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Chapter 40. And the Lord said to Job, "Shall a fault finder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it." Then Job answered the Lord, "Behold, I am of small account, what shall I answer thee? I lay my hand on my mouth, I have spoken once and I will not answer twice, but I will proceed no further." Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, "Gird up

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your loins like a man, I will question you and you declare to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God and can you thunder with a voice like his? Deck yourself with majesty and dignity, clothe yourself with glory and splendor, pour forth the overflowings of your anger and look on everyone that is proud and abase him. Look on

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everyone that is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them all in the dust together, bind their faces in the world below. Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can give you victory. Behold the hippopotamus, which I made as I made you. He eats grass like an ox. Behold his strength in his loins and his power in the muscles of his belly.

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He makes his tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of his thighs are knit together, his bones are tubes of bronze. He is the first of the works of God. Let him who made him bring near his sword, for the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play. Under the lotus plants he lies, in the covert of the weeds and in the marsh. For his shade the lotus trees cover him, the willows

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of the brooks surround him. Behold, if the river is turbulent, he is not frightened. He is confident, though Jordan rushes against his mouth. Can one take him with a hook or pierce his nose with a snare? And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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Sometimes funny things appear in church bulletins. There was one at Easter a couple of years ago that said, "The children's Easter celebration will begin when Mrs. Walker comes forward and lays an egg on the communion table." And then there was one that said, "Next Sunday, what is hell? Come and hear our choir." And I think we've contributed our own this morning, for it says,

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"Behold the hippopotamus, Bruce Thielman." I was behind two of our ladies as we walked into church this morning, and she said, "I wonder if this will be an autobiographical sermon." Well, I'll admit there are some physiological similitudes, but that's not the aspect of the hippopotamus that I want to talk about. Let's start with last night. Last night,

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I was watching the evening news, and there were three stories on the news that related to environmental or ecological concerns. There was, of course, the story about the continuing damage being done by the oil slick up in Alaska, that which has been contributed to us by Exxon and the liquor industry. And then there was a story about how all of the dogwood in the northeastern

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part of the United States is dying off, and that within five years, they expect it all to be gone. And finally, there was the story, because yesterday was the first day of trout season, that some factory here in western Pennsylvania had jettisoned a lot of poisonous fluid into the water and had killed in one stream more than 3,000 trout. Now, of course, I was sorry to hear each of

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these stories, but there was one sense in which I was glad to hear them, because at least they were making the news. Some attention was being paid to these matters of ecological concern. And I very much am in favor of that, because I believe God is committed to that also. Let me be more specific. A couple of weeks ago, I read about a hippopotamus in California named Bubbles, who gave birth

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to about 3,000 pounds when he was born after the eight-month gestation period, and he was born as the manner of hippopotami is, under the water. And I thought that this must have delighted the heart of God, because along with a lot of other animals, the hippopotamus is described in some detail in Scripture. It says in the passage, which I read just a few moments ago, that he eats grass, that

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he has great power, that his tail is like the branch of a tree, that he has ribs like iron, that he basks in the shade of the lotus leaves, that even the rushing waters of the Jordan cannot turn him aside, and that no one will ever be able to pull a hippopotamus out of the water with a hook. God delights in hippos and in many other creatures described in light detail in Scripture. Under

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the influence of the Holy Spirit, the record is there. He loves all of nature which he has made. We sometimes, you know, fall into the mistake of believing that nature was made first of all for us. Now, it is true that we live from the fruits of nature, and it is also true that it feeds not only our bodies, but also our spirits, if we have the eyes to see. But the record of Scripture is

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that God made nature first for his own delight. He made the day and the night, and he said, "That's good." He separated the oceans from the dry land, and he said, "That's good." He made the plants, all the multitudinous species of plants, and he said, "Good." He made the heavenly bodies which soar through space about us, and he said, "Good." He made the fish and the eagles, and he said,

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"Good." And he made all the animals from elephants to prairie dogs, and he said, "Good." God made all of these things and described each and every one of them as good before man even appeared upon the scene, before humankind was created. And after humankind was created, God does not speak of the particular goodness of humankind, but rather he says, "And God saw everything that he had made,

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all of nature and man besides, and behold, it was very good." God delights, you see, in what he has made, and man is only a part of that. This same idea is picked up in the 104th Psalm, where it says, "The Lord rejoices in his works." And there's a very interesting suggestion there in verse 26, where it says, "There go the whales, the whales with whom thou dost sport." In other words,

