Hilton Head Island, SC - March 5, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 1:26-31; Isaiah 24:3-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. - Isaiah 24:5 (RSV)
The first two chapters of the book of Genesis are a brief but very powerful expression of the intentions of God regarding the created order. From the smallest atoms of every animate or inanimate object to the largest of the stars, from the delicate equilibrium of the earthly ecosystem to the most distant limits of space (if space has limits, which we are told it doesn't), everything that God created, which is everything, He created to be good, to have goodness as its existential essence. And, according to Genesis 2, as the capstone of creation, the piece de resistance of His creative purposes, God created humanity at the peak of the created pyramid. That is a debatable notion that increasingly is highly debated, but we’re not going to debate it here. And, according to Genesis, God made it clear that we are to be the primary custodians and stewards of creation, at least of the earth and that small sector of space which is in our immediate ethereal neighborhood.
Although the human race had a spotty record as creation-custodians up until the past century, there really were not enough of us around completely to botch our responsibility, nor did we have the technological or demographic capability of destroying the planet. Now we do. And we have acquired this odious ability only within the last century. No generation has had the awesome burden on their shoulders which our generation has unintentionally placed upon itself.
There have been human beings of the Homo sapiens variety on the earth for about 200,000 years. From the first moment the maternal progenitor whom paleontologists have named Lucy emerged from the top rung of the primate ladder into the verdant recesses of the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, up until World War II, it took 10,000 human generations before the world's human population reached two billion people. At the current rate of population growth, we will reach ten billion people in three more generations. Every decade the planet has a billion or more new people. We cannot sustain that increase. Too many of us will obliterate too many of us.
For anyone who has a serious concern for the future of creation, a conscientious pro-life position can never be synonymous with the ideology of the current "pro-life" advocates. If we are honest with ourselves and we exhibit an informed concern for coming generations, we will grudgingly come to realize that a worldwide policy which prevents abortion is a guaranteed recipe for the elimination of a viable earthly environment for any life at all, human or otherwise. To be pro-life must equate to favoring the viability of all living life, not just individual lives or unborn fetuses. A valid “pro-life” policy means controlling population growth by what clearly is the least acceptable means, abortion. However, universal serious birth control education is by far the best way to control population growth. That means supporting organizations like Planned Parenthood, and not defunding them, as many benighted American state governors and legislatures are doing. Almost no other government officials anywhere on earth follow that ill-considered policy.
The World Health Organization of the UN reported some amazing statistics. Every day, they say, there are 100 million acts of human sexual union throughout the world. (If you wonder how they came up with that number, you're not alone, but then, skepticism and statistics sometimes go hand-in-hand.) From that daily creative concupiscence there are 910,000 conceptions, half of which, says the World Health Organization, are unplanned. How do they know? I don't know; but they said it.
Of the presumably 455,000 unplanned pregnancies which occur each day, afterward, says the W.H.O., there occur 150,000 terminating abortions. That leaves, as I calculate it, 305,000 unplanned fetuses potentially to make it to full term, though of course that won't happen, due to natural miscarriages and the natural or unnatural deaths of a very small percentage of those potential mothers. Some of those deaths or miscarriages result from starvation.
Fortunately, according to the W.H.O., the world birth rate is dropping dramatically. In the past 20 years in developing nations it has fallen from 6+ children per woman to 3 ½ or so, which is an excellent trend. Furthermore, contraception is being practiced far more widely than ever before. From 1965 to 1970, contraception was used by only 9% of the people in third-world countries. From 1985 to the present, it rose to nearly 60%. Good education succeeds; badly formulated ideology almost always fails.
And why do I begin this sermon on ecology with a discussion of human population? It is because all the species on earth are most threatened by the very species whom God presumably put in charge of the earth, Homo sapiens. The supposed “wise ones” seem not to be exercising too much wisdom these days. It is as though the zookeepers of creation are intent on killing everything in the zoo, including themselves. The warming of the atmosphere, the cutting and burning of the rain forests, the pollution of the air, and the yearly destruction of thousands of species are symptoms of the problem, but WE are the cause of the problem, we whom God created at the pinnacle of the created order. There are increasingly too many of us, we are using far too many of the earth's irreplaceable resources, and we are using far too little of our God-given intelligence on behalf of a wise stewardship of the earth.
