Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

Monday December 11 2024 

More random sayings (3), perhaps better described as 

“incoherent utterances.”

1. ??“Why is everyone so grumpy?”  the New York Times asks. The answer mentions Covid and Inflation, but misses the real cause: “The main reason is that all of creation is in a down mood, because we are the trees, the animals, the birds, the soil, the air……” 

• I have been re-reading some old books. In my second and third reading I often discover great truths I missed. One of these is in “The Hidden Face of God”, by a professor of Hebrew: Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman. He alerted me to Deuteronomy 32: 20: “I shall hide my face to see what their end will be”. That ending is what we are experiencing NOW.

• “Amusing ourselves to death”, is the title of a book Neil Postman wrote, referring to Television. TV has conditioned us to digest visually entertaining material, but it is given to us in bits and pieces, effectually eliminating prolonged public discussion and rational communal affairs. TV brought us Donald Trump: the face of Satan. These are serious times, and TV fails to inform us. No wonder I stopped watching it.

•  There is a saying: “time will tell”, but time is running out: literally. Time too is a disappearing substance that has a beginning and an end. Eternity is upon us, is upon all God’s children, but not on others. For them time continues to exist and with it, pure anxiety. 

• “Eating ourselves to death” finds it origin in the fast-food business. “Curing ourselves to death” finds place in hospitals, the most dangerous of places.

• Churches are called House of God.  The Bible calls creation the House of God. When will churches learn that simple truth?

• The name “automobile” comes from the Greek word Auto, meaning ‘self’ and the Latin ‘motare’, meaning ‘to move’, hence: self-propelled. Nothing is further from the truth. One tankful of gasoline has more horsepower than 100 able bodies. Our ‘self-propelled vehicles – now world-wide numbering One Billion – will self-propel us into perdition. 

• The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek ‘kurios domo’, the house of the Lord. Today one of the most thriving businesses is to decommission church buildings. The nearby Actinolite United Church is now ‘the Marble Art Centre’, the word ‘marble’ pointing to its marble stone structure, and the marble mined there a century ago. Our Anglican Church is sold and the Salvation Army’s building is for sale. My church can seat 250 people, far more than the total gathered in the 3 remaining churches on a typical Sunday.  

• The only time young people are possibly exposed to prayer and Bible reading is when people are buried. Does this cause them to associate the church with death? 

1. Obesity is an ailment caused by the lack of functioning family life which, at one time, thrived on stated sit-down meals, prepared from scratch, where conversation was as important as nutrition.

1. The wrong choice of spouse often leads to premature death. Male spouses suffer more and die sooner when they marry an incompatible marriage partner. 

1. The selection of a spouse is the most important choice a person can make. 

1. The reason why marriage is becoming less and less popular is intimately connected to the decline of churches.

1. My wife, a master handwriting analyst, taught me that there are four different human personalities: Elephant, butterfly, turtle and frog. The Clinton couple, Hilary and Bill, is an excellent example of Elephant- she – with Butterfly – he. A stable combination. Turtle and frog, too, jell well. The former are extraverts, the latter introverts. You might want to see where you fit in, and your spouse.

More aphorisms next week.

A NEW COP SONG and

SOME MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS (2)

I am an old-fashioned guy, with new-fangled ideas, especially about the church. To me, monologues, also known as sermons, are passive experiences, with mainly the hearing engaged, easily distracted, while multi-note expression, also known as singing, is much more active, with eyes, voice, brain, ears participating.

That said: we need new church songs! Scrap the 19-20^th pious and outdated hymns, often heaven-oriented, but treasure the old melodious tunes, and then simply write songs to reflect today’s world, because – for the first time in 100 years – the world is trying to change: we are hearing, reading, experiencing daily that we must shake our addiction to carbon fuels: an (almost) impossible venture. But our future depends on it. That’s why we also need NEW songs!

It’s not difficult to compose a new song: just pick a tune, and a theme, and pronto, a new hymn is soon composed: if I can do it, anybody can. Take COP.

