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Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost – June 6, 2010
Something not very sweet is happening to the honey bees, and the effects are more far reaching than we would at first imagine. Over the past four years, about a third of honeybee hives in the United States have died off, says the Department of Agriculture, which notes that it is “an unsustainable situation for insects responsible for pollinating many important food crops, among them apples, blueberries, almonds, cranberries, cucumbers and more. In fact, says one Penn State agriculture professor, “One in every three bites of food (we) eat comes from a plant, or depends on a plant, that was pollinated by an insect, most likely a bee.”
So what’s happening here? There’s no single answer; bees are dying for reasons known and unknown; some say it’s a virus, or a fungus, or a parasite or a pesticide. Some researchers are investigating the electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, wondering if the signals were disturbing the bees. (This may explain why there are no bees within miles of my daughter and her friends.)
Nobody knows for sure; it’s a mystery giving birth to a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, in which healthy worker bees fly away, leaving the hive, honey, queen and immature workers to die. “It’s altruistic suicide,” said one expert. “The workers somehow know they’re sick, and in an attempt to stop their sisters from getting infected, they fly away.”
Altruistic behavior is actually common among bees, as it is among a number of species with complex social systems. And few are more complex than that of your average honey bee. According to one biologist, “The honey bee exhibits a combination or individual traits and social co-operation which are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.”
Each hive is constructed in a repeating series of almost perfect hexagonal cells. Within each hive is a rigid caste system in which everyone knows his place and everyone does his or her – mostly her - job. The queen, of course, reigns over the nest, running the show and laying the eggs, some 1,500 a day. There is only one queen per hive and the other bees – male and female - exist solely to serve her. (Comparisons with the rector’s home will not be made here.)
The male bees, called drones, are stingless, defenseless, and unable to feed themselves. (Comparisons with some of our parish member’s homes will not be made here.) The sole function of the drones is to mate with the new queens; immediately after doing so, they die, probably wondering if it was all worth it.
The majority of a bee hive’s population consists of what are called worker bees, all females. A healthy colony may contain 80,000 worker bees at its peak growth in the early summer. These bees live up to their name, building and maintaining the hive, caring for all the little bees, protecting the nest, leaving home each day to gather nectar and pollen which they then convert into honey. And after all that, they have to feed the queen. A drone basically has one job; a worker bee’s work is never done. And it’s all work, too. These bees do not mate and therefore cannot reproduce, like the queen; their eggs, unfertile, grow into drones.
Even when they are setting up shop in your building’s walls – as you recall happened here not so long ago – bees are fascinating creatures, inspiring sacred scriptures and intriguing natural scientists.
When God first speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt…and I have come down…to bring them up out of that land to a…land flowing with milk and honey.”
And The Qur’an even has a chapter entitled “The Bees,” which says, in part, “And thy Lord taught the bee to build its cells in hills, on trees and in men’s habitations. There issues from within their bodies a drink of varying colors; truly in this is a sign for those who give thought.”
Among those who gave it a lot of thought, from an evolutionary, scientific perspective, was Charles Darwin. As one biographer put it, Darwin “was specially exorcised over honey bees.”
What got him so worked up was the existence of those pesky worker bees; his question was not, as ours is today, why are they dying off, but rather, why didn’t they do so a long time ago? You see, according to the fundamental principle of natural selection, only those traits which benefit a creature’s reproductive success are passed down from generation to generation. Consider a wolf, Darwin wrote. When prey is scarce, “the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the best chance of surviving and so be preserved.” They, in turn, would produce offspring which possess those swift and slim traits which helped their parents to survive.
But worker bees, as we’ve seen, do not reproduce. They are what evolutionary scientists call “biological altruists;” that is, their behavior benefits other organisms at a cost to themselves. They build, they forage, they feed the queen, they defend the nest by attacking would be intruders – dying in the process, mind you. And, it appears, they commit mass suicide to prevent the spread of disease among their members.
