Genesis 1:9-12

January 20, 2008

Mark S. Bollwinkel


Thank God that today it is difficult for our children to even imagine a time in our country when citizens were openly and systematically denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin. Much has changed in the fifty years since the Civil Rights movement lead by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exposed to our country the blatant, violent repression of racial segregation.

In the Southern states citizens of color were commonly required to prove literacy in order to vote. Some counties required a deed of land ownership or a birth certificate when the same counties refused to issues such a document at the birth of an African American. These and other restrictions, along with outright social and physical intimidation, were not too subtle ways of restricting the access to millions of poor, uneducated African American citizens in the South from taking steps to change their future.

In the ten years before President Lyndon Johnson would sign into law the National Voters Rights Act of 1965 thousands would be arrested and jailed for demanding their right to vote, hundreds would be beaten and hospitalized, scores would be murdered.1 The violence wouldn't end with the new law. Even today there are isolated places in our country where people of color are intimidated or manipulated from casting their votes in freedom.

But we can be grateful that it is a far, far different day today than when Fannie Lou Hamer stood up at the Williams Chapel Baptist church in Ruleville, Mississippi (August 27th 1962) to join 17 other sharecroppers in the pledge to register to vote.2 They were responding to the preaching of Rev. James Bevel, a civil rights organizer leading the voter registration project in the Mississippi Delta.

Not only would all those sharecroppers be denied registration at the courthouse of Sunflower County, Mississippi a few days later but the owner of the Marlow plantation evicted the entire Hamer family that night from their shack of eighteen years as a result of Fannie Lou's attempt to exert her rights. She was the twentieth child of sharecroppers; short and stout at 41 years old, who walked with a limp and was semiliterate in all subjects, expect biblical wisdom.3

In fact, at the beginning of the civil rights voter registration movement it was hard to find educated middle class African Americans who were willing to face the repercussions of confronting the powerful status quo of their communities. They would eventually, in the thousands, but at the beginning it was the poorest of the poor who sought their rights. In Greenwood, Mississippi during February of 1963 more than 600 sharecroppers lined up outside the Wesley Chapel AME to hear preaching and freedom songs that inspired them to march to the court house and attempt to register. On the day they were turned away, four stores owned by African Americans in the town were burned to the ground. And still the farmers came back the next day...and the next.4


Family farmers make their livings in relationship to the cycles of the earth. They depend on rain, seed and season to pull a harvest of food from the land. Let's not romanticize farming; it's hard, demanding work done at the mercy of distant markets and capricious weather. I would doubt there are even a few people in this room that could spend one hour harvesting lettuce by hand in Salinas or apples in Washington State or strawberries in Texas let alone for an eight hour day, seven days a week during a harvest. Families that stick to farming do so because of a special bond with the cycles of nature, the joy of watching something grow and the heritage of those who grow food for others.

It was the poor Black farmers of the South that were the first to stand up for their right to vote. May be they had nothing left to lose. As Fannie Lou Hamer was famous for saying, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."5 And may be the dignity and faith that comes from a life close to the earth and its rhythms make the resistance to tyranny and shame inevitable.

Certainly that happens when the Bible become your friend.


The first creation poem of Genesis in the Old Testament (1:1-2:4a) says that God created the land and all that grows on it and "that it is good". It goes on to say:


The word "dominion" has long been misinterpreted as "domination". Rather the original it implies humanity's role as stewards of the earth and all its blessings. The created order is inherently good as is our relationship to it; we find ourselves and who we really are tending that order, nurturing it and being nurtured by it.

Most of us in the urban and suburban world of North American live lives very disconnected from the cycles of the earth. If asked, "Where does milk come from?" most of our children would answer quite naturally, "The grocery store".

Yet many of us search for that connection with the earth on the smallest scale as we garden, as we care for a pet, as we enjoy a day at the beach or a week camping with the kids. This good earth is a gift; a blue marble teeming with life as it spins in the dark cold of space.

