DECEMBER 31 2017
LESS THAN TEN YEARS?
2016 was a real ‘news’ year, with Brexit and Trump and lots of hot weather. How about 2017? To me it looks like the same, even more so. While ‘no news’ signals good news, signals the old and trusted way of life, ‘news’ usually means uncertainty, insecurity, unpredictability.
In store is Change, Change with a Capital C: in 2016, the engine of change got cranked up. In 2017 change will speed up: change and more change will shift in high gear, which means that the future will be much, much more different.
Much of that acceleration is due from what we have wrought on both Poles where the real WEATHER makers are. The ARCTIC NEWS website shows that the ice in the Far North is disappearing beyond the wildest prediction. Last week it was 30 degrees Celsius – 50 Fahrenheit –there above normal, and that happening in December when there is perpetual darkness at the North Pole, 24/7.
The website states that: “The situation is dire. If no action is taken on climate change, the earth faces a potential temperature rise of more than 10°C or 18°F by 2026.”
Ten years, a blink of the eye. Is that all we’ve got? One more decade? Of course, of course no action will be taken: so it’s almost sure that we will experience a sudden, unexpected, as lightning in a blue sky, a beyond extraordinary event, totally fatal for all of us: a jump in the world-wide temperature of some 10 degrees Celsius, 18 Fahrenheit.
What’s behind all this?
ARCTIC NEWS last week featured a closer look at LAKE BAIKAL, in Siberia, within the Arctic Circle, the depository of 20 percent of the world’s accessible drinking water. It’s deep, some 1600 meters, with a bottom temperature of 3.5°C. Underneath that huge lake lies 425 Giga tons of methane. Compare that to the 5 Giga tons currently in the atmosphere. Methane can be up to 100 times more devastating than CO2, our car exhausts.
Now remember that our entire world is screaming for water – used mostly for irrigation of agriculture, fracking and obtaining synthetic oil from tar sands.
Take a look at the Aral Sea, a similar water body, further to the west in Asia: it disappeared almost overnight because of climate change and irrigation. If this were to happen to Lake Baikal it could release 85 times the methane now in the atmosphere, which would increase the world temperature by 10 C, spelling the end of the world: we all would burn to crisps.
That is only one place. The Arctic Ocean is shallow: 50-100 meters deep. There many more Giga tons of methane are buried. The same is true in the Arctic Tundra, both in Canada and Siberia, where melting permafrost is already unlocking much more deadly methane.
If 30°C above normal in the Arctic is shrugged off as a blip, what if this blip turns out to be a harbinger of what is in store for all of us: sudden death.
I find it difficult to fathom my true feelings, but the extraordinary weather events lately, the deviation from the norm, the irrationality of political events, the extremely vulnerable state of the economy, the callousness and shallowness of the religious situation, the total lack of vision of politicians whose quest for economic growth is absurd, the exponential rate of drug overdose deaths by mostly young people, all serve to increase my sense of foreboding.
Suppose, suppose that the Lord comes back and nobody really expects him?
The BIG ONE?
Revelation 16: 18 is just one of the many Bible books that predict an earthquake. There it says: “Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred … “
Now almost every day a new earthquake causes upsets somewhere in the world. Does this passage point to the US-Canadian Pacific Rim where some 100 million people live?
I try to do my little thing to prepare me for eternity. Frankly it is always on my mind while I venture – not very successfully – to emulate a lifestyle of eternity, difficult to do in a carbon-saturated environment.
I know, this is not the most encouraging start of a new year, but when I look ahead to 2017, I see elections in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands all having the potential to destroy the European Union.
And then there is TRUMP.
Does he account for the inexplicable restlessness in me, the afore-mentioned feeling of foreboding, fostered mainly by his irrational utterances and his creation-destroying appointments? I see the USA as a disaster in waiting in the Trump presidency. Society has become so complex that a simpleton like he may have no clue how to deal with the different political and bureaucratic entities which may resist him all the way. Enough to drive him even more crazy.
So where are the hopeful signs? Are there any?
I sometimes feel like that old man Simeon, who suddenly pops up in Luke 2. He was told by the Holy Spirit that he, in his lifetime, would meet Jesus Christ. And he did: he held the baby Jesus in his arms. What a feeling would that have been! It made him exclaim “My eyes have seen your salvation”.
True, the Holy Spirit has not talked to me directly, yet I must trust my gut feelings. Then Simeon was the very exception, something I feel as well. Israel then had only one wish: to be freed from Roman tyranny. That desire dominated Jesus’ disciples even until his Ascension.