Now, because of climate change, often when there are floods or droughts, they are far worse than they were up to two or three decades ago. Two weeks ago we had hundreds of record highs and lows on the same days in the USA. It is the glaring result of climate change. A fascinating article in the Audubon Society magazine said that roseate spoonbills are moving north from the Everglades, because they have become too hot for them. Now these unique birds are in Virginia. That kind of environmental abandonment is happening with millions of species.
Twenty-seven centuries ago, a prophet from Judah painted a dark verbal picture of what happens when humans abdicate their responsibilities as the keepers of creation. "The earth dries up and withers," he said, "the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.... Therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled, and few people are left" (Isaiah 24:4-6). Was Isaiah an ecologist 27 centuries before the word was coined? Even when there were only perhaps 50 to 100 million people in the world, people could still upset the balance of nature. Isaiah knew it, and he warned Israel about it.
What an absolutely astonishing portion of scripture is Isaiah 24! And how utterly discouraging -- and positively challenging -- it is to read words which Isaiah wrote so long ago! How could he so clearly understand the twentieth-first century of the Common Era when he lived in the eighth century Before the Common Era?
Look further at the numbers, fellow creation custodians! Average temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are rising twice as fast as was conjectured only a few years ago. At least 140 plant and animal species become extinct every day. Forests are vanishing at the rate of more than 40 million acres per year, an area half the size of Finland. The earth's surface was warmer in 2010 than at any time since measurements began. Six of the seven warmest years in measured history have occurred since 2010.
In an article entitled Ecocrisis and Theology's Quest, Larry Rasmussen, a professor of social ethics at Union Seminary in New York, wrote, "True dignity, intrinsic worth, existence valued for its own sake, and moral limits on use were restricted to that one species among millions created in the image of God. Imago dei [the image of God] set us apart from the rest of nature as free agents who act upon nature in responsibility before God.” We alone have the capacity fully to understand how we fit into the created order, and only human beings have the ability to determine whether or not the earth shall survive. Neither orangutans nor butterflies nor sea slugs nor amoeba nor bonsai trees nor algae can deliberately affect the future, but we can. And if we can, we must - - - but only for the better. Long ago God entered into a covenant with us to do so, and for the sake of the earth as well as our own sakes, we must not fail.
The wall paintings in the tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, are being destroyed by the carbon dioxide and the humidity brought in by the thousands of tourists who pass through the tombs each day. The marble monuments of Rome are literally being eaten away by the fumes of the multitude of cars in a city of five million which can easily support only one or two million. The area around Sudbury, Ontario has looked like the face of the moon for decades, because the nickel smelter which belched forth its noxious smoke for so long killed every green plant within miles. Now it is closed down, but the damage has been done. The industries of Kansas City and St. Louis and Memphis have killed the trees on the western slopes of Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina. The fatuous flatulence of millions of cattle world-wide is sending millions of tons of methane wafting into the upper atmosphere each year, causing incalculable stratospheric damage. The time may come, but not soon enough, when international law will make vegetarians of us all.
The growing ecological crisis has been hastened far more by relatively small industrialized populations than by the rest of the underdeveloped world, even though the latter nations have far more people than we have. But we also have the technological ability more effectively to reverse the trends. However, to succeed we are going to have to do it in cooperation with everyone else. Our nation, the greatest contributor to the world's ecological problems, so far has shown itself to be among the least cooperative of the world's nations aggressively to address the issues. (China has now become the world’s Number One Polluter, taking that dubious distinction from us; but then, they have four times more people than we have.)
If God intended for us to be in charge of the earthly creation, which I believe He did, then it is imperative that we begin immediately to redress some of our ecological excesses. That means, among other things, that we are going to have to go without certain kinds of luxuries which have become almost necessities to us, and to which we believe we have a natural if not a divine right. I mean things like big cars and probably internal-combustion cars of any sort. I mean big houses and power boats. Bicycles must become not just a form of recreation but a serious means of transportation, and public transportation must replace much if not most of private transportation. Already we are seeing people on Hilton Head Island going to work on rechargeable electric bikes. Legs also must become more widely employed for getting to work, probably even on Hilton Head. We must construct much more compact communities. Municipalities like Hilton Head Island will not be developed without first making public transportation an absolute priority in the planning stages.
