The question around evolution is still an awkward subject for the church today. Creationists insist that all human life began with Adam, and that the bible tells about the movement from Adam to Abraham to you and me in a fairly straight line. Evolutionary theory argues that the line from caveman to Christian was much longer and more convoluted than the Creationist option. We do know that spirituality developed in early hominids; Neanderthals and other pre-human species would bury their dead with artifacts and a certain amount of ritual, pointing to a belief in an after-life. We also recognize that there was a progression from polytheism (belief in many gods) to monotheism (belief in just one God) to the Christian belief in a Triune God – Creator, Savior and Holy Spirit. Progressive faith encourages us to trust both science and faith, both evolution theory and scripture. But to narrow down this topic a bit, I want to focus on one question that emerged about 40 years ago in the famous rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Listen to the question as it is raised in that musical’s title song.
Hear again: Galatians 4:4-5 When the fullness of time had come, God sent God’s Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that they might receive adoption as [God’s] children.
In the song we heard, Jesus Christ is asked the following question: Why did you choose such a backward time and such a strange land? If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication. It’s a good question. If Christ is the Lord of all history, why did the incarnation happen when it did and where it did? Why in ancient Israel, on the southeast coastline of the Mediterranean Sea? Why not in China, or Africa, or America? Why not 1000 years earlier or a 1000 years later? What made that time and that place just right, a moment seen as being “the fullness of time”?
The simple answer is to shrug and say, “God knows best” and just leave it at that. But evolutionary theory and our belief in a God who is Lord of history have to fit together somehow. There must be some clues as to why Jesus’ appearance long ago reflects the providential, intentional planning of God.
When I was on vacation last month, I read the well-known book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Written in the late 1990s and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Diamond’s book explores why civilizations evolved where they did and when they did. It was a 450 page book, but I’m going to try to summarize it in a few paragraphs and then link it to our scripture for today.
In truth, there was very little in Diamond’s book about guns, germs or steel. I think a more accurate title would have been “Plants, Pigs and Latitude,” for those three elements point to the real keys in the history of human civilization. There are lots of places in the world that can support human life, but ideally you want a temperate climate – a place of good weather, good soil, and good natural resources. Three locations for this climate are in the Fertile Crescent from the Mediterranean Sea to Central Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in parts of North and South America. Jesus was born in Palestine; why not Ghana or Guatemala? Reason #1: For a civilization to develop, the people must make the transition from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, because farmers are more stable. They build real homes and store food, and thus they can have larger families and protect themselves by living in communities. To become a farmer, you need a wild seed plant that over time can be domesticated and turned into a dependable food crop. In all the world there are about 56 species of plants that are candidates for domestication – types of wheat, barley, corn, and rice. Out of that group, 32 of those species were found around the Mediterranean, while only 11 were found in all the Americas and only 4 existed in sub-Saharan Africa. So most of the plants needed for food and farming originated near Jesus’ homeland.
Reason #2: Just as you need plants to be domesticated in order to develop human civilization, you need domesticated mammals for meat, leather, wool and as work animals. The big five in this category are pigs, sheep, goats, cows and horses. Out of 14 species worldwide that could be domesticated, Africa has zebras, buffalo, and elephants, but no mammal that was ever domesticated. The Americas only had one – the llama. But Eurasia had 13 of these 14 species of domesticated mammals. That’s why by the time of Christ, Jesus could send demons into a herd of pigs; he could speak about a good shepherd who tends his sheep; and he rode into Jerusalem on the back of donkey.
Reason #3: Once you domesticate plants and move from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, you end up sharing these agricultural innovations with other people. However, both Africa and the Americas have a North-South geography and a wide range of climate zones. This means that wheat or sorghum grown in Virginia will not flourish in the Honduras or Bolivia. Barley grown in Senegal won’t make it in Egypt or South Africa. But Eurasia has an East-West orientation. Much of that continent shares the same latitude, so crop innovations could move from Palestine to Italy to Turkey to Mongolia.