So, according to Darwin’s theory, this type of bee should have vanished long ago. Natural selection leads you to expect animals that behave in ways which increase their own chances of survival and reproduction. When Darwin pondered the existence and the behavior of the worker bee, he wondered, what’s in it for them?
And what he settled on was this: blood kinship. If natural selection acts only on an individual basis, favoring some creatures over others, then it seems altruism cannot evolve, for behaving in a self-sacrificing way would not be beneficial for a single creature. It is possible, though, that altruism is advantageous at a group level. As one Stanford scientist recently put it: “A group containing lots of altruists, each ready to subordinate their own selfish interest for the greater good of the group, may well have a survival advantage over a group composed mainly of selfish organisms.” And this certainly appears to be the case; until now, honey bees seem to have gotten along just fine.
Help those who are just like you, and altruism makes sense. But, does what works for bees work for us? How do we account for altruism in human beings? From a root which means “other people,” the word itself only dates to 1851 when it was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Does that mean there were no altruists before then?
Studying our Scriptures and pondering the teachings of our tradition, you would think that, for us, altruism is the exception, not the rule. Ever since Adam and Eve took those fateful bites from the forbidden fruit we have been tainted by what the church fathers called “original sin” best be described as “selfishness;” our only interest is our own interest; our only concern is ourselves; even God can’t tell us what to do. Well, he can; we just choose to ignore him.
Selfishness, egoism – the belief that morality is solely based on self interest – seems to be our natural state, one we can be fairly certain we will not evolve out of any time soon.
And yet, we’ve seen the opposite of egoism; we’ve seen altruism. Our history, both holy and secular, is replete with examples of people behaving in ways which seem to run counter to all natural expectations. And not just saints, either, but regular, every day people, like a widow who lived with her son in a barren, drought stricken land; a widow whose actions went beyond the demands of blood kinship and entered the realm of altruism.
In the passage immediately preceding the raising of the widow’s son today, I Kings tells of the prophet Elijah’s journey to Zarephath – a pagan land – and his request to the widow for food and water, all triggered by the command of God. “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” Right away, in the midst of a drought, she goes and gets it. Then he adds, “Bring me a morsel of bread…” Here she balks, stating the simple fact that she has “nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.”
Instead of preparing a last meal, Elijah tells her to make a cake with what she has and bring it to him first, then she may feed herself and her child. And why should she even consider doing this? Because a man she has never seen before assures her that a God she has never worshipped has made a promise: “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”
She did as she was asked, putting a stranger’s welfare ahead of herself and her child’s. There was no promise of a personal reward, no guarantee of future benefits to her; for all she knew he would take all the food himself; people have been known to lie. And even though the story says that God commanded the woman to feed Elijah, God also commanded Adam and Eve not to bite into the apple; look what happened there.
God commands us to care for his creation; look at the bees, look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what happened there. Looking at the muck washing up on the coast, the words of Ezekiel come to mind, “As for you, my flock, says the Lord God: is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of the pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet?” Then, after a few more verses, God adds, “I will set up over them one shepherd and he shall feed them...And I, the Lord, will be their God.”
And it is to our shepherd and his love for us that we finally turn; in his grace and in his word we find a way in a world filled with wolves, a way which takes us beyond survival and into fullness of life. “This is my commandment,” he said, “That you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you…I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father…And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
For that fruit to last, literally and spiritually, some sort of sacrifice is necessary or we will all bear the cost. According to Michigan State University: “The value of agricultural crops dependent on honey bee pollination was estimated to be $14.6 billion per year in the U.S (and) Michigan’s fruit and vegetable industry produces over two billion dollars per year and nearly 50% of that value is due entirely to honey bee pollination. This is more than 100 times the value of honey alone.”
Yes, the Word we hear is of great value; as the Psalm says, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” But what is of greater value is the Word made flesh, in Jesus’ self-giving love to us; and our self-giving love to all of God’s family and all of God’s holy creation.