Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

November 25 2020

LOVE IT, OR …………….

This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.

                                                                                                                                         Matthew 24: 14.

The church is supposed to bring the Gospel. The Gospel? The Good News? What is the Good News today? Do you know?

An even more difficult question: What is the Gospel of the “Kingdom”? More confusion. Ask any minister, ask any church member, and the empty stare provides a clue, signaling uncertainty: “Heaven perhaps?” might be a hesitant answer.

It becomes even more complicated: “Preaching the gospel of the kingdom, as a prelude to ending the world?” What is that? Who will do that? The Church? But the church is dying, and the Pandemic is making sure that the coffin is ready. Is the church still up to this? Will it have a sudden reform, an abrupt mass conversion? A universal metanoia? No, no, it’s not going to happen. It’s too late for that! No, don’t count on the feeble church with its watered-down message, its aging population, its declining attendance, to preach “The Gospel of the Kingdom” in such a way that the entire world will notice it, nobody excepted. Just look at the church in Jesus’ days: it was totally unprepared for his coming then, and today, it is even more unready for his second coming.

But still, the question remains: How will the entire world be confronted with The Gospel of the Kingdom before the total collapse?

Jesus’ hobby horse.

One thing is true: the ‘Coming of the Kingdom’ was Jesus’ hobby horse: he constantly hammered on that concept. All the time. In the prayer he recommended, aptly called, The Lord’s Prayer, almost the entire content is centered on The Kingdom. The very first request in the “Pater Noster”, (the “Our Father”, as the Roman Church has labeled it based on its very first two words), is “Hallowed be Thy Name”.

Oh, that church. I love it; I loathe it. Forgive me my feelings, almost bordering on paranoia, but I suspect that the church on purpose kept the archaic word “Hallowed” in there to obscure its real meaning. It simply means ‘holy’. Any aspect of God is an expression of God’s totality, and thus is holy. When Psalm 33: 9 tells us that “God spoke and it came to be”, this relates to me that, because God made it, creation is HOLY, is His Kingdom. That tree in your front lawn, that forest elsewhere, is holy ground. Also, we, we human beings, reflect God’s image, live in God’s Holy Earth, his Kingdom. That’s why Bonhoeffer believed that “we cannot understand God without the world, and cannot understand the world without God.” But today we’ve screwed up creation so badly, that, in its totality, it has become contaminated, thus ‘unholy’: God’s holy name has become a curse.  

This brings me to the second line in that Jesus’ prayer: “Thy Kingdom Come”. We must PRAY for the Kingdom’s speedy arrival, and live accordingly. John 3: 16 is in the Bible for a purpose: it expresses God’s ultimate love for his holy creation and his ultimate sacrifice.

The third line also is Kingdom oriented: “Thy will be done on EARTH as it is in heaven”. Up there, God’s will is done unconditionally, so too it is God’s desire that we preserve earth’s holiness as well. We know all too well that this is not the case, and now has become impossible.

And then there is that fourth item: “Give us this day our daily bread”.

Now, here is a flagrant instance of mistranslation, which the church has maintained, I suspect because its trademark is ‘ignorance’. Yes, the church – just like the pre-Christ Temple church – wants its members to remain immature. Preaching – by and large – is totally ineffective, should be abolished and replaced with group discussion. Here is a typical example of misdirection, centered on the Greek word “Epiousios”, which does not mean ‘daily’. Even Pope Benedict, when he still was Cardinal Ratzinger, tried to change it. He translated it as ‘of extra substance’ or ‘supersubstantial’. Hmm: “Give us today our ‘supersubstantial bread?’ Oxford Professor, Dr. Diarmaid MacCullogh, in his award-winning book, “CHRISTIANITY, the First Three Thousand Years, writes, “If we can assign any meaning to epiousios, it may point to the new time of the coming kingdom………because the kingdom is about to arrive.” Ah, that Kingdom angle again!

We duly, and in total ignorance, spout out “Give us this day our daily bread” and the church each Sunday re-affirms that mistranslation, because it does not dare to talk about THE KINGDOM, Jesus’ Central Message, God’s Holy Creation.

Oh, the church!

It’s such a compromising body! It has distorted the message to read: God so loved humanity, which he does, of course, but only as an important part of the entire creation. Until this day the church, openly or by omission, preaches the basically pagan propaganda of ‘heaven’ as our destination. Jesus, in his mission, embodied the Kingdom. When he returns, he will bring it with him: the perfect earth, something we NOW have to strive for.

