“And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof; but when ye entred ye defiled my land, and made of mine heritage an abomination.”

(Jeremiah 2:7)

Last week our Fourth of July celebrations called to our remembrance the names of many patriot heroes who have made our nation great.  On that Honor Roll of our national heroes are the names of not only soldiers and statesmen but many teachers and business people and scientists who have dedicated their skill and energies to the making of America.

As we look ahead and think of our nation’s future no name should be placed higher or written in larger letters on our Permanent Honor Roll than the names of our ecologists; for the ecologist is that scientist who makes it his business to study man’s physical environment and his relationship to it.  The Ecologist checks out scientifically what we are doing to improve or destroy the essential life-sustaining elements in our environment.

The devastating drought we are now suffering and the drying up of the Mississippi River makes us turn hopefully to the ecologists for solutions to our most urgent problems.  For ecologists study what air pollution from automobile exhaust and chemicals in industrial smoke is doing to cause the global “Green-house” effect over our planet that is allegedly stopping the rains and burning up our crops.  The ecologists show us how our efficient chemical insecticides are killing off pests but at the same time destroying friendly wild life in an alarming way which may upset the delicate balance of man’s life on earth, as well as render extinct many beautiful birds and animals.  The ecologists concern themselves with what modern technological society is doing to our rivers and lakes and oceans.

But strange as it may seem, the ecologists are not universally honored as national heroes, nor are their efforts to save human environment always applauded.  Twenty years ago Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian author-explorer, while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus reeds, was horrified to discover large areas of the Atlantic ocean polluted by human waste; oil slicks filled with plastic bottles, squeeze tubes, and other signs of man’s industrial civilization.  Appealing to the United Nations to do something to impose international legislation to keep our oceans clean, Heyerdahl said, “Modern man seems to believe that he can get everything he needs from the corner drugstore.  He does not understand that everything has a source in land or sea or air, and that he must respect these sources.  If the indiscriminate pollution continues, we will be sawing off the branch we are sitting on.”  Nothing much was done in spite of Heyerdahl’s warning, and this past week we have been watching short clips on the TV of vacationers on New York and New Jersey beaches horrified to discover plastic bags of hospital waste washed ashore where they were sun-bathing.

Our family used to spend some vacation time at Montreat in North Carolina.  I can remember summer after summer reading in the Ashville papers letters to the editor in a continuing controversy that raged on endlessly.  Some people were writing to praise the efforts of a retired army officer who was leading a citizen’s campaign to stop air pollution because of what indiscriminate industrial waste was doing to the people, the vegetation, the glorious scenery throughout the lovely Swannanoa Valley.  But some citizens of the Valley in their letters to the editor were opposing the anti-air pollution campaign, maligning the character of its leader, and charging him with running off industry, robbing people of their jobs, and starving women and children.  The same sort of controversy is going on now between Canada and the United States over acid rain.

It’s at this point that we all need to do some hard thinking and honest soul searching about the spiritual ecological problem that confronts our homes, our churches, our communities and our nation today.  There is such a thing as a wholesome environment for growing bodies and there is such a thing as an unwholesome environment for growing and nurturing souls.  What is true in the physical realm is also true in the spiritual realm.  The young poet, John Keats, insisted that it was wrong to refer to this life of people on earth as “a vale of tears.”  It’s more like a vale of soul-making, said Keats.  As vital as developing a strong, healthy body is, nevertheless the supreme end of life and living on earth is just our chance at experiencing to the fullest what it means to be human in terms of the highest qualities the human soul can develop.

To what extent must we be left free in our moral and spiritual environment, and where must restraints be imposed to protect each person himself, and others, from our enormous human capacity to poison our spiritual environment?  This is the problem we keep wrestling with in such things as whether or not to control the sale of pornographic literature, movies, TV programs, whether or not to permit liquor by the drink, or the ounce, or the bucket full and at what age; just how lenient or repressive to be with the sale and use of marijuana and harmful drugs; how permissive or repressive to deal with drunken drivers, and that oldest profession of prostitution, and that newest plague of the AIDS virus.

All of these problems are in the area of social controls of man’s spiritual environment.  As we make up our minds and act responsibly on each, we are required to be responsible ecologists, understanding as fully as we can what our actions will do, not only to our own spirits, but to the spiritual environment in which we live and move and have our being; what is happening to others; including the very young, whose developing souls require a careful balance of protection from both extreme repression and extreme permissiveness.  We need to remember those well-put words of Helmut Thielicke – “It is the torment of the dead that they cannot warn the living, just as it is the torment of the mature that the erring young will not listen to them.”

