Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

March 20 2016
ANARCHY

Again Keats comes to mind:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I have often written that the last days of the present world will be horrible. I now am beginning to see how they may unfold. The American electorate is not voting for Trump or Sanders. The voting public is out to destroy the establishment. People prefer anarchy over the current state of affairs.
What really frightens me are the US army soldiers, especially those with the Special Forces stationed in Fort Bragg N.C. They voted for Trump. Even though a former Pentagon official said that the top brass would defy orders from President Trump, the troops support him. Utterly scary.
All this brings up memories from the 1939-45 war years in Europe where I, from 1940-45, lived in German occupied the Netherlands. In the early Hitler days goons were permitted to harass Jews and others opposed to the NAZI regime. America is ripe for Trump, ripe for revolt, ripe for ripping everything apart. People are angry, angry at a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. Trump is exploiting all this, feeding ferment after two lost wars, as American power declines, while there is Republican political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money.

Here’s how one commentator describes Trump:
“I watch the head of this Las Vegas croupier, this kitschy carnival performer, coiffed and botoxed, drifting from one television camera to another with his fleshy mouth perpetually half-open: you never know whether those exposed teeth are signs of having drunk or eaten too much, or whether they might indicate that he means to eat you next.
“I listen to his swearing, his vulgar rhetoric, his pathetic hatred of women, whom he describes, depending on his mood, as bitches, pigs, or disgusting animals. I hear his smutty jokes in which the careful language of politics has been pushed aside in favor of supposedly authentic popular speech at its most elemental – the language, apparently, of the genitals. ISIS? We’re not going to make war against it, we’re going to “kick its ass.”

All this breeds ANARCHY; all this is pure chaotic disorder inducing.

The word has a Greek base. Anarchos is Greek for a rudderless person. Where the word ARCHE means ruler, authority, the beginning of good things – the first words in the Jewish Greek Bible, the Septuagint, are “En Arche, in the Beginning”- anarchy is the opposite. ANARCHY means disorder, rudderless, lawless, turmoil everywhere.
ANARCHY can already be seen in the weather. There stability is basically gone. Denying Climate Change is a form of intellectual ANARCHY. This atmospheric anarchy is especially evident in the Arctic and Antarctic, supposedly the coldest region in the world, yet the ice accumulation in the Arctic this year was the lowest ever, with icebergs splitting off even in February, which was the hottest month ever: 1.35 degrees Celsius above the average. Also utterly scary. Not only was last month the hottest but also the most unusual warmth for any month on record. Unprecedented temperatures in the Arctic, averaging an astonishing 11 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, which melted away layers of ice to record-low levels. The heat helped prolong the longest planet-wide coral bleaching event. These unprecedented milestones caused the highest recorded jump in carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.

THAT’S WEATHER ANARCHY.

Anarchy is never an isolated event. All of life is connected. When nature is angry then people are angry. When chaos reigns in the financial world, then all of life is affected, also our minds and spirits and even our religious lives.
We now live in a different world, where people no longer see or sense or experience the truth. “What is Truth” Pilate wondered when he was interviewing a certain man called JESUS brought to him by the church of that day to be condemned to death because Jesus had challenged their religious practises.
That was evil at work. Then and now the sad truth is that this world is ruled by evil: Satan rules supreme. The “anarchy” he induces will intensify as THE DAY approaches. The wise King Solomon in his famous book of PROVERBS hit the right note when in one of the last chapters he wrote: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29: 18). That’s where we are today. We no longer have a clear cut idea what life is all about. Polluting energy use has distorted everything. No longer do we know that Life is about glorifying God by loving his creation.

David Brooks in his New York Times column referred to an essay Andy Crouch published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Crouch starts with the distinction the anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized, between a guilt culture and a shame culture. In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.
Crouch argues that the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion. Trump is a perfect example of this: he lives for praise, for acceptance. And so does his constituency, his millions of followers.

The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition. Crouch writes, “Talk of right and wrong is troubling when it is accompanied by seeming indifference to the experience of shame that accompanies judgments of ‘immorality.”
No longer are there permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.
Here’s what I confess as a Christian. We must hate sin but love the sinner. But that rule has gone by the wayside because there are no more permanent standards. Anything goes. Gone are the old criteria, where people are treated as ‘images of God’, as persons entitled to an alternative view and valued for their contribution.