If the church were true to its calling, it should always, continually, without letup, unconditionally, preach The Gospel of the Kingdom, but just as the Old Testament Church got stuck in rules and regulations, the Post-Christian Church wallows in ignorance. Bonhoeffer was entirely correct when he 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.” This is all too evident in its massive support for Trump.

So, then, how will Matthew 24: 14 come true? How will there be a universal proclamation of the KINGDOM?

Well, it’s happening right now, before our very eyes!

Look at the context! Look at the next text, Matthew 24: 15: “So when you see in the holy place – creation! – the abomination that causes desolation (let the reader understand): flee!!! Get out!!  The caution, “let the reader understand”, means that only when this ‘abomination’, universal pollution, Climate Change, takes place, can this warning be understood, especially in COVID time. Flee? Get out? It’s too late for that: that’s why His coming is imminent! Today this text, the proclamation of “The Gospel of the Kingdom” is now happening. It is God’s judgement on us.

Oh, there are lots of precedents.

Remember the Flood? Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? Conversion there had become impossible. So, God destroyed them. Remember how 10 of the 12 of Israel’s tribes disappeared without a trace? They succumbed to total evil, and God wiped them out. God promised not to do that again. Now WE are the perpetrators. But: God’s JUSTICE will prevail.

The signs of the KINGDOM are two-fold: Love and Judgement. God so loved the world by offering his Son to restore it. Our failure to follow that example results in destruction, total destruction, and the ironic part is that we ourselves are the agents, the instigators. So, it is not surprising that Hebrew 11: 30 tells us that: “It is mine to avenge, I will repay, and again, “The Lord will judge his people.”

To avoid this, we must be “Born again”.

Jesus, in John 3: 3 said to Nicodemus, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” In this discourse, Jesus makes two statements that, by and large, have been overlooked by the church. (1) in John 3:13 Jesus said: “Nobody has ever gone to heaven”, and (2) in verse 16 Jesus claims that he would give his own life to restore God’s creation, his Kingdom, renew the earth upon which we live and move and have our being.  

The entire GOSPEL centers on The Kingdom. Jesus, in his famous Sermon on The Mount, unambiguously states that (Matthew 6: 33): “Seek first God’s Kingdom and God’s righteousness”, God’s laws for Creation. Either LOVE it – seek its wellbeing – or face God’s wrath. The choice is that stark.

MAKE HASTE SLOWLY

This proverb appears in most languages: Latin, Vestina Lente; Greek, Speude Bradeoos; French, Hatez-vous lentement; German, Eile-sich langsam; English, Make haste slowly; Dutch, Haast u langzaam.

We all are in the hurry. For what? I too, in my advanced years, have trouble slowing down. I may tell myself that I have eternity and that Revelation 14: 13 tells me that “my good deeds will follow me into eternity”, so I should concentrate on ‘good deeds’ but that too is easier said than done.

All good things take time. Good whiskey, good wine, take years to reach perfection. Cultivating good habits is a long-term project. To write well, they tell me, takes at least one decade of constant practice. Will I ever learn? To gain wisdom takes a life-time, and even that is not enough, so we need eternity for that goal alone.

I continually try to improve myself: I have eternity in mind, am fully aware that our actions must be based on a vision what eternity is all about: perfection, in other words.

Jesus, in The Sermon on the Mount, tells us to be “perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect”. The Greek word for perfect is ‘teleios’ which has as root ‘telos’, a word we find back in tele-phone, which the Germans in their goal for genuine German words, call ‘Fernsprecher’, the correct translation of Telephone. The same is true in Telegram, Television, Telemarketing, Telecommuting, all indicating doing something ‘from afar’: telos, which means ‘far away’ in the New Creation, where things are ‘perfect’.

Make haste slowly, and, somehow, the Pandemic is teaching us ‘patience’. I believe – and that is a great comfort to me – that the Apostles’ Creed hit it on the head when this confession concludes with “I believe in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”.

“Make haste, slowly”. Eating should be done that way. Making love, too. Writing also falls in that category. Picking the right word, musing over an adjective, wondering about the story line. Suddenly an idea pops up, and the entire essay needs revamping. The choosing of a title for my blog changes at least twice, and often more frequent.

