New Creed illustration Gary Crawford
Joy to the world! the Lord is come:
let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare him room,
and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven, and heaven and nature sing.
Joy to the earth! the Saviour reigns:
let all their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy,
repeat, repeat the sounding joy.
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“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
John 3:16 (NRSV)
Have you ever wondered whether the planet would be better off without humans? There are 7.7 billion of us and that's just too many, given that we a greedy bunch when it comes to consumption of the world's resources. We fight a lot and our arrogance is seemingly unbridled. Little wonder that we have been described by some pessimists as a "weed species."
A recent opinion piece in the New York Times is provocatively titled Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?: Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering. It's written by Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. Early on in the piece he posits:
...what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.
The rest is worth considering and I'll leave it to you to read it, should you choose to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/human-extinction-climate-change.html
As I read I thought of this season and the strange and wonderful contention that the God who brought the cosmos and the planets of our solar system, including Earth, into being also choose to enter humanity as a child. The incarnation is a stretch, granted, but also remarkably affirming of human existence. Not only has God entered Creation in the person of Jesus, the Christ, this is the source of joy for everything that lives.
On my cynical days I figure that God should smite us all, ala Noah and the ark. And it does seem that we are a "self-smiting" species, unable to stop ourselves from destruction. In the end, though, I'll celebrate God-with-us, praise my Maker, and live with respect in Creation.
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