Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

August 25 2020

COME HELL OR HIGH WATER….

Come what may, no matter how bad, whatever unnatural calamity occurs, we will not alter our way of life, because our mindset is frozen. If it takes Hell or High Water, Hell now all along North America’s Pacific Coast, and High Water now all along the Gulf, so be it: we will not abandon our carbon-fed luxuries, so we’ll have to face the consequences. And we will: we already are!

I don’t know about you, but this makes me feel anxious: I know, I know, ‘trust in the Lord’ and all that, but still, when I survey what’s going on everywhere, I see no way out.

So, what keeps me going? Well, I am not the passive kind: writing my blog keeps my mind in gear; walking every day 5 kilometer, or biking 11 km, or looking after my vegetable garden, keeps my old body in shape; by the way, my patch of soil has yielded an excellent crop of green beans – now in the freezer – lots of red beets, some already frozen, most still growing, and there are potatoes galore.

This year I have oodles of apples, two varieties, one to keep over winter and the other excellent for apple sauce. And I have made a lot of it, so much, in fact that I use it in my oatmeal porridge instead of milk. Every evening I phone my wife of 67 years, who is in a local new Long Term facility: we chat and sing Dutch Psalms and Hymns together, learned in our youth, and always pray: there always is a lot to pray for. I no longer am allowed to visit her in her private room, but I see her every Wednesday for 30 minutes seated some 5 feet apart. That requires a Virus test every other week, obtained some 40 km away by appointment, strictly adhered to.

Our five children are fantastic, especially our oldest daughter and her husband who come every mid-week for a few days; others visit on weekends or phone. So, yes, considering the testing times, I am doing very well and so does our extended family now multiplied from just the 2 of us in 1953 to 39 today, including 6 great-grandchildren, who grow up in a time much more challenging than when my wife and I married.

And that fills me with a degree of anxiety.

The Times, they are a’changing.

Suffice it to say that we now live in a different world, where, sorry to say, matters will never, ever, get better. During the 1940-45 war I was a teenager in the Netherlands. Then there always was the real prospect of ‘liberation’ and “after the war” to look forward to. Sorry, but such an optimistic vision can no longer be expected, except for The Coming of the Lord.

Now normal life—shopping for food, holding a meeting, going to work, seeing my wife – has shifted dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will our grandchildren be able to keep their jobs? Will they ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? Now everybody keeps an anxious eye on the ocean and the growing intensity of hurricanes, this week with  two storms reinforcing each other. Now everybody is afraid that our TV and radio will beep the threat of tornadoes and unexpected ferocious windstorms of the kind that fell on Iowa and Illinois. And what does an ice-free North Pole mean for weather events? Is the Covid-19 the beginning of a series of pandemics as Global Warming and denuded forests unleash more of the same?

I am afraid that the year 2020 is the start of increasing global perils, because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth. Don’t count on a massive conversion because, even Come Hell or High Water, human nature will not change in spite of scores of books and articles full of warnings. We, all of us, live in denial. Arctic News makes abundantly clear that we already have exceeded the TWO DEGREES Celsius threshold. Trees are life. No trees mean death. A plague of tiny mountain pine beetles, no bigger than a grain of rice, has already destroyed 15 years of log supplies in British Columbia, enough trees to build 9 million single-family homes. They now are chewing through forests in Alberta and Canada’s Northwest, while an outbreak of spruce beetles is devouring forests in the USA and are decimating supplies in parts of Europe. Hosea 8:7 has become a well-known proverb: “We have sown the wind and we now reap the storm, whirlwind, hurricane, whatever.”

Nothing happens in isolation.

Climate turmoil does not happen in isolation: it also happens to affect people in a negative way. Hot weather gives birth to hot tempers and irrational conduct. Stormy weather and natural disasters are not only property destructive, but also lead to strained relationships. Add Covid-19 to the mix, and anything can happen, including an Economic Depression. That’s the reality. But, as T. S. Eliot once said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality is confronting us and it does not look pretty. Suppose, suppose that Trump is re-elected, or contests the results! Two of our daughters live in the US. Eight of our 13 grandchildren reside there. They all are doing well. Even as reality continues to intrude, President Trump has either largely dismissed or ignored his science and medical advisers. And the result is that the economy, the one thing he seems to care most about, and which he hoped would escort him to a second term, has been devastated. The VIRUS cannot be wished away, cannot be ignored. There’s an enormous difference between the US attitude and the rest of the Western world.