Still making haste slowly, does not always apply. I have that treadmill, and there the saying doesn’t fit. My first 10km race I had set a goal: 43.44 minutes. That was before the metric system came in and I still counted my distance in miles, just as the Marathon race is some 26 miles. So, I had in mind to do the 6.2 miles = 10km in 7 minutes per mile, for a total of 43.44 minutes. The first 3.1 miles, 5 km, I ran with a bunch of fast runners, and clocked it in 18 minutes. That was too fast: pain all over, so I had to slow down, but finished exactly in the time of 7 minutes per mile.

Now, 42 years later, I still run, but a lot slower. Last week it took me 40 minutes to cover 5 km. I have come to ‘hasting slowly’. Still I recommend to take up running. It has been clinically proven that for every hour of running – not walking, not biking – a person gains 7 hours of extra life-time, for a maximum of 3 years. I have far exceeded that time limit.

I started to run in 1960, 60 years ago, when a life-insurance client of mine was dying of lung cancer, and while he could hardly drink or eat, still smoked. That gave me the resolve to quit smoking and start running.

I used to run around the block in rural Tweed, 14 km, before breakfast, along a wooded road where I once, on a misty morning, saw a bobcat, lynx, at the edge of the forest, watching my progress, only his head slowly tracing my steady movement.  

Running is good therapy. The human body is made for walking and running. I sometimes study my feet: such an elegant part of the body, slender, well-shaped, wonderfully made, exactly sculptured to carry the upper body gracefully and proficiently. The human body is a marvel of ingenuity.

Running, even now in my 93d year, makes me feel better, Before I set out, I feel tired, lethargic, grumpy. But once I have set my pace, tiredness disappears, hidden energies emerge, the brain gets into gear, ideas pop up out of the blue, and suddenly I am a new man, with new perspectives, new angles to a story, clearing the brains’ cobwebs,   

Jesus’ disciples too were in the hurry: “when will you establish your kingdom?” was uppermost in their minds. That quest remained with them for decades, if not centuries. The band of believers in Jerusalem after Pentecost expected Jesus’ immediate return, but that was not in God’s plan.

Jesus himself had no inkling of this either: “Only God has the answer to the time of the Second Coming”, he said, and it appears that God is in no hurry, and that brings me to a question, the ultimate question: “When will the Parousia appear?

Matthew 24: 36 has the definite answer: ““But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” But, says Jesus, there will be definite signs, and these signs are there today everywhere. Also note the language. The text only mentions ‘the day and the hour’, not the month or year or decade.

Jesus also said, “The Lord is not slow in coming”. He wants the right kind of people to be part of the New Creation. The New Creation needs the experience and technical know-how also of the ‘Latter-Day Saints’. By the Latter-Day saints I don’t mean the Mormons, although there maybe some of those as well. Who knows? The New Creation will include those whom we consider ‘misfits’ and ‘crackpots’ and Greenpeace fanatics, and ‘preppers’, those who have readied themselves to live sustainable lives, because that’s what the New Creation is all about.

Yes, those who ‘make haste slowly’ will perfectly fit into the New Creation, because they will have eternity to pursue their hobby, the tabulation of all the different spiders, the exact number of birds, the counting of mammals, the tallying of different insects, all that will take eternity to register, and takes patience and prudence.

And how about historians, and artists, composers and playwrights. To do perfection – and perfection is the measure in eternity – takes time, and requires the critical eye and ear from others. And then there is eating, the perfect pie recipe, the most delicious delicatessen, the most adoring dress: and the list goes on. It all takes eternity to fashion, that’s why we now have the ‘trial and error’ stage.

So, yes, slow is in, speed is out. Perfection is in.

That’s why it is only out of that sort of a future that the present can be lived.

ON DEATH, DYING AND LIVING.

November 4 2020

Eighty years ago, in 1940, when I was twelve years old, I saw my first dead person: my maternal grandfather. He had lived all his life in Kornhorn, in the West Quarter of the Groningen Province, having been a farmer there – as were his ancestors – and, apart from the occasional visit to STAD (The City of Groningen), never traveled anywhere. Prior to his burial, his body lay in the annex of the church where he had been an elder. A large sheet of glass covered his coffin, where he lay fully dressed in pure black, including his favorite dressy cap. When I saw him, a large fly had managed to penetrate the enclosed box, which later was placed on a horse-drawn wagon, and we all followed on foot to the nearby cemetery.