The next three (3) weeks is COP time again, an annual affair: Number 28, meaning that 27 “Conferences Of the People”, have preceded this one, all with negative results. These UN sponsored gatherings are, supposedly, about eliminating or at least diminishing Climate Change. Yes, it warrants a new song, emphasizing its lofty goal: to save the world from burning: literally a hot topic these days.

Here’s simple try: by no means a literary masterpiece about this present problem.

COP 28:

Is it too late?

Should we preserve the present?

Keep burning oil,

Risk great turmoil

Endanger our essence.

COP 28,

Is it too late?

Can we still do the mending?

Can we retreat

And stop the heat

For it would cause our ending.

COP 28

Is it too late?

Our lifestyle needs a changing

Turn down the heat

Eat much less meat

Our life needs re-arranging.

COP 28

Is it too late?

Our future is the new earth

God promised this

He’s not amiss

Pray for a speedy re-birth.

I agree: it’s not the greatest poetry, but so what? It gives a message; it is a communal act, in which the so-called laity is actively involved.

A few more random thoughts.

Carl Jung and his idea of the collective unconsciousness, is now evident in anger, war, climatic turmoil, political discord; they make me think that the human race is preparing to face its own extermination.

 Jevons and his paradox. The resources saved by do-gooders are gleefully used by those who don’t care, so the overall resource consumption keeps growing. 

Our collective response to the environmental crisis has been marked by denial, delay and delusion – denial of the problem’s seriousness, delay in doing anything significant about it and delusion about the efficacy of those things we’ve finally gotten around to doing.

The Bible records that the early humans lived hundreds of years, as many as 968 in the case of Methuselah. The abundance of trees ‘in the beginning’ made this possible. We cannot live without trees and we cannot live without air. Trees produce life-giving and life-prolonging oxygen.

We know the answers, and they will be given in the COP28 meetings, but they will be shunned and ridiculed: only today’s moment counts, the present prosperity, the current standard of living, and so, 

we plot and plunder, 

we waste and wonder, 

we foul and flounder, 

we try and trample

and still expect to emerge victorious. 

It now is beyond certain that we will experience the utmost of floods, the tipping points of earthquakes, the culmination of all possible crimes, human-induced and divinely determined, so severe…. 

Here I go again: great in the negative, sparse in the positive.

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS (1)

 I continue my blog, not on a strict, disciplined weekly basis, but more haphazard. My aging brain directed me to some ‘sayings’ I had gathered over the years, under the heading of Incoherent Utterances, but I decided to give them a new title: Some Random Thoughts. Actually, the proper name for these is APHORISMS, defined as ‘concise and perhaps witty ways to express a thought’. Well, forget about the ‘witty’, that requires more talent than I possess. I chose ‘random thoughts’, because it better suits my aims to avoid words whose meaning is not immediately clear: aphorism is not a word we encounter too often. Also, I write for a global audience, where English is the second language

The concepts that engage my consciousness, are, I believe, not really original, because “everything is connected to everything else”, one of the laws of ecology, suggesting that every thought has its root in something previous: basically, there is nothing new under the sun. 

While I am thinking and writing, an ‘aphoristic’ thought is gathering momentum in my brain. Here it is: “The much-hyped AI will probably travel a road contrary to the ancient Tower of Babel, which fueled world-wide development. AI could well cause the exact opposite: global destruction”.

Some more examples.

Here are some of my sayings, picked rather at random from my collection.

• The veil that hides the face of the future is woven by the hand of Mercy.
• Wisdom comes from trying to see the totality of things. Without observing a matter from beginning to end, no positive development is possible.
• When bluster and lies find a ready acceptance in the nation, collapse is not far away.
• The general acceptance of television has accelerated the disappearance of organized religion.  
• If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the word ‘fear’ needs an acceptable explanation.
• The fear of the Lord starts with seeing the harmony in creation, observing the intricacy of all that lives.
• If wisdom is seeing the interrelatedness of matters, then stupidity is failing to see the coherence of all that is.
• The Bible says that ‘the lust of money is the root of all evil’. Evil started in the Garden of Eden when humanity chose utility – the apple – over the aesthetic, the beauty of creation.
• Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, captured his thought in a stunning summary: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.” This statement is mindboggling – for me at least.
• I see Friedrich Nietzsche as the first true ecologist. I base this on a statement in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he writes: “I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, (his emphasis) and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! (heaven, in other words) Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them. (The majority of preachers).

