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ATONEMENT
IS ATONEMENT ON THE AGENDA AT COP 26?
Twenty-Six Times, every year since 1995, have thousands of delegates, representing the nations of the entire world, gathered to combat the ever more expanding CLIMATE CHANGE and GLOBAL HEATING.
We have now come to the point of no return. Only a total change, what the Bible calls a METANOIA, can avert universal collapse.
This change must start with asking God for forgiveness. It is exactly for this very reason that the Lord, knowing human nature as no other, prescribed A DAY OF ATONEMENT, as outlined in Leviticus 35: 16, and I quote,
“This is a LASTING ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for the SINS of the people.”
I have emphasized two words: Lasting, and Sins. I sin all the time. My spirit is willing but my flesh is weak. At this point in history, where we all – except perhaps the Bushmen in Africa – pollute without letup: we have become “Carboholics”, and Climate Change is the inevitable outcome, and a direct sin against creation, God’s work of Art. Now more than ever do we need ‘atonement’ for our sins.
In connection with the upcoming COP 26, we, everybody, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Agnostic, people of all stripe and faith, color and persuasion, need to gather wherever we meet, in an act of ATONEMENT, because only a universal confession of sin, and a consequent change of conduct will avert total annihilation.
Our challenge is to focus on the ancient concept of ATONEMENT, a feeble attempt to help our personal and communal struggles, by setting aside a period of lament before the COP 26 starts.
Here is a song I have modified that may help to set the scene: there is a tune to it. See below.
Where are the birds that sang in tall tree towers,
Why are the woodlands now full-soaked in ash,
Where are the eyes to see the fire showers,
Where are the tears when birds no longer dash?
How clean the water, how tall the grain?
How green the forest, can the earth renew again?
When will the deserts stop their massive spreading?
Where will we plant so food can freely grow?
When will we hear no more of species dying?
When will we care enough to cherish all?
How clean the water, how tall the grain?
How green the forest, can the earth renew again?
When will the sea be free from human binging?
Safe for the whales that frolic in the deep
Who will arise and send alarm bells ringing?
Now is the time and for our voice to weep.
How clean the water, how tall the grain?
How green the forest, can the earth renew again?
We can sing it in a 11.10.11.10 meter, based on TIDINGS: James Walch 1875. P.D.
We are not alone.
‘
The entire world is struggling with extinction. You and I are not alone.
Despair is mounting.
When anxiety for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and pray, Maranatha, Lord Come,
and visualize the new creation,
where all is at rest, where the wolf and the lamb feed
together, and swords have become instruments of peace.
I then see shalom emerge, everywhere
in earth and sky and seas.
In my dreams I see Jesus, walking hand in hand
with his woman friend, amidst a throng of children
Happily dancing around that pair.
I see flowers in manifold colors and shapes,
And I see above me the balmy sun,
with healing in its wings,
friendly, soothing, refreshing, blessing
those who have waited for the Lord.
O holy earth receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears.
We live as exiles in our land,
Oh, where, oh where your helping hand?
The people all are drunk with wine
In blinded daze see no decline
The nations’ rulers spread the lie
Insist all’s fine, the truth defy.
But one day soon God’s wrath will come
With death for many, life for some.
What evil thought gave life to birth
That made us kill God’s Holy earth?
(Tune: The Old Hundredth: O people that on earth do dwell)
I read last week that:
“Just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of Nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity”.
Yes, we are at a critical juncture, where technology bleeds the earth dry, and information dominance threatens to sucker our brains.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
WHAT MUST WE DO?
I know, the way to Hell is paved with good intentions. Yet, Atonement starts with verbalizing our intention, and, by the grace of God, try to act on them.
Here is a feeble beginning, based on Genesis 9:
“A Covenant between God, Humanity and all created matter.”
Atonement declaration #1
In our arrogance and pride
We have grabbed what was not ours
and have abused what was entrusted
to us only for safekeeping.
Forgive us for breaking our covenant.
Atonement declaration # 2
We have flouted your fixed order, and
In willful defiance and deliberate ignorance,
We have shut our ears
To the pleading of your people and
To the groaning of creation.
Forgive us for breaking our covenant.