Since then I have witnessed my father dying in 1977 at his home. I can vividly recall this. To be with death in the same room can be an uplifting experience. Just hours before, he had called us and said, “I hear singing and choirs: is the radio on?” Our answer did not register with him anymore. He kissed my mother and also his youngest son whom he had not kissed since he was a child. A tear fell from his eye – there really had been an age-gap, and it had pained my father greatly that the son who had been named after him, had left the faith of the fathers – and he fell into the sleep out of which he only will awake on the Day of the Lord.

It still took about five hours before he actually breathed his last. His lung intake became more and more difficult, its gurgling started to sound like a perking coffee pot, becoming louder and louder and then softer and softer, and his gasps of breath had longer and longer intervals, until it stopped altogether.

Dying at home does involve certain duties normally assumed by others. Shortly after he died, I took his dentures and fitted them into his mouth. My mother and I kept a towel tightly around his face to make sure that it would keep form when the rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body, would set in.

Yet another task awaited us: the preparing of the body. My sister in law, a nurse and I did this together. To me it felt as if his body wasn’t my father anymore. It seemed just a lump of sodden flesh. When we turned him over, took off his bedclothes and washed him, I suddenly realized that I had never seen my father naked in his life. We dressed him in his Sunday suit. Slowly his features relaxed: his face became younger.

To die at home and to be buried from there gave all of us time to take leave. My mother would go and sit with my father in the quietness of the night, and so became a little more used to him not being alive anymore, not calling for her to help him. His children – there were nine of us – and grandchildren would see him in his own bedroom, serenely, as if praying, with hands folded as in prayer, perfectly natural, yet dead.

Closer to home.

Now death has come closer to home: my wife, my companion, my spouse for 67 years and a long-time friend of my own family many years before that, died recently.

Our history goes back 88 years. I seem to remember the first time we met, far back in 1932. I can well picture the occasion. Her father, a ‘dominee’, a minister of the gospel, had accepted the call to our church, a large congregation, worshipping in a very plain building, with three enormous balconies, a large auditorium, seating more than a thousand, and filled to capacity twice on Sundays. It also had an impressive pipe organ.

On that first Sunday, when he had preached his inaugural sermon, the entire church council was invited to the official ‘pastorie’, the 4 storey dwelling next to the church for coffee and cigars. My parents too were among the guests. We children were let loose to play, and went ‘hide and go seek’. Diny, the minister’s daughter, my later wife, and I hid under an iron bed. I can vividly recall this episode.

Two dreams.

In my life I have two recurring dreams involving my wife. Up until recently, I had a dream where I was cycling past Diny’s house, just some 300 meters from where I lived, just to get a glimpse of her. You see at one time she ended our courtship and there I was feeling rejected and miserable.

In the other dream I was just married, and desperately wondered how I, totally unexperienced and never having worked before, would ever be able to adequately provide for a family.

That too turned out well.

DYING AND LIVING

I know, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”, says 1 Corinthians 15: 26. Death has been my companion these past weeks. A farmer-member of our church, killed himself in the same week our family buried my wife, their mother and Oma.

I have been reading Bonhoeffer lately, a man who, in a German prison, was waiting to have his death sentence carried out for conspiring against Hitler. For years he lived with death. He wrote, “Life really begins when it ends here …..God says, they are at peace…His presence does not end even in death…..our death is in reality only a transition to the fullness of God’s love.”

Bonhoeffer has become my favorite theologian. He is so contemporary because he intimately experienced the End of his Days. In one of his sermons he said, “The hour of death is determined for each of us, and it will find us no matter where we turn, yet consent to death liberates us to live fully and wholeheartedly”.

In an Easter sermon he declared, “The heart of Easter proclamation is: God is the death of death; God lives, and thus Christ lives as well; death had no hold over Him against the overriding power of God.”

For Bonhoeffer the hope of the resurrection is the central axis of Christian faith. God is present in life and in death. Resurrection is the pledge of his reality. Yet a belief in resurrection is not the solution to the problem of death.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. Death remains an enemy, even though God is the death of death.

On death, dying and living.

“Blessed are those who have lived before they die”.