If you have a favorite saying, secret hope or fear, or, text, Bible or otherwise, send it to me: bert@hielema.ca, and I will publish it to the world.

I will expand on this APHORISM topic in future instalments.

Saturday November 18 2023

GOD’S KINGDOM = WWW = Whole Wide World.

Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, ¹³ but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. ¹⁴ And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Jesus’ words, from Matthew 24, are becoming reality: take the first line: while the world’s population has quadrupled in my lifetime, churches in my white- race world, are closing or are near empty. I live in small-town Eastern Ontario, where exurban development has buoyed the population, but the church which I joined in 1980, has declined from some 70 people to a few dozen seniors. Wickedness has probably not increased, but most certainly ‘love has grown cold’. 

How about the rest of the text?

To me the next prediction is the greater mystery: “The gospel of the Kingdom will be preached!” Will the churches suddenly see the light and start preaching the Kingdom message, in accord with Jesus’ plea: “Seek first the Kingdom”?  

With churches in the Western world in deep decline, and, in the Rest of the World dominated by kingdom-shy, Heaven-promoting Pentecostalism, while the Roman Catholic Church often equates the church with the Kingdom, no, no, the church will definitely not suddenly start preaching The Kingdom message. Yet, Jesus tells me and you and everybody else, that the Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached everywhere, yes, everywhere.

Well…..

What does “The Gospel of the Kingdom” entail? What, actually, IS the Gospel of the Kingdom? It’s not the church.

My parent’s church, the Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands, had a Latin slogan, Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda, meaning, The Reformed Church, Always Reforming. However, The Reformed Church, became Nunquam Reformanda, Never Reforming, stuck in the Pagan Greek “Heaven” heresy, still dominating the totality of Christendom. 

I translated a book by Dr. J.H. Bavinck, and the publisher, Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. gave it the title, Between the Beginning and the End, a radical Kingdom Vision, so, yes, I have a notion what God’s Kingdom entails. Bavinck writes that “personal salvation and the salvation of ‘nature’ go hand in hand”. No wonder a Christian College refused to review it!

And then there is the Belgic Confession:

We know God by two means: first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe;¹ which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, His eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul saith (Rom. 1:20). All which things are sufficient to convince men, and leave them without excuse.

Yes, Creation IS God’s Primary Word! No excuse! Remember, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree”.

How then will “The Gospel of the Kingdom be preached in the whole world”? 

Global Warming, Climate Change: that’s how the Gospel of the Kingdom is being preached! It is shouting this very minute; it is now broadcast everywhere: not a square centimeter of soil is excepted; not a cubic millimeter of air escapes its curse; not a drop of water is left pure, not a breath of air remains unspoiled. 

God’s kingdom comprises all plants, all animals, all human beings, all air molecules, all water entities, all ground particles, all that has a name and has been placed in catalogues and scientific papers and journals: even those who have not yet been discovered and recognized: all these comprise the Kingdom and now we are discovering that this Gospel, this Holy Earth, is on the way out, and, as Elizabeth Kolbert has outlined in her book, The Sixth Extinction, is dying! and then the end will come.

Sin and Grace, Wickedness and Kingdom go together. That’s why the gospel of extinction, is now being preached throughout the world, proclaiming loud and clear that tampering with God’s Creation leads to death, while treasuring and observing and honoring her way leads to life: life eternal. Romans 1: 20 tells us that failure to recognize Creation as divine, and failure to love creation (see John 3: 16) results in death. In the Old Testament, God almost always chastised the people of Israel through climate disasters.

