Hilton Head Island, SC – October 4, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
(Psalm 8 – responsive reading); II Samuel 11:2-9,14-17; Romans 7:13-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – What is man that thou art mindful of him, and 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. – Psalm 8:4-5 (RSV)
Our species has been called, by our species, Homo sapiens. From the Latin it means “Man of Wisdom.” Let’s make it more inclusive and call ourselves “Wise People.” Whether we are truly wise or not will be indirectly addressed throughout this sermon.
There were several other species of what paleontologists call “hominids” before Homo sapiens made our evolutionary appearance on earth. Our species shared the world with Neanderthals for many thousands of years, and then they died out, although it is possible that we deliberately killed them off. No one will ever know for certain why the Neanderthal species disappeared.
Homo sapiens have been around for a hundred thousand years or more. For more than 90% of that time, we were what anthropologists call hunter-gatherers. That is, we caught animals in traps and ate them or speared them to death of shot arrows into them after we invented bows and arrows. We also ate fruit and nuts from trees and found berries on bushes and ate plants that we knew wouldn’t kill us. But we never planted any crops until maybe eight or ten thousand years ago. Then a few of us, but not many, became farmers, but most of us still hunted and gathered, until that seemed too primitive, and most of us, but not all of us, became farmers or herders.
All that time we were evolving as a species. As hunter-gatherers nobody wrote an epic poem like the Gilgamesh Epic or the Illiad or Odyssey or Beowulf, because no one had yet invented a written language. Nor did anybody sit down and compose anything like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem, but we were slowly getting there. Gilgamesh appeared in Mesopotamia about four thousand years ago, and somebody among the Hebrews or Jews took the basic idea and put a twist on it with a man named Noah who built an ark, into which he took a female and male of every animal, the story says.
Psalm 8, like almost half of the 150 Psalms included in the Bible, is attributed to David. Either he or someone after his time was astounded by how far he thought humanity had evolved after the creation narrative in the first three chapters of Genesis. Speaking to God in his Psalm, he was moved to say, “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast created, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.”
The planet we call Earth has existed for about four and a half billion years. Only in the last three million of those years were there hominids, creatures like Homo sapiens but not Homo sapiens. Only in the last hundred thousand years were there actual Wise People such as ourselves. Evolution takes a long, long, long time.
In his book Origins Reconsidered, Richard Leakey, the paleoanthropologist, updated his book Origins, which he had written a dozen years earlier. Between the books, he and many other scientists had made important discoveries about ancient humans, and he wanted to share that information. One of the reasons humans turned out as we did is that we have really big brains compared to almost all other animals. Whales and elephants have bigger brains, but then, they’re much bigger than we are. Gorillas also have big brains, but not as big as our brains, and in many but not all respects we seem to be smarter than they are. Leakey says, “The brain is an expensive item to maintain. It constitutes only 2 percent of the body bulk, yet consumes almost 20 percent of total energy” (p. 165). That’s amazing. In the “Devolution” part of the sermon, we might begin to question whether we’re smarter than whales, elephants, or gorillas, but we’re not there yet.
When you hear Renata Tebaldi or Maria Callas sing Un bel di vedremo from Madame Butterfly; or you see Meryl Streep in any movie, especially Sophie’s Choice or Doubt; or you read Marilynne Robinson, from Gilead through the three other novels in her quartet, Jack having been released only last week; or you again see the film clip of Neil Armstrong hopping off the last step of the ladder and saying, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind;” or you drive on an Interstate highway or punch keys on your laptop that miraculously connect to the Internet or you eat a strawberry that is as big as big as a lemon, you might conclude, along with Shakespeare, “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!”
Hammurabi, Homer, Socrates; Sarah, Ruth, Mary; Moses, Jesus, Muhammad; Cleopatra, Marcus Aurelius, Abraham Lincoln; William Shakespeare, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Dostoevsky; Leonardo, Newton, Edison; Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk.
In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks quoted James Davison Hunter who wrote another book called The Death of Character. Both authors focused on the development, or we might say, the evolution of human character. Hunter wrote that character “does require a conviction of a truth made sacred, abiding as an authoritative presence within a moral community. Character, therefore, resists expedience; it defies hasty acquisition.” As a species and as individuals, we cannot quickly get to where we should be. It takes time, and lots of it, spread out over many years, for admirable character to evolve in us.
Forty or fifty years ago or so a young man on Hilton Head Island wrote an essay called Where We Live. In it he said, “We are to refresh ourselves in the vistas and shadows. We are to enjoy the stillness that only great trees and the tallest pines can offer….We are not here to strip out rectangles and to build pastel houses nor to decorate the dark roads in the forest with glowing paints and glittering reflectors.” When Charles Fraser wrote those words, he had evolved into one of the most influential land planners in America, and his ideas for Sea Pines have been copied in countless communities here and abroad ever since then. Many thousands of people in scores of places are blessed by the thoughts of Charles Fraser. He was a great visionary, but not a great businessman, and besides having character he was a character, most decidedly.
Tommy Douglas was a six-year old Scottish boy whose knee was badly broken when he was playing with some friends. The injury left Tommy with continuous pain and a limp. The Douglases moved to Canada, where, when he was a teenager, a surgeon in Winnipeg performed experimental surgery on the boy, and he could walk normally with no limp and no more pain. Tommy was very grateful for his unexpected good fortune, but he wondered why everyone shouldn’t have the same kind of medical treatment he had received without charge. He became an ordained minister, and in time he became the premier of Saskatchewan. In that capacity he instituted a province-wide medical program for everyone. He gave it the name of Medicare. In 1961 the Canadian Parliament adopted that plan for the whole nation.