Jesus did not come to establish religion: he came to teach us how to live. That ‘living’ centers on all of creation, all animals, all trees, water and air. John 10: 10 spells it out: Jesus said, “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” That means ‘LIFE’ in the fullness of creation. We cannot understand God without the world, and the world without God. What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one.

Our society today is “the way of death”, death of species, death of trees. Life means total life, living in harmony with all creation.

I take comfort from Psalm 116, “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful”. Being ‘faithful’ includes loving creation. Blessed are those who have lived in ‘love’, love for God and love for the world God made.

October 20 2020

NEW TIMES, NEW FORMAT

Imagine a school where teachers only lecture, where students cannot ask questions, where they are taught only from one book, where there never is any homework or tests, where the outside world is hardly ever discussed or examined, where students sit facing one way only and, now during the pandemic, have limited interaction with others.

Well, that’s how most church services operate. No wonder it fails to attract young people, loses the middle age crowd, and basically becomes a geriatric assembly. In today’s cruel Covid-19 times, so suddenly different, the church needs a complete “metanoia”, a total revamping of its business plan. It begs to go back to the way Jesus brought his message. He first tried it the old way, by visiting his own church, but there they tried to kill him! For his home-crowd he was too unconventional, too ‘biblical’. He then already showed his disdain for organized ‘religion’, instead urged his physical neighbors and erstwhile buddies and blood relatives, to embrace LIFE and see God’s creation as holy. No luck at all: familiarity breeds contempt!

 Take “The Sermon on the Mount”.  But first some observations from a book, members of our church are discussing: “What CHRISTIANITY is Not”, written by Dr. Douglas John Hall. On page 56 he cites Karl Barth: “Doing Theology means having the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” illustrating that “the Gospel is not a fixed message,” especially now that we are approaching THE END. We have to recognize that we live in times where everything is different, where everything smells of finality, so the Message too must reflect this new situation: new times means new format. Away with the old, discredited, style of preaching.

That’s why we also need a new view on “The Sermon on the Mount”; that’s why need a new interpretation of what Jesus taught, sitting in the open air. Take note: Sitting ‘together’ outside creates intimacy with God’s created Word, and bonds people in multiple ways. Yes: church should be held outdoors, where possible, scattered in small groups, making dialogue possible, asking for immediate clarification, stimulating discussion. The old way smacks of ‘religion’ and ‘religion’ killed Jesus, and ‘religion’ kills the church.

Back to that ‘famous’ sermon. Let me single out a few lines:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.

Today we must see the Scriptures in the light of the Suffering Planet, and the forthcoming New Creation, descending as the Kingdom from heaven. These three beatitudes quoted above today especially relate to the wounds we have inflicted on the human spirit and God’s earth. Add to this the current Pandemic, and deep sorrow fills my heart, mourning for those who have died and suffer. Yes, it’s fitting to shed tears for the species that have disappeared, to feel depressed for a planet empty of plenitude and deprived of diversity, but full of our toys. Also the lack of human touch, the extra stress on family and work situations, makes us less human.

There’s so much willful ignorance, so much indifference for the Climate Change phenomenon that affects mostly the poor. Church Buildings are energy hogs, total depending on the automobile for access. It is time for people to cluster, to buy homes near each other, so that real physical community is possible. Every day I walk or run on the Canada Trail that cuts through our village. There I encounter very few walkers, but plenty of ATVs. I always wonder what sort of enjoyment these people derive from sitting on a noisy, polluting machine, drowning out conversations, obliterating natural sounds, exposed to dust and poisons. Nothing ‘gentle’ about it!

“Blessed are the gentle”; some translations say, “Blessed are those who claim nothing for themselves”. Of course, this applies to creation, to our natural world which we must treat with gentleness and utmost care, and which we will inherit when we NOW claim nothing for ourselves, because we will inherit this very earth. “Blessed those who are mourn”, because so much of our planet, including people, is dying unnecessarily.

We all have become immune to the cries of creation. Roman 8 comes to mind:

“consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of God’s children.  For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.  Not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies. 

There are some pronouncements by Jesus that have never caught on, such as “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. “For I came to SET A MAN AGAINST HIS FATHER, AND A DAUGHTER AGAINST HER MOTHER, AND A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AGAINST HER MOTHER-IN-LAW; and A MAN’S ENEMIES WILL BE THE MEMBERS OF HIS HOUSEHOLD.” (Matthew 19: 33-35).

