OCTOBER 6 2018
ATONEMENT instead of THANKSGIVING?
The Day of Atonement (Leviticus 23:27-28), was the day on which the high priest performed elaborate rituals to atone for the SINS of the people.
The word speaks for itself. It’s a word I like: ‘atonement’. It suggests making amends, straightening out something that is out of kilter, and returning it to its proper place.
Celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend is out of touch with the times. It implies that matters are fine, that there is cause for rejoicing. Thanksgiving Day is one for celebration, for praising our accomplishments, for believing that we have done great. Atonement advocates apology and penitence and sacrifice, uttering expressions of regret, while thanksgiving contains seeds of self-congratulation, of being prideful and positive and prosperous.
So should I list the perils we face? Should I recite what is in store for us? Should I enumerate the dangerous future we face because of our greed, our stupidity, our SINS? If we are really in tune with the times, we should weep, we should pray to God on our knees, asking forgiveness for the acts of aggression we persist in doing to God’s creation.
JESUS WEPT
Jesus wept (John 11: 35) is the shortest text in the Bible. That’s how the editors liked it, I guess, to make it stand out that Jesus was an emotional human being.
Of course he was a man like all other men because Jesus wept. You know what? Jesus still weeps.
Did he ever laugh? Of course he did. He chided others for not showing how they really felt, “We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” (Matthew 11: 17.) Nobody dances with a long, unhappy face, no, laughing, elation, clapping, exuberance go hand in hand with dancing, just as shedding tears go with sounds of weeping, with exclamations of sorrow and pain.
Did Jesus ever fall in love? Yes, he did, because he was human: nothing human was alien to him. How did he deal with that delicate situation? How did she? They both frankly talked about it, and decided to wait until meeting again in the New Creation.
Being a human is being emotional. When was the last time you cried? Me: I am a tear-guy, cry very easily; my eyes moist at the least tragic news, or good news, for that matter.
Today is the time for weeping.
Why did Jesus cry, even though he knew that in the next instant he would call Lazarus back from the dead? Jesus did not cry because Lazarus had died. He cried because he knew that the wages of SIN is death, including the death of the creation, the cosmos he loved so much. He cried because of us, the humanity of the world, so callously sowing destruction everywhere, so that now not a spot on the planet has remained spotless.
Oh, that heaven heresy again. It is at the root of our global disaster. In my youth I was totally indoctrinated in the heaven heresy. At the Christian School I attended, each Monday morning my mother made sure that I could recite the assigned hymn, one of them being: “In the hemel is het schoon, waar men zingt op blijde toon”, which I translate as, “Being in heaven is the best: there we sing with joyful zest,” or something to that extent.
That sort of song, made me, as a 6-8 year old, ask my mother why Jesus would call Lazarus back from heaven where things are so much better than on earth? There’s where the germs of my conversion started, as a pre-teen boy. Perhaps my query stayed with my mother: just before she died she asked me what would happen then. I told her that she would be with Jesus.
So why did Jesus weep? Why is that short text in the Bible?
True, Jesus also wept because his friends were distraught. He did not weep for Lazarus: his tears were for Mary and Martha and today they are for us and for creation for which he was responsible, as Colossians 1:16 tells us, “For by Christ all things (ta panta) were created.”
Jesus is still crying because much of what he created is in a sorry shape, is in a state of decomposing, and threatened with annihilation. The earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, the floods in the Carolinas, the wanton war in Washington, the hurricanes, the typhoons, the melting of the Arctic, the methane madness in Siberia, all are the results of THE SINS OF THE PEOPLE.
Proverbs 29: 18, “Where there is no vision the people go hog wild, but blessed are they who heed wisdom’s instruction.”
Take North Carolina, the home of 10 million hogs and untold millions of chickens, generating sewage equivalent to the City of New York. When animal waste gets into the water, it causes a deluge of nitrogen, phosphorous, copper and other nutrients that throw the rivers out of balance. The damage can be immediate and dramatic. In the 1990s it filled the Neuse River there with millions of dead fish, bleeding from open sores. It could well be that large sections of the Carolinas will become inhabitable thanks to the floods that have poisoned much of the two US states.
One Hundred Million Barrels per Day.
I have a book, SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, bought it in Stratford July 1 2001. Dr. J. R. McNeill, professor of History, sees our addiction to Carbon and the resulting Climate Change as something new.
Among other things he traces the Energy History since 10,000 B. C. Here’s a quote, “My very rough calculation suggests that the world in the twentieth century used 10 times as much energy as in the thousand years before 1900 A.D.”
