There was a day when this time of year was punctuated with harvest festivals.  Many pagan rituals were motivated by bringing in a better harvest, tactics to invoke more rain or sunshine.  They built temples, they had feasts and prayers.  As pagans began to convert to Christianity, they modified these practices into events thanking God for his blessings.  People were closer to the land and they realized that without the fertility of the land we would starve.  A seed is placed in the earth and it brings forth an increase, a head of wheat which is a sheaf of multiple seeds.  When that increase was not sufficient, there was famine.  When it was sufficient or overly so, there was praise of God’s blessing.  The excess could be sold and other aspects of culture could be pursued.  In fact the name Joseph means ‘increase’.  The name has not been common since the Puritans one of their ministers, Increase Mather, comes to mind.  They understood the importance of increase, their lives depended on it. We think we have the luxury of forgetting.

We here in Bozeman should be familiar with agriculture.  This is still a largely agricultural community.  We have an agriculture college and it has may test field throughout the valley and the state.  Various hybrids are bred and tested for factors like disease resistance, bug resistance and yield.  Obviously the plants which prove most resistant to pests and which produce the most increase, are chosen and spread to the farmers.  Over the years this system as allowed modern farming to produce far more food with much less land.  This has enabled us to spend more time doing other things, like distributing porn on the internet.  Now lets suppose that instead of choosing the most productive plants we chose the least productive plants.  I know silly right?  But this is what sin does.  Sin is not logical, hmm I’ve heard that somewhere recently.  So let’s say we not only choose the plants that produce the least but we choose the plants that don’t reproduce at all.  Then we replant these plants.  And we develop a whole festival to these plants.  We might have parades as a part of these festivals.  We could call the new plants ‘diversity’ and all wear rainbow clothes and carry rainbow flags.  Um, I’m sorry did I say ‘could’?  This is homosexuality, the celebration of infertility.  The celebration of the eunuch, the steer, the capon.

Of course, our society has been celebrating infertility for years under a different name.  Long before the homosexualist had his way with society we began celebrating infertility as ‘birth control’.  Surprisingly the call of convenience was too hard to resist even by the Christian.  The Catholic church held firm, but the call of pro-death Nazi’s like Margaret Sanger was too strong for the Protestants. With Sanger’s narrative, of over population and fear that somehow we had better assist evolution, or 80 million years of progress might be stopped by the unfit races, they conquered.  After society got used to the idea of marriage as a means to pursuing sexual pleasure, Katy bar the door.  Marriages which no longer offer the same sexual stimulation they once had, were simply dissolved.  “It was no one’s fault, we grew apart”.  Marriage fell apart, commitment meant noting, it became all about pleasure, tax and medical benefits.  At this point why not include the homsexualist?  They  ‘love’ each other too, by this new definition.  Who are you to criticize their wanting to find love and then visit it in the hospital?  You backward bigoted hater!  And we didn’t have an answer because we lost the more fundamental argument a generation ago.

Part of the Beulah Land tradition.  ‘Beulah Land’ is the married, pregnant land.  Isaiah 63:3

Oh you might say, “What about the couple that can’t have kids”.  And you would probably say it whilst sticking out your tongue or with some other such snarky expression.  Well you are onto something. This is infertility.  This has been seen as a problem, the world over.  This was the charge against the witches of old.  The witches Increase Mather gets accused of trying to burn.  But this is a case of the exception proving the rule.  This is a concept we really don’t understand these days.  The fact that your mind goes to that situation is because you know it isn’t normal.  It proves what normal is by it’s peculiarity, think ‘unusual’ not ‘creepy and weird’.  Our society wants to take every deviant or strange situation and expand the norm to accommodate it.  If some new crime is purpetrated in some new way, we want to make more laws binding everyone instead of realizing this is a unique situation that needs to be fairly judged under the law and not proof the the law has failed.  If we can find a person born with both sets of genitals, we want to redefine gender, instead of realizing this is a deformity.  A case of the world not working as it ought.  The fact that some couples can’t have children, is not proof that marriage is not about children. Just like the wheat that withers and dies before it brings forth fruit, is not the wheat that should be celebrated.  That is why we mourn with those couples at their infertility.  The fact that this couple can adopt, is no reason to remake the created order and suggest that Adam and Steve can be parents because they can adopt too. It does not suggest that they are parents the same way as Adam and Eve.

“Oh but it’s working out in Europe, neener-neener.”  Oh really?  Well, it’s working out just like the wheat.  Most of Europe is committing cultural suicide.  Their birthrates are falling to the point that their population halves every generation.  This doesn’t sound fine to me.   Celebrate unfruitfulness and you will become unfruitful.  By this we can see that the commands of God are not just about advancing in heaven or the afterlife.  They work here too.  They are for our own good, now.  We disobey them at our own peril.

Oh the stupid things we have done, trying to be different than the Catholics.