Bad as the virus has been this summer, it actually spreads better in low temperatures, and when temperatures fall, more people will be in poorly ventilated areas where transmission is more likely. If the U.S. goes into the fall with new daily cases in the tens of thousands, as they are now, then the numbers could explode and the Morgan Stanley prediction of 150,000 new infections could come true. Considering our containment efforts to date, there is little reason for optimism.

I repeat: We live in totally new times.

It seems that all possible disasters are converging on us. Look at the USA: There the perils of decades of fast food breeding obesity, decades of building spacious subdivisions, making mass transportation and biking or walking to work impossible, decades of under investments in education and hospitals are now emerging. In the wider world, decades of earth-exploitation everywhere, on land, in seas, in the air, are crying for revenge.

The bitter truth is that in the USA, so long as COVID-19 continues to spread at a rate of more than 50,000 new cases per day, the virus will continue to act as a deadweight on the economy, depressing productivity — and total economic output — to well below pre-crisis levels.

Writes John Mauldin in his weekly report, quoting Dr. George Friedman, geopolitical forecaster,

Bottom of Form

“I have argued that unless a solution is found by September, the probability that the recession could turn into a depression would mount. A recession is a normal part of the economy, a primarily financial event that imposes disciplines on an overheated economy. A depression, from a geopolitical standpoint, involves the physical destruction of the economy, something that lays waste to businesses, dislocates labor and vaporizes capital. A recession is the economy cycling. A depression is an economy breaking.

Just for the record, there have been five depressions in the history of the US: 1807–1814; 1837–1844; 1873–1879; 1893–1898; 1929–1941. Note the frequency. We haven’t had a depression for 80 years! But today everything, everywhere among humanity and in nature, is under pressure, a phenomenon unique in all of history, but we live in denial, have shut our minds for the total onslaught that’s looming.

Call me a pessimist. Call me nuts. Call me anything. But reality does not lie: HELL and HIGH WATER are just the start.

Top of Form

AUGUST 14 2020

TINA?

TINA is the new-old-acronym. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of England, casted the expression when she proclaimed: “There Is No Alternative” (to the Capitalistic system.) And, yes, the terrible truth is that she was right: we live and die with our existing economic enterprises because ‘There Is No Alternative’.

 Thus TINA really indicates that we have been suckered, been bamboozled, been falsely fooled. Our entire economy – a word of Greek origin, meaning ‘the law of the land, of the oikos, the house, the world in which we dwell – has been constructed on the faulty premise that ONLY an oil-based society can give us the luxuries we crave. The underlying assumption always has been that the earth can be exploited ‘ad infinitum’ on the erroneous assumption that it has endless resources and constant cosmic  cooperation. We now are discovering that our curse is TINA because all our eggs are in the Carbon Basket.

A New Paradigm Needed.

As the TINA ‘truth’ has been exposed as basically flawed, the time is ripe for a new paradigm, a totally different set of rules, to be applied to all of society, including the church, because also our theological themes no longer work: we, Christians, have nothing to say anymore to society, because we too have adopted the TINA theology and have integrated ourselves with the ruling reign whose only outcome is death. Electronic speed has replaced reflection and meditation. Instead of carefully cultivating and then expanding our religious heritage, we have stuck to the old. Alienated from the cosmos that fashioned us, we have succumbed to the machine, and so have become the machine, witness our church buildings with it paved parking lots.

The Plague.

You and I know that a plague is roaming the land, easily recognized by the masks we wear. The real mask our society is hiding is the revenge we undergo by a retaliating earth, because violence begets violence. The cure for that is not a mask: it’s the opposite of one: we must expose our real face, our destructive conduct, our suicidal bent. We must publicly confess the harm we did and daily do to God’s earth and thus to God before we can attack the Pandemic.