Atonement declaration # 3
We have enslaved the poor of the earth,
Uploaded on them our surplus garbage
And our unwanted pollution,
Endangering their health and refusing
Their rightful place among us.
Forgive us for breaking our covenant.
Atonement declaration # 4
We have paved your planet with
our greed for speed and
our need to escape from ourselves.
We now have upset the laws of creation
at our own peril.
Forgive us for breaking our covenant
Atonement declaration # 5
We have done business
to enrich ourselves at the expense of all
creatures and creation and
now have imprisoned our souls and imperiled our planet.
Forgive us for breaking your covenant
.
Atonement declaration # 6
Teach us, Lord, to live again
the true life of joy and peace,
of loving you as you want to be loved and
truly loving creation and all creatures
and truly love ourselves.
Atonement declaration # 7
Teach us to live the true life of joy
and peace and justice
as your covenant children
in a life of obedience, in a true response to your
created and living word.
Atonement declaration # 8
Give us the courage and faith
to prepare ourselves to live the full life
in tune with creation, so that we can become
what we are when we see you as you really are.
Atonement declaration # 9
May we look forward to your coming
when all hurts will be healed,
when the total creation will again be
utterly good and pristine again.
Atonement declaration # 10
May we look forward to the time
when everything on earth and
everything in the starry expanse
will be made new,
when total justice will reign and
each eye will see at last that this world belongs to God.
IS ATONEMENT ON THE AGENDA AT COP 26?
No. Instead Psalm 2 applies.
The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
“Let us break their chains
and throw off their shackles.”
(However) The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.
Climate Change will persist because it is pure revolt against God and creation. It’s nothing else but an extreme effort to defy God and his laws.
Yes, The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.
Posted in Co-owning the Earth
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JESUS AND THE CHURCH
JESUS AND THE CHURCH
I have this book to which I return at least once a year: The Hidden Face of God, written by a Jewish Professor of Hebrew, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman. In it he frequently quotes both the Old- and the New Testaments, as well as Bonhoeffer, Nietzsche and also Dostoevsky, whose passage from The Brothers Karamazov has intrigued me for a long time.
Here it is:
Dostoevsky presents ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, as a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it, Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition….”It is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to see signs from heaven. And now the deity appears once more among men in human shape in which he walked among men for three years. The divine visitor performs miracles: a blind man sees, a dead child rises. Everyone recognizes him. And then the aged cardinal sees him and has him seized and taken to prison (and tells him) not to speak for ‘Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old….. Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?…..All has been given by Thee to the Pope….the Church is the authority now.’ The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness: miracle, mystery and authority, and Jesus rejected them. But, the old cardinal reveals, the Church accepted them. The Church rules the masses precisely by miracle, mystery and authority; and he argues that is what the masses need…., but Jesus wanted them to have freedom of choice. But freedom is too difficult and frightful for them, says the Inquisitor and so the church has taken the three awesome gifts from the devil, and he concludes, “We are not working with Thee, Jesus, but with him: that is our secret.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more…. Come not at all, never, never”. And the divine visitor leaves.
Dostoevsky is entirely correct when he writes that ‘Jesus wanted us to have freedom, but freedom is too difficult and frightful for the common folk’.
That still is true today. Preachers and sermons essentially have replaced the old cardinal with their ecclesiastical preaching monopoly. The monologue method of communication is not only outdated but essentially deprives the laity of the ‘freedom’ to explore and question, something Jesus wanted his followers to be engaged in, all the time. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, says the Gospel. That requires ‘freedom’ to search and ‘freedom’ to experiment, something ministers and priests in particular and the church in general through their dominance make very difficult for the communion of saints to implement.
Jesus, just like I, had his run-ins with the church. In his hometown they wanted to kill him when he spoke in the ‘church’. The same happened when he ventured into the temple, that’s also why his preferred podium was the natural open space, God’s real holy temple.
That brings me back to both Friedman and Bonhoeffer. There is a striking similarity between the conclusion Dr. Friedman reaches in the book I mentioned, and what Bonhoeffer, after a lifetime of reflection writes. After almost 300 pages of exploring The Hidden Face of God, Dr. Friedman concludes in his very last sentence, “There is some likelihood that the universe IS the hidden face of God”. Being a cautious professor, he really means that he is certain that creation and the deity are synonymous.