Fifty years ago during the Civil Rights movement in the bitterness of the broken dreams of America for its racial minorities, good and decent people claimed their rights as children of God and insisted...at times at great personal sacrifice....that they be included at the table. It is no accident that some of the greatest pioneers in that effort were poor farmers who knew all about caring for the earth.

Many of the White Americans who resisted the civil right movement with bigotry and violence were farmers, too. We can assume they loved their land and felt connection to the earth. They could quote the bible. By insisting that "African Americans stay in their place" they mistakenly thought they were doing good. Somehow they could see themselves as children of God but were not able to see the same God within the hearts of their Black neighbors.

The essence of Dr. King's non-violent resistance movement was that we would see the One God within each other and having done so there would be no way we could deny the rights of a brother or sister. Those who marched and protested and went to jail for their inherent rights as citizens were redeeming the lives of those same people who were bending the laws and committing violence out of blind hatred.


All people are children of God born in divine likeness on a planet of blessing which God calls good.

What if such an ideal were to become the ethic to our treatment of the earth?


Our local San Jose Mercury News ran an interesting front page article on Thursday (January 17, 2008) entitled "Paper or Plastic?" It was reviewing a possible ban by the city of San Jose of the use of plastic grocery bags, as has been recently done in San Francisco, a number of other American cities, and as China is considering as a nation.

It is estimated that 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are consumed globally each year. It takes 60 million barrels of oil to produce those bags. We only recycle a fraction of them most of them ending up in the garbage. Bags buried in landfill can take as long as 1,000 years to break down, they are not biodegradable. If they aren't thrown away properly they end up littering our coasts, roadsides and water.7

Paper grocery bags aren't much better. Although made out of a renewable resource and biodegradable "it takes four times as much energy to make a paper bag as a plastic bag" and their production "generates 70% more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags". And again we only recycle a fraction of them.8

Paper or plastic? Either of them can be replaced with canvas or renewal grocery bags now available at our grocery markets. At the very least we could recycle either paper or plastic with little effort. Although such a gesture is highly symbolic if enough of us did it, it would really make a difference to our planet and its future.

What does our choice of paper or plastic have to do with God?

If our immediate needs, wants and desires are the center of our universe it's easy to discard that plastic grocery or paper bag without a second thought. But if we indeed consider the needs of our neighbors, brothers and sisters children of the same One God, we are called to act as stewards of the earth because we share this planet and its future together. And then, according to scripture, the center of our universe is becoming the God that calls the human community and this beautiful world "good".


In 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer would be beaten nearly to death by Mississippi police. She was jailed and her life threatened many times before she finally won the right to vote. She would be the first African American women seated at a Democratic Party Convention (1964) from the state of Mississippi. She ran for Congress twice. This granddaughter of a slave was recognized as a brilliant public speaker, singer and organizer for civil rights and she is honored as such in the National Women's Hall of Fame.

It was simple people of faith, many who spent their lives to tend the earth...like her.... that insisted that the American ideal of "all men and women are created equal" would become more than a dream.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and his pioneering civil rights colleagues were fighting for much more than the right to vote, as important as that is. They were insisting that each and every citizen of the earth be recognized as a child of God and as such share in its blessings and future.

Such an ethic has everything to do with how we treat the earth today as we make decisions for its future in a time of climate change.

Amen.


1 Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1998.
2 Branch, p. 57. Also note: Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom's Sake: the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine: the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York, New York: Dutton, 1993.
3 Branch, p. 57.
4 Branch, p. 66-69
5 Her epitaph, a quote from her time at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
6 Famous Black Quotations, Janet C. Bell, ed., Time Warner, NY, 1995
7 "The EcoQuiz", Lori Pottinger, Sierra Club, Pomegranate Communications, Petaluma, CA, 2007
8 San Jose Mercury News, January 17, 2008, "Paper or Plastic?" p. 1A


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