“What Makes Us Human?” August 9, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Forbes March 21, 2020
Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed.
Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger; you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.
The Old Testament’s primeval history, recorded in the opening chapters of Genesis, gets dark fast. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. A serious
Case of sibling rivalry turns into fratricide. Cain murders Abel and a very anthropomorphic character of God comes calling and asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” And Cain replies defiantly with a question that has echoed down through the centuries, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
I would be surprised if any sermon written on this text from the 4th chapter of Genesis over the past 2500 years answered this question in the negative. The resounding response is so obvious that it is not even stated . . . “Yes,” “yes you are your brother’s keeper.”
But the language of church and synagogue are often in denial of the language in the marketplace. Seriously, to what degree is our neighbor, our sister or brother, or worse yet, the stranger on the other side of town . . . to what degree are they my problem?
Especially in our post agrarian society, even more in our socially isolating, pandemic social order in which we focus on making sure that we have enough toilet paper, hand sanitizer, beef, and gasoline for ourselves before we give a moment’s thought to anyone else. Am I my brother’s keeper? To what degree are my sister’s problems also my problem?
The most famous passage of scripture that isn’t in the Bible at all is, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Especially in our American form of liberty and independence, we frequently insist upon a very strict, “I got mine” world view. We have seen this now for more than a decade of discussion about health insurance, especially in the coverage of “pre-existing” conditions. If insurance companies are legally required to cover pre-existing conditions, the healthcare costs for healthier people goes up.
The debate over this part of Obama Care has pitted younger, healthier people who are often at the beginning of their career with lower wages, to help pay for the medical expenses of older and sicker people who maybe have more money. The Trump administration has filed law suits for the past three years trying to do away with mandated coverage for people with pre-existing conditions while publicly swearing that they will do whatever they can to protect this vital coverage . . . which, if you were looking for another reason to despise this president, this is a good reason.
But in the “screw my brother and sister” category, locally, we have a classic example in Rachel Shelton who is suing the City of Springfield because of the mask requirement which she says that they do not have a right to impose on us. She explained, “Your health is not my responsibility. Your emotional well-being is not my responsibility,” Though she did cite her own claustrophobia as a reason for her lawsuit, so I guess 150,000 people are supposed to risk a lethal infection because of her emotional reaction to being asked to wear a mask over her mouth and nose. In classic white-privilege over-statement, she added in a news conference that the City Council, by asking us all to wear masks in public during a dangerous pandemic, that “they have created Nazi Germany here.” I’m sure you can all see the similarity between attempting military world domination and murdering millions of Jews, gays, gypsies, and special needs kids, and being asked to wear a mask.
She has set up a “go fund me” fund, asking for donations made out to her personally to help pay for her legal fight against this “Nazi” move on the part of
the city. What galls me about her hypocrisy even more is that she claims to be a minister . . . which is why I always tell the stranger sitting next to me on a plane trip that I am a philosophy professor.
I don’t believe we should call anyone “Karen” because it comes too close to being just another racial stereotype, besides, some people actually are named Karen and they probably want their name back but Rachel makes me understand why people came up with the term.
Rachel sees herself as an exemplary Christian while failing to get the answer right to one of the first questions in the Bible, “Am I my brother’s keeper.” Clearly, she doesn’t want to be. She is willing to fight for her right to be socially irresponsible and to publicly engage in depraved indifference towards her sisters and brothers, but she still wants to be the church lady.
All of which is complicated for me by the fact that her legal counsel is our former city council member, Kristi Fulnecky, who literally embodies almost everything that generally makes people hate lawyers and right-wing Republicans. So, I don’t know about you, but I’m not donating to the legal defense fund.
We took our wisdom lesson today from a story about the famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead,
Who told a class that the earliest sign of human civilization was tethered to the find of a human femur that had belonged to a man about 15,000 years ago. He had broken his leg and had survived long enough for it to heal. In most of nature, if you break the largest bone in your leg, you can’t run from danger, you can’t hunt, you can’t go for water, and so, in the animal kingdom, and among human ancestors prior to this, a broken femur meant that you would die.
The evolutionary turn towards humanity was when tribal humans were able to move beyond the instinct to care for vulnerable babies to also apply that compassion to the sick and the elderly of their tribe. If Donald Trump had been around 15,000 years ago and saw this caveman with a broken leg, he would have said, “That’s a pre-existing condition, we don’t cover that.” Which, if Margaret Mead is correct in her anthropological assessment that caring for the man with a broken leg was a sign of humanity, not being willing to care for a man with a pre-
existing condition might therefore indicate that Trump is less than human . . . and that assumption matches previous evidence but that is not what we are here to talk about today.
What we are here to talk about was this crucial moment in ancient history when our pre-human ancestors stopped to consider taking on the challenge of caring about another member of the tribe who could no longer care for himself. This point of reflection when horror and fear are conquered by something else . . . when a primitive mind moves beyond sympathy, beyond empathy, to compassion . . . a level of compassion that involves willing sacrifice for another person. In fact, in this case, I can say even that this wounded individual became a “person” when someone decided that he was worth the risk, the effort, the sacrifice, to take care of him until he could walk again.
It is a choice. You can see the wounded man as an “other” or as “one of us.” Maybe even see that it wouldn’t take very much of a twist of circumstances for you to be the one lying on the forest floor faced with the prospect of becoming saber-tooth food by sunset. It is in this very ancient impulse to “do unto others what you would have them to do unto you,” that we find our humanity.
But here is the problem: the work of evolution is never entirely finished. It is not that this cave man 15,000 years ago had a dawning realization and forever since there human civilization has been aware that we are our brother and sister’s keepers.
One moment in history we realize that we are our brother’s keeper and then, 15,000 years later, that old reptilian brain is still down there in our brain stem and we can give full throated vent to the belief that your health, your well-being, your survival is just not my problem. And I don’t mean to exploit Karen . . . I mean RACHEL here because it really isn’t just her. Some days it is all of us, and every day, it is a lot of us, who choose not to evolve, to take a giant step backwards.
We have very persuasive language about it…. We need to have boundaries . … we don’t want to be enablers . . . we need to tend our own gardens . . . . you be you, I’ll be me. There is some truth behind all of that . . . but then there is this guy with a broken leg, you know, the person who lost their job, whose employer moved to China, the one who struggles with demons we cannot see but that are real to them.
There are people who have a very high likelihood of dying from Covid-19 if they get it . . . people who need for us to wear a mask, wash our hands, keep our distance, and get a vaccine when we can.
How human we are is not about something that happened among our ancestors thousands of years ago. How human we are is the sum total of the choices we have made during our lives. We don’t always choose correctly. We get it right sometimes, we get it wrong sometimes, and sometimes we are just too tired to do the right thing that we know is right.
Still, I love this bit of wisdom from the solitude of Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.’
Mrs. Shelton, in spite of her protestations of faith, is reacting out of fear, letting her lizard brain speak before her more evolved brain gets a chance to do the right thing. And, Mrs. Fulnecky is, well, being Mrs. Fulnecky . . . her name has more than 4 letters but it is still a 4 letter word . . . but you, you are not Shelton or Fulnecky . . . about you I can say that I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a person to elevate her or himself by conscious endeavor.
Covid-19 is highly infectious. It often manages to get around masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing and it may even get past the first rounds of vaccines and we can be reasonably frightened by this potentially lethal virus. But beyond that fear, this is our opportunity to evolve, to be more than what we have been, to be the heroes that the moment calls for.
Compassion is the key to the spiritual life. You are the one who will not leave the guy with the broken leg to die. You are the ones with an evolved conscience. I trust you and I believe in you.