It is also quite startling that Bonhoeffer, the eminent protestant scholar, has reached the very same outcome. Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her spiritual biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also on the very last pages, writes, “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and Creation 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”.
That’s why God in his grace has shown me that not heaven, but the earth has become the centre of my life: Think about that for a few hours. I am NOT heaven-bound, but now my freedom encompasses the entire creation.
The Belgic Confession is also quite explicit on that score, stating that we know God primarily through his creation which, “like a tapestry, like a marvelous picture book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God.”
God and Creation are co-existent: harming creation is cursing God, is ‘using God’s Name in vain’.
On his departure from America in 1939, where he was offered a teaching position at a prestigious seminary, to return to Hitler Germany and certain death, Bonhoeffer wrote:
God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God.
Dr. Harold Bloom, famous literary critic in his The American Religion writes that “The American Religion is Post-Christian”, in which “The Flag and the Foetus” dominate. It has ceased to be Christian”. Gnosticism has penetrated it from top to bottom. In ‘Gnosticism’ it does not believe or trust: it ‘knows’. (Gnosis). It knows it goes to heaven. James Watt, former secretary of the Interior (charged with the preservation of ‘the land’), opposed conservation because, as he explained, “this world would pass away within a generation or two.” That outright heresy now dominates most regular religious organizations.
Oh America, which calls thyself “A City on the Hill”, a shining light in a dark world. How little dost thou know thyself.
How then shall we live?
Implement Jesus’ words, as recorded in John 10: 10.
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
That is more fully outlined in John 3. In verse 13 Jesus tells an upper-class Bible scholar, Nicodemus – who had come to Jesus by night, sneaked into the home were Jesus was staying – “Nobody has gone to heaven, except Jesus himself”, a direct refute to all ‘know-nothing’ evangelicals. Jesus then tells this theologian,
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Here Jesus instructs this theological expert, a Teacher of Israel, how to live. This text proves again that the ‘know-nothing’ Fundamentalists really know nothing. This text plainly states that Jesus did not come to save sinners. His primary mission was to ‘save the earth’, and included in that ‘saved earth’, would be those (1) who ‘loved the earth’ as God did, and (2) believed in the saving act of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. That’s the message the church has to proclaim, all the time. That truth will set us free.
Want to live forever in a perfect world?
In perfect freedom?
Remember: God and Creation are co-existent: harming creation is cursing God, is ‘using God’s Name in vain’. Old Testament religion killed Jesus, and New Testament religion killed God.”
Yes, I admit: Jesus and the church is a very contentious issue.
What I have learned is to beware of religion, and to beware of the church. What I have learned is to: “Love the earth, and so love God”.
What I have learned is to: “Believe in Jesus Christ, who taught us how to live and that to the full”.
What I have learned is that: “Redemption of the planet and personal redemption go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.”
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A PANDEMIC OF PANDEMICS
A PANDEMIC OF PANDEMICS
My brother DREWES in the Hague, the Netherlands, sends me every month the digital copy of Civis Mundi, a Dutch periodical for Social Philosophy and Culture. From its latest #113, I translated an article by Dr. Jan de Boer, a historian, entitled, A Pandemic of Pandemics.
Please note the date on the opening line:
August 2024: #8 version of the pandemic.
In spite of the vaccine, hospitals are packed with pandemic patients; it’s a case of the sixth variant of Covid-19. But the eight’s wave is much less unsettling than the new Ebola-hanta-2 virus that suddenly appeared earlier in 2024. It’s a rare variant of Ebola with a tremendous capacity to adapt.
Via the usual exchanges and our growing planetary connectivity, this variety arrived in Europe in May of this year, 2024. This virus is extremely infectious and deadly: 60% of those affected die. In the last three months in France alone some 200,000 have died. (The author lives in France). Everybody is scared witless. The lockdown now is commonplace. Nobody visits family or friends. Schools, stores, all sports, theatres, all closed. When it all started in 2020, nobody could imagine that our society, our world, would collapse like a house of cards. And also, that the life of yesterday would never come back. The start of the latest lockdown happened two years ago, in 2022. People have become resigned to it, because we have no choice.
