"Even the Wind and the Sea Obey Him?"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on June 21, 2009

Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.”  36 And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.  37 A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.  38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  39 He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.  40 He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”  41 And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Genesis 1:26-28

Then God said, “Let us make humankind † in our image, according to 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 wild animals of the earth, † and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

 27       So God created humankind † in his image,

in the image of God he created them; †

male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Jesus orders the wind to stop and it stops.  Really? Is God outside of nature?  Can God suspend the laws of physics and make a storm, or an injury, or a disease just go away? Fortunately, there’s always the symbolic interpretation: He’s talking about the storms of life. Jesus puts to rest the disciples’ inner fears and torments.

But what about a storm as a weather event? Does Jesus, or does God, change nature, or interrupt nature? Of course, storms and diseases and injuries do go away on their own, or by means of nature. But that’s different from the wind obeying Jesus’ voice.

This notion that nature is not God, and that nature obeys God, is actually woven deep into the fabric of the Bible, the Jewish faith and the Christian faith. According to this view, God is above nature. God created nature. God controls nature. The God of Israel is not found in trees, wind, sun, and crops.

The God of the Bible is in heaven and works through special people (especially Jesus) to change nature.  That’s what miracles are.

Creation itself, the story of the flood, the parting of the read sea, the manna from heaven, the stopping of the Jordan River, and the calming of the storm are all examples.  In one story, God even makes the sun stop moving across the sky. In all these stories, God is above nature.

This isn’t a view we are obliged to accept, but it’s there in the Bible.

In our Old Testament lesson, God made human beings and said, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish, birds, and so on. Here God tells us we’re above nature too. We’re made in God’s image.

Keep these ideas in the back of your mind while we take a look at a couple of graphs in your bulletin — one on each side of the page.

The first graph shows human population for the past 5 million years.

“Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.”  For a long time human population was quite stable.  It increased very slowly as humans found better ways to hunt. Then they migrated to a wider area, then figured out how to raise animals, and plant crops, and specialize, make ships, travel, trade, and support more and more complex social systems and greater population density.

There’s one visible drop in population that corresponds to the worst outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14^th century. About a third of the people in Europe died.  By the way, that disaster itself severely undermined faith in this Biblical God. That’s an interesting story in itself, because it helped set up the modern age that soon followed.

But notice that in the last few hundred years, human population has shot right up in a very steep spike. Talk about being fruitful and multiplying!  What happened to cause that spike?

Beginning in the 16^th century, there was modern science, and that brought an explosion of technology and industry.  Science is figuring out how the natural world works, and it led to better tools, farming methods, transportation, ships, navigation, and world travel. 

But what really drove this population boom was fossil fuel: coal and oil. These fuels made it possible to have such a steep rise in food production and economic expansion. Cheap, abundant energy is the reason we have 6.5 billion people living on earth today.

So in terms of the command fill the earth and subdue it, the human species has been amazingly successful and we have reason to feel like we’re above nature. But where will the population graph go from here? Will it keep going straight up?  Will it level off?  Will it go down as steeply as it went up?

If it’s true that cheap energy fueled this population explosion, then it makes sense to look at oil supply, since oil is the backbone of the food economy, the manufacturing economy, the transportation economy, the plastics economy — the whole economy.

The graph on the other side of the page that shows the amount of oil pumped out of the ground over the past 90 years in parts of the world where oil production has peaked, which is almost everywhere. The year printed next to each region’s name is the year that oil production peaked in that region. As you can see, the amount of oil coming out of the United States peaked in the early 70s. 

Virtually everyone agrees that the amount of oil we have to use is already going down or it will soon go down. Right now, demand is also down due to the recession, but as the recession ends, demand will rise again but the available supply can’t keep going up to meet that demand. So where will our energy come from in the future?

It will come from coal. (There’s still a lot of coal in the ground, but the carbon emissions per unit of heat that we get from coal is high, so coal is a problem in  terms of global warming.)  It will come from uranium, but there’s a limited amount of uranium, and there are a lot of other environmental, security, siting, and financial challenges associated with nuclear energy. We still have natural gas, but that is limited in supply.  And we have renewable sources like the sun and wind.

I’m not an economist.  I’m not a physicist.  But economists and physicists have done the math on the potential of all those sources, and what most of them say is that there is no way that any of them, in the foreseeable future, or all of them together, will make up for the decline in oil supplies. If that’s true, then we should pay attention, because it’s going to change all of human life on the planet.

This is very serious. There will be less total energy available in the future than there is now. Imagine gasoline costing $20 a gallon. Imagine meat costing $50 a pound. Those prices aren’t so far-fetched, given our energy situation. How will people live? And what will happen to human population?

Many population experts predict that human population will have to go down, and even crash steeply by birth control, infant mortality, disease, death by starvation, because oil is what grows our food. Oil runs the machinery, irrigates the fields, fertilizes the field, packages the food, transports the food, and refrigerates the food for 6.5 billion people, which is 5.5 billion more than the world supported before oil.

No one really knows what will happen to human population. But whatever happens, it is hard to avoid the mathematical reality that whoever is living on earth is going to live with less energy.

So back to our original question:  Is God above nature? Are we above nature? How we think about God affects how we think about ourselves.  And the powers we ascribe to God are powers that we imagine helping us and saving us — God’s special creatures.

These Biblical miracle stories are useful because they remind us that we don’t understand nature, or why things happen. And sometimes things happen that we think are impossible. We call them miracles. That’s the good news.

The downside is that we humans can think we’re too special.  There’s also some danger in believing that Jesus told the storm to stop and it stopped because God wanted it to stop, for the sake of human beings? 

What thoughts and feelings does all of this stir up in you? This is where we need to start, and this is where the Christian faith can be most helpful.

We talk about “problems in the environment.”  But the problem is not in the environment.  The problem is in the human mind and human soul. The earth will be fine without us.  

The problems in the world begin in the human mind. They used to call it “sin.”  Today, we call it “over-reaching” or “the way we are” or “human nature.”