WHEN IS ENOUGH ALREADY?TITLE
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

October 4, 2009

Genesis 1: 23-31

There have been a few times in my life when I have made good but hard decisions that have resulted in someone that I love and care about deeply, my decision has left them in tears.  In most all of our lives there are times when roads diverge and we must choose, often times between two very excellent directions.  Choosing between positives are amongst the most challenging times.

When I was a recent high school graduate from the Rossville Consolidated School District I had a most significant decision to make.  One was to stay as part of that rural farm community of Old German Baptist Brethren and close by to the other 52 of us who had been in the same class together for eighteen years.  It was a well identified path with many many positives. 

Behind Curtain Number Two was for us farm boys and girls less known path into higher education and a formal entrance into the wider world.  When I went to tell my Grandmother Skiles that I was leaving to go to college, she wept.  She cried because she was sure she was losing me to the world.

When she died two years later, I managed to end up as a keepsake her Bible.  She received this Bible as a wedding present when she was sixteen years old.  She was an avid reader of it and as a minister's wife and mother she took it and her children to church twice a Sunday for her entire life of nearly eighty years.  It is worn to say the least.

It is a fairly common stock King James Version, not valuable except for whose it was and for me in addition for what it has in the family genealogy section.  She has listed her family of origin's birth and death record from the 1870s to just after the turn of the 20th century.  She was one of twelve to Henry and Leona Cripe.  Every two years or less there was an addition to the family and of course, not all of them lived very long.  Her mother, my great-grandmother spent at least the better parts of 24 plus years either being with child or with very small children.

Expanding our view this morning, most of us are aware of the sensationalism surrounding the Oct-o-Mom who in the last year gave birth as single mother to eight children in one pregnancy.  Others of us are aware of the Dugger family who announced to their 18 children last May on Mother's Day that mom was now pregnant with what will be #19.  The oldest child just turned 20 and is married and will be providing Mother Duggar with her first grandchild just before giving birth to her 19th child.  The Duggars on their web site state, their "desire is to make Christ known and for others to see that the Bible is the owner's manual for life."

They quote Psalm 127 which states that children are the Lord's heritage in our lives.  (I'm not sure what that means.)  The Duggars do believe that children are a gift from God and that it would be a sin not to have the children that naturally appear when conceived within the covenant of marriage.

Harry Hollis is one of our members here at First United and is a tireless advocate of environmental concerns.  Harry can be read monthly in the Bloomington daily paper the HT.  Population control is one of Harry's most mentioned topics.  If living a long time makes one an expert on anything, Harry at age 95, has been watching the population of humans on our planet grow tremendously in his lifetime, as have all of us, even if we have not been paying attention.

From the generalized estimate of the first appearance of our human species on this planet some one or 2 million years ago, it took until the year 1750 of the current era for the world's population to reach 1 billion.  It took from then until 1930 for the human population to double to 2 billion.  Now we are well into Harry's lifecycle and many others here.  It only took from 1930 until 1970 for us to add the 3rd billion.  A vast number of us are part of that number.  From 1970 to today, a lot of you here are part of the latest human growth spurt which makes the Duggar Family look like small bit players.   Not only has our population doubled to 6 billion in a mere 40 years, we are fast dancing ahead to where we are now already approaching 7 billion people on this planet that we share.

My interest this morning is not to get bogged down in the daunting maze of realities that surround the issues and problems caused by the needs and wants and wastes of nearly 7 billion human beings.  My eyes go blurry and I have watched people's minds go blank when once again forced to wade through apocalyptic scenarios that will accompany human population overload.  I laugh when I read how impassioned we can become in Bloomington with the growth of the white tailed deer population who are eating our flowers and herbs, but we can't raise more than a casual yawn when it comes to the crushing realities of human population concerns.

What is the Word from God on what many of us would deem to be the largest, most pressing health care concern, human population growth?  The Duggar family and most of Jewish, Muslim and Christian history have found the Word from God on this issue in the Book of Genesis 1:28, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it."   Haven't we done really well at that command?  Isn't it about time we gave it a rest?  We have done and are doing fruitful multiplication exceptionally well.  Let's give ourselves an A+ and rest. 

Before I go crashing on, let me add this caveat:  Reproducing is a fine thing to participate in.  I have long bought into the formula that a one for one exchange ratio will do just fine.  In our culture with excellent health care it is more than reasonable to have our two children, one for each parent, to easily survive and thrive in our world.  The more troublesome issues that will arise are those surrounding how many resources each of us in our culture gets to use as compared to most of the world's children.  We are selfish in our current arrangements and the last I checked with God, unrestrained selfishness is a significant sin.

What is the word from God in regard to our population issue?  What we must seriously be in dialogue concerning is that for the better part of human existence since the writing of the first creation story in  Genesis,  our ancestors have joined us in saying that God's  words are:  Be fruitful and multiply and subdue if not dominate the earth and all the creatures therein and on.  Genesis 1:28 has served as the mythic premise from which we have marched forward.

The people that you and I interact with want to know what the Good News is that we who claim to know God, who listen to God, who sometimes even try to speak for God; they want to know, what is the Good News in the face of tsunamis, Teutonic plate movements, over-population and climate change and the rash that keeps appearing between my toes?  Does God have a good word for today or are we still operating on some of those old ones?

Let's do a serious look at one of those ancient texts that still gets quoted within Judaism, Islam and Christianity as if God spoke it earlier this morning,  "And God said, go forth and be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth."

