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Church of the Crossroads
First Sunday in Lent
February 13, 2005
Neal MacPherson, Pastor

PUSHING THE LIMITS

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

The Sovereign God took the man and put him
in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
- Genesis 2;15

Touch the earth lightly, use the earth gently,
nourish the life of the world in our care:
gift of great wonder, ours to surrender,
trust for the children tomorrow will bear.

For, my friends, the earth is changing, and not for the better. Global warming is beginning to take its toll. As we learned the other night when we viewed the remarkable documentary, "Oil on Ice," we now know that the arctic perma-frost line that once began at a depth of six inches now begins at a depth of four feet.

The consequences of global warming have been brilliantly portrayed in Margaret Atwood's futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake. The setting of the novel is the end-time, after the waters of the earth have risen, after the failure of a "progress" based on biotechnology. The only human being left on the face of the earth is a character by the name of Snowman. The novel begins with these words:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep.

On the eastern horizon there's a grayish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon. The shrieks of the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic.

Out of habit he looks at his watch - stainless-steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

We know what time it is, and yet in the name of progress we still move on, purchasing more and more SUV's, consuming at a rate far exceeding any time in the past, using up the earth's resources at an alarming rate while billions are starving or nearly starving. We are living now at the expense of the children tomorrow will bear.

Clearly, we are overreaching the limitations that were placed upon us in creation. Ever since the Garden of Eden, human beings have been overreaching the boundaries of their creature-hood. In the creation story, Adam and Eve push the limits by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Of course, the story was created to explain the origin of human sinfulness. In their original innocence, Adam and Eve have no need to know the difference between good and evil. That knowledge needed only to remain with God. But Adam and Eve, spurred by their desire to be as God, knowing all that God knows, eat of the fruit.

Jesus in the wilderness clearly reverses the act of Adam and Eve. In the wilderness, Jesus refuses to be more than human. He will not turn stones into bread, an impossible act for human beings. He will not jump from the parapet of the temple, only to be caught up in the air by angels. Human beings are not caught up in the air by angels. Nor will he be tempted by the lure of power. Human beings ought not to have power over the nations of the earth. Jesus refuses to be anything but human. In the wilderness, he will not exchange his reliance on all that comes from the mouth of God. Nor will he worship anyone but God. He will not exchange his humanity for any kind of glory, any kind of desire to obtain equality with God. He will not push the limits. His messiah-ship will be rooted in his humanity and in his readiness to accept the limitations of his creature-hood, even if it will mean for him a cross.

He is truly the One whom we should follow, the One who reminds us of our own humanity, and our vocation to exercise a faithful stewardship in the earth, accepting the limitations, the boundaries of our creature-hood, shunning all aspirations for more power than we ought to have as human beings, and setting aside all notions of progress that involve excess and recklessness.

We simply need to be vigilant. John Ralston Saul says that we need to put on our ethics each and every morning in the same way we put on our clothes. In other words, our ethics need to become a daily habit. In our personal decisions we need to exercise care that we do not live excessively or recklessly. In our corporate lives, we need to bear in mind the common good of all, and the common good of the earth itself.

I commend to you a little book, called A Short History of Progress, by the anthropologist-historian Ronald Wright. Ronald Wright was the featured speaker at this year's Massy Lectures sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the book contains his lectures.

Ronald Wright, in his lectures, reviews a number of past civilizations and their notions of progress. He suggests convincingly that the downfall of each civilization in the past was directly related to its pursuit of progress. Each civilization, not content to abide by the limitations placed upon it, especially the limitations placed upon it by the earth itself, instead pursued a course of action that led to its downfall. An example is the civilization that existed on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, as we know the place. Pollen studies of Rapa Nui's crater lakes have shown that it was once well watered and green, with rich volcanic soil supporting thick woods of the Chilean wine palm, a fine timber that can grow as big as an oak. No natural disaster had changed that: no eruption, drought, or disease. The catastrophe on Rapa Nui was man.

The 10,000 inhabitants of the island, who had more than they needed to sustain their lives, got this notion that what they needed to do was to erect the hundreds of the impressive stone images that are familiar to us. Massive amounts of timber were needed so that the statues could be transported from the place they were constructed to the ahu, or altars. Soon there was not enough timber available for canoes and houses. Each generation of images grew bigger than the last, demanding more timber, rope, and manpower. Trees were cut faster than they could grow, a problem that was worsened by the settlers' rats, who ate the seeds and saplings. By 1400 C.E., the woods had been utterly destroyed by both the rat and man, the smallest and largest mammal on the island. The Rapa Nui settlers, convinced that the stone statues were needed, pushed the limits, and their civilization came to an end.

My friends, we are headed in the same direction, unless we can once again live within the boundaries of our creature-hood, exercising our stewardship of the earth faithfully, paying attention always to the needs of the earth itself, following Jesus the Christ who chose to be human rather than seek to be anything more.

Ronald Wright ends his lectures with both a warning and a word of hope.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right.

May God help us so to do.

Amen.

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