The naked truth is that our face-covering is a sure symbol of the sickness and curse we have inflicted on the cosmos. We have to deal with that masquerade first before we can find a cure for the VIRUS. As a human race we must confess – and the church must initiate that process – that we have been wrong, that we cannot return to the old system because it is killing God. We must admit that this gradual TINA process has altered our religious nature.

In our demystified and secularized world there, apparently, is no longer a place for the idea of God: that is too old-fashioned, too humiliating, because it fosters dependency and challenges our humanity, even though we conveniently forget our total reliance on fossil fuels. Still there is a kernel of truth here: we no longer can use the church as a crutch. The current anti-gathering situation is testing that concept, and clamors for a new beginning and a new language. That too needs reflection and communal consultation, because the price for ‘progress’ is too steep, the cost for continuing means certain death as it requires the End of Nature and the acceleration of our dehumanization. Failure to implement this means the end of the church as we know it.

Enter Le Mileu Divin.

 This past week my attention became focused on a Roman Catholic Priest, born in France in 1881: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I remembered that I had a book by him, bought many decades ago, as it still had a 75 cent price tag, and was never read.

What a treasure! I increasingly see God’s guidance in my life. The book, in English, sports the French title because the word ‘milieu’ is difficult to translate. “Milieu” means more than ‘environment’, means more than a social sphere, more than different societal classes: it’s all of that and more. “Milieu Divin” indicates that the world in which we live and move and have our being, is holy, is God’s precious work of Art.

And it is exactly there where the ALTERNATIVE lies. Teilhard, at the conclusion of his book, writes, “One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come to end.” (As an aside: this erudite priest wrote this in 1927 while teaching in China.)

TINA has a certain limit. Exactly because “There Is No Alternative”, that limit is fast approaching, that END is very near. Teilhard, in good Calvinistic fashion also wrote, “The whole process out of which the New Earth is gradually born is an aggregation underlaid by a segregation”. That needs some clarification: ‘aggregation’ means making a ‘whole’ from separate parts. ‘Segregation’ indicates separation from that ‘whole’. God will make everything ‘whole’ and entrust this wholeness to those who have NOW worked for that ‘wholeness’.

That is the message, the ‘new’ message the church has to proclaim will it be relevant.

Teilhard, who has a doctorate in paleontology, the study of fossil animals and plants, connects traditional concepts with his scientific insights. In his Le Milieu Divin, his Divine Milieu, he convincingly argues that we must detect God everywhere in the Universe, inspired by Paul’s writing in Colossians 1: 15-20, where it says that “In Christ all things (Ta Panta) hold together,” and in Acts 17, “For in Him (Christ) we live and move and have our being.” For Teilhard God is a self-revealing, comprehensive reality, not merely an unknowable idea.

      Just before he died in New York City in 1955 at the age of 74, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realization that when the two ingredients – God and the world – were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such brilliance that all the depth of the world were lit up for me.”

      Ever the obedient priest, but also a professional paleontologist he refrained from writing his evolutionary findings when Rome forbade him to publish them.

      Teilhard very much echoes Bonhoeffer and J.H. Bavinck. I do well to quote Bonhoeffer here who too was a visionary person. He wrote, “God is either 100 Percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other….It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or he reality of the world without the reality of God….Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ fighting for its own existence and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world…. Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, Humanity and the Earth belong together.”

      J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, writes that our salvation and the salvation of the cosmos, go hand in hand: we can’t have one without the other.

      Is TINA, is There is No Alternative, absolute?

      No. There is an Alternative. Instead of fondly favoring fossil fuels, we must seek God’s favor, confessing, “God, I have sinned, and from now on falteringly and even hesitantly, I will try to have an alternative life-style, loving God’s earth in word and deed, loving myself, and my neighbor, and wholeheartedly live in the hope of the New Creation.”

 August 5 2020

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

Forty-five years ago – 1975 – our family moved to the municipality of Tweed, about midway Toronto-Ottawa, both some 200 km away, too far to walk. That was a time when many others too left the city and sought refuge far away from ‘the energy crisis’ and $150 oil price barrel. I sold my insurance business and surrendered my Real Estate brokerage in St. Catharines, Ontario, and bought 50 acres of mostly woods and rocks. There I built an energy efficient house into a hill sloping south, passive solar, with 2 storeys facing South, having large windows there, and one storey in the North, with only a small window. I also fashioned insulated shutters, used only in extreme cold conditions. Oh, yes, heated with wood, of course. Planted a large vegetable garden, still producing great crops.