I can imagine this having been the case in Jesus’ time when becoming a Jesus’ follower, when quitting the synagogue walk, when abandoning ‘the faith of the fathers’ created a terrible division in the household. Or, in the time of the apostle Paul, when people quit pagan worship and adopted Christ.

But today?

Yes, today too there is this same hostility evident.

The days, using carbon energy in abundance, are over.

The days seeing creation as holy and adopting a life-style reflecting this, are upon us: that creates tensions.

The religious days of going to heaven are over, and the days of gearing our actions toward the earth, are upon us.

The days of abundance, causing Climate Change, are over, and sobriety, wartime conditions, scarcity and insecurity everywhere, are upon us.

The days of gathering in large church buildings are over, and ‘small is beautiful’ also in worship, are upon us.    

All that creates animosity, tensions, divisions.

Yes, we live in a different era, where thinking outside the box is required to attain a degree of sanity. Hence, NEW TIMES, NEW FORMAT.

The days of the Christian Religion are over. The future of Christianity does not exist in denominations of any kind because they promote religion. The future of the faith community is in personal dialogue and small group discourse.

Jesus died to save us from religion too, to free us from its burden. Bonhoeffer – just before his death – predicted the advent of a non-religious form of Christianity. That time has now come: we must be ready for the New Creation, which, in the last Bible book, states that “There is no altar there”. The days of religion are over: the time to LIVE to the full in the creation renewed by Christ, is upon us. Augustine has said, “Many who God has, the church has not; many who the church has, God has not.” Another reason to meet in the open: easier for others to join.

NEW TIMES, NEW FORMAT.

October 7 2020

A LETTER TO MY GRANDCHILDREN

Dear grandchildren.

You all live in cities. There’s where the jobs are. You all are successful, live healthy lives, have good jobs, happy families, beautiful children, loving parents: in a word, you have made it. The last thing you need is a letter from a 92 year old man who happens to be your grandfather.

Talking about grandfathers: as a kid, 4-12 years old, I often stayed at my mother’s parents, who operated a farm, a small holding, about 30 acres, powered by one horse for work and bicycles for transportation. No electricity. A pig, a flock of chickens, a dozen milk cows, and some young cattle. My paternal grandparents had a grocery store and this Opa, in his horse-drawn wagon, called on my mother’s parents once a week, to barter eggs for coffee, tea, soaps, etc. Both my Opas were elders in the same large village church.

They all lived simple and sustainable lives. When my mother married in 1923, the only one of the five children to settle in the city, her father gave her in today’s currency the equivalent of $200,000, enough to buy everything the young couple needed to furnish a complete household, with enough left over for my father to start his business, buy a car and the machinery he needed to manufacture bakery ingredients.    

In 1934 I started to attend elementary school just around the corner from where we lived. I remember one particular lesson in 1938, the 100^th anniversary of the first steam-powered train in 1838, traveling from Amsterdam to Haarlem, a distance of some 15 km. The teacher told us that some people then called this new-fangled transportation a ‘devil’s device’. We all laughed: how could that be true!

Things have changed.

We now live in a world where a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. We live in a world where an elephant is worth more dead than alive, where a whale…..

When we moved to Tweed in 1975 from the city, the bullfrogs would wake us up in the morning, accompanied by the loud rapid-poor-will, often repeated for an hour. These sounds are gone. In the city you don’t notice these changes: here in Tweed, I do. They are no longer heard for reasons you know: it’s the economy!

That’s how the economy works: it will keep on destroying trees, keep on mining the earth, keep on pulling oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and leave a worse world for you, my dear grandchildren.

James Lovelock, an atheist scientist, now 100 years old, coined the word GAIA, his designation for a planet that is fully alive. In his important book, “The revenge of Gaia”, he maintains that our planet is fighting back: hence Climate Change and melting Poles.  

I, my generation, started this unraveling process. That is my legacy, and I beg you for forgiveness. The short-term thinking of my generation based on the RELIGION of profit at all cost is at the root of it all: now I see that WE are the severed tree, WE are the dead whale, WE, my generation, were the initiators.