Most of you know that there are in the first two chapters of Genesis two, two, not one, but two creation stories and while they are similar, they are not the same.  Quite possibly they have centuries standing between them.  Most of us are guilty as charged in referring back to the creation story as if they were one and the same and we have not often demanded of ourselves to know the wider context or matrix that gave rise to them.

The first story of creation in the Book Genesis is not the oldest one.  The first Creation story in the Book of Genesis that includes God's command that we should go out and be fruitful and multiply was not written until the Jews were in exile in Babylonia in 586 BCE.  Neither Genesis Chapter I nor Chapter II reflects anything more than poetic imagination as the early Jewish communities sought to give verbal and finally written form to the stories that identified them as a people.

And the world situation in regard to population has changed dramatically since 586 BCE and now, 2009 CE.  When the Jewish writers penned Genesis Chapter 1 as the Jews were languishing in captivity, they remembered what helped them escape the captivity in Egypt centuries before.  The Jewish exiles in Egypt grew numerous and the Pharaoh grew fearful of their numerical strength.  Babylonia was Jews in exile, chapter 2.  It made sense that God would say, "Go ahead, be fruitful, multiply and subdue, seek to take dominion over your situation."

In an evolutionary sense, the need to be fruitful and multiply for the first, Oh, two million years of human existence made all the sense in the world.  Disease, disaster, war and poverty often took huge numbers of very vulnerable human populations and decimated them.  There have been true needs felt for thousands of years for our human ancestors to be fruitful and multiply.  It is not easy to put the breaks on anything as simple and fun and hardwired as human reproduction. 

If it was the Word of God for the people of God, Genesis 1:28, dare we say that it no longer is.  That which has worked so well, is now on the verge of killing us all off, as the very earth groans from the burdens we have placed upon it and in it. 

So frustrating is our current situation that last week even a noted naturalist called for the world to stop trying to save the Panda Bears and just let them fade into extinction, he argued that the money spent  trying to save a doomed species could better be spent trying to save the human race from extinction. 

A vast majority of Christianity is not very earth centered.  The focus for nearly two thousand years of Christian thought has revolved around saving the soul that will escape these Earth bound bodies and we will live in the house of the Lord forever and ever.  Amen.  And the house of the Lord is always off the planet. 

Jesus said, the Kingdom of God, the Reality of God, the Reign of God is here, NOW!  Traditional Judaism had long taught that God was away somewhere, resting after six hard days and nights of work and that when God was rested and ready, God would come back with a mighty Messiah and force righteousness on the land, like a mighty mountain stream coursing down toward the ocean below.  Most of Christianity is waiting for the apocalyptic return of the Messiah Jesus who has been watching from far distant heaven who will defeat all that is evil and the new Jerusalem, God's holy world will descend down upon the earth and peace will be here forever and ever, Amen.

The bad news is that God is not going to magically save us from environmental calamity.  The Good News is that God is seeking to intimately partner with us, religiously, spiritually, scientifically, intellectually and pragmatically to help us save ourselves.

God is speaking as clearly as God has ever spoken and the sensitive souls and minds in this sanctuary know that it is true. 

The tough news perhaps to hear is that salvation is not a quick dunk in a tank of water where our sins are washed whiter than snow.  The Good news is that what God wants is for us to stop wallowing like a pig in muck and for us to begin with God to wash, to clean, to make right the multitude of sins that have dirtied our lives and our skies.  Washing means bringing justice to the poor, the hungry, the displaced, the damaged ---- whether human, animal or the very earth itself.  Washing means being the ones who champion the causes of righteousness for those most in need, for being agents of creative positive change for energy sources that no longer poison the air we breath and the water we that drink or the soil that grows our foods. 

Even though the Church that has long claimed to follow the ways of Jesus has lagged far behind, those of us in this church know that God is still speaking a new word that has concern for the whole planet, all the peoples no matter the shade of our skin or the chemical make up that brings forth a plethora of human expressions.  God's word for our new day is not dependent on what men have said before.  God's word for a new day is the voice of women of all colors; all shapes and sizes, women who have watched their babies die from lack of medical care, clean water and nourishment.  God's word for a new day comes from the voices of women past who have died because birth control options were never available and because men trapped them in societal religious prisons of bondage.

God's word for a new day that we are living comes from the voices and concerns of all the creatures of the earth that mankind has for long sought to dominate, subdue and use rather than partner in bringing a wholesome fairness and justice for all.

God's word for a new day is a song whose melody line comes from the very winds swirling from all directions on this planet, whose choruses are sung by the birds, the animals and the humans and whose bass drums are the mountains and whose timpani are the branches of every green plant and tree, whose varied instruments are the voices of every creature at one with God and singing the song, that indeed we are finally free at last, free last, Good God almighty we are free because we are one and living God's word today in a new way; that it is time to share and repair our planet; to conserve and preserve, to innovate and create energy sources that resemble the loving power of God, ongoing, inventive, novel and pure, w ith minimal waste and pollution.

God has always been speaking and has been often times misquoted.  Our task is to be a humbly strong people serving the just and righteous needs of all the earth, all her creatures and to be the ones from whose lives people see, hear and witness the presence of God, yes, even the voice of God because of the works that we do, the lives that we lead and the hope that we inspire.

Might it be so with God as our partner.

Amen.