Now in 2018 the pace of oil use has accelerated, so that we, 7.6 billion earth-dwellers, DAILY use 100 million barrels of oil.
WE SHOULD GET READY TO LIVE WITHOUT CARBON-BASED FUEL.
We did during the war 1940-45, in the last frosty and snowy winter in occupied the Netherlands. For cooking we had an hour of coal-gas, hardly enough to cook a meal. For lighting we had some candles as electricity was no longer provided. Churches still had it, and since we lived next to a large church, we stole it from them via an extension cord: one light only.
To keep the house warm in that horribly cold spell, we had a meagre ration of black coal, carefully burned for a few hours, and so spent long hours in bed, under many woolen blankets and walked around in double layers of wool, even indoors.
With a curfew from 8pm to 6am, we played monopoly games, chess and checkers all the time: TV had not yet been invented and all radios were confiscated, so entertainment was strictly home-made. It was energy and food starvation in slow motion, but we knew it would get bad and were mentally prepared for hardship.
It was different in farm country, where people had cows, chickens, pigs, grew grain or potatoes, had stuff to barter, but city people with no country connections fared badly.
Will history repeat itself? Don’t be too quick to dismiss this scenario. We survived the war because we knew that the future would be different. Next time there isn’t that prospect.
So why do I start reminiscing about events that happened 70 years ago, in faraway Europe?
Times have changed.
Eighty years ago there were 2.5 billion people in the world. Today there are three times as many. Then the majority was rurally based. Now, thanks to industrial farming, even farmers need the city for food, while we need 10 energy calories for every food calorie we consume: we eat OIL. We are so OIL dependent that once the oil is gone – a finite item – we too are gone. When the next extended black-out happens there won’t be a future.
A hidden peril.
Thanks to our oil use we have created a global haze that prevents the full power of the sun to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. A drastic global recession, a sharp curtailment of oil use will lift that curtain in less than 2 months, giving the sun extra power to heat up the earth: it’s called Global Dimming.
Here are the hard facts: there’s no reason to celebrate and every reason to ask God for forgiveness with a heartfelt DAY OF ATONEMENT.
1. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In earlier times the energy supply was maintained by careful cultivation: that’s no longer possible. Fuel used is gone forever.
2. When collapse comes, it comes without warning. The Bible is quite definite on that score. Matthew 24 unequivocally states that “they –the rest of the world – knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took all (the sinners) away”. In other words, Rapture is reserved for SINNERS. 2 Peter 3: 10 reiterates that, (verse 10) “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Revelation 18 illustrates how the Capitalists will be fooled with (verse 14) their stock in trade suddenly being worthless as the economy collapses.
Just as the people in Noah’s days were shown a certain sign – that enormous ship being built with no sea in sight, by that family known for their godliness and impeccable reputation, so Jesus too, in that notorious Matthew 24 Chapter tells us that there will be plenty of warning signs out there, but people will ignore them.
Like old Simeon and Hannah (Luke 2:28), we all must constantly look for his coming, are daily called to repent and pray without ceasing both for forgiveness and for THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM.
That concept, THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM, is the central theme of the Bible. That’s why the Bible is so necessary in these days of expiry dates. Jesus is very explicit in his message, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6: 33)”.
That gives us our mandate, even though this direct indication has become a blurred directive. We must always keep John 3: 16 in mind. There the Lord tells us that God the Father offered his only Son as payment for buying back the cosmos which we sold to the great adversary.
Loving Creation assures us eternal life. Loving creation is fulfilled in seeking the kingdom, by constantly striving for the betterment of creation, and following the creation laws, so well captured by Dr. Barry Commoner, who coined the 4 laws of ecology,
1. Everything Is Connected To Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Humans and other species are connected/dependent on other species. With this in mind it becomes hard to practice anything other than compassion and harmlessness.
2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature, and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown. Everything, such as wood smoke, nuclear waste, carbon emissions, etc., must go somewhere.
3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.” The Creation, one can argue, has an intelligence, and to tinker with that “unintellectually” we get global warming pollution, etc.
4. There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.
Oh, I know that all this is old stuff. Nevertheless it’s not what we SAY but what we DO that finds favor with God.
The time for repairing the planet is past. Only prayer can save us. The Psalms say it so beautifully, “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.” (Psalm 51: 17)
Still Thanksgiving is in order, not for our wealth and health, but for Jesus’ sacrifice and death to assure eternal life.