I am a big sucker for lists. I love lists. Top 10 Lists. Bottom 10 Lists. David Letterman lists. Any list.
In fact, there’s a book written for us list lovers called “The Incredible Book of Wacky Lists” by Patrick M. Reynolds (2001), where he has lists of “Plants That Eat Animals” (there are 4 of them: Venus’s flytrap, Butterwort, Sundew, Pitcher plant), “Seas Named After a Color” (Black, Red, White, Yellow Seas), 3 Tallest US Presidents (Abe Lincoln, 6'4", LBJ, 6'3", Thomas Jefferson, 6'2½”, now 4, with Barack Obama, 6'2"), “7 Birds That Can’t Fly” (emu, kiwi, penguin, ostrich, cassowary, rhea, Galapagos cormorant), “10 Animals with Pockets” (kangaroo, koala, opossum, sea horse, Tasmanian devil, wombat, wallaroo, bandicoot, cuscus, echidna), and “10 Knock-Knock Jokes” (enough is enough—I’ll spare you.)
My new favorite list is at first flush an alarming one. It is called “24 Things About To Become Extinct In America.” Among the 24 predicted extinctions are the imminent demise of the Yellow Pages, movie rental stores, phone landlines, VCRs, Ham radio, incandescent light bulbs, cameras that use film, and the milkman. In fact, some extinctions are good. When things are no longer useful, when things do not function in a helpful way, or just aren’t sensible anymore, they should become extinct.
When extinctions happen, whether biologically or culturally, they leave a blank spot, an opening, a new niche that needs to be filled. The exit of the mighty dinosaurs made it possible for an upstart little group of creatures called mammals to thrive. Does anyone want to trade in their iPod for an eight-track tape player? Does anyone who works in an office miss the mimeograph machine, or typing and correcting carbon copies?
The extinction of certain behaviors and attitudes is long past due. During his inaugural address as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama recalled that only a few decades ago his own father would not have been allowed to sit and be served lunch at the majority of the restaurants in Washington D.C.. Jim Crow is a species that needed to be wiped out. And we must be vigilant to keep the Jim Crow species on the extinction list.
In today’s gospel text Jesus acted as an agent of extinction. When Jesus entered into the local synagogue in Capernaum it was time for the unclean spirit inhabiting that place to go extinct. The presence of Jesus, whom the unclean spirit declared to be “the Holy One of God,” left no room for the unholy attitude and actions of that demon.
Have you ever noticed that the demonic spirits Jesus encountered always identified themselves in the plural? The unclean spirit in the synagogue asked Jesus “Have you come to destroy us?” The brokenness of the human spirit is not one, clean, single break. Our brokenness is a fracturing into hundreds of splinters. The demons that inhabit us are rightly named “Legion.” When we invite Jesus into our lives, into our hearts, there is a lot of “unclean” space that needs to be scoured out. The more bad behaviors and wrong beliefs we can relegate to the “extinct” list, the more room there is for the presence of the holy.
[Here is where I recommend you walk down into the congregation and interact with them, asking them what they would like to see go extinct in our world and in your community. What would they put on the #10 Extinct List. What would they like to see go extinct in this world. As they are nominating candidates for extinction, have someone write your people’s #10 down on a whiteboard, or if you use video or PowerPoint, place the list on the screen so that everyone can see. . . .
[If you would rather preach the sermon yourself without their participation, you have a variety of candidates to choose from. We humans are a jungle of human selfishness, sordid hypocrisy and base cruelty. So you might begin there, and talk about our need for root canals of the soul, root canals that do more than numb or reduce our selfishness, hypocrisy, and cruelty.
Or you can get a little more political about what we need to make extinct:
1) Make Poverty Extinct
2 billion of the 6 billion people on planet Earth life on less than $2/day of income. Many of these impoverished millions live in places familiar to us: for example, the combined GDP of the African continent is less than that of Spain and about the same as the Pentagon’s annual budget. Tragically, only five African countries are taking poverty reduction seriously: Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda.