As I write this today, 2021, perhaps we may still have a choice, a choice between changing our world or allowing our word to collapse. That is the dilemma, because one thing is sure: the Covid-19 is just the start of a long series of epidemics and pandemics. Recent scientific research carried out by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) told us that through the systematic destruction of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, through the expansion and intensification of agriculture, and a production and consumption system based on unlimited growth, (and I add a surplus of people on a planet with limited capacity), the interaction between fauna, cattle, pathogens and humans multiply, with pandemics being the inevitable result.
The report tells us that, until now, there have been some 1.7 million viruses discovered, of which between 540,000 and 850,000 have the possible capacity to infect humans. The IPBES concludes that this ensures that once per decade or even more frequently we may expect a pandemic from a new virus, with the great possibility that a future pandemic be more dangerous and deadly than the current version. Just picture an Ebola virus or the Marburg one, with a fatality rate of 88%, recently again appearing in Africa. Add to that the fact that every virus wants to assert itself and mutates to better cope with all obstacles encountered during its lifespan, including a vaccine. That’s the reason why mutations of Covid-19 become more infectious and now partly (see the Delta-variant) negate the effectiveness of the existing vaccines. If we don’t succeed – and we won’t because we have ears but do not hear and eyes but do not see, as solidarity is pure self-interest, something we fail to grasp – I repeat, if we do not succeed to vaccinate all humans on the globe against Covid-19 and its current mutations, the odds are immense that we will face mutations able to resist the present vaccines.
A world-wide vaccine able to combat all possible mutations of Covid-19 has not yet been developed and the question is whether such a vaccine is even possible. That’s why the future looks dark, because there is no defence against the looming, but as yet unknown viruses vis-à-vis the current Covid-19. Seen from that perspective vaccines fail to offer a solution for the looming threat of these viruses.
This outlook ahead looks even more ominous considering the far too timid efforts to combat climate change and its catastrophic consequences. Global warming enhances the emergence of new viruses and pandemics and the only effective remedy is a total revision of our production and consumption system.
The current vaccine as well as any future ones (I can well imagine that we need a new vaccine every other month) will still force us to deal with the crucial choice of dealing with our impossible economic life. All indications are that we blithely will pursue the route of limitless growth and greed. However, if we don’t change in the very near future, if we don’t assume a more sober lifestyle, and thus persist in the destruction of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, then the odds of the survival of our human society through viruses and the catastrophic consequences of global warming, are minute.
Simply stated, that choice, considering the welfare of future generations, has to be made not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but now.
So far the article.
My comments.
The warnings are coming hard and fast. If you have a Bible, you do well to read Isaiah 24 which depicts our current situation in gruesome details. Already then, echoed in Romans 8, overuse of land was universal. The Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, centered on the City of Rome. After ravishing the nearby agricultural lands to provide food for its millions of people, the next supplies came from ever more distant regions and were a large factor in the Collapse of the Roman Empire.
Today we face multiple dangers, all too well known. Now too food prices are rapidly rising, thanks to droughts and floods, and dangerous tipping points are clearly in the cards. Young people sense this.
Climate demonstration.
From September 5-12 I was away from my rural abode and spent a week in suburban Hamilton. There I attended a Climate Demonstration in downtown Hamilton, and watched the crowd: mostly young and some old people, no middle age. Will these youngsters allowed to grow old? I look at them, (I have 13 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren) full of compassion and tears well up in my eyes: they are – and I hate the comparison – just like the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1940-45, destined to become the victims of the looming cataclysm, from which I see little escape.
Warnings are all around us. From my local library I borrowed two books, one by Deon Meijer, a South African mystery writer who wrote FEVER, dealing with a Pandemic that killed 95 percent of the world’s population. In it he described a brutal society where the few survivors cope with violence and internal conflicts. The other book is THE END OF MEN, set in a world where a virus stalks our male population. Both are set in 2024-5, just as the above article by Jan de Boer.
Decision Time.
I truly believe that the next 3-5 years will be decisive for the human race. No nation will cut down on Carbon Use: world-wide 200 coal-fired generators are under construction: we need electricity to power our toys!
A sure tell-tale sign of the LAST DAYS will be is a gigantic earthquake. The Bible repeatedly mentions this as a sure sign of the World’s End: they are described in Revelation 6, in Isaiah 24 and, of course, Matthew 24, and in numerous other places. I can well imagine how the Ring of Fire, encircling the Pacific Rim, explodes in a catastrophic cascading crescendo, with unimageable force.
