Creekside Church Sermon of August 15, 2004 "All the Little Live Things" Romans 8:19-24	Rev. David Bibbee
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Koko recently had a tooth pulled. She told the people who worked with her that she was having pain in her mouth. She cannot speak, so a pain chart was made-the kind you see in the hospital with "one" being no pain whatsoever, and "ten" being excruciating pain. Koko consistently pointed to nine and ten.

Her tooth had to be extracted, and more than a local anesthetic was necessary. She had not seen a dentist before, so it was decided to put her under a general anesthetic. At thirty-three years old and weighing over three hundred pounds, the dentist didn't want Koko the gorilla to become agitated.

Koko is a celebrity because she has learned more than 1,000 gestures using the American Sign Language system. Twelve specialists were brought in to see her-a cardiologist, anesthesiologists, dentists, veterinarians, a gastroentrerolotist, and a gynecologist. Her language teacher was at her side as the anesthesiologist prepared to put her under when Koko asked to meet the people who would be working on her. All twelve gathered around her, and Koko asked one of the doctors to come closer. The woman handed the gorilla her business card. Koko looked at it, then ate it.

In the film, Dr. Doolittle, Rex Harrison sang a song called, "If We Could Talk to the Animals." It went:

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss.
If we could talk to the animals, walk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk like the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.

Well, the animals ARE talking to us. Koko isn't the only one pointing to nine and ten on the pain scale. This week I read that in the Congo, over a fourteen-month period, poachers killed almost twenty white rhinos. There are now only twenty left in the wild. Many species of animals, birds, and plants have become extinct in our lifetime, or are at the brink of extinction because of human activity-deforestation, pollution, development, and changing weather patterns caused by fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. God's creatures that inhabit the earth and sea and sky have something to say---"YOU'RE KILLING US!"

Since we are worshiping in nature's amphitheatre, surrounded by the glory of the flora and fauna, I want us to consider why we should be so concerned about the plight of our planet and its inhabitants. We should care for obvious reasons. Prolonged damage of the environment will have an impact on our health and well being. Unless concrete actions aren't taken, the earth we leave to our children and grandchildren will be a dreary one where the only wildlife to be seen are in zoos, and wilderness they will see will be in an encyclopedia.

We can't base our concern isn't upon nature romanticism. I have yet to feel romance or even goodwill toward poison ivy, mosquitoes, and ticks. It's not about extinction rates, or alarmists warning about the growing hole in the earth's ozone layer and the dramatic increase of skin cancer, or upon the pronouncements of people Tony Campolo calls, "the granola-types who hang out at natural food stores."

We should be concerned because our faith compels us to be concerned. Care for the environment is a theological and spiritual issue. Genesis tells us we were latecomers to creation. God worked hard creating fruit trees and crabgrass, skies thick with birds, waters teaming with fish, whales spouting, cockroaches creeping, snakes crawling, and cows chewing their cuds. Only after the world was chock-full of life did Adam and Eve appear. To put it into historical perspective, if the time from the creation of earth to the present was compressed into twenty-four hours, humans didn't appear until two seconds before midnight.

Why were people last to show up? I think its because we are God's crowning achievement. Every person who has ever or will ever live, in a way we can't explain, is created in God's image. Why? Because God wanted everything just right for us. God wanted us surrounded by beauty. After God pronounced his handiwork good, he breathed life into man and woman and said, "Well, what do you think? How do you like it?"

We were placed on this precious planet, as far as we know, the only like it that exists in the cosmos, and God wants to fill us with wonder and awe, and feed us with the abundance and beauty of his creation. As the chorus of the hymn goes: "All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all."

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," the psalmist said. It doesn't belong to us, but God made it for us! We're here to enjoy it. We survive only because of fellow creatures further down the food chain. Someone said, "The fish and the crabs owe it to us, just as the pears and apples do. And what do we owe them? Tender husbandry, plenty of good will, and feelings of pleasure when we eat them."

But God didn't put us here just to be sonsumers. God appointed us caretakers as well. The world isn't ours to do with as we please. The Landlord has entrusted it to us, not to feed our insatiable materialism and trash it, but care for it, and lots of care will be necessary to repair it.

