(48) Making Civilization

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Making Civilization, originally shared on September 17, 2020. It was the forty-eighth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Do we live in a civilized country? We’re going to consider that today, and we hope to give you some tools to help you make the world better for everybody by being a contributor to a more civil society.

   Margaret Meade, the anthropologist, was once asked what she thought was the first sign of human civilization in a given society. She answered, “The first evidence of civilization is a healed femur.” (thighbone) 

   That means that someone had to set the bone and provide security, food and water for them while they healed, all at a personal expense to themselves. Prior to that, if you broke a femur, you died.

   Civilization begins when we put the need of others ahead of our own.

   That is a very Christian concept, perhaps at the beating heart of what it means to be a Christian.

   It is rooted in the central event of the Christian faith.

*Romans 5:6-8

   But the origins of that behavior go back even further, to our relationship with the one true living God at the very beginning: Adam and Eve, and their little family.

   Adam and Eve had been expelled from the perfect place God had prepared for them because they had rejected the perfect relationship with God and al of Creation that God had given them. They had brought Sin into the world.

   That Sin showed up in the next generation between their sons, Cain and Able:

*Genesis 4:1-11

   Why was Cain’s gift rejected? Was it because it was not a blood offering, the kind that ended with Jesus Christ? No. Did he ignore some previous instruction that we don’t know. Possibly. Was it of poor quality. Maybe. Was it the wrong motivation? Probably, at least in part.

*Hebrews 11:4

   We see Cain’s bad character in Genesis, but we do not see his faith, the faith that would motivate that character. This passage in Hebrews gives us insight into Cain as, again, the Bible interprets the Bible. We are all created for a living relationship with the living God. Cain seems to have rejected this and that’s why he was able to murder his brother.

   Offerings did not save either Cain or Able. That is, offerings did not restore a living relationship with the living God, for either Cain or Able. Faith is what made Able’s offering acceptable and the lack of it made Cain’s offering unacceptable.

   You can’t buy God.

   When Cain asks, seemingly rhetorically, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer, evidenced in God’s response, is a resounding “Yes!”.  Not because we have to, but because care for others, even sacrificial care for others, is part of our spiritual DNA. It is who we are. It is as natural for us as it is for an apple tree to bear apples.

   I’ve said before, but I’ll say it again. When Mother Theresa was once asked what she thought was the world’s biggest problem, she said that the world’s biggest problem is that we don’t define “family” broadly enough.

   Suppose the police officers who killed George Floyd, Breana Taylor, Eric Garner and others saw them as family, their bothers and sisters, would they have acted differently?

   Suppose the assassin who shot two LA Sheriffs Deputies as they sat in their car in Compton last Saturday saw them as family, as a brother and a sister? Would the assassin have acted differently?

   Suppose people saw each other as being sons and daughters of the living God, whose common relationship with that God as our parent makes them brothers and sisters one of another? Would we be more civil toward one another?

   I saw these several years ago. They’re called the Toddlers’ Rules for Property Ownership:

1. If I like it, it’s mine.

2. If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.

3. If I can take it from you, it’s mine.

4. If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.

5. If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

6. If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.

7. If it looks just like mine, it is mine.

8. If I saw it first, it’s mine.

9. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.

10. If it’s broken, it’s yours!

   Some of us never mature much beyond these rules. They are totally self-centered.

   It’s been said that growing old is required, growing up is optional. That’s especially true with regard to the values that exist beneath our behavior. We are naturally inclined to be turned in upon ourselves, and there is very little in our culture that encourages anything else:

1.        Social media like Facebook, Tic-Toc, Twitter, and Instagram reinforce this self-centeredness. They have brought community to many people, but not civilization. They make it possible to easily develop communities of people that are only just like ourselves. In many ways they are civilization’s opposite.

2.       The informative media has brought fear into our homes. Crime down but fear of crime up. We learn to fear others, not to love them.

3.       The materialism that sees things as objects of my own fulfillment and not as means for ministry entrap us in a system that values us mainly as consumers.

4.       There are very few places today that society will teach us how to think and to learn, much less the humility that that requires. We are increasingly being taught what to think. That’s not education, that’s indoctrination.

   How do we learn to think critically and still love one another? From the same faith that Paul commends as the basis for Abel’s offering. It comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from the living God who calls us to a scale of values that transcends this world and its childish and selfish lives. It moves us to offer our hearts to the living waters that are the living God, who calls and forms us to love.

   Paul writes in his letter to the Church at Ephesus in Chapter 4:

*Ephesians 4:1-3     

   We make civilization when we put the needs of others ahead of our own. That is, when we love one another with the same sacrificial love with which God loves us.

   That selfless love that can only come from God is the only basis for civilization, and our greatest contribution to making and maintaining a civil society.