Hilton Head Island, SC – November 5, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 1:24-31; Issiah 24:4-8,17-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the face of the earth.” – Genesis 1:26 (RSV)
Climate change has become one of the major issues which further polarizes an already polarized nation. On one side it is correctly claimed by expert scientists that there have always been changes in climate all over the world through all the four and a half billion years of its existence. Geologists and climatologists have verified that through many studies in many locations.
On the other side are other expert scientists who say that the changes we are observing now have a different origin. It is not nature itself causing the shift, they say; it is humans who are largely responsible for what is happening around the world with respect to climate. Average temperatures have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they say. From the early twentieth century, this is due mainly to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is the result of the widespread use of fossil fuels for planes, trains, and internal combustion vehicles. Fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. The generation of electricity also creates millions of tons of carbon dioxide in the air worldwide every day. The heating and cooling of homes and commercial buildings adds to the rise in temperature. If current temperatures go to 2 degrees centigrade above normal for all previous centuries, life will become unsustainable, it is claimed.
In North America, tropical animals and birds are leaving the habitats where they have lived for generations because of increasing heat in the water or on the land. Several weeks ago, some flamingoes were photographed in Wisconsin on a beach in Lake Michigan. Flamingoes! In Wisconsin! The habitat for polar bears is shrinking in the Artic, because the extent of sea ice has drastically shrunken over the past few years. Ice is melting faster near the North and South Poles than in lower latitudes. Homes that stood for decades on frozen tundra in Alaska and northern Canada are sliding into the earth as the ground thaws beneath them. Nothing can be done to slow the process.
The number of natural disasters (hurricanes, tornados, floods, forest fires) has not risen, but the severity of these events has. Smoke from wildfires in northern Canada and the western and northeastern United States drifted to cities all across our country, as far south as Miami. Air quality was greatly impaired. Widespread flash flooding has occurred in many places, including New York City, of all places. The amount of rainfall in a few hours has been devastating in many areas around the world. The US has not had many hurricanes this year, but Idalia, the one which came ashore in the Big Bend area of Florida, quickly became a Category Four. Fortunately that part of Florida is sparsely populated. Furthermore, in just seventeen hours Hurricane Otis, which hit Acapulco, Mexico last week, went from a tropical storm to a Category Five, with winds of 165 miles an hour. Meteorologists are worried about how that will affect their forecasting of future hurricane strengths.
In the year 2022, there were major 22 storms in the USA, each of which did a billion dollars or more in damages. That was the highest number of such storms on record. By early September this year, there were already 23. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that from 1980 there have been 371 climate disasters, and the total damage was two trillion, six-hundred-fifteen billion dollars --- 2 trillion, 615 billion.
There have been a few years in the past decade when there was little or no ice across the Arctic Ocean from Greenland to the Bering Strait in September, the warmest month in the Arctic. It is predicted that sometime between 2040 and 2050 there will be no ice at all in the Arctic Ocean in the summer. Nine or ten days ago there were all-time record highs across much of the northern tier of American states. By Halloween there were all-time record lows throughout the Northeast. Climate change does not necessarily mean warmer temperatures. Colder temperatures in many other places are also being experienced. Last Tuesday was the last day of summer on Hilton Head Island. The first day of winter was Wednesday. It felt as though fall had fallen into oblivion in southern South Carolina, but now the weather is back to normal.
The problem of living at any time in human history is that you can’t know for sure everything that was going on in every other period of history. Is climate change a reality, or is it simply a conspiracy theory, a hoax perpetrated on people who are gullible enough to believe the doom-sayers? We know that there have been other climate anomalies at various points in meteorological time. Who can say for certain that what we are experiencing now is truly unique?
Only in the past century or so were daily weather records widely kept around the world. By various means scientists can learn much about what transpired long ago, but they can’t determine everything about everywhere for certain.
However, experts can predict with a high degree of accuracy what will happen if the speed of climate change is not slowed or reversed in the next few decades. Already many species of fish and birds have become extinct, and some places where crops grew only ten or twenty years ago are now arid wastelands. Desertification is gobbling up millions of acres every year. Lack of water has made some areas uninhabitable.
Climate change deniers have a rationale for their denial. They believe the very notion is bad for economic growth. The doom and gloom of climate-change believers drives down the income from certain kinds of investments and for certain kinds of workers, such as oil or coal producers. Bad news is bad for business, and pessimism makes venture capitalists nervous. This is all true.
But does that rationale render climate change false? If there is a wolf nearby, is crying “Wolf!” a mistake, or is it best for everyone to be kept in the dark? (If the truth is told, most wolves are a lot more afraid of people than people are afraid of wolves.)