My grandparents, born 150 years ago – the 1870’s – in rural Groningen, knew how to live: community-entertainment thrived. Yes, no penicillin, people died younger, but there was genuine fellowship, music bands, choir, theatre groups, church. All gone, together with the frogs and birds. Yet, I believe that some of this ‘living close to nature’ is still in you, after all we are products of our forebears, still partners with the air, soil and water around us.

What I hope you will do is cultivate a planetary consciousness: we all are the earth; we all are the air; we all are the water: embrace the natural world around you and in every action work for her welfare: truly a full-time job. Love the earth; love her unconditionally. Question every one of your action for its consequences, every step for its ultimate result.

You are smart young people. When you more closely examine what goes on out there, you will re-discover the unity and order that is evident everywhere, because everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else. The one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without the plants as these often are the sole source for their food.        

The phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter, of rain and drought, of heat and cold, all are part of the grand chain of happenings, depending on where the sun happens to be and from where the wind blows. The one event influences another and yet the one cannot be without the presence of the other.

A closer look will show that the order is full of purpose. The great connectedness of all these entities is at the same time the reason why the totality is served by it as well. We don’t even need to explore everything too deeply to discover the amazing fact that behind everything there is an invisible set of natural laws: the butterflies serve the flowers just as much as the flowers serve the butterflies. The sun is itself not conscious that it from a distance of millions of miles brings light and warmth, yet it is the sun that maintains life on earth, causing plants to sprout out of the moist earth. If the sun had a mind if its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a law mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. The sun, that so superior sun, serves that tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.

That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the miniscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures, who need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.

When you look around with open eyes and minds then there is one thing that time and again touches to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature thinks that it is there only for itself, but in final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be.

Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal. All that serving goes automatically, is not a conscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this in motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, not a duty, but in-born, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.

How about us?

With us humans, service is simply different, is infinitely richer, but because of that also more difficult. It is self-evident that the afore-mentioned natural instincts are also present with the human race. There too the care for children; there too a touch of the ‘specimen-egoism’. But these powerful instinctive forces are here recognized as such. Humans know exactly what they do and why they do it.

As a consequence, humans have much greater opportunity to serve. Every category in society serves the other, a world can’t do without medical helpers, but it also needs arborists and food inspectors, and even video-makers.

The trouble with us humans is that the inclination to only serving OUR needs is both stronger and more dangerous, promoting OUR welfare at the expense of our fellow citizens and especially all other species. Even though we are more conscious of what we do, are able to gauge the needs of others, we also can easily ignore the plight of our neighbors and the care for creation.

In short: serving is for most of us something we are reluctant to do, driven by self-interest, the ‘I come first’ instinct. That ‘I come first’ inclination often overwhelms all other feelings, stifles them, and comes out on top. With us humans the urge of ‘me first’ usually takes priority over conflict, the struggle, the concept of serving.

Given this weakness, we humans have been given a command: serve one another, serve creation! This serving, so ‘naturally’ accomplished by all other segments of the world, by instinct as it were, we humans have to implement in full awareness of what we are doing.

That’s why we must cultivate a Global Awareness, a Planetary Consciousness because we all are connected from bottom to top to each other and all living matter.

My wish for you, my dear grandchildren, is that this multi-level serving will be an integral part of your daily life.

Yours, with all my love, and a tear in my eye,

Opa   

THE VISIBLE CHURCH: ITS DECLINE AND DEMISE.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)

Asking the question is answering it.

Of our five children, four are church members, while one belongs to a Sikh group. We have 11 adult grandchildren: maybe one belongs to a church. The two minor ones go with their parents.  

Last week, in a casual conversation with a friend, she mentioned that her sister, an ordained minister, had resigned because the members of her church, settled in their historic situation, seeing the church mainly as a social institution, showed no interest in hearing about Jesus and his work of salvation.

Professor Dr. Harold Bloom, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, categorially states that, especially North America’s Baptist and Pentecostal churches have ceased to be Christian, instead they have completely adopted Gnosticism, the basically paganistic doctrine that all material matter is evil – earth – and only spiritual thinking is good – heaven – spawning the ecological crisis.  

And here I start to become controversial: “Generally speaking, the Bible has become a liability, open to many different explanations, the church, as institute, by its structure, is becoming an obstacle to salvation and the ministers, unwilling to offend, hardly ever mention “the coming of the Kingdom.”

That calls for an elaboration. First: “Faith what is that?”