What I really want to convey is that time is short. The Lord will come unexpectedly and without warning. To paraphrase Revelation 18: 10,
“Terrified at the planet’s torment its leaders will stand far off and cry, “Woe! Woe, our magical world, Our Man-made Empire, Our City of Power: In one hour your doom has come.”
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THE CHURCH: A HISTORIC ABERRATION?
THE CHURCH: A HISTORIC ABERRATION?
I am not a theologian, nor a church historian of any sort. I confess to be a Christian, and I believe that Christ is the Son of God, fully human, fully divine, who died on the cross, rose from the grave and, as the Apostle Creed formulated it, will return to judge the living and the dead.
I also believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, which, I believe will be in the New Creation, because we have screwed up the old one beyond repair.
But I do have my doubts.
Where I have my doubts – which will likely label me a heretic – is with the historic development of the church. I continue to believe in “The Holy Catholic Church”, further explained as, “The communion of saints”, but I no longer believe in the ‘man-made’ church, even though I still attend it.
I am now convinced that this entire ecclesiastical concept is not only based on an incorrect premise, but also that the worship takes place in the wrong premises. Yes, I see the entire instituted church as a historic aberration, of which Climate Change is the direct result.
Climate Change caused by the church? Yes, the general belief that Creation can be exploited at will, as we go to heaven anyway, has, starting 1700 years ago, led to our current atmospheric agony.
And the church?
Its root is Greek: KURIAKOS, derived from KURIOS=Lord. That word has also been the base of Kirche in German, Kirk in Scotland, Kerk in Dutch. My Greek dictionary defines KURIAKOS as ‘Belonging to God.’
Does the church, visited by fewer and fewer people each Sunday, belong to God? No. Psalm 24 tells me that, “The Earth is the Lord’s and fulness thereof, the world and all that dwells in it”. Church, no matter how you slice it, goes hand in hand with religion, and religion killed Jesus! Jesus did not bring ‘religion’: he taught us how to live in his creation!
Should I mention the sexual crimes of the clerics, the enforced celibacy, and the church’s protective response, or the exclusion of women for the clergy, or its lackluster concern for the young people, who have abandoned the church in droves, or its lack of vision at a time of global climatic changes, and political disarray everywhere?
I am particularly galled by the church’s modus operandi, placing the sermon at the centre of its witness, a means of communication that leaves the pew-sitters with the impression that this constitutes the essence of Christianity. I see them as a holdover of the pre-television and radio ages, more than 150 years ago when many could not afford books, when instruction was done via biblical lectures, called sermons or homilies.
My additional doubts increased when I read in the last chapter of the Bible, that in the New Creation ‘there is no altar there!’, telling me that, since the law of the Lord will be written on our hearts, we no longer need either the church or the bible. Based on that revelation, it should be the task of the church to prepare people for that kind of independence.
Is House churches the answer?
Acts 20:20 tells me that Paul, the apostle, “Taught publicly and from house to house.” That was the original and vibrant church for some 250 years. Will it work today?
We must keep in mind that, when Jesus died, the divider that separated the common area in the Jerusalem Temple from the exclusive domain of the high priest was thrown open, signaling the very end of temple and church-based religion. The early Christians understood that, and, most successfully engaged in neighborhood evangelism, with homes as the focal points.
However, with official sanction of Emperor Constantin, and public recognition, the church restored that divide, heralding a new era of the sort of religion that today has perpetuated the aberration.
It’s not too late.
It is never too late. Now is the time to change course, and admit that the church is not God’s possession: the earth is. That’s why John 3: 16 is today the most important text in the Bible: “God so loved the ‘cosmos’, the house where he dwells. He gave it to us to improve it, and we did the opposite: That’s why he sacrificed his beloved Son to buy it back.
Unfortunately, we have gone beyond the ‘house church’ stage, but we can adapt this to the current situation through using the pew-filled auditorium for public prayer and singing, including choir, followed by small group discussions, and an orderly free for all, based on a specific biblical or societal topic. In other words, a house-church format, of no more than groups of 10 – 20 people,
What today is desperately needed is a forum where people can air their doubts, their beliefs, their prayers and hopes and fears, laughs and especially ‘tears’, since all signs today point to a speedy arrival of the Parousia, the Second Coming of the Christ, bringing with him the New Creation.
