Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's January 2, 2005 Sunday Morning worship service.

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You may have heard of the hygiene hypothesis proposed by Swiss researchers. This hypothesis suggests that children who grow up in extremely clean households are more likely to develop certain health problems than children accustomed to a bit more dirt. Our modern obsession with protecting ourselves from every germ, every dog hair, every fleck of dust might be backfiring. It seems that our immune systems have been so protected by anti-bacterial soap and Lysol disinfectant that our ability to fight off germs has actually declined. Penicillin and other wonder drugs no longer seem to have the same effect they once had in warding off infections and keeping us safe (Knoxville News Sentinel, 9/25/02).

When these Swiss researchers offered their hygiene hypothesis, the Soap and Detergent Association, whose members produce more than 90 percent of the cleaning products in the US, felt compelled to issue a press release defending the idea that hand washing and surface cleaning save lives, just in case we were thinking about abandoning our Irish Spring and Softscrub. And no, in case you’re wondering, my New Year’s resolution is not to see how many germs I can save this year!

Maybe the moral of the story is, go ahead and let your kids eat dirt, or, at least, give the ole immune system a fighting chance to do its thing by developing a bit more musculature to fight off disease. And judging by my house most of the time, my kids should be quite healthy!

The hygiene hypothesis is just one of many examples of the continuing human quest to understand threats posed by that complex, intricate environment that supports all of life - an environment that we mismanage or try to exploit at great peril to the health not only of a few people, but at great peril to the whole human species, and even the entire cosmos.

While the hygiene hypothesis might draw our snickers, many of you could help me make a long list of environmental issues that we find even more troubling, from the federal government’s permission to drill for oil in national parks or protected wilderness areas, to concerns about preserving precious wetlands and other fragile ecosystems.

Did you know that:

• We are witnessing the extinction of species of living creatures at rates 100s of times higher than rates just several centuries ago?
  
• That the world’s topsoil is eroding away faster than new soil can form through natural processes?
  
• That atmospheric emissions from petroleum-guzzling economies are contributing significantly to global warming?
  
• That we have so altered the natural course of so many rivers around the world, large and small, that they are drying up before they reach their natural destinations?
  
• That some 20-22 million acres of rain forest are being destroyed annually?

And on and on the list could go. As important as are New Year’s resolutions to “reduce, reuse, recycle” or to “Think globally and act locally” or to “Love your Mother” that is, the earth, when it comes to caring for the environment, we consumer citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth are not so easily inclined to make sacrifices or to adjust our lifestyle choices.

If you read the series of articles in the Knoxville paper last fall about how our dependence on fossil fuels is ruining the very air we breathe here in East Tennessee, then you are aware of one example of just how vulnerable we are.

And as the cartoon character Pogo once said famously: “We have faults that we have hardly used yet.”

Contrast the state of the environment with today’s Old Testament reading. The poetic and liturgical beauty of the ancient Hebrew account of a primordial creation portrays a planet once in harmony, a world once in peaceful co-existence and interdependence, but a vision of Paradise lost that follows from the Fall, from human disobedience and banishment from the Garden, and from being forced to eek out an existence by tilling the ground by the sweat of the brow.

Given the reality of sin and brokenness that determines our interactions, not just with one another but with the whole creation, what does the writer of Genesis mean when he speaks of “having dominion over,” and how do you balance that with the idea of the God-given “breath of life” breathed into all the animals, not just the human species, but the theological idea that the whole creation was pronounced “very good” by God? In other words, what is the human role in caring for creation? Does the Judeo-Christian tradition call us into a kind of partnership with God as co-creators in tending to the natural world?

One important thing to remember is that Genesis records that God is launching a history with the whole world, with the many created things, and not just with the human creature. You know that story of creation in six days, culminating with the creation of male and female humans beings, followed by a seventh day of rest.

Consider all of that which gets created before we even get to male and female persons -- are the sun and the moon and the stars, the water, the fish, and all the animals somehow less important than humanity, even though they, too, have been spoken into existence by God’s creative word? God blesses the fish and multiplies them; the waters collaborate with the divine creator: “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures. . . “

Whenever God speaks in scripture, whether in the words of the creation story in Genesis or the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, divine speech always signifies a commitment to personal sharing, to a personal relationship. While the nature of that relationship will differ in accordance with the variety of the creatures, God partners with the great variety and diversity of animate and inanimate life forms which God has called into existence by the spoken word. “God respects other creatures, works with them, takes time with them befitting their own created potential, in order to enhance and realize the integrity of the whole” (Paul Santmire, “Partnership with Nature According to the Scriptures”).

Maybe the likeness of God given to humanity is the gift of being in partnership with God in caring for creation. The image of the divine likeness in each of us is the image of the deity’s desire for order and harmony and respect among all the creatures.

Repeatedly, in the opening chapters of Genesis, God says to human beings: find a way to partner with the whole creation, so that everything will be good.

The essayist Wendell Berry, who has done so much to call for the preservation of farming as a way of life, writes that “our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibilities, it is the most horrid blasphemy” (quoted in Christian Scholars Review, 366).

Does our faith influence the way we live on earth, treat the earth, partner with the earth in using its resources wisely and carefully and lovingly?

I have been thinking about this poem by Mary Oliver, entitled “Wild Geese.”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

In different ways, the creation story in Genesis, no less so than the environmental crisis that so characterizes the times in which we live, challenge us to head home again to find our place “in the family of things.”

Our home is the central Christian belief that the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show us the nature of the creator, and this belief is a clue even to the mystery and miracle of creation. In other words, we, who find ourselves along a continuum stretching from the Genesis of creation to the new creation at the end of time, we who seek to follow the Word made flesh are also called to enter into a partnership with God and nature in caring for the whole creation.

And today, we know best our place in the family of things when we come to the table to partake of grain and grapes, the fruit of this bountiful earth, God’s first fruits given to us as free gifts. These are symbols of the wonder of it all that we can never fully grasp and which we neglect at our own peril and to the endangerment of the whole creation.

Let us come, recalling the image of Christ implanted within, so that we might fall on our knees and renew our oneness with the Genesis of God’s new creation.