Our World Today
June 23 2013
Some General Remarks
I have about 150 visitors to my blog each day. They come from all over the world, reason why I assume that my readers have no or very little general Bible knowledge and are basically searching for answers. I also send my column to some 100 people, almost all of some sort of Christian persuasion among which there are some 20-25 members of the clergy. None of them responded to my call for a Day of Atonement even though I provided some liturgical aids. A reader sent me a notification of a service like that in the Trinity Wall Street Episcopalian Church in New York City which on June 23 hosted an interfaith panel to explore how our sacred stories influence our ability to live with one another and nature as a peaceful, creative, just, and sustainable Earth Community.
There is a growing awareness that there is more to the Christian religion than the Bible which is subject to various interpretations. During the German occupation in Holland -1940-45- I saw how religious divisions within the Reformed Church created animosity bordering on hatred. Some of that I experience now. Some whom I have known for years don’t see me anymore. I do get positive comment from the laity but so far I have only heard from three retired ministers, while the active ordained among my list of direct column receivers have never reacted. Perhaps “silence signifies assent.” Perhaps. That’s why in this week’s column I address these people in particular.
We are fully aware that religiously we live in uncertain times, one of the reasons why there is a great deal of burn-out among those who have chosen to speak in the name of the Lord. As a youngster, between 6 and 10 years old, I wanted to become a missionary in the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Our church, the Christian Reformed Church, had two missionaries there, Rev. Geleynse and Rev. Bicker, who would appear on special mission days with a recent convert in tow in the days before World War II. Then the sight of an Indonesian person was a novelty. My parents too wanted me to develop that way, reason why I was sent to a prep school, where upon graduation I could directly enter either law or med school or seminary. However, after graduation I was drafted in the Dutch army from which I obtained discharge to go to Canada in 1951. There within a year I was self-employed and remained that throughout my entire working life. Yet somehow that missionary zeal never left me as you may have noticed.
In 1975 I made a radical break. I sold my business and residence in St.Catharines, Ont., bought 50 acres of land in Tweed, Ont., 200 km from Toronto and 200 km from Ottawa, basically in the middle of nowhere. I was instrumental in setting up a Christian High school in Belleville, where I also did a bit of teaching, while preparing for a new career in Commercial Real Estate Appraising. Somehow among the woods and fields, in the quietness of nature, I became more aware of God’s greatness in creation, and developed an entirely new appreciation of His Holy Word in which we daily live and move and have our being. The Lord’s blessings were definitely evident in developing a lucrative and especially an interesting new career in evaluating every kind of real estate from putting a price on the 500,000 acres of the Bruce Peninsula for a Native land claim, working out the value of river dams for the purpose of generating electricity as well as appraising a former RAF training airport near Picton, to name just a few among the great variety of businesses I appraised. I sold that business in 1983 and settled down to reading, writing, gardening, running, biking, skiing and becoming ever more self-sufficient, also in electric power.
Better get used to it.
We now live in different times. There is an abundance of evidence that everything is up for questioning, resulting in increasing levels of fear, anxiety and trauma among people everywhere. Also everything now seems to be tainted with fraud. People sense that and this increases their feeling of foreboding.
Earlier this month we went to the graduation of one of our grandsons. He told me that most of his fellow graduates had no jobs, no notion of what they were going to do now that they had finished their B.A. My grandson was an exception. Fortunately he has no debts and thus could let go off his regular summer job as foreman of a landscaping crew to work at greatly reduced pay as an organic vegetable grower. He had gauged the future correctly: a world dependent on fossil fuel is no longer viable. He now works with horses and learns to grow a great variety of food products the way my own grandfather also did two generations ago. He loves it. As a history major he has seen that the old systems and solutions are totally inadequate for the times to come and is preparing for a different world.
What is happening in our world?
Something entirely new is taking place. It is the same story everywhere. Impersonal Big Government, impersonal Big Business, impersonal Big Institutions are slowly choking off the little people: big money buys everything, including political offices, especially in the USA. This is happening as job security is disappearing, as wages are at best stagnant, as debt is acting as a brake on development. The people in power helped the big banks and are loading their debt on future generations in an underhanded and secretive way, endangering the future of generations to come, just as we all have offloaded our environmental debt to our children and grandchildren.
All this is occurring while Climate Change is accelerating, while weather patterns are becoming increasingly erratic, while water- air – soil quality is both diminishing and its availability decreasing. As a result poverty is becoming a reality for many more millions. About a decade ago I was a member of a pension board of a corporation. At that time the interest rates were still reasonable, at least 2-3 percentage points above the inflation rate. Now the return of money is well below the cost of living, which itself is doctored to come in much lower than the actual increase. Fraud is endemic there too. All this makes it much harder for people to retire, keeping them in the work force while young people scream for jobs. The future looks bleak for tens of millions of people, a fact that has produced an epidemic of fear and anxiety, and that while the safety nets have big holes in them.