The Biblical passage from Jeremiah we read this morning affords some help to people who are aware of man’s continuing problem of spiritual ecology and to people who want to act as responsible spiritual ecologists.  The prophet Jeremiah was astonished at what was happening in his own land in his day.  He and his nation knew that they had been remarkably blessed.  When they were a bunch of oppressed slaves in Egypt their God had heard their pitiful cry for deliverance and freedom.  He sent them a redeemer who led them out.  God had brought them into a homeland, given it to them for their own, and blessed them with a bountiful and beautiful country.

But wonder of wonders, this nation of His had polluted the land that was given them and turned it into a desolation.  They had forsaken the God who was the source of all their wellbeing, and they were making the heritage he had given them into an abomination.

Jeremiah says of his people: “They have committed two evils: they have forsaken God who is the fountain of living waters, and they have hewed for themselves broken cisterns which can hold no water.” First, they forsook God.  Second, they made for themselves their own gods.  What were these man-made gods?  Why, the values, the things, the powers to which they dedicated their lives.  These gods, these powers and principalities, the prophet likens to empty cisterns, broken water pipes, which cannot hold the water of life which man must have to survive.

Our commentator writing on this text says:  “The people went after worthlessness and became themselves worthless.  It is not merely that men become like what they worship, as though vanity, or the idol, or nothingness, were static or inert.  On the contrary, the nothingness of which Jeremiah speaks is extremely lively.  It is as lively as we are, as powerful as our thirst is powerful, as desperate as our hunger is desperate.  For it is not anything outside ourselves.  Its root is within our soul.  Where the individual spirit is not related to God, as to a fountain of living waters, he is filled with a great emptiness.  He is deceived by all that he values; everything to which he puts his hand crumbles as he grasps it; he pursues nothingness, and by the desperate dialect of his choosing he becomes nothingness.”  (Interpreters Bible on text)

“O God,” cried St. Augustine, “Thou hast made us for thyself and our weary hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”  There is no mystery about the meaninglessness that plagues our modern American culture, driving our young – as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it – “to search for a new religion whose symbols and sacraments are outrageous dress, use of drugs and ear-splitting music.”

It’s the same old cultural debacle which Oliver Goldsmith described in his Deserted Village – “Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.”  What’s wrong when our own college students today say that that’s the trouble with their society – that everybody has too much money.

It is the inevitable imbalance in the realm of spiritual ecology which always takes place when the one indispensable life sustaining element has been removed from man’s environment:  Faith in God, reliance upon and obedience to Him.  “My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters; and hewed themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

So, today, if we turn from God who has redeemed us and given us this good land for an inheritance, and no longer seek His face or obey His gracious will, then the result is not just a vacancy in the worship department of our time, and an excusable ignorance of Biblical material in a very fast paced society.  Oh, no – much more tragedy is inevitable.  Our souls are impoverished of the only spiritual protein which can supply their life and a veritable poisoning of our thoughts and emotions takes place.

A number of years ago over in Texarkana people were suffering a plague of rats.  This town of some 60,000 inhabitants harbored some 900,000 rats – 30 times the national average of one rat for every two people.  The rats were causing 3 million dollars damage a year and subjecting the citizens to typhus, rat bite fever, and 18 varieties of fleas.  Why the rat plague in Texarkana?  A combination of breakdown in municipal government, garbage removal, public lethargy, ignorance and lawlessness.

The Texarkana rat plague is the physical counterpart of what happens in the human soul and in the realm of spiritual ecology when the garbage of life is allowed to collect and fester, when no spiritual sanitation of confession of guilt and expurgation of evil takes place, and no living waters of God are allowed to flow in and cleanse the Augean stables of man’s mind.

In the high Andes above the clouds in Peru I remember visiting the site of an ancient city where once thousands of people had lived.  The adobe houses were still there with their intricate connecting walls for protection, and an elaborate water and sewage system.  But no one had lived there for hundreds of years.  Indeed, our guide told us that the archeological evidence pointed to a mass migration of all the people at one time.  Why had they deserted their city?  There had been no attack from an enemy.  No death dealing plague had driven them away.  Why had they gone?   Why, an earthquake had changed the course of a river, destroying completely their water supply.  Without water the city could no longer exist.

The spirit of man must feed on the living water that flows from God alone.  If an earthquake of social revolution, or a landslide of personal catastrophe, or the slow, silt deposit of neglect, changes the course of that river of living waters so it no longer flows by where we are, people must either migrate or perish.

What about you and me?  Are we so situated that we are in a spiritual environment producing health, strength and growth?  Or, do we need to migrate, make a move in our habits, or life style, in order to find a more wholesome environment for our souls and others?