Yes, I certainly planned ahead, later bought solar panels for personal use and also installed a frost-free handpump on a well that can pump 150 liters per minute!

Over the years many drifted back to the City, as making a living in rural Eastern Ontario proved too daunting. I stuck it out, living on some savings, doing some teaching, taking the university courses required for my appraising accreditation, writing master theses on a single-family dwelling, a 12-unit apartment building and an industrial property, 100 pages each, thus qualifying for commercial real estate fee appraiser.

I was fortunate that the area where I lived, the center and north of the county of Hastings adjoining Haliburton to the north-west, had no accredited appraiser, so I had a huge territory all to myself. Over the years I hired three residential appraisers, each specializing in their area. I did well.

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

I sincerely believe that the last Bible book, Revelation, gives us an outline of what is imminent, tells us what is on the verge of being ‘revealed’, especially in the later chapters. The book’s basic message is that ‘the true nature of human enterprise will be laid bare’. Granted, the book has some mysterious passages, too obscure to explain, such as the number game, 666, and that Thousand Year period, but there are certain happenings that apply to today and tomorrow. The Good News here is not good, except for the very ending: The New Creation emerges out of the chaos caused by you and me.

The Last Things.

In Revelation 15: 5 till 16: 21 the last things are set into motion. The picture John provides us with is a sad succession of disasters, reminding us of what happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, but much more intense and dangerous.

Today we experience Revelation in motion, with weather calamities having cosmic implications, as even the sun and the earth take part. The outcome is our present Pandemic, producing panic in the planet’s population, while deadly droughts, hellish heat, ferocious floods and legions of locusts are devastating crops world-wide.

And more to come. The Bible, in numerous places, tells us that the culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain is caused by an earthquake (16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs everywhere shake wildly and record numbers are recorded, beyond any ever registered: the houses tumble, the office towers collapse, the highway bridges crumble. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power.

Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

Revelation reveals two types of distress: there are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Revelation only elaborates on the first type. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as its own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become an enemy and full of fury has thrown itself upon humanity.

Yes, we live in the Last Days.

I am convinced that humanity’s days are numbered. We are literally living in the Last Days. Of course, the entire New Testament has been written with that in mind. Right after Pentecost the small Christian congregation lived in that expectation, sold what they had, shared in-common, daily expecting Christ’s return.

That urgency has disappeared over the millennia. It seems to me that the Lord is awaiting the outcome of human ingenuity, having no doubt that sooner or later we would succeed in eliminating our own race. And that’s what is happening now.

I also think that God, in his mercy will lend a helping hand, perhaps causing a Coronal Mass Ejection: a disastrous CME, a geomagnetic storm, when millions of tons of charged particles thrown off by the sun slam into Earth’s magnetosphere, and cause all sorts of chaos.

It happened on September 2 1859, just before the US Civil War, when electricity was nearly non-existing. The few transformers around then melted. Today these induced currents would cause world-wide chaos: all electrical grids would topple and all satellites would disappear. Just imagine the global gutting of all electrical systems. We already have a pandemic; huge earthquakes are overdue, and a severe CME would paralyze all life on earth instantly. The chance of a CME is as great as being hit by a Pandemic!

Already the weather has become a factor: Arctic sea ice could disappear completely before October 1. What that means is that the huge deposits of Methane there could suddenly be released and cause a sudden 4 Degree Celsius spike in the world’s temperature, already at a historic high.

PLAN AHEAD!

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

 

There’s only one scenario possible today: the worst case. Plan for it. Is preparation still possible? It is like dying. We always live with death because, as the saying goes, it is inevitable. We simply have to keep death in mind, our own death and death of Our Way of Life, which, we all know, has truly become The Way of Death.

So, what must we do?

There is no way to escape the outcome. That must be our primary admission: we have come at the end of the road. Climate calamities will only accelerate, economic advancement today goes contrary to all common sense, and yet this is what politicians advocate.  

After consciously admitting that we are at the end of what we used to call civilization, we then must – and I emphasize the word ‘must’ – live in such a manner as if eternal life is already here.