The primary dispute between climate-change deniers and climate-change alarmists is whether or not human beings are the root cause of climate change, if it exists at all. Are we the culprits, or is Mother Nature?
There are two creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. In the second one, in Chapter 2, it tells about the Garden of Eden, but it doesn’t explain how it or anything else, including Adam and Eve, got there. It just says that Adam got there first, and then God decided Adam needed a mate, so He took a rib from Adam and created Eve from it. Only then did the animals and birds show up, but no explanation is given for their appearance, either.
In Chapter 1, God creates certain things on each of the six days of creation. Finally, at the beginning of the sixth day, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
There is an especially important theological word in that verse. It says that God wanted humanity to have dominion over all the earth. The word dominion connotes dominance; it suggests power and authority. Monarchs and other types of rulers have dominion. They govern; they lead; they rule.
You need to know that in the past fifty years or so, many theologians have taken vehement exception to the Chapter One Creation Story. They think that God never intended human beings to be the highpoint of creation. They say that through Darwinian evolution (which I think is an excellent theory), we just happened to end up as the apex of all living beings on Planet Earth. God gives Mother Nature free rein in the world, but somehow, backstage, God puts in His hand here and there to give nature little nudge, meaning that God can be, in Yiddish, a Nudzh. I believe that one of God’s biggest nudges was to put us on the top of the earthly heap. In retrospect, however, He may often have wondered whether that little push was such a good idea.
If climate change is a factor, and if it has been caused by human errors and misjudgments, then we have made a murky mess of our dominion. Our dominance has been faulty, and our power has been misused. We thought we knew what we were doing, as we went from one grand and glorious technological advancement to the next, but in the end, where did it get us? We are like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; what have we loosed on the world, if climate change is an irreversible reality?
Two cable news networks reported that since 2019, homeowners’ insurance rates in Florida have increased 200%. Some insurance companies have abandoned the Florida market altogether. In the same period for the nation as a whole, rates are up 21%. All of that can be ascribed to climate change.
If, on the other hand, climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientific spoilsports on gullible worriers, then things are not nearly as bad as we were led to believe, are they? Is this just one of many such blips on the ever-unfolding timeline of climate chronology?
Climate-change deniers, including expert scientists who deny climate change, may not have read enough of the most reliable studies, or they may know that climate change is happening, but they refuse to acknowledge it. They realize that would require costly steps to be taken to defeat it, and that would mean more taxes and a lower standard of living, and they don’t want that. To be sure, no one does.
Here are five M’s: Maui in flames; Lahaina incinerated. Montana, Minnesota, Maine: forest fires. Hurricane Matthew on Hilton Head: numerous homes damaged, a hundred thousand trees blown down.
Here’s a thought: Even if people over the past three centuries didn’t bring the dangers of climate change upon ourselves, and even if it might still be denied that climate change is a certainty, if it might be true, if there is even a faint possibility that the data assembled could be correct, wouldn’t it be better for us to do everything in our power, in our dominion, to slow it, and then stop it, and then reverse it? If climate change is real, whatever its cause, and we don’t do anything, or we don’t do enough, human stewardship of the world will have failed, and we will be held accountable by God for allowing the destruction of one of His innumerable planets, snuffing out the future existence of every species of animals and plants that God created on the earth. If climate change might be a growing threat, and we do too little to deter it, will we have failed as God’s primary stewards of God’s green Earth?
Rats or bats or cats are not capable of doing anything to alter climate change. Even the most intelligent of animals --- chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, elephants, whales or porpoises --- cannot do anything to save the Earth. Only human beings can do that, if it is to be done. And God will not save it.
The prophet Isaiah lived in a time when conditions were somewhat similar to what we are facing. His understanding of how it happened was different than ours, though. “Behold, the Lord will lay waste the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants….The earth shall be utterly laid waste and utterly despoiled….He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit; and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare. For the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble” (Isa. 24:1,3,18).
To some it may seem as though God’s judgment is the cause of climate change. That might be a possible conclusion. But the real origin of our woes is of our own making. We are the cause of this continuing disaster, and only we can prevent it from totally destroying us.
At least twice before I have preached about this distressing subject in your hearing. I become ever more alarmed by the signs of the times. There is very little that we individually can do to slow the grim menace. Collectively though, the world’s nations, and especially those of us in the most powerful and affluent of all the nations, who are among the most obvious perpetrators of the decline, must do all we can to act while there is still time to do so. To do otherwise is meekly to submit to the folly of human indifference.