But poverty is also found in the US as well. Roughly 35 million Americans live below the poverty level, and children make up 40 percent of the poor but only 26 percent of the total population. In fact, the poverty rate for children is higher than for any other age group. The US government spends ten times more on each poor senior than it does on each poor child.
By making poverty extinct I don’t mean equality is our goal. All too often we make “inequality” a synonym for “democracy” and “equality” becomes the litmus test of the moral stature of any society. Not true. I don’t resent the fact that I don’t have the income of Warren Buffett, or Kurt Warner. Poverty and Inequality are not the same thing. The scandal is not the wealth of some; the scandal is that some are dying of hunger, disease, dirty water, homelessness.
To end poverty means to lift people out of the trap of not being able to improve themselves.
2) Make Waste Extinct
Poverty & Waste Go Together. Every year, US Americans waste billions of pounds of food, which translates into billions of dollars thrown away. In fact, the average household wastes 14 percent of its food purchases, and that’s a conservative estimate. Some say as much as 20% of our food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills.
Roughly 49 million people could have been fed by those lost resources.
Conclusion:
If you think you’re having a bad day, just remember this: 90% of all living things are eaten alive.
But the 10% of us living things that aren’t being eaten alive can indeed be eaten alive: by exactly those things you mentioned needing to put on the extinct list: greed, jealousy, anger, hypocrisy, selfishness . . . .
Go exorcize some demons this week. Make a list of things you want to go extinct in your life, and then stop feeding them. Change the climate in your home and in your heart. Make the climate in which you live inhospitable to hatred,
a wasteland for bigotry,
a desert for envy.
[Alternative Beginning: Here is an alternative start to your sermon, which can be used to supplement or supplant the “list” beginning above . . . .
Just as predictable as a baby goes from the crawling phase to the cruising phase to the walking phase, somewhere around five years of age kids go through a “dinosaur phase.” In the dinosaur phase kids who are afraid of the dark suddenly are fascinated with enormous, scaly, razor-toothed monsters.
In the dinosaur phase the kid who can’t say “spaghetti-os” suddenly masters names like “Triceratops,” “Tyrannosaurus,” “Compsognathus,” “Galimimus,” and “Archaeopteryx.” In the dinosaur phase kids who don’t know where they left their sneakers ten minutes ago know the difference between the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods during the Mesozoic era. Even kids in families that don’t believe in evolution have a “dinosaur phase.”
Truth be told, a lot of us never do grow out of our “dinosaur phase.” There is a reason the Jurassic Park movie expanded to a series of three films, and a fourth is due out later this year. Dinosaurs are fascinating. We love them because dinosaurs were huge. They ruled the world for millions of years. They were terrifying.
And we love them especially because they are now extinct. Gone completely. The twenty-first century is filled with a lot of frightening scenarios and panic-inducing possibilities, but the threat of dinosaurs isn’t one of them. Extinction means gone forever. All we have of dinosaurs are extinct valleys of dry bones, dry bones that will never live, in spite of Jurassic Park.
Plants and animals become extinct for two reasons: 1) because the organism can no longer tolerate the environment in which it finds itself; and 2) because the organism cannot adapt to the changes in that environment.
*Passenger pigeons couldn’t adapt their flocking behavior so that they wouldn’t be easy mass targets for shotguns. So we shot them until there was one left: Martha, the last passenger pigeon.
*The melting polar ice is making the future of the polar bears look pretty grim. Either they will have to learn to hunt different species than seals basking on ice flows, or they too will become extinct. Will we name the last polar bear like we named Martha?
Oh, that’s another thing to like about dinosaurs. Yes, they are extinct. But no, it was not our fault. Plus, not all extinctions are bad. Check out the size of the teeth in a Tyrannosaurus jawbone (about 8-10 inches long) and you will rejoice that you missed the opportunity to share air with that creature.
We are living in a time of massive extinctions. Not just of biological organisms, but cultural organisms as well. There are cultural extinctions occurring all around us.]