ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND
The Power of One
January 4, 2009
Clay Nelson
Christmas 2 Jeremiah 31:7-15 Matthew 2:13-23
As part of my summer reading I thought I’d escape theology for a bit and treat myself to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. But there is no escape. I’ve just read about the discovery of dinosaurs. What is fascinating is that scientists in earlier chapters of his book have figured out such things as how much the earth weighs and how far we are from the sun. The theory of gravity has been sorted and the laws of thermodynamics have been sussed. But 18th and 19th century scientists are still stymied by how old the earth is. Sure in 1650 Archbishop James Ussher studied the Old Testament and other historical sources and proclaimed famously that God created the earth at midday on October 23, 4004 BC, but even his contemporaries found his conclusion amusing. Most scientists at the time agreed that the earth was ancient, but they were clueless as to how old or even how to figure it out.
As late as 1862, Lord Kelvin, one of the brightest of his generation could only put it somewhere between 20 and 400 million years old. Darwin offered a more exact number of 306,662,400 years. But it was so controversial he left the figure out of the third edition of his Origin of the Species. It was dinosaurs that would lead to the answer. But first they had to figure out what they were. An American discovered the first dinosaur fossil in 1787, but had no clue as to what he’d found. It wouldn’t be until 1841 that dinosaurs would be accepted as species that no longer existed on earth. The problem for these scientists was Scripture and theology. To accept the idea of dinosaurs required accepting the idea of extinction. Accepting that from time to time the earth experienced global catastrophes in which entire groups of creatures were wiped out seemed impossible from their Scriptural worldview.
For religious people the idea of extinction raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on the part of God. Why would God create species only to wipe them out later? The notion was contrary to the belief that the world was carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had and always would. Wasn’t that in part the point of having Noah save a mating pair of every living creature when God did bring catastrophe?
Even the enlightened Thomas Jefferson, not much of a believer himself, could abide the idea that a whole species might be permitted to vanish (or evolve for that matter). Part of his rationale for sending Lewis and Clark to explore his Louisiana Purchase was out of the hope they would find herds of healthy mastodons at home where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play.
But as more and more fossils were discovered in more and older geological strata it became clear that there had been many, many extinctions of countless species. With this knowledge the prevailing view of divine providence had to evolve.
A mere 150 years later we read the story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and the holy family’s flight to Egypt with a whole new perspective than all those who read it prior to the discovery of dinosaurs.
For Matthew’s first readers it was a story that connected Jesus to their very roots. Hearing about Mary’s husband having prophetic dreams would remind them of another Joseph who ended up exiled from his family in Egypt, who later saved his family during a time of famine. Hearing of baby boys slaughtered by the empire would remind Matthew’s readers of the way Moses narrowly escaped that fate as well. And any Jew hearing this story in 1st century Palestine would remember the more recent terrors under Antiochus, when any mother caught circumcising her son would be rewarded with a dead baby hung around her neck.
There is another memory Matthew wishes to stir up when he quotes Jeremiah 31:15, which called to mind the matriarch Rachel as the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and marched families off into exile. Rachel’s weeping occupies a key turning point in Jeremiah, when the prophet shifts from declaring God’s judgment to promises of hope. "Keep your voice from weeping . . . there is hope for your future . . . your children shall come back."
It is at this point we run into trouble with the story, now that we know about dinosaurs.
Like all those who heard the story for the first 1,850 years we know that the world can be a harsh and dangerous place. It is no less true today than it was when Jesus was born. Not too far from Bethlehem, this past week innocent women and children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Across the Red Sea children are dying of famine in Darfur. To the east, Iraqi children who managed to survive American bombs and suicide bombers live as refugees in Syria where they are prostituted by desperate parents. And these are only a few of the innocents slaughtered. Every minute 20 children around the world die from something preventable. Today 26,500 innocents will die.
So much for all those warm, cosy Christmas feelings. The Christmas wrappings are in the rubbish bin, the gifts we didn’t want are returned, the VISA bill has arrived and the tree has lost its needles. This should be called “Back to the real world” Sunday. But it was nice ride while it lasted for it fed our hopes for a better future; our hope for a God who saves us.
What has changed after dinosaurs is any sense of special divine protection for the human species. Even for those who still hold on to the idea of a white bearded external deity sitting on a throne in heaven monitoring every prayer left on his answer phone, there is clear evidence he will let us destroy ourselves without lifting a finger. That realisation is no small challenge to faith and hope. That’s why biblical literalists state with a straight face that dinosaurs never existed. For them fossils are a divine fraud; planted to challenge the faithless.
However, for those of us not in denial about dinosaurs, where do we put our hope? Where do we go to keep Christmas from being slaughtered by the cruel realities that surround us?
Post-dinosaurs we hear Matthew’s claim that Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us,” in a new way. For us, the Christmas story is about discovering God within us. Discovering divine love within our hearts gives us hope in the “power of one” to save us.
On Christmas Day my sister shared two “Power of One” stories with me. The first was of a physician in her congregation, John Sands, who visited Kenya with missionaries from the congregation who have an orphanage there. He discovered that the children were suffering from malnutrition because a noxious weed called Striga was drastically reducing the crops they grew. Striga compensates for having no root system of its own by penetrating the roots of other plants, diverting essential nutrients, stunting their growth and reducing significantly their cereal yield. John introduced a fungus to their crops that only harms the weed. Now they are able to grow enough food to feed the children. [1]
The second “Power of One” story is of a Boston paediatrician, Kris Olson, who spent half his year abroad feeling helpless in the face of the slaughter of innocents. “Everywhere I went, it was 'stillborn, stillborn, stillborn,' ” he said of his work in such places as Burma, Thailand and Darfur. “Almost 40 percent of deaths happen in the first 28 days of life, and they are unseen deaths, buried in the backyard... But in a lot of cases, they just needed to be given a breath,” and they would have lived. He responded by finding what is little more than a straw with a tiny mask attached costing $7.00 and then training 330 midwives in Sumatra how to use it by putting it over the baby’s mouth and blowing. When he returned to the area after the initial training he was greeted by excited midwives shouting out the number of babies they had saved. [2]
These two stories remind us that Jesus was not born just on Christmas Day but in these two doctors as well. Their compassion, empathy and personal accountability remind us that in spite of the extinction of dinosaurs God is within us, filling us with hope.
Endnotes
[1] http://www.idrc.ca/es/ev-8534-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html