The world today and the 10 plagues in Egypt.

We now experience – in Climate Change – what Egypt underwent in the 10 plagues which were all environmental, ending in death. But it resulted in freedom. The same is happening today: Climate change will bring death to the present society, and give birth to the New.

Today, November 18, pledge, pray, live new creation, God’s Eternal Kingdom: WWW = The Whole Wide World.

Saturday November 11 2023

JESUS IS A JEW.

When we visited one of our three daughters, who lived near Beverly Hills, we stayed at a hotel next to a Messianic Synagogue, and on the Sabbath my wife and I attended the service there: very impressive, fully conforming to the rabbinic tradition, me wearing a yarmulka, a skullcap, observing the unfolding and reciting of the law, observing a cantor – an opera singer – chanting the required verses, but the preaching was from Corinthians. 

Is Jesus a Jew? 

Is Jesus a Jew? Of course, Jesus is a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly attended the Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text of the Hebrew Bible. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem where he was under the authority of priests…. He was born, lived, died, taught as a Jew. This is obvious to any casual reader of the gospel text. What’s striking is not so much that he was a Jew but that the gospels make no pretense that he wasn’t. 

Yes, Jesus was born a Jew, a true descendant of the House of David, hence born on Bethlehem, David’s home base. Jesus died a Jew, and he was raised from the dead, still being a Jew. When he returns, soon I believe, he will be visibly recognized as a Jew, just as I will be a blue-eyed white person – then a visible minority – in the New Creation, as black and brown or whatever, will dominate then. 

Being a Jew is something special.

By all accounts, Abraham was the first Jew, a man of great faith and wisdom, a man who left the security of his tribe and followed God’s instructions blindly, fully trusting the divine ordinances. He was the start of a great people, an epithet that has endured throughout the millennia. Much of the mental attributes of the modern world is of Jewish origin. Yet they were – and still are – the quintessential ‘strangers and sojourners’, the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. 

In my youth I witnessed how, during the 1940-45 occupation, Jewish families were torn apart, the German Polizei arresting first the little children, then, days later, hauled away the father, leaving for a while an agonizing mother: satanic cruelty! 

“Jews are just like everyone else, only more so,” somebody once said. True: it gave us a John, the Baptizer; it gave us also a Judas, the betrayer; it gave us an Einstein, but also an Epstein.

The Final Phase.

We now are in history’s final phase. A 4,000 years old vendetta is in its end-game: Sarai versus Hagar, Isaac versus Ishmael, Jew versus Arab, Israel versus its surrounding neighbours.

And where does Jesus fit in, the eternal Jew?

Jesus called himself, not a Jew, but “The Son of Man”. When, in that famous chapter, John 3, Nicodemus, a distinctive Jewish teacher, came to him at night, Jesus told him that he ought to be ‘born again’, a phrase this Jewish professor had never heard before. What Jesus meant was that he had to shed his religious, Old Testament, Jewishness, the laws and ordinances connected with his belief, and become a New Testament person, ruled not by regulations and ordinances, but by ‘love’, by total all-comprehensive love: ”Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and your neighbor as yourself – a re-birth into all of God’s creative acts”.  

Jesus called himself the Son of Man, or as I translate it Humanity Personified. Jesus was and is a Jew, but his physical appearance is just the outward shell. In his totality, Jesus represents all Jews, all Arabs, all races and colors and appearances, all the good, the ill, the defunct, the injured, the disadvantaged, the maimed and crippled, the entirety of all human experiences: that’s what I think, ‘the Son of Man’ depicts, perhaps better depicted as “Humanity personified”, because he is the savior not only for the Jews, but for all human beings.

Another misunderstanding.

Jesus did not start a religion: his last act, before he died on the cross, was to shred the curtain in the Jerusalem temple separating the Holy from the Holy of Holies, that unique place where only the High Priest, once a year, was allowed to enter. With this act, Jesus forever abolished all formal religion; forever abolished church and Bible. Instead, as John 10: 10 attests: Jesus came to bring LIFE and that to the FULL. That’s why John did not see a temple in the city, (the new Creation) because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. (Revelation 21: 22.)