Hebrew 11: 1 offers a simple definition: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”.

The letter to the Hebrews was sent to the early Christians, who all lived in the immediate hope of Christ’ return. Today that hope basically is missing, even though signs everywhere point to a collapsing ecosystem. Last week in the Toronto Globe and Mail I read this line: “Smoke from forest fires combined with the pandemic, it did feel like end times.”

Of course, Faith thrives. Economists tout Economic Growth, showing absolute faith in an impossibility. It’s all around us. President Trump has a lot of faith, faith that the VIRUS will suddenly disappear, faith that the vaccine will do away with Covid-19, faith that he will be re-elected.

However, the author of the letter to the Hebrew Christians goes deeper, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible”. In other words, Faith and Creation go hand in hand.

The Bible is there to connect us to creation: Psalm 119: 105 tells us that “God’s Word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path”. It’s like a miner’s lamp shining ahead on the earth, God’s Kingdom.  The task of the church is to preach “The Coming of the New Creation, God’s Kingdom”. Jesus’ explicit command in Matthew 6: 33 is, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”.

That relies on FAITH. His Kingdom is the creation in which we have been allowed to live. When we live responsively in Creation, loving it, then God will provide! It basically means that our goal in life is to enhance creation, his kingdom! That is our explicit task: when we do so, our needs – food, shelter, clothing, will be met.

The Belgic Confession, one of the mainstays of Reformed faith has this to say: “

We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life.

This crucial statement of faith spells the end of Christianity as we practice it, because nowhere do I see the church treat creation as holy, as God’s Primary Word.

Just as prior to Jesus’ mission, the LAW ruled ancient Israel – as it still does today in Jewry – and resulted in his death on the cross, today the Bible has become a liability, subject to many different interpretations, a talisman and crutch: the church has been reduced to Pious Secularism, to quote Bonhoeffer, failing to “preach the Kingdom”, failing to prepare for Christ’s return. That’s why Jesus wondered about ‘finding faith’ upon his return.    

Don’t get me wrong: I read the Bible every day. I start the day with it. Just as “we were not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for us”, to quote Jesus, so too we were not made for the Bible, but the Bible was made for us, to prepare us for eternal LIFE on earth. Upon Christ’ return both the Bible and the Church will disappear. We have to get ready for this event.

All this reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche, who in So spoke Zarathustra wrote:

“I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes!

They are poisoners, 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!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dread-fullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!”

Nietzsche condemned the heaven believers in no uncertain terms. He was trained to become a preacher, in line with his father and both grandfathers, but the ‘heaven heresy’ was for him a stumbling blog. He became a full professor in classical languages at the age of 23.

I think we have come to the stage described in Jeremiah 51: 9, “We would have healed Babylon (The current world), but she cannot be healed……….her judgement reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

That brings me back to the question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Jesus knew the future. When Jesus died the heavy curtain shielding the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple ripped from top to bottom, signifying the end of the Old Testament Church, and warning his followers to refrain from establishing a formal religion. Ripping that curtain was Jesus’ very last act on earth: it signaled the death of all institutional religion!

The early church expanded rapidly through house-churches, through neighbors inviting neighbors. Rod Dreher in the Benedict Option (2017) recommends the same. That lack of formal church organization conquered the world in 300 years. Then Emperor Constantin became a Christian and the church – as it is now – officiated in public functions and started building. No longer was creation seen as holy: now elaborate buildings with spires pointing to heaven, became sanctuaries. Then the hierarchy was instituted, fashioned on the imperial structure: Emperor-Pope; Generals-Cardinals; Colonels-Bishops; Officers-Priests; Soldiers-Laity. There’s where the church started to decline.       

Jesus loathed religion: it killed him! Instead he taught us how to live a full human life, totally relying on God the Father and not on the human institution of church. That experiment is now over.

Remember Nietzsche: Remain true to the earth! Those who advocate heaven are ‘poisoners’ and ‘despisers of LIFE’.

Learn how to live eternally, because that’s what we will do when Jesus returns.

P.S.

The Tweed Horticultural Society (of which I am a member) has more active members than my church, and plays a larger role in the municipality. A speaker from Queen’s University at one of its meetings inspired members from our church to grow flowers and vegetables on the church grounds: a basic witness, providing the food bank with produce each week and beautifying the main street.