In 2004 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation took a national poll to determine who was “the greatest Canadian of all time.” Hands down, beating out such men as Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and Wayne Gretsky, whom many consider the greatest hockey player ever, was Tommy Douglas, the man who inspired the Canadian national health system. “Character resists expedience; it defies hasty acquisition.” Tommy Douglas evolved oodles of character during his long and eventful lifetime. What a piece of work is man.
But there’s more to the story than merely those upbeat stories. Sadly, there is much more to the story than just that.
In the sixteenth century the Spanish came to the Western Hemisphere. With them they brought their diseases and their guns. In a couple of generations they obliterated flourishing Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations in Central and South America. In the late Nineteen-Teens the Turks tried to exterminate all of the Armenians, and came close to achieving their genocidal objective. In the early Nineteen-Forties Nazis killed half the world’s Jews. For every Hammurabi there has been a Hitler, for every Socrates a Stalin, for every Moses a Mao.
Every day in every way it seemed as though human beings were getting better and better. That appearance continued for hundreds of millennia. We evolved into agriculture, and then into cities, and then into nation-states and then into space. Multitudes of individual human beings left permanent positive historical marks. Magnificent empires arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in Japan and China and India and Persia, in Portugal and France and Britain.
We would like to believe there has been a steady march forward throughout Homo sapiens history, but evolution can quickly deteriorate into devolution. One of the dictionary definitions of devolution is that it is “retrograde evolution or degradation.” As individuals or as peoples we can continue in what looks to us like endless progression, but we also can quickly stumble into disastrous regression.
David has always been reckoned the greatest of all the kings of Israel. Nonetheless the Book of Second Samuel describes in detail some of the egregious sins David committed. His virtual rape of Bathsheba is one of his most heinous of his sins. One day he looked down from his palace balcony and saw her bathing. His allowed his lust to overwhelm him, and he had his regal way with her. She became pregnant. Then, to hide his sin, he ordered her soldier-husband to come home to sleep with her. However, Uriah thought it was unfair for him to have that benefit while his fellow soldiers were still out fighting the king’s enemies. Therefore he slept outside his door, being what he considered honorable. David then ordered his general to put Uriah into the most lethal sector of a battle, where he soon was slain in combat. David then hastily married Bathsheba, and claimed her baby as his own. Evolution and devolution: David was a master of both.
The apostle Paul well understood that pattern. In his letter to the Romans, Paul explained that within himself there was a constant battle between moving forward in his earthly existence and also moving backward. “We know that the law [God’s law] is spiritual,” Paul said, “but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
Human behavior is at once noble and ignoble, splendid and sordid, great and ghastly. We are marvelously made by God, but we do some of the most incomprehensible, reprehensible deeds! There is too much of David and Paul in all of us, and too little of Jesus.
How could the Ottoman Turks, who produced Suleiman the Magnificent and the exquisite city of Istanbul, have tried to annihilate the Armenians? How could the Germans, from whom sprang Bach and Beethoven and Goethe, allow an insane genius deliberately to extinguish the lives of twelve million innocent people, half of them Jews, and among the other half pastors, priests, Roma (Gypsies), communists, and the disabled?
In the October issue of National Geographic there is an article about the modern barbarity and tragedy of the international human trafficking of young girls who are sold as 21st century sex slaves. An international organization conducted a study which declared that in the year 2016 over a million children became enslaved victims of sexual exploitation. Another study suggests that over 50,000 girls from Bangladesh are kidnapped and sent to India every year. Moral devolution constantly occurs at the same time that moral evolution takes place.
Political campaigns are seldom paragons of inspiration. This year politics seems to have plummeted into unparalleled new lows to give added weight to that sad observation. The pandemic has made it worse, because too many of us have too much time on our hands, and we watch too many attack ads. The 2020 campaign is the epitome of retrograde evolution. With the dejected psalmist we cry out, “How long, O Lord, how long?” This year feels like four years.
In our creation, God etched endless potentials into our DNA. Human beings have risen to great heights in every worthwhile endeavor that has ever existed. God was there in everyone who contributed to the human march into the future. God does not force us to do anything, but He moves within us to accomplish the most we can for the benefit of the entire earth.
The evolution of the human race is an amazing saga. However, the dour English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that the life of the natural man is nasty, brutish, and short. There are innumerable illustrations which combine to refute that claim. Nonetheless, both as a race and as individual people we have taken detours which led us astray and have done things which raised questions about how far we have actually come. Are we better than we often appear? If we are little less than God, sometimes it seems like we keep it a well-disguised secret.
On the bulletin cover are two quotes. The first is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth century American Transcendentalist and Unitarian minister. He said, “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.” The second is from Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth century American evangelical Congregationalist Calvinist minister. He said the human being is “a little, wretched, despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing; a vile insect that has risen up in contempt against the majesty of Heaven and earth.”
So which is it? Are we Emersonians or Edwardsians? And who are we: the evolved beings God wants us to be, or the devolved beings we might choose to become instead? Within each of us and within all of us the answer is to be found. Are we there yet?