The most telling text of the entire book of Revelation, is found in its very last chapter: Revelation 22: 11, “Let those who do wrong, let them do wrong even more, let those who do vile, let them continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

That is the naked truth. The mask has to go, the secret must be unveiled, everything must in the end become what it always has been already.

Humanity is being be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest, in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Nature is falling upon the human race as a provoked lion, and will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, exploding into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics, threatening to cause the dissolution of human society.

If all else fails, make war. Donald Trump loves his nukes while, driven by radical ideology Pompeo and Pence see themselves as God’s chosen to bring on Rapture and Armageddon! Their followers sooner destroy themselves than admit defeat; they will only become more spiteful in their hatred, more determined in their powerlessness, more relentless in their rage.

Indeed, “Let those who do wrong, let them do wrong even more, let those who do vile, let them continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

Always plan for the worst case scenario, but after DARK DAYS a NEW DAY dawns.

July 25 2020

LOVE: IMPOSSIBLE?

I have been thinking about LOVE lately. “All we need is LOVE”, the Beatles sang.  C. S. Lewis, in his “The Four Loves”, said that some people are glad the English language uses both the words “love” and “like.” He says his own generation was told not to say “I love strawberries,” but to use the work “like” in that instance. Lewis talks about loves in terms of Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. His true message is that the four are almost always intertwined and that they are at their most intense and satisfying level when they are connected to a love for God.

That is the angle I want to explore, and I have come to a startling and disconcerting conclusion, so disconcerting that I hesitate to come to a final verdict. It most certainly remains a point of debate.

Love and Like. Biblical examples.

 Thanks to my classical schooling – Latin for 6 years and Greek for 5 years – I can read the New Testament in its original Greek and distinguish the four kinds of LOVE: Agape, Philo, Eros, Caritas, two of them evident in John 21.

When Jesus, after his resurrection, met with his closest followers on the shore of The Sea of Galilee, related in John 21: 15-17, he specifically addressed Peter who had denied him three times. This passage illustrates two types of LOVE in the Greek language, perhaps best translated as Love and Like. Jesus, pointblank, asked Peter, “Do you love me”, using the AGAPE – the unconditional ‘love’ verb. Peter answers Jesus with a different verb for love – philo – which expresses the love one has for a friend, sort of ‘like’, have affection for. Jesus, the second time uses ‘agape’ again (do you really, really love me) and Peter again answers with philo or ‘like’. Jesus then too switches to philo and Peter confirms this. The tempestuous Peter has become temperate.

How do we love God?

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”. (1 John 4: 16). Jesus in Mark 12: 30, spells it out: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. Jesus here echoes Deuteronomy 6: 5 which has exactly the same wording. In both instances the equivalent of AGAPE is used. Jesus tells us that loving God is an all-consuming matter that’s why the ‘all’ ‘and’ is repeated three times.

This begs the question: HOW DO WE LOVE GOD? There is a definite creation-love connection, based on John 3: 16,”For God so loved (agape) the world that he  gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I believe that this is the only other instance, apart from declaring his love for his Son, when God expresses this utmost emotion: love, in this case love for his creation.

Of course, there is 1 Corinthians 13, that famous chapter on LOVE.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, (Agape used throughout) I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Words come cheap: deeds are decisive. When we say we love God, then this needs clarification, hence a little detour. I have a Van Gogh biography, a most depressing book. He and his father, a Protestant minister, were constantly in conflict, especially because of his aim in life: to become a fulltime painter. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming an evangelist worker in London of all places, but that did not last long. He was as stubborn and stupid as his parents were. However today we don’t treasure ‘Vincent’ – that’s how he signed his paintings – because of his character – depressive – and his living habits – he killed himself – but because he produced marvelous artwork, now trading in the tens of millions of dollars.

All great artists are valued by their works: Rembrandt, Bach, Shakespeare: we couldn’t care less about their personalities. God too, is and remains a mystery. The Old Testament depicts God as very human, caring, forgiving, but also vengeful and angry, but in the New Testament God is pictured differently: he is ‘invisible’: “God lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” (1 Tim. 6: 16). Yet we must love him, unconditionally, the AGAPE way. So how do we love him? We love him, the invisible Creator, as we love all great artists, by his works: his creation is the utmost in everything.