I occasionally watch TV. Last week I saw Peter Mansbridge, the CBC news anchor, interview David Suzuki on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Suzuki has been the most visible environment defender in Canada. He admitted that in his many decades of fighting for clean air, water and soil – the essential ingredients of our own bodies – matters have gone from bad to worse. He admitted that it is almost too late to turn the tide. He is cautious there, probably really thinking that it is too late, but a public figure cannot say that. That polluting is a sin, is something the Church is not ready to admit, adding to the religious confusion, typical of all of life today. Disobeying the laws of creation generates anarchy.

Fact is that t here’s no greater danger in this world than anarchy. Now more than ever the world has to come together to combat the great dangers, of which Climate Change is the most prominent, because it will trigger massive people relocations, the likes of which the world has not experienced since the Fall of Rome. Even the millions that moved after the war in Eastern Europe, retreating with the German armies, fleeing before the Russians, will be a mere tribal affair compared to the masses that will be driven from their natural habitat due to drought in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia and the rising seas that will threaten most of Florida and even cities such as New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Where will they settle? The trouble is that the world is full already. We have gone far beyond our natural population limits, perhaps by as much as a factor of 3-4, which means that our present population of 7.3 billion far away exceeds what the earth sustainably can support which is perhaps no more than 2 billion. We have experienced exponential growth due to the use of chemical fertilizer, and fossil fuel. We now are exposed to the revenge of Gaia, as James Lovelock put it. Anarchical weather with too much rain in some places and not enough in other locations will test the best of us. It seems to me that this coming summer will provide the answer. If February was 1.35 Degrees Celsius above the normal what will the outlook for the summer be?

There already is ANARCHY on the political front. Europe is at its wits end how to deal with the influx of Syrians, while the current outlook for the US elections in November looks totally terrifying. There always remains the VISION thing. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That perishing is both a spiritual matter as well as physical. No longer is there a God-consciousness. God has disappeared except in the OMG expression.
ANARCHY everywhere. People in China cannot stand any more pollution, so more growth will simply mean more dirty air and water. Too many laborers in developed countries are being marginalized by globalization and by competition with ever more intelligent machines that can replace much of the function of humans. None of this would be a problem, except that we have a huge amount of debt that needs to be repaid with interest, and we need commodity prices to rise high enough to encourage production. If these problems are not fixed, the whole system will collapse, even though there seems to be a surplus of energy products.

Our world needs new standards, needs new moral rules.

Of course the Bible has given these. Take Jesus’ great commandment: “Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself.” We love the great artists, Bach, Mozart, Rembrandt, Leonardi Da Vinci, van Eyck, Shakespeare, by paying millions for their paintings, by listening to their music and seeing their plays. We hardly ever specify how to love God, which most effectively is done by sincerely loving his creation and so ensuring the health and welfare of all that lives.
To me this is such a fundamental matter that it is beyond me how Christians by and large fail to implement this basic truth. By paying only lip service to ‘loving creation’, it really denies its validity. That too is anarchy of the highest order, wrapped in a false form of piety.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

We have painted ourselves in a corner. Repeatedly the Bible tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. As so much in Christianity it’s not the words that count, but the deeper meaning. “The fear of the Lord” basically means being in deep awe for what God has created, marveling at his infinity as evident in the ‘needing eternity to learn everything of all the treasures of creation’. That’s what the New Creation is all about! It requires a great deal of intellectual curiosity, a real desire to never stop learning.
Today we live in the un-creating of all things, exactly the opposite of what God intended as to do. Yes, admit it: un-creating means taking matters apart, creating anarchy. Creation was a beautiful WHOLE. Once we eliminate one part, all other things fall apart and anarchy ensues.

In the chaotic anarchy we have created, it is almost impossible to find the Source of Order, the Creator of it all. We have sown the wind and now will reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8: 7).

MARCH 13 2016

“I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22)

Curious title, isn’t it? Even more curious: that’s God speaking who declares himself, well, sort of powerless.