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God plays games with whales. And you remember the story of Noah and the ark, how two of every species are saved, and when at last the waters pass away and the dry land is reached, God enters into an agreement with Noah, but not only with Noah, but with Noah's family, and not only with Noah and with Noah's family, but with all of the creatures. The scripture says, "I enter into it

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with you and your descendants and with every living creature that is with you." God covenants with his whole natural order. Shouldn't surprise us that Jesus spent so much of his life outside, or that his favorite place in Jerusalem, a big city, was actually a garden outside of it. That he talked about sparrows and foxes and the winds that blow, and about fish and flowers, and talked

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about how God took care of these things, and even so he will take care of his other children. That's the reason we're taught again and again in scripture that we are to be good stewards of nature. I listed over 100 different instructions in scripture about how we're to treat nature. Things like, "Do not overuse your beasts. Never kill little birds in the nest. Let the land lie

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fallow every seven years that it might restrengthen itself. Do not muzzle the animals in order that they might eat what they need. Till the earth and enjoy its fruits." All kinds of specific instructions are given. And even at the end time, when Jesus returns in power and glory, and rolls up the scroll of human history once and for all, what do the scriptures say? The

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scriptures say that God will create a new heaven and a new earth. Not that nature is going to disappear, not that it will vanish away never to be seen again, but rather that it will be new and more beautiful than ever before. And that same promise is picked up in Paul's letter to the Colossians when he says that Jesus has come to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth.

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Not only us, not only humankind, but all things, the whole creation. That includes you and me and the hippopotamus. So my friends, on the basis of testimony of scripture repeated again and again, to attack nature or to degrade nature, to sin against nature, is also to sin against God. I believe that wounding the natural world is to wound God as well as ourselves. We are supposed

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to use nature, we are to, in a sense, make it that which serves us, but there are still within nature orders of creation. Now it's true that humankind is the highest order, and then there's the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom and the inanimate and so on. But all of these things are to be respected on their own levels. Each is subservient to the others, but each is to be

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treated in a respectful manner. And whenever this is forgotten, well, terrible things result. I mean, it's a great tragedy that this country used to have 15 billion acres of trees, but that now one-third of those are gone, and that we are presently cutting down trees 15% faster than we're replacing them. It's a great tragedy that when this country was found 200 years ago, that

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we had nine inches of topsoil on our land, but that today that's been cut to only five inches, and the 380 million acres of topsoil have been washed and eroded away because of lack of care and concern. Let me so throw some very quick slide pictures against the screen of your consciousness of some of the things that I have seen. I counted more than 200 beer cans around Plymouth Rock, just

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thrown there as litter. I remember watching a seagull trying to fly, though it was covered with oil, in the bay at Santa Barbara, California. Robert Frost's home in New England is now a junkyard. Driving across the great Tsavo Game Preserve in Kenya, Africa, I counted 405 dead elephants in one day, flying over the Amazonian jungles and looking down and seeing how the great rainforests

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are being destroyed, which is affecting our temperature and our humidity already. And what about the loss of animal species? You know, for a thousand years, we only lost one species of animals every 10 years. Now we're losing them at the rate of about one every year, and it is estimated that by the year 2000, we

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will be losing one species of animal every hour. There are 180 different species on the endangered list right now. See, we're getting different perspectives about the seriousness of this problem than we've ever had before, and it's because of our astronauts, because of our being able to go into space. You see, up till now, we've been rather like little creatures crawling on some

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great body, and we can examine the hairs and the pores and things like that. But now, suddenly, we're able to get up off the body. We're up off the earth, so we can look down and see the whole thing. And what the astronauts are telling us again and again is that the deserts are expanding, that the rivers are polluted, and that the seas are turning into giant cesspools.

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And astronauts who go up even as often as once every three years state that they can see the difference every time they go into space. This planet echoes today with the scream of seagulls that can no longer fly, and with acid rain that falls like tears, and with the moaning of winds

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that blow through acres and acres of dead trees. And that's very sad, for God has made these things and blessed these things and rejoices in these things, and has given us these things to protect and to enjoy and benefit from them. This is very sad and very sinful, too. What is our Christian responsibility in the light of all of this?