Walter Brueggemann, in his The Prophetic Imagination, foresaw this situation. He writes: “I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal – ruling and ecclesiastical – arrangement.”
For us it is fitting to mourn for the church that has misappropriated the term KYRIATOS, which has led to an irrelevant, building centered religion, and many different bible views.
For us it is also fitting to mourn for creation, now threatening our very physical existence, and imperiling God’s beloved cosmos.
Brueggemann quotes Jeremiah who “knew long before the others that the end was coming and that God had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression and presumptuous religion….. that death was at the door and would not pass over”. He quotes Jeremiah,
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void
And to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
And all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no man,
And all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
And all its cities were laid in ruins,
Before the Lord, before his fierce anger.
Jeremiah 4: 23-26
THE CHURCH: A HISTORIC ABERRATION?
Luther warned that using the blind word ‘church’ in the creed, makes the common man think of the stone house which we call church. He wrote that it would have been easy to avoid the word ‘church’ by using “the holy Christian people”. The dire consequence is that today nobody associates church with God’s Holy Creation, with disastrous environmental consequences
Amos, the prophet who lived in the country, comes to mind:
“The days are coming”, declares the sovereign Lord,
“When I will send a famine through the land,
Not a famine of food or thirst for water,
But a famine of hearing the Words
Of the Lord.
Men will stagger from sea to sea and
Wander from north to east,
Searching for the Word of the Lord,
And they will not find it.”
Amos 8: 11-12.
That time has come. We worship in the wrong premises and our basic heaven-oriented, earth-exploiting, planet-plundering premise is perverse. Some 1700 years ago, we decided to institutionalize religion. There’s no way back: we have burned all our bridges.
I realize that this topic is quite controversial. Yet, since Revelation 22, the last Bible chapter, specifically mentions the ‘absence of an altar’, of organized religion, today we must visualize this situation and prepare ourselves for it. Prayerfully, I should add.
That my topic is the instituted church, outlining it possibly being a historic aberration, is all part of the Great Unveiling: everything will become what it is.
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CHAOS OR COSMOS: A CHOICE
CHAOS OR COSMOS: A CHOICE
The word Chaos is perhaps best described by its opposite: Cosmos. Where Cosmos indicates something wholesome and harmonious, pictures an orderly and logical situation, and illustrates a simple and coherent solution, in my Greek dictionary Chaos is defined as, well the opposite: an unformed and shapeless mass, a useless, unreformable blob. Yet God saw this indefinable entity and, says Psalm 33: 9, “God spoke and chaos came to be cosmos”. It’s as simple as that, so simple that it is beyond our comprehension.
The phrase ‘came to be’ included evolution. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that famous priest-paleontologist, author of “Le Milieu Divin”, THE HOLY EARTH, saw this gradual development, the innate capacity of the initial creation to blossom into something beautiful, and tried to explain this process to the church, for which he was condemned as a heretic by the ecclesiastical authorities who stuck to the Genesis story addressed to a people with acute agricultural insight but with no scientific knowledge. More often than not, the clergy has been the death of progress and the bane of the church.
Cosmos
Last Monday morning, I sat back and looked around in my living room, where I saw ‘cosmos’. I saw on my windowsill flourishing plants, silhouetted against the sky; I saw beautiful furniture, functional and attractive to the eye, I saw a large decorative bookcase full of colorful books, I saw original paintings, some from local artists: in other words, I am surrounded by cosmic creativity, reflecting my innermost being, fully dependent on the Way, the Truth and the Life, personified in Jesus Christ.
When I peer outside, I see a large vegetable garden and fruit trees, as well as gigantic maples, providing ample shade to keep my two-storey home cool in the summer, with windows south-facing to warm the dwelling in the cold winter months. All that too is part of cosmos.
Chaos.
However, when I open my computer and look at the three dailies I read every morning, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the British Guardian, I see chaos everywhere. I also see it as irreversible. Chaos, noticeable in the atmosphere, where excessive heat has created chaotic conditions among the very elements that make life on earth possible. And that most certainly involves trees: No trees, no LIFE.
