Dick Dorworth has an interesting observation titled Seven Billion Gorillas in the Garden (but don't talk about them). Go ahead and read it, I'll wait for you.
Are you back? Yeah, pretty powerful stuff, no? And what do we make of it?
I think that is the question that the church has actually been asking herself from the beginning. John Dominic Crossan points to a letter found in a garbage dump (aka archeological gold mine) written by the family patriarch while traveling somewhere in the Roman Empire to his wife back home in Egypt. The extent of the letter is this: If it is a boy, lift him up, but if it is a girl, cast her out. One assumes he is speaking of her pregnancy, or the pregnancy of someone in the house hold. This of course strikes us modern readers as cruel. Crossan points out that it likely did to the early church, too, as we have the passages in the synoptic gospels about Jesus' saying, "Let the children come unto me." In Mark's account, Jesus even lifts the children up into his arms. (See the tie in with the above mentioned letter?) So, the church has always been a place (or longed to be such a place) in which children are welcomed and celebrated and cherished.
Yet it was in reading Saving Paradise (Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. Beacon Press. 2008) that I dawned on me that the celibacy stances of the early church were in fact acts of resistance to the Empire. In order for the Empire to survive, all citizens must give birth to four children. That was just to make sure that the population remained stable - so high was the death rate of child-birth, childhood, from disease, etc.
So, on the one hand, the early church was taking in all and every orphaned and abandoned child, and yet on the other hand, encouraging celibacy. I have been in churches in which some of my proudest moments as the pastor was watching the congregation take on a family of children at Christmas time. The congregation provided gifts of clothing and toys - to each child - so that no one would feel left out or embarrassed. But, so often within our churches, single members don't feel like they quite fit in, that they are on the outside, that activities are based on married couples and especially married couples with children.
I'm unsure of exactly what this is going to mean for the future. For a time, the experts were believing that the population growth was going to continue climbing steeply. After all, everyone you know over 80 was born into a world with only a 1/3 of the current human population. Yet, what I have lately learned is that the experts are expecting the human population to crest at 11 billion.
With that many more mouths to feed, what does it mean to live justly? What does it continue to mean to live with compassion? How do our beliefs about how God is actively engaged in the world impact our daily decisions?
Blessed Be,
Joel
No comments:
Post a Comment