Hilton Head Island, SC – January 21, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 24:1-10; 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 sermon you are about to hear I first preached over thirty-one years ago. I have updated bits of it, but I left most of its statistics as they were in 1992. You will know when I use current statistics. Further, by way of introduction, I am preaching this sermon now, which is similar to one I preached two months ago that was entitled Is Climate Change a HOAX? However, this one is not primarily about climate change. And I wanted to preach it now because of a book I recently listened to on CDs called The Story of Stuff, which alarmed me even more than I was already alarmed before I listened to it. It was written by Annie Leonard, who is an extraordinarily dedicated and highly informed ecologist. You can get a short animated version of her book by Googling The Story of Stuff. In a sentence, Ms. Leonard believes we consume way too much stuff. In a four-word sentence in response, I agree with her. And now to my sermon of thirty-one years ago.
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Although the human race had a very spotty record as creation custodians up until this 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, by means of excessive consumption and overpopulation, we do. We have acquired this odious ability only in the last fifty years or so. No generation has had the awesome burden on their shoulders which our generation has.
There have been human beings of our species on the earth for about 200,000 years. Biologists called us Homo sapiens, “people of wisdom.” As you shall hear, that may have been an exercise in dubious self-congratulation. From the first moment the earliest hominids emerged from the lowest rung of the primate ladder 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 two or three more generations.
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, it is incumbent upon us to realize that a worldwide policy which prevents abortion is virtually a guaranteed recipe for the elimination of a viable earthly environment for any life at all, human or otherwise. To be pro-life now must equate to favoring the viability of all forms of life, not just individual human lives. Sadly that means helping to control human population growth by what clearly is the least acceptable means, namely, abortion.
A careful consideration of the numbers forces us to that sober conclusion. Every day there are 100 million acts of human sexual union throughout the world, according to the World Health Organization. (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, they say, 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, on some other day there occur 150,000 terminating abortions, meaning that, as I calculate it, every day there are 305,000 unplanned fetuses potentially to make it to full term. Of course that won't happen, due to natural miscarriages and the natural or unnatural deaths of a small percentage of those potential mothers, some of those deaths or miscarriages resulting from starvation.
Fortunately, according to the W.H.O., the world birth rate is dropping dramatically. That is a very good thing, and it is due to various methods of contraception being utilized by increasing numbers of people everywhere. Nevertheless, even the most conservative estimates say that by the mid-21st century, we will have ten to twelve billion people living on a planet which cannot possibly support that many in an acceptable fashion.
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 put in charge of the earth, Homo sapiens, the supposed wise ones who 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 and the burning of the rain forests and the pollution of the air and the yearly destruction of thousands of species are symptoms of the problem, but WE are the main 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 the earth.
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). Even when there were only perhaps 50 to 100 million people in the world, people could still upset the balance of nature, and Isaiah knew it, and 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 21st century of the Common Era when he lived in the 8th century Before the Common Era?
Look further at the numbers, fellow creation custodians!
- The ozone shield is thinning twice as fast in far northern and southern latitudes 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 1990 than at any time since measurements began; six of the seven warmest years in measured history occurred since 1980. (As you know, 2023 was the hottest year ever up to the present, and nine out of the hottest ten years occurred in the last ten years.)
We alone have the capacity fully to understand how we fit into the created order. Only humans 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, and not for the worse..
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 alive 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, in northern Ontario, has looked like the face of the moon for decades, because the nickel smelter which belched forth its noxious smoke for so long has killed every green plant within miles. 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 thousands of tons of methane wafting into the upper atmosphere each year, causing incalculable stratospheric damage; the time may soon come 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 they have far more people than we do. 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. This always becomes evident at every worldwide environmental conference in which the U.S. participates.
If God intended for us to be in charge of the earthly creation, which He did, then it is imperative that we begin immediately to redress some of our ecological excesses. That means 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 or maybe even internal-combustion cars of any sort. I mean big homes, power boats, electric air conditioning and heating. Bicycles will become not just a form of recreation but a serious means of transportation, and public transportation will replace much or most private transportation. Right now we need much more compact communities than we planned. In the future, places like Hilton Head Island will not be developed unless public transportation is a priority.
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 to decline, 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 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. Bringing more electric power quickly onto the grid by wind and solar means must be a high priority.
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. However, we humans must affirm that we alone have a will, and that in the short run, nature has no control over nature. Only humans can assist nature to do its best, as we also should always try to do our best. The trouble is that humanity in general is not very good at trying to help nature. Aboriginal peoples - native Americans, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen and the like - have had remarkable concern for the natural order, but the farther away from nature which technology has led industrialized peoples, the less care we have tended to exercise care for the created order.
I read a book which I think is simply wonderful, but which many and perhaps most would consider as dull as dishwater. It is called PrairyErth, and it was written by William Least Heat-Moon, the author of the best-selling Blue Highways. PrairyErth is a social and natural history of Chase County, Kansas, which is located not far from the center of the Sunflower State. Having lived for three years in Kansas as a child, it reminded me of many fascinating things I had long since forgotten about the southern Great Plains. In it the writer, who is part-Indian, tells about the Kaw tribe who populated Chase County before and for a brief time after the "Wasichus," the Caucasians, came. Black Elk, a Kaw chief at the beginning of the 20th century, observed how the customs of the native Americans were passing into oblivion, and he said, "Only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all. I looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own" (p. 543).
There is the heart of the environmental problem. Westernized, industrialized people perceive the earth and its natural resources to be individually owned or utilized, but biblically, theologically, everything ought to belong to everybody, at least in some measure. 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,” as it says in Psalm 24, and God wants the whole creative shooting match to be used to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of the most species possible.
After a sermon like this, people will ask me, "That was all well and good, but what can we do?" Here is a small list of personal ecological activities in which all of us can effectively engage.
1) Recycle everything that is recyclable, everything.
2) Set your thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter.
3) 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 redundant, which is to say the wrong, stuff. Wear the clothes you have until you would be too ashamed to give them to a thrift shop. Americans consume more stuff and produce more trash than anyone else in the world. Also, buy only used clothes in the thrift store. It will help restore the environment.
4) Whatever size car you now own, make your next car one which either is smaller or gets better gas mileage, or both. If you can afford to buy an electric car, buy it.
5) Buy a smaller home. We can't re-write the past or present, but we can inscribe the future.
6) Purchase only stuff you need, and nothing you merely want.
6) Finally, and most importantly, remember that sacrifice is the 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 that doesn't happen, our problems will only get exponentially worse. Less is more; it really is.
As long as God has placed human beings as the de facto sole caretakers of the earth, we alone can save the planet. God will not do that; it is up to us. However, and this is the best news, if we save the planet, we will also save ourselves. Ecology pays, but it also costs. First it must cost in order to pay. So let's start paying.