November 4 2023

THE CASE FOR CAUTION.

My father was a successful businessman and entrepreneur, until he wasn’t. He failed to detect a radical change in his market, at the very time when he took on debt to finance an extensive home renovation. 

His clientele were the small bakers, of which every village in North Netherlands had a number, and every street corner in the city also. Almost overnight, with the advent of automobile ownership, and the growth of supermarkets, this scenario drastically altered, and with it his market. 

Geert Mak, one of the most celebrated authors in the Netherlands, pinpointed this event in his book, “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”, Jorwerd being a village in central Friesland, a location that could just as well have been any small settlement in rural Netherlands. It is the story of their retail merchants and the overpowering city influence, and also the overnight vanishing of the church and the loss of ‘faith’. 

My youngest brother lived in such a place – he worked in the city. Once there, I counted 5 abandoned churches: no retail stores or active faith-community at all. 

An identical phenomenon happened in Tweed, where I have lived since 1975. When I came, there were 4 hardware stores, a butcher, a baker, and a clothing store: nothing now. We do have one hardware store, large, on the South edge of town, too far out to walk to. 

This year the Salvation Army revived its Thrift Shop, now thriving: its church closed, and so is the Anglican while my Presbyterian Church is fading slowly. 

So, what holds the future? Will the automobile prevail? Will ‘faith’ return?

The automobile was not the only cause that killed both retail and church:  The dying faith in community and in God, kept alive during the economic depression, 1929-39, and also endured during the 1939-45 World War II, collapsed soon after peace came, replaced by faith in technology.  

Now that God vacuum, somewhat filled by the advent of the freedom-generating vehicle, is facing a major test: that idol, now our new deity, has become the very threat to our physical and spiritual survival. The latest Arctic News warns caused, ironically, by our so adored automobile and technology, that: “The climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks”. Can we tame that beast? That is the multi-trillion dollar question today.

The case for caution.

My father got burned when he failed to detect the onset of the new culture that killed his business. Now our entire self-driving mode is under attack, with the distinct possibility that a sudden and drastic rise in Global Heating will force governments to curtail the total use of gasoline-powered vehicles, while, replacing them with all-electric substitutes, will prove difficult, due to bottlenecks in material and affordability.

There is an additional case for caution because the Middle East holds the key to the oil supply and peace. A wrong turn there and the OPEC – the Oil Producing Exporting Countries – might close the tap, as they have a choke hold on our economies. 

My father failed to read the signs of the times, and so lost his business. 

The question today is much more complicated and all-consuming. Through my father’s failure I personally have learned a lesson, which has haunted me all my adult life. 

I have learned one additional lesson: the church, as an organization, no longer has an answer, even though I still attend. Bonhoeffer taught me that a church, existing only for itself, is a failure: it HAS to be there for others. Miraculously, my dwindling church is as good as it gets, even though our Sunday services are, by and large, useless, because, in my experience, sermons are a waste of time, making preachers redundant. What I see as important, is the singing, the coffee hour and fellowship there. What I see as important is our Monday-noon free hot meal, attended by some 20-25 people. What I see as important is our church initiated communal Christmas Cantata. What I see as important is the Wednesday morning Coffee Hour. What I see as very important is the use of the churchyard to grow greens for the local food bank, demonstrating that “The Earth is the Lord’s and all it contains”, as Psalm 24 attests. What we do miss is a communal prayer gathering.

Fortunately, our church building is right across the Beer Store and the only Food store.

The Belgic Confession is very explicit, which, when asking, “How do we know God?” answers: “First of all through his creation, which, as a wonderful book, tells us about him through his miraculous works”. That Word is shouting today.

Unless a church community emphasizes deeds, including environmental ones  – see the book of James – it will fail, as today so many churches already do.