Today is no different: we want Economic Growth at all cost: job security, prosperity. There is hardly any real desire for the Lord to return because, unlike Simeon who saw salvation and eternal life on the earth, we have utopian ideas of human-induced peace. Forget it. It’s impossible. Always has been. Frankly I see the Lord’s return as the only hopeful sign.
Are we due for tremendous change?
Every 500 years or so the world undergoes a mega-metamorphosis. In the year 1,000 before Christ, the Davidic kingdom saw its start. Five hundred years later Buddhism emerged and the Jewish exile to Babylon took place. The Christian era had its beginning 2000 years ago while Islam’s inception was between the years 500-600. One thousand years ago, starting in 1096, there were the Crusades, a Europe-wide event to wrest Jerusalem from the forces of the prophet Mohammed. This year, 2017, it is exactly 500 years ago -1517 – that Martin Luther started the Reformation, causing immense friction in Europe.
We now are at a crucial point in history where everything has an expiry date: globalization, nature, religion, potable water, the use of paper money, democracy, stable weather, ice on the North Pole, and the list goes on. Yes, the very fate of the human race is at stake. It looks more and more that the Earth too has an expiry date.
Is that the reason why I am so uneasy?
All this reminds me of Jesus.
Jesus was convicted by the religious rulers of his day for saying that he would break down the Temple, the very symbol of THE GARDEN OF EDEN, representing the unspoiled creation. Jesus, the first-born of creation, the maker of heaven and earth, was accused of ‘the sin against creation’, the very sin that is the most offensive of all sins because it’s directly aimed at God’s majesty.
Jesus was accused for ridiculing God’s Paradise on earth, accused of saying that he himself would create a new temple, a new Paradise. That was his sin. The church then convicted Jesus for committing the original sin.
Actually, that’s what we have been doing right from the start! We always have been busy, right until now and into the Day of Christ, breaking down the Holy Temple, God’s so beloved creation, replacing it with our own culture, our arts and sciences, our music and literature, our films and television, all in an effort to build a new paradise. We have not respected The Tree of Life, and so assured our death.
The great irony of all ages is that the church of Jesus’ day killed him because he was accused of the very crime we are daily engaged in: he, the sinless one, took our sin, our very own creation-defiling sin, upon his shoulders.
And the church today?
Don’t get me going. The US church elected a person who is the exponent of all that offends creation. Watch 2017 take revenge in unprecedented ways, or should I spell that as UNPRESIDENTED ways?
This brings me to Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche always told us ‘to remain true to the earth.’ He, the offspring of generations of clergymen from both parents, a brilliant man, a sharp observer, a devout Christian, lost his mind when he saw one of God’s creatures, a poor horse, whipped to death.
We, insensitive as we are, find it normal to be active participants in the death of 60 percent of all mammals. Nietzsche revolted against a Christianity that sought escape in heaven, an idea now so entrenched that many of the hymns we sing have lines slandering and depreciating this world, together with the praise and exaltation of a heaven to come, drawing odious comparisons between the things of this earth and the blessings of heaven. Current church practice gushes in a very unsportsmanlike manner over an imaginary beyond, to the detriment and disadvantage of a “here,” of this earth, of this life. That turned Nietzsche off so much that he lost his mind.
Another year lies ahead, another year mostly lived without God and disregard of his creation. We simply cannot expect God to be with us when we intensify our efforts to despoil creation.
Jesus was killed because he bore the sin against creation, which he did not commit but which we do every day of the entire year. We cannot escape it. We have it built into our way of life.
So, the age-old question pops up again. How then shall we live in the coming year, which, who knows, may be among our last?
The perennial question.
It seems to me that we must slowly retreat from the system that perpetuates the sin of Adam, the sin against creation. How that is to be done is a question that confronts each of us in a different way. What it boils down to is that, as Bonhoeffer has observed, we must look at the `telos`, the end and work back from there.
Again the opening lines of Bonhoeffer’s CREATION AND FALL come to mind:
“The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.” He then quotes Jesus: “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing,” as recorded in Isaiah 43: 18-19.
Don’t expect the church to do this. The church only lives for the church. So, it’s up to us, as church members.
That’s our mandate for 2017, as it has been for every year, but now more urgent and necessary than ever. The old things have brought us where we are: at the edge of destruction. The world’s answers are failing and, as true fanatics, their leaders are redoubling their efforts.
Expect more of the same, even more so: more destruction, more war, more empty rhetoric, more irrelevant political and religious banter.
We must quietly feel our way to eternity, perhaps alone, perhaps in a small group. We must pray a lot, try to walk or bike the road to life everlasting. Take on the burden of Christ, for (Matthew 11: 30) “his yoke is easy and his burden is light.”
Perhaps that also means that we must travel light: the less we own and the less we are engaged in worldly matters, the easier it is to travel on the path of Christ.