He is referring to the Lot family fleeing from those godless cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God cannot proceed with obliterating these towns until this small family is safely settled. God’s action depends on human cooperation! Perhaps we are more important than we usually portray ourselves.
How did Lot come to live there in that evil region? When he, as Abraham’s nephew, had followed his uncle to The Promised Land, obeying God’s command, these two extremely rich families, were competing for grazing grounds. Even then, in those then so pristine regions, with still a very sparse population, space to accommodate the large herds of these two plutocrats, became so tight that they decided to split up, rather than get into each other’s ways. Abraham, more the gentleman of the two, and wiser as well, left it up to Lot to choose where to go, knowing full well what Lot would do. Lot, the more greedy one set out for the fertile plains where the decadent cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were situated. Abraham wanted to stay away from there because being bad is contagious. Did the prosperity there cause them to become so degenerate? I believe so. In that regard they resemble our world today, a world almost entirely dominated by the root of all evil, the desire for money, usurping all that is precious on the globe: air, seas, soil. God then did not want that evil to spread, at least not yet. Now, I think, evil is out of control: that’s why we too will suffer that same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah. God then rescued that little family, saved them because of their connection to Abraham. When the coming global holocaust hits – and it is coming – God will again rescue his own, you can be sure of that, thanks to their connection to Jesus Christ. Let’s face it: God will not forever condone evil in his Holy Creation.

Back to the Lot clan, a greedy lot, these four persons, who with his wife and their 2 daughters are consorted out by God in person to a safe haven. They, are cautioned not to look back, are warned not to regret their forced exit. Lot’s wife does and this one look paralyzes her. Lot would like to stop and help her on, but, and here come God’s remarkable words: “I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22). Get where? Get to the little town that is their safe haven, their refuge, where they will not be affected by the fiery quake that will swallow all their riches, their barns full of cattle and their homes full of treasures: all gone in a twinkling of an eye.

We are still stuck with these remarkable words, telling us that God cannot proceed with destroying these wicked cities until Lot and his two daughters are safely within the confines of that tiny town called Zoar.

Suppose they had refused to go on. Suppose they had said, “No, our treasures are too precious, our herds and pricy possessions are worth more to us than safeguarding our lives”, then evil would have triumphed, then God would not have had the power to destroy these cities. Then SATAN would have scored a major victory: evil would have prevailed because the Bible says that “I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22). Strange words. Lot and his daughters are not independent of God here, but nevertheless these three people do have quite a bit of power.
Conclusion: we have more influence on GOD than we realize.

That becomes plain when we skip from Genesis, the first Bible book, to Revelation, the very last part.

A word about the Bible. The Bible is no more than beautiful ancient literature unless we connect it somehow to ourselves and to contemporary happenings: sermons that fail to tie the Bible into what goes on here and now with us and the world around us, are a waste of time. The fact that this is happening all too frequently is the main reason why the church is not going anywhere, suffers a slow death, actually. By now everybody in church already knows the basics: God created; we fell for Satan instead; Jesus made it right again; we are saved by grace.

It is exactly at that point where the church usually goes wrong. Most of the ministers preach that we are destined for heaven, explaining the Bible wrongly, having no notion of the renewed earth, while others often ignore the Bible altogether and present some sort of sociology lesson, which is equally useless. Karl Barth has said: the newspaper, TV, Internet news, whatever, combined with the Bible must guide us in life on our way to the Kingdom. Failure to do so has often caused the church to become a hindrance for understanding the Kingdom, yet the great paradox is that, even though the church may be an impediment for gaining a Kingdom vision, “there is no salvation outside the church”, or as Bonhoeffer puts it, echoing the Roman Catholic church with its love for Latin: Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Savus.
This makes me jump from the first Bible book, Genesis, to the very last one, Revelation 8: 1, where it says: “THEN THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN FOR ABOUT HALF AN HOUR.”
It seems to me that today we live in that 30 minute period of silence.