Without doubt some environmentalists have given the environment total precedence over the people and planet the environment is meant by God to benefit. Humans are to be interdependent with creation for their survival, but God did not intend for us to be utterly subservient to creation. Thus as long as we have as large a world population as we have, and until it begins slowly to decline (which eventually it will), we are going to have to place increasing temporary reliance on nuclear electric power, for example, even though inevitably there shall be more Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands. But the real hope for energy production is solar and wind power. Nevertheless, it is both impossible and ludicrous to imagine that we can just shut down our power production facilities or eliminate overnight the systemic polluters of the environment. We can never achieve a perfect balance between humanity and nature, but we certainly can strive for a better equilibrium.
It is impossible to negate our past, but we can more wisely prepare for our future. We need to become far more responsible than we have been for the sake of people yet unborn as well as for those who currently inhabit the earth. We need continually to ask ourselves, Was the world created for humanity, or was humanity created for the world? The answer, of course, is that each was created for the other, but we humans must realize that we alone have a will, and that nature has no control over nature. Although nature does exist for itself, it also exists for humanity. The trouble is that humanity in general is not very good at taking care of nature. Aboriginal peoples - native Americans, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen and the like - have always had remarkable concern for the natural order, but the farther away from nature which technology has led industrialized peoples, the less care they have tended to exercise for the created order.
Individuals and corporations can do a great deal to mitigate the human factors which have led to ecological disasters. Nonetheless --- and here is both the great hope and the biggest obstacle --- governments and government regulations are the main means we have for saving our planet from human beings, who are the primary despoilers of the planet. The trouble is that too many people are too ideologically opposed to governments and their regulations. They trust themselves, but they don’t trust government. However, dear hearts, neither individuals nor governments have done nearly enough to reverse the damage that industrialization has wreaked upon the earth. We cannot depend solely on individuals; national and international governmental agencies MUST take the lead. That will mean they must make choices which inevitably will be politically unpopular with the masses in their nations. We need politicians with courage much more than we need politicians who reflect the will of the democratic or the autocratically-led masses.
There is the heart of the environmental problem. Westernized, industrialized people perceive the earth and its natural resources to be individually owned or utilized. However, biblically, theologically, everything ought to belong to everybody, at least in some limited and also dimly understood way. I am not talking about socialism as compared to capitalism; I am talking about US compared to ME. Unless all of us are relatively well off, none of us can be absolutely well off. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof, and God wants the whole of creation to be used to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of the most species possible.
An observation: For the good of everyone and the whole world, climate-change-deniers should stay out of this discussion altogether. They have nothing constructive to add to it, and they only impede what must be done.
After a sermon like this, people will ask, "That was all well and good, but what can we do?" Here is a small list of personal ecological activities in which any of us can effectively engage. ONE) Recycle everything that is recyclable. TWO) Set your thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter. THREE) Buy only things you need; we are already being suffocated in stuff, so may the stuff you purchase be the right stuff rather than the unnecessary, which is to say the wrong, stuff. FOUR) Whatever size car you now own, make your next car an electric model. If you can’t afford a new car, keep your old car going as long as you can, and use it less than you used it up to now. FIVE) If you live in a big, free-standing house, sell it and buy a smaller free-standing house, or better, sell you house of whatever size and move into a dwelling in a multiple-unit building of some sort. Why? One quick illustration: we pay one-tenth the electric bill we paid when we lived in a free-standing house twice the size of our present dwelling. SIX) Finally, and most importantly, remember that sacrifice is the best key to a better environment. We cannot continue to live in the future as we have in the past. We are going to have to give up some things, and to pay much more for certain other things we cannot give up. Our standard of living shall certainly change, and it probably will have to decline. If all these things don't happen, our problems will only get exponentially worse. In today’s world, less is more; it really is.
Because God made human beings the de facto sole caretakers of the earth, we alone can save the planet. Not even God can do that; it is up to us. Ecology pays, but it also costs. First it must cost in order to pay. So let's start paying the necessary costs.