head Island into a modern-day Atlantis, with no assistance from any other high-latitude ice fields. By the end of this century, it is conceivable that this will no longer be one island but two or three much smaller and uninhabited islands. Elon Musk may have a good idea, but a much better idea would be immediately to initiate every possible measure to prevent further major human-caused degradation of this planet.
In December of 2004 Harvard Medical School presented its Global Environment Citizen Award to journalist Bill Moyers. In his acceptance speech the Rev. Dr. Moyers said, “As difficult as it is …for journalists to fashion a readable narrative without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge – to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe….For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington….When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.”
Bill Moyers gave that speech twelve years ago. In the meantime, conservative politics and conservative theology continue to join forces at every turn to stymie efforts to slow climate change. When January 20 comes, we may find ourselves back in 2004.
We are killing the Earth, you and I. Our carbon footprints are far too large, and our use of energy is far too profligate. On average, every person on the planet contributes enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause 600 square feet of ice to melt in the Arctic. Furthermore, there are far too many of us causing all that melting. For the time being we can feed seven or eight billion people, but over the long haul, which may not be very long at all, the air we breathe will begin literally to choke to death thousands and then millions of us each year.
Our final hymn this morning is We plow the fields and scatter. The text was composed by an 18th century north German journalist and Commissioner of Agriculture for the Principality of Hesse-Darmstadt. His name was Mattias Claudius, and he was the son of a Lutheran pastor. He wrote a seventeen-stanza poem, each stanza of which was to be a solo, and then everyone would join in on the chorus. You will be relieved to know we shall sing only three stanzas. The tune, Wir Pflugen, was written by another German, Johann Schulz. It became a well-known children’s hymn, but the text has an adult understanding of God’s purpose in creation. Incidentally, it is one of the numbers in the Broadway musical Godspel, although there it was sung to a different tune. It proclaims in 18th century words what the earthly environment was meant to be, and therefore it has particular relevance for the 21st century and the issues we are facing.
In Chapter 24 of his prophecy, Isaiah’s theological musings turned very dark. “The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt. Therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left” (24:4-6).
When Isaiah said that, he was speaking poetically, not literally. Environmental and ecological disasters lay far ahead of his time. Nevertheless, what he wrote sounds like a description of Planet Earth in the Twenty-Teens of the 21st century. Those who refuse to recognize that the human race has unwittingly put their planet into a crisis mode prefer delusions to reality, false hopes to worrisome reality.
Nevile Shute’s classic novel On the Beach was fictionally placed sometime in the future. The reader, or the viewer of the movie created from the novel, was to understand that a nuclear war had destroyed most of the inhabitants of the Earth. The last place where there were still a fair number of survivors was Australia, but they also knew their days were numbered.
In the movie, Gregory Peck was the captain of an American submarine. He and his men sailed out into the South Pacific, and then disappeared beneath the waves, hoping to escape death by radiation. On the shore there was a banner which had been draped between trees by the Salvation Army. It read, “There Is Still Time, Brother.” The banner fluttered in the breezes which swept over the land, but all the people were gone.
There is still time, brother. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.
Did Isaiah paint his dark picture because of what God had done, or because of what humanity had done? He doesn’t clearly tell us. We infer that bad times were coming because God was going to punish Judah for its sins.
God will never crush us because we failed to maintain proper dominion over the Earth. After all, it was He who gave us that awesome responsibility and stewardship in the first place. If the Earth fails, it will be because we allowed it to fail and in many ways we even hastened its failure. But God always yearns for the best in this world and in his billions and billions of other worlds. Wherever there are sentient beings, presumably they too have dominion in their worlds. Soon we will have a new President and a Congress controlled by a political party who have disavowed the very notion of climate change. Best of luck, Planet Earth.
And thus we ask: Do we, like God, also want the best for this world?