When we talk about sin, it is almost always in connection with the damage it does to our relationships with each other and God. But we also sin against creation.

My cousin married a very intelligent guy. He loves her very much, but humility isn't one of his strengths. He is a retired engineer who helped design the enormous shovels and draglines used for stip mining. During my feisty college years I said to him, "Stan, I just drove through West Virginia and southern Ohio and want to compliment your company on the fine job you've done stripping the landscape and leaching toxins into the rivers." I then god a speech on the fabulous reclamation work they do. I still hear him saying---"I'll have you know we lave the land in better shape than it was before we mined it!" Like I said, humility wasn't one of his strengths.

The damage left in the wake of our sin and rebellion against God's order is everywhere. Atonement for sin restores broken relationships and that includes making things right in our relationship with the world. Jesus came to make new creations, and not just us, but creation itself, including Koko and all the earth's inhabitants. Listen to this text from Romans 8: 14-24:

For the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons and daughters of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan with ourselves, waiting for adoption and the redemption of our bodies.

My wife is into "clean." In her work, lots of precautions are taken to make sure the operating room and instruments are sterile. In her home she wants things meticulous. Every surface must be cleaned. Every thing must be in its place. I'm learning that her mood and the condition of the house is tightly linked. If things are clean and orderly and smelling of Pine-Sol and air fresheners, Twig is happy. If not, she's not.

Likewise, it's easier to worship and feel connected to God in beautiful surroundings. It takes far more effort to be in touch with God's presence if you are surrounded by blight.

Sometime I am going to commission Rosanna to turn a Henry David Thoreau quote into calligraphy. He said, "Men spend the years of their lives fishing and one day realize that it is not fish they are after." A true fisherman understands that the enjoyment of fishing is in being connected to something greater than himself. You realize that you are subject to the forces that determine what you can and can't do, as the inhabitants of Florida can attest.

There is something in a passage from Luke 3 that I had not noticed before. It says:

In the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor Of Judea, when Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip Prince of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanian Prince of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.

Walter Bruggemann says that in this one sentence, Luke lays two very different worlds side by side. One is a domesticated, ordered, and controlled world. The other is wild. One is about power and the powerful, kings and priests and government. The other is about the wilderness and a wild man who lived in it named John the Baptist. Where does the text say the Word of God is found… the ultimate word that can't be controlled or domesticated but seeks to control us? Not in banks. Not on Wall Street. Not in Indianapolis or Washington D.C. Bruggemann says, "The Gospel is about how the managers conspired to eliminate the Word in the wilderness."

Today, the powerful want profits and control of the oil fields, but at what price? A minister stood on the edge of the Senegal River in West Africa talking with a tribal chief who led a nation of nomads. Their population was dying off because of the lack of water. They depended on goats for their livelihood, but their goats were dying. The young men left the tribe and moved to the cities. The chief said, "This is not a drought we must endure. It's far more serious. My people know how to survive during droughts. We have survived droughts for a thousand years. This is no drought. When he was asked what he thought was happening, he said, "The world is changing."

The world IS changing. Paul said, "The whole creation groans together in travail… the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God… the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the liberty of the children of God."

So what should we do? We're just a little group in a vast world. You can't save a rainforest, but you can cut your consumption, and simplify, and extend goodwill to the little Eden in your backyard.

You can become informed about the environment and how to influence the political process. The Clean Air and Water Act adopted in the 1970's is being scaled back because it's a burden on industry. Whether voting for a congressman or President, don't vote on what they say, but on their actions. Find out whether or not George Bush is an "Environmental President."

Back in college, we read a novel called, "All the Little Live Things," by Wallace Stegner. He was a distinguished writer who wrote stories about the American West that included environmental themes. Before he died he wrote these words: "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and cigarette cartons; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams…."

It's your responsibility and mine to prevent this from happening. It's not something to do apart from our life of discipleship. We can make it the seventh mark of Christian discipleship.

God is a saver, not a waster. We have been saved by Jesus to make a mark in the world. We've been saved to spread the story of Jesus and his love. We've been saved to leave the earth and all its little live things in better shape than when we entered it. We've been saved to join with God and his will to make ALL things new.

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