Practical Implications.

Back to 1 Corinthians 13.

Paul, in his letters, always warns against backsliding to the Jewish rituals, outlined in the Mosaic ordinances, such as circumcision and temple worship. He brought a new message: not LAW but LOVE. We, too, prefer the easy way out: we still want to go to heaven so that we can abuse the earth. Forget it: that’s 19^th and 20^th Century stuff, basically Gnostic Paganism. Jesus died to make a New Earth under a New Heaven possible, because God so loved the world, the cosmos, the universe. We too must love what God loves, that really means LOVING CREATION the AGAPE way, unconditionally, without any hesitation, whole-heartedly, with all the power and intellect and human strength we possess.

That is my conclusion, and I wonder whether that is still possible. Today, whatever we do, from birth to death, from our rising in the morning to our resting at night, we do the opposite of God’s love commandment in regard to creation.    

The problem  is that loving God and loving his creation is the key to eternity: that is my ultimate conclusion, but that has tremendous implications, scary and impossible.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. 

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am nothing. 

If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I gain nothing.
 

LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION is the key to eternal life, the key to THE NEW COSMOS. Jesus died to regain PARADISE, the Garden of Eden. Love for creation extinguishes the boundaries between all religious expressions: Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hinduism, Buddhism, even the atheist, perhaps especially the atheist!

Impossible? A pipedream? Difficult today? Yes, but it explains Jesus’ words, “Many are called, few are chosen”, (Matthew 22:14) and “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8), because today it is impossible to live totally in line with ‘perfection’. Matthew 5: 48 tells us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. The Greek word used for perfect is ‘teleios’, meaning that in all we do we must keep the ‘telos’, the far-away ‘end’ in mind, a word we daily use in ‘tele-phone’, ‘tele-vision’, and ‘tele-commuting.’

LOVE: STILL POSSIBLE?

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, (Philippians 2: 12). Salvation is not something to take for granted. Jesus gave his life to buy back creation. Is salvation still possible today?

Lord have mercy! Pray without ceasing. Live to do the impossible. Save creation. Ora et Labora.

July 15 2020

 PREPARE YE………

Our world is in an overshoot situation. Overshoot? Imagine a car that missed a turn and is now precariously suspended over a cliff where at any moment it can clatter down, as the slightest movement could cause a tipping point, demolishing the automobile and killing the occupants.

So? Worried about the overshoot state of the world? Well, maybe we should just in case, because such a scenario usually is fatal.  

At any rate, that’s how I picture our plight now. Why? Because we simply have too many people on earth, using more water, more soil, more earth, more energy than the earth can provide and tolerate. At a certain time, a moment nobody knows, there will be a tipping point when, just like that car, nature collapses: the treasures, the raw materials, the air, the water we extract from ‘nature’ are simply too much, and soon the earth will refuse to accommodate our wants.

All old news of course. It reminds me of Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy. She was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he ordained that her prophesies would not be believed. That VIRUS is a wake-up call. The weather is another, but the Cassandra curse still counts.    

That VIRUS? Truly a case in point: One minute everything is normal: the next minute nothing is. That’s what we face as conscious citizens, as people who have no excuse, as earth-dwellers who have unlimited access to news sources and relevant information on any topic, but refuse to listen and absorb. Christians especially cannot plead ignorance, because the  BOOK, that age-old document on which Christianity is based, repeatedly, constantly, without letup, repeats the theme of creation, fall, redemption, of birth, of maturity, of death and resurrection, not only of all that lives, including us humans, but also of the entire living world.

We need to change drastically, but we won’t, of course, just like Noah’s contemporaries who saw him for decades building the Ark, and not heed his warnings. Noah was known as a straight shooter, an upright artisan, a master builder, and even when that long file of animals came traveling in pairs and entered the Ark, and all sorts of birds came flying in, curiosity did not change into action, so they all drowned. We have similar warnings in reverse: species are disappearing at an alarming rate; weather is freaking out; pandemics in humans and animals a sure sign, but still we go our merry way.