The symptoms are all around us.
Suicide rates are soaring, as are depression, drug use, abuse and addiction. While governments curtail access to medical treatments, stress makes people not only more susceptible to serious illness but also can play a role in the progression of cancer.
We no longer must hide the obvious. We must name the beast. We must admit that we are witnessing collapse, collapse of morality, collapse of the environment, collapse indeed of the capitalistic system. That is no exaggeration. We are in the process of witnessing “The Four Horsemen of our Apocalypse”, portrayed in the last Bible book as Conquest, War, Famine and Death, now revealing themselves in the form of Privatization, Financialization, Militarization and Criminalization, combined with a continuously growing Police-state, evident in the overarching surveillance methods exposed by Snowden. The lust for money is at its root. We see a society favouring the rich, rather than the common good, also visible in the increasing use of toll roads, privatization of parks and charter schools. It is also evident in the destruction of nature to benefit the already well-to-do and especially in the creation of money out of thin air and loading the debt off to the poor, the 99 percent.
What to do? How to prepare? What is the Christian response?
I believe we slowly must prepare ourselves for a different type of worship, incorporating a new approach to God’s world. For the last 2000 years the Bible was sufficient as a source of inspiration. The Bible tells us that (Psalm 115:16) “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, and the earth he has given to us.” It may sound like a terrible heresy to you but I believe that the way we treat the earth and its creatures-people, animals, plants, etc.- determines our eternity. That same Bible also tells us that in the New Creation there is no temple (Revelation 21: 22), thus no church, no ministers, no bible, as God’s law is written on our hearts. We now are in a state of transition which means that we must slowly but purposely make the Bible more and more a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (Psalm 119) to guide us into the way eternal, that is God’s Holy Created Word, the New Creation. That I see as the message for today.
I’d wish that we could start a dialogue on this matter. Why are you ministers so reluctant? Just recently I read passages of a book with the telling title of Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, written by Edwin H. Friedman.
Friedman wrote this book before Climate Change became an issue, before the political scene, especially in the USA, deteriorated to the point of ridicule, and before Obama revealed himself as a gutless leader. Friedman attacked how churches too primarily adapt themselves to their most dependent, recalcitrant, and anxious members, rather than to ‘the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the motivated’. Political leaders depend more on their ‘expertise’ than on their capacity to be decisive. Friedman believes that problems are not solved when we rely on what is reasonable, or when we appeal to love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, and strive for consensus, usually the way the church operates. Strong, perhaps very unpopular, leadership is needed. We need leaders not followers.
I do a lot of my thinking while running or biking. Last week I was working through this Friedman book and thinking about Jesus’ forthrightness in forcefully addressing the Pharisees. Jesus always urged others to speak out, let their feeling be evident. He chastised people for not mourning with the mourners or rejoicing with the happy. I was struck, when translating J. H. Bavinck’s book, which I gave the title of The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming,that Bavinck goes directly against the grain of the church today, against its very purpose almost, by stating that the goal of the Christian is not personal salvation but is the seeking of the Kingdom, promoting the welfare of the Kingdom of Heaven to come, the New Creation. Did you as preacher ever say that? Writes Friedman: “Any renaissance, anywhere, whether in a marriage or a business, depends primarily not only on new data and techniques, but on the capacity of leaders to separate themselves from the surrounding emotional climate so that they can break through the barriers that are keeping everyone from “going the other way.” Jesus took a stand radically different from what the church of his day proclaimed. He advocated a totally new way, the way of the Kingdom of God. “Seek first the Kingdom, the welfare of God’s earth and everything else will fall into place.” We must not seek new answers to old questions, but we must reframe the questions. We must no longer ask what the purpose is of the church, but rephrase it in terms of the Kingdom: What is the Kingdom? What speeds its coming? Will there be a church in the Kingdom to come? Will there be a Bible in the Kingdom to come? What must we do to be members of the Kingdom? Will God be part of the Kingdom or will he disappear? Will the Trinity still be a viable concept?
We need another Martin Luther, a different Abraham Kuyper, a modern-day Bonhoeffer, persons who challenged the holy cows of their day. We need people who build on the past to formulate questions relevant to our end-times.
Will I get some response? Or……..
Next week I will try to formulate what will be the leading issues in these last days and what the Bible tells us of these matters.
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