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Well, it's a serious subject, of course. I suppose some thought when they saw the title "Behold the Hippopotamus" that this was going to be a light-hearted message. Oh, I'm deadly serious. And we cannot think as a Christian church about our responsibilities toward nature just by pulling some poinsettias in here at Christmas time or some lilies at Easter time, and it's not enough

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for us to have a chapel at our camp up in Ligonier called the Chapel of the Pines, where you can sit surrounded by the trees and worship God there. That's not enough. I'd like to suggest two main things we need to do. We need, as a Christian church, to develop an environmental theology, what I call a theo-ecology,

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a view of God and the whole household of the world. You see, life is not human-centered. Life is God-centered, and all things are subservient to him, and we need to understand when we look at the world that everything that is here has been put here primarily as an expression of his will and not an expression of our desire. You know, there are some people

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who would say that my even talking about this subject this morning is beside the point. He talked about nature. He didn't talk about saving souls. Well, the Christian faith has dimensions to it beyond salvation because we are to be growing in our understanding of our Christian lives. But let me say this. A person who doesn't understand

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the Christian's responsibility to the world has a very shaky Christianity, and there's a lot of pagan Greek thought in it. You see, it was the pagan Greeks who believed that everything's centered in humankind and all the rest of the world was unimportant. But that's not the testimony of Scripture. The testimony of Scripture is that God came into life right in this world to live

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like a man, that he entered into every dimension of the human experience just as we do, and that he came, and these are the words of Scripture, to redeem all of creation, all of the orders of creation. And that includes humankind and animals and, well, everything else that you can name. And that means, among other things, to put it very simply, that a rock is a rock,

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and we are not to deface or scar or abuse that rock unless it is needed to serve one of the higher orders. And when I say that we're not to deface that rock, I mean we're not supposed to paint "Jesus saves" on the side of it, because it has its own beauty and it has been made by God for that purpose. Yes, we may go hunting and fishing, but not slaughtering. As long as that food is used

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to feed, then that's one thing. But a fish has a right to be a fish, and an animal has a right to be an animal, just as much as a human being has the right to be a human being, and they must be respected within their own order. Trees? Do you ever notice how you can't say the word "trees" without smiling? Trees? Well, to bulldoze down trees just because it makes it more convenient,

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not because they're needed for fuel, not because they are needed for building. Those purposes are good and legitimate purposes, and as I say, each order serves the orders above it. But no order is to be abused and misused. That's what's got to stop. And it's got to stop, my friends, not just because we want to keep the world nice for ourselves, but out of obedience to God.

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I think it's very, very important that when we think about our relationship to nature, that we don't do what we do just because it's the intelligent thing to do. Let's face it, it's stupid to destroy the world in which you're living. That's stupid. But to turn away from that and to become responsible with regard to nature just because

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it's the smart thing to do is not enough. At least for Christians, we do what we do out of obedience to God. I would not be satisfied for one moment if the youngsters who went to our camp and who enjoyed the world of nature and had it explained to them and saw examples of it each and every day, I would not be satisfied if what they came back with was just some appreciation of nature.

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I want them to know that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, that he has created and sustained every bit of it. And it is for his honor and his glory. And while we may rejoice in it and use it, we protect it and we reverence it because it is his gift. That's what I want our kids to get, that vision. And that's what the whole church ought

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to develop, a theo-ecology. And the other thing we need to think about is our individual, disciplined, personal restraint. I heard about a family that was caught in a storm up in Massachusetts, and one of the youngsters became frightened and began to cry. And the mother said, "There's no use crying. There's not a thing we can do about this storm." And the little boy said,

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"Yes, mommy, but isn't there something we could do about ourselves?" Well, there are some things we can do about ourselves. We need to moderate our lifestyles. Don't be led into consumerist traps, responding to everything that is presented to us by some clever advertiser. We need to buy what we need and not to pollute the world with garbage.

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We put out more garbage than all the rest of the world together. It's an incredible thing, you know, how little things can make a difference there. When you buy paper towels or when you buy toilet paper, if you buy white towels or white paper, that's quickly assimilated back into nature. But if you buy products that have dyes in them, colored dyes, those chemical dyes take

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decades to dissolve and to go back into nature again. So only buy white paper products and use soap, not detergents, and recycle everything that you can. And we must not litter. That's a dirty habit. If you're not afraid of having people think you're a little bit odd, when you see some litter, pick it up and put it away. We need to learn to walk more and not to use our automobiles,