Enter John, who is not a Baptist, but a Baptizer, famous for telling us to “Prepare ye, the Way of the Lord”; a line used in the Godspell musical, starting this masterpiece by repeating it 8 times. Mark 1:3 says, “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'”

I’ve been thinking about this man, his message and the musical all week. It’s easy to sing that catchy tune. It’s easy to repeat it numerous times so that it’s grafted in our memory, but today the reality remains, “A voice crying in the wilderness,” commonly indicating an almost hopeless task, where the only hearers are the trees, the birds and the wild animals.  

As you may know, my constant quest is, “How do I prepare a ‘way of the Lord?’ Should I see it as myself becoming ready to face the Lord when he returns? Or does it also have a broader context, a missionary goal? Or both? How did John himself see it?

John the Baptizer preceded Jesus by preaching at the river Jordan where he instituted baptism by immersion, symbolizing the washing away of sins. A radical person he was, a true environmentalist, living off nature’s gifts, wild honey and locusts, himself a pronounced example what it means to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’, totally living in tune with creation, practicing what he preached. His body demeanor spoke as loud as his verbal language.   

 From his very beginning he realized he was a person of destiny, a man of God, a true outlier, a pronounced prophet, always aware of his mission in life, a man of nature, born of devout parents, a miracle child, an outspoken speaker, condemning Herod, Israel’s ruler for living in sin, which caused his death.   

Is that how we too must prepare the ‘way of the Lord’, just as The Baptizer? Must we too be radical in living habits and condemn our way of life which we know kills creation?

Jesus knew him quite well as their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, were intimate friends. Jesus commented on him, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11). A bit of a hyperbole, this statement about his greatness, I think: how about Moses and Elijah? Perhaps Jesus referred to those born in his time.

And then there is that Kingdom thing!

Does that mean that a person like me, a tiny cog in the Kingdom, is greater than this immense personality who was brutally murdered because he criticized King Herod, the ancient equivalent of President Trump? I think John the Baptizer lacked a Kingdom vision. He was of the old Jewish school: look at the Psalms: many imply that dying is the end. Jesus, by his resurrection, as Paul repeatedly emphasized, conquered death and made the same possible for his followers. John was one of the old school.

Still I see John as a model for me: he, the forager, the un-compromiser, close to nature, having a defined goal in life to prepare Israel for the Lord’s coming, just as I see as my task in life to tell the world that the Parousia is imminent, that Jesus’ second coming can happen any day now.

My question: Was John really a prophet? Luke 9: 19 suggests that the people in Israel saw John as such.

What then makes a person a prophet? Let me throw out some thoughts.

A prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically predicts what is to come.

No, a prophet is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly looks at what is happening in society and sees it as his or her responsibility to point out the immense challenges facing us in a quickly changing world. 

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who courageously and critically looks at the church and her doctrines, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who dares to look to the future and tries to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and also strives for a church in which these young people feel at home.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new.

That’s why a prophet, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming. 

So, was John a prophet? Am I? Are you?

July 5 2020

WHAT TO EXPECT AND WHAT TO DO.

“The Harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not (yet) saved.”                                                 Jeremiah 6: 20

This anguishing outcry portrays our isolation and exile. It signifies our anxiety stemming from our despair for an uncertain future with ever expanding planetary pandemic pockets, with accelerating atmospheric heat and no feasible solutions to solve the intractable need for carbon energy. These perils encompass us all. It’s not like the plagues in Egypt when the Jacob tribe was excluded. Today the plea in the Lord’s Prayer, “Don’t put us to the test”, goes unheeded, because no person, rich or poor, of any possible color or orientation, is excluded from the current wave of tribulations.

Sorry RAPTURE crowd, there won’t be exceptions for you either: all will be LEFT BEHIND to endure the unbearable heat, predicted in Malachi 4, “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a fire.”

That “Christians” around the world will be taken up into heaven prior to the unleashing of these cataclysmic events that most associate with the end times, is pure poppycock. Those images of empty piles of clothes and rudderless cars whose drivers had suddenly disappeared, are outright nonsense, plainly contradicted in Matthew 24. There Jesus is quoted, warning us about the Last Days, “As it was in the days before the flood people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the Ark, and they knew nothing about what would happen, until the Flood came and took them all away. That’s how it will be at the coming of The Son of Man.”