Remember: Human history is a long, long history. Our evolutionary origins stretch back over 7 million years. 500,000 years ago Homo Sapiens emerged along with Neanderthals and spread throughout Africa and Asia. 50,000 years ago, human history took a great leap forward as humans developed effective weapons and tools for hunting, sewing, building, as well as carving, painting, and making musical instruments. By 11,000 BC, Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas were all inhabited, and over the next 3,000 years, the processes of domesticating plants and animals began in earnest in each of those regions.
But the clear winner in this evolutionary competition was the Mediterranean area near to the Fertile Crescent. It had nothing to do with the intrinsic abilities of the people living there but everything to do with their having access to plants able to be domesticated, animals able to be tamed, and a geography that allowed their innovations to spread rapidly to other peoples. So it would be there that empires would rise and conquer the known world: Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Sure, there would be Aztecs and Incans in the Americas, Ashanti and Zulu states in Africa, but the Eurasian Fertile Crescent, because of plants and pigs and latitude, had a two to three thousand year headstart on all the other civilizations. And so it would be there, in the fullness of time, God would send God’s Son, born of woman, born in a place and part of a civilization about to explode across the entire world.
We are going to look at this topic some more over the next two Sundays. For example, the only other place historically comparable to Palestine where Jesus might have been born was ancient China. But for reasons that we will discuss later, China would not have been a good choice for the birth of the Son of God.
So in taking a step back and surveying the panorama of a million years of human history, there is scientific reason to believe that the birth of Christ in the Palestine Fertile Crescent about 4 B.C. actually made a lot of sense. I’m sure God is amused by our presumptuousness as we deign to say to the Almighty, “Lord, you did good work, having Jesus born when you did!” But there is, to me, something incredibly humbling imagining God surveying the entire range of human history – of continental drift and evolutionary change, homo erectus, homo sapiens, Cro-magnons, wheat and barley in Palestine, rice in China, corn in the Americas, wild horses of southern Russia, sheep of Central Asia, pigs in North Africa – as well as monitoring the exploration done by ships sailing across the seas, seeing the global ravages of war, plagues and diseases, and noting the development of machines, computers, and spaceships. Mindful of that vast span of time, God knowingly sent Christ into a specific time and place. And just as knowingly God is aware of each of us, of where we fit into this grand historical parade – caring for us, worrying about us, sending the Spirit to us that we might not be slaves or orphans, but children of this loving God.
When Paul wrote his words to the young Christian church in Galatia, he wasn’t trying to give them a tutorial about God’s knowledge of all humankind from the dawn of civilization up to that point in history. But he was stressing that God is the intentional Lord of history – who desires to set people free. In this specific case, Paul was encouraging these new believers to stop seeing themselves as Jews or Gentiles, as slaves or free citizens, as men or women, but rather see themselves as heirs, children equally adopted by a loving God – a loving God who has knowledge of all history, who was active in the fullness of time by sending Christ into the world, and who continues to be active in present and future history by sending God’s Holy Spirit to abide with us.
And why are Paul’s words important to us today? Well, frankly, we each could use a dose of humility – a reminder that history did not begin with our birth nor does it cease at our death. We can benefit from the awareness that we are given a limited period of time to walk in the parade of life and we each choose whether our time is spent in ways that affirm God and life or that deny God and deny life. In Paul’s words, it is a matter of whether we live enslaved to the swirling, fearful spirits of this world or live as freed, forgiven, faithful children filled with God’s own spirit. There’s no denying that the big “fullness of time” event involved the birth of Jesus Christ long ago. But maybe, in God’s eyes, your birth, my birth, the birth of each and every child constitutes a little “fullness of time” moment.
For the opposite of faith is not unbelief. The opposite of faith is indifference. God is the Lord of history, who acts to set us free and set us in motion so we can make a difference in this world. So, friends, the real question is this: Where are you going? And who are you following in this “fullness of time” moment right here, right now?