I noticed a little poem while reading a book on ‘trees’:
“Poems are made by fools like me.
But only God can make a tree”.
That’s how God started to make cosmos out of chaos: he made trees to sprout. At one time a person could walk along the North of Africa, from Morocco at the Atlantic Ocean to Oman at the Pacific and always be in the shade: indeed, civilizations, from the early Sumerian era flourished and fell when trees and land fertility disappeared.
These same trees have been in the news lately, proclaiming their intricate root connections, their utter usefulness for the human existence. I once read that a CIA study had calculated that, in order to sustain the oxygen level for the average North Americans, including the O2 burned in our combustion engines, 4500 trees per person are needed. From a friend, a retired forester, in British Columbia, and affirmed by Peter Wohlleben in his new book, “The Heartbeat of Trees”, I learned that the ‘plantation’ method of replacing old-growth-clear-cut approach to forestry with pine-seedlings, is causing the immense forest fires in the North American Pacific West.
The Tree of Life, in the Garden of Eden, means to me that the TREE is LIFE. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees. The frenetic forest fires, now wherever trees are found, spells the end of our civilization. Its abusive agricultural practices deprived Rome from its nearby food sources and aided in its fall. History is repeating itself. A lengthy article in the New York Times on August 18, predicts that the anti-weed chemicals produced by Bayer and Monsanto are becoming ineffective, as weeds defeat all efforts to suppress them, with dire consequences for our food supply, spelling Chaos also in the soil.
Chaos in the church.
Whenever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman.
The Latin Mass, anyone? Abortion? Same Sex Marriage? Evolution? The Bible’s Letter-for-Letter accuracy? Female Priests? No salvation outside the church?
The church is deeply divided everywhere I look, much more Chaos than Cosmos, much more devilish than divine.
Jesus usually was quite mild-mannered, but when it came to organized religion, and its leaders, he was furious, warning his disciples to be aware of the church officials, and in a direct confrontation with the religious leaders, he called them ‘poisoners’ and ‘hypocrites’. Matthew 23 contains a long list of statements condemning the clergy of his days. They ended up killing Jesus. Jesus hated religion: he wants us to be god-fearing, creation loving humans, just as he was.
Michael Coren, ordained in the (Canadian) Anglican Church, in a Globe and Mail article, decried the resistance of ‘fundamental Christians’ to Covid vaccination. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a staunch conservative in the US Catholic church who has emerged as a leading critic of Pope Francis and a vaccine skeptic, was placed on a ventilator just days after testing positive for Covid-19.
Abide with us.
That song plays through my mind: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.”
“We are entering an unprecedented era in human history, two simultaneous and hugely challenging climate changes at once: one in the climate of technology and one in the climate of the climate”, writes Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.
We are sleepwalking into CHAOS everywhere: politically, religiously, environmentally, agriculturally: everywhere we look, we are at the end of the road, and we have run out of solutions.
“Abide with us”, but God has abandoned us because we, as a society, have abandoned God.
Chaos everywhere: just as God in the beginning, created cosmos out of chaos, with leaving us in charge of creation, he knew what the outcome would be: chaos everywhere, and the resulting immense hardship, now already evident everywhere. Brace yourself. We will see Matthew 24 emerging in all its dramatic disasters.
Here’s a Jesus’ quote:
“For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”
Other Bible passages also refer to this event, emphasizing the prosperous conditions, and the abundance of material production, before Jesus returns, with merchants lamenting the lack of sales of their luxury wares: all utterly normal times! Yet, sudden and unforeseen events do happen, witness Afghanistan today, or the Haiti earthquake or pouring rain in Greenland, another unique event.
The literary world is full with sayings such as “the last straw that broke the camel’s back, or the grain of sand or the snowflake that caused the avalanche.” As Seneca said long ago: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
The Bible tells us to live our lives always with eternity in mind, more relevant today than ever, as the finiteness of the world becomes increasingly evident. The trouble is that we live in a culture capable to accomplish almost everything but unable to imagine anything. That the God Creator has plans for a totally new creation, is something even the church no longer believes, and is unable to imagine.
So, total CHAOS will come: be assured. And total COSMOS will follow: be assured, because the Lord will never allow his beautiful creation to permanently fall into disuse.
Posted in Co-owning the Earth
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