In other words, God’s people are The Left-behind-Crowd: those who, like Noah, believe in God’s deliverance.

In 1974 I bought a book by Dr. Robert L. Heilbroner whose textbook I used taking Economics 101 at Queen’s University. In his An Inquiry into The Human Prospect, he concluded, “If then, by the question ‘is there hope for man?’ we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenge of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No there is no such hope.” 

The Fourth Turning.

I have been re-reading a book I bought 20 years ago, The Fourth Turning, with as subtitle, An American Prophecy: what the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.

Written in 1997 the two authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, apply their generational theories to the cycles of history and locate America in the middle of an unraveling period, on the brink of a crisis. (Remember this was written 20+ years ago.) They specifically mention the year 2020 as being at the center of The Fourth Turning.

The authors convincingly demonstrate how history like the annual seasons, like a human life, has 4 stages called Turnings. The most recent First Turning corresponds with the era from 1946-1964, the American High, followed by the Second Turning, which the authors call, The Consciousness Revolution, from 1964-1984. The Third Turning comes with a question mark Culture Wars from 1984-2005? because this was written in 1997-8. It is now clear that the real ending of the Third Turning was 2008, when the great financial collapse took place and governments pumped in trillions to rescue the banks. This indicates that we now, since 2008, are in the midst of the Fourth Turning.

I am the great under-liner in my books, mostly an odd collection that nobody else would want anyway. Here’s what I emphasized: “The spirit of America comes once a saeculum (a life-time) only through what the ancients called ekpyrosis, nature’s fiery moment of death and discontinuity. History’s periodic eras of Crises combust the old social order and gives birth to a new.

Ekpyrosis explained.  

Ekpyrosis is Ancient Greek: ekpýr?sis, “conflagration” and is a Stoic belief in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great conflagration every Great Year. (The time frame of destruction was never defined or given by any of the Stoics).

Here’s a relevant quote:

On the Earthen floor of the rounded hogans, Navajo artists
sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time.
Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They
draw these sand circles in a counterclockwise progression,
one quadrant at the time, with decorative icons for the
challenges of each age and season. When they reach the
end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a
small gap just to the right of the top. That signifies the
moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenists called
ekpyrosis.

Back to the make-up of The Fourth Turning, some excerpts.

“Eventually, all of America’s lesser problems will combine into one giant problem….. the product of all the wrong choices…. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we are at the mercy of its deeper rhythms … We cannot avoid history’s last quadrant….The epoch that began with VJ Day (in 1945) will reach a natural climax and come to an end.”

The book continues, “An end of what?”

“The next Fourth Turning (Now in progress, I might add), could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing.”

Let me leave it by that.

WHAT TO EXPECT AND WHAT TO DO?

I have repeatedly hinted at what to expect.

The Bible is quite clear on this point. 2 Peter 3: 10-11 pictures reality and also hints at the solution: But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness. 

“Conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness”.

That concerns our personal behavior. We need a new mindset, a ‘metanoia’, a different approach, an attempt to live a totally creation-friendly life, because we now must assume the life-style of eternity to (sort of) qualify. Prayer is not enough. God made creation: we un-made it: that has to change.  When we are asked ‘to conduct ourselves in holiness and godliness’, then this also applies to our conduct vis-à-vis creation, because God made it and this means it is holy.

If you believe in God and The Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and believe that our future is upon a new earth, then now is the time to assume the ‘Life Style of Eternity’.

I know this is next to impossible, so pray, pray for enlightenment, spiritual insight, and pray for forgiveness, because we all are implicated in the disastrous situation we find ourselves in, and all are guilty. The Lord’s Prayer, that so often mis-explained and misunderstood prayer, has the line “forgive us our trespasses”. Trespasses occur when we invade someone else’s property to cause harm. That’s why I understand that phrase to refer to us abusing nature, something we constantly do. That’s why I see John 3: 16 – telling us how much God loves the earth – is for us, today the most important text in the Bible.

“The Harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not (yet) saved.” The Fourth Turning is upon us, and ‘ekpyrosis’ is rapidly approaching.

Ora et Labora, Pray and Work.