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thus polluting the atmosphere. And if we want more children, we need to think more seriously about adopting them. You know, every child reared in this country will use 100 times as much of the world's resources as a child in Africa or in Asia. We constitute in this country only 6% of the world's population, yet we are using 50% of the world's resources. So rather than bringing

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more children into the world, why not do what more and more Americans are doing, adopting children from other parts of the world, thus making their contribution to the future. And we need to teach our children by our example and the way we care for the world of nature. And we need to ask questions of the businesses where we hold stocks and equities. You know, it's always intrigued me

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that businesses which are capitalistic in their nature and who want a laissez-faire government policy, they don't want the government meddling, they want to get away from protectionism, they want to be able to live on their own, fine, I support them in that. But what I don't understand is why these businesses, committed to doing it on their own, suddenly expect other people to pick

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up the bill for the streams that they've polluted and the forests that they've destroyed and the air that they have fouled. If you're going to be an independent organization not dependent on anybody else, if you're going to go and do what you're going to do without subsidy, then let's include that also. It seems to me that that's only fair. It seems to me also that that's

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only legitimate cost accounting. And yet there are so many businesses who fight environmentalists or ecologists who are trying to protect the world in which we live. We need to report violators. When we discover those who are doing those things which are contrary to the health of the planet, we need to be intelligent when we vote. Where do people stand with regard to these issues of such

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great importance? You know, there are times when we ask you to become involved in things here at the church and maybe you are not gifted or talented in those ways and so you cannot do those things, but this is something in which everybody can be involved. We're all living in this world and every one of us has a say by our conduct, our individual responsibility,

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as to what it's going to be like tomorrow. You know, back in 1788, when Pittsburgh consisted only of about 70 log cabins, there was a saloon down near the point called the Black Bear Tavern. And one day, two young men showed up there. Their names were Nathaniel and Jonathan Chapman. And they wanted a place to stay so they let them sleep over in a corner and they stayed there for two or

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three days. They were missionaries. In those days, Pittsburgh was the jumping off point to Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana and they were going out to sing the gospel in those areas. But they had an uncle who lived north up the Allegheny River so they decided they would travel up the Allegheny to see him before they headed farther west. But when they got there, they found that the uncle's

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cabin was broken down and gone and there was no trace of him. So they came back to Pittsburgh and one of the brothers noticed as he came that there were no fruit trees about, no evidence of the blossoms of fruit or the produce of those trees. Well, Nathaniel Chapman, the one brother, served here in the area only for a short time and then returned to New England. But John Chapman devoted

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the rest of his life to serving in this area. And he became not only a missionary, but also one who planted fruit trees. He traveled all throughout this area. Every place he would go, he would read the Bible, he would speak about what the Bible had to say, and then he would leave saplings and apple seeds. In fact, he came to be known by the people of this area as Johnny Appleseed.

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And he had a cabin right here near Pittsburgh from which he carried out his ministry, not only of the gospel, but also of the fruit tree, of that which beautifies the place. He died on March the 11th, 1847. And between here and Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he died, I suppose you'd find 12, maybe 15 different monuments to Johnny Appleseed. But it's always seemed to me that the most appropriate

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monument to him is when you go out on one of these April days and you drive through the hills around this place and you see blooming here and there, even in the woods, apple trees and apple orchards. And if you're fortunate enough, you can get close enough to them to smell the sweet redolence with which they perfumed the air. One man did that.

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Now, I'm not suggesting that we can be Johnny Appleseeds, though there are people today who are living lives just as significant in ecological and environmental terms, and I wish I had the time to tell you about some of them this morning. What I'm trying to say is this, that when it comes to the natural world, we must be Christian. We must realize that God has made it for his enjoyment

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and for ours, and that God loves it as he loves us, and that God wants all that which he has made and loved to get along together. We need to repent, to be reverent, and to recommit ourselves to responsible Christian living in terms of this magnificent planet on which we ride through space. One of the things we try to teach our youngsters at the camp,

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and one of the things I've tried to say this morning, is simply this. All the good things that God has made deserve our respect and our rejoicing, and that includes the hippopotamus. Let us pray.

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[Praying] Our Father, on this day when we celebrate the ministry that occurs out of doors, grant that we might be reminded of the sanctity of all that you have made, and of our stewardship with regard to the care and the tending and the loving of it.

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Make us in our own lives, and grant that we might become as a church, responsible, theoecologists, ready to reverence, to uphold, to make even more beautiful to the degree that that capacity lies within us, this blue jewel we call the earth.

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We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. [background music]