John Mark Hicks

[Message by Jared Randall at All Saints Church of Christ, February 17, 2019, in Nashville, Tennessee.]

Today, I want to start by listing the basic ideas that make up Darwinian thoughts about Survival of the Fittest. Don’t worry, you’ll see why later. There are three basic ideas.

1. Domesticated plants and animals show a tremendous range of variation. That sounds right, my cats are both cats yet only one feels the need to bite my toes in the morning to make sure I’m up.
2. A similar range of variation exists in nature among wild species. Kinda simple, elephants in India are different than Elephants in Africa. There’s variation.
3. All living things are engaged in a struggle for existence. X2. Everything wants to survive for as long as possible, that’s obvious. And if we need the same things to survive, we’re going to have to share; and if there’s not enough to share than one of us is going to have to die, and who ever dies doesn’t get to make more mouths to feed.

That’s basically it. That’s basically what Darwin noticed that no one else at the time did. Something that any gardener here instinctively knows, that there’s a web of dependence and competition that makes sense of everything that we do.

One of my favorite parts of Richard’s book, Myths America Lives By, is the section on the Gilded Age, where social Darwinism is on full throttle. I love that section because it basically shows how people applied those three building blocks of natural selection to an entire economic system that crushed the weakest people in society and wrote it off as “only natural.” It’s only natural- this is how the world works: you eat the same food as me, I need all the food, you fend for yourself.

People like Andrew Carnegie in 1889, one of the earliest, strongest millionaires, recognized that this is how nature was set up, which means this is how God had set the system up, which meant that those who were at the top of the pile were the ones living by God’s system.

Let me read this quote, “While the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as condition to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment and the concentration of business… in the hands of a few…” and then later “Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined someday to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring “Peace on earth, among men Good Will..”

This is the game that we play- in America especially. Because there are only so many jobs. There only so many seats in the University lecture hall- only so many spots in the parking lot. There are only so many offices at the Capitol building in Washington DC.

So I got a headache today after reading Luke chapter 6 over and over noticing that no one is going to put these words across the doorways of the admissions building. No one’s going to move their family across the country because the company offered a smaller paycheck. No doctors have asked me if I have considered taking medication that would make me more sad.

I don’t know what world Jesus is living in. You know, Luke has this way of just shoving it in our faces. He just wants you to know. Reading Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, he’s kind of content to let you figure it out for yourself- but Luke just holds it up: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Doesn’t that give you a headache? I can imagine Andrew Carnegies head popping off if someone read him that text. I can imagine my own head popping off if I could understand it. I don’t know what world Jesus is living in, but it’s one that doesn’t make any sense. I guess it’s just one where The Origin of Species hadn’t been written yet. Because now we know about how the game works.

I think that I’m realizing lately that Jesus isn’t just the best hope for the world, but he’s the only hope for the world. And it’s because he’s the one who barges in on game night, clears the table and rips up our precious little rule book. Jesus is the only one with the guts to check the soil and taste the salt. Jesus looks around and says that surely there is some river where we can plant our shrubs.

Luke points to us and he says that either the poor are blessed or Andrew Carnegie is. It can’t be both. But with that said, Paul writes the scariest thing that we’ve read today. I got a headache when I read Luke, and I got shivers when I read Paul. Because he makes it clear; we are either living in a world where Christ is raised from the dead and the poor are blessed, or we aren’t. Jesus either flipped the board and cleared the table, or we lost the game. Jesus’s death on the cross was either the new way towards new life, or it was the non-survival of the not-so-fit.

We cannot be sure which is correct. But we can trust. And blessed are those who trust in the Lord, even between the headaches and shivers. No, better yet, as Jeremiah says, blessed are those whose trust is the Lord. Blessed are the poor and the hungry and the sad, for they shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream that only the trusting can taste.

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