That silence is significant.
Here’s what is happening up there in heaven, before God’s throne. There seven angels are standing poised, each having a trumpet at the ready, eager to announce the greatest event of human history: the arrival of the New Creation.
BUT……………….
Nothing happens.
Everything is silent.
Progress suspended.
History takes a pause.
Development stops.
Everything comes to a standstill: no singing, no praising God, no angels reporting back about their activities as guardians for the believers. There is silence for 30 minutes. Why? Why has all celestial activity been stalled?

“I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22)
Something happened similar to what took place with Lot’s small family. Sodom and Gomorrah could not be destroyed until the Lot clan was safe.

Now the church is holding things up. The cruel truth is that the arrival of the Kingdom, the ascent of the New Creation cannot proceed as long as the prayers of the holy, the words arising from the pious men and women on earth have not been placed on the altar before God. Heaven is not able to reveal its full authority and majesty as long as the earth has not prayed for it.
Everything has its prescribed time and so also the last happening before the final end can only begin when the proper time for it has arrived. And one of the factors which determine that the time has come is that the church on earth must have sent up her prayers to God. Failure to do so stalls the arrival of the Kingdom.
What this really comes down to is that in the leading up to the great universal denouement, the final reckoning, the church on earth has a very particular and important task: her task is to pray, pray without ceasing. The space of 30 minutes of silence in heaven, that half an hour of suspense, is there to give the church time. The grand finale, the point in time for which the church lives and has its purpose can only take place when what the church has to do on earth and what takes place in heaven click, are on the same wave length. The return of the Lord in all his glory depends on his body below. If the church is not ready then there is silence in heaven.

And that time of silence in heaven is now. The church is not ready. Her prayer lacks power. Her conduct is not sufficiently intimate, not mature enough. The churches everywhere on earth are far too preoccupied with secular affairs and not enough with the earth itself. The church is too much involved with the ferments and foments here in the affairs of the world, too tied up with her own state of affairs and not sufficiently geared to the final ending, not enough yearning for the completion. Her clock is slower than the heavenly timepiece where everything is in place, where the seventh, the last seal, has been broken. And still nothing stirs in heaven where the silence is deafening. The waiting is for the earthly voices. The waiting is for the church which, amidst this world, has her place and calling.

There’s where the mighty element of delay is to be found. That interlude does not lie in the lack of power of Jesus Christ, because that power is sufficient to make the END come speedily. Neither is the coming of the Kingdom postponed because the world itself is not yet ripe for the judgement. If only the church would confess more ardently, pray more fervently, were to look forward to the coming of the King more eagerly, then it all would fall into place because then God is capable to make all other matters come to pass. The church’s primary task is to look forward to the coming of the Lord. Failure to do so is the real reason why these seven angels are waiting, with their trumpets at the ready. That’s the reason why there is a breathless silence in the heavenly palace. That’s the reason why in the infinite majesty of God’s heavenly temple there is that almost unbearable tension lasting for a specific short time. How long? Who knows. It will last as long as the church clings to its own ineffective ways while the world around her is frantically trying to keep matters from going out of control, with millions on the run toward Europe, and many more millions in America in revolt. With the climate changing and China collapsing, with droughts and floods, the church goes her often irrelevant ways. Now that the very last happenings are knocking at the door, she is not ready, no longer knows how to pray. The Bible tells us to wait on the Lord, but now the rolls are reversed: the Lord is waiting for the church.

THE LORD CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL THE CHURCH ACTS.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his CREATION AND FALL wrote in his introduction: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST WITNESSES TO THE END OF ALL THINGS, IT LIVES FROM THE END, IT THINKS FROM THE END, IT ACTS FROM THE END, IT PROCLAIMS ITS MESSAGE FROM THE END.
Does it? No. The church will not change, and I will not leave the church. I believe in One Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. Fortunately I find that in the church I attend, a small church, as churches should be, an imperfect church as all churches are.

We underestimate ourselves vis-à-vis God. God could not act until Lot was secure. God will not return until the church sees it real task, praying for the Lord’s return.
The real task of the church is to prepare the people for the Kingdom to come. Jesus’s coming into the world always was centered on that goal: the pearl of great value: all we possess to acquire the Kingdom. All his parables had to do with “Seeking first the Kingdom”, Jesus’ prime message, but the church has different priorities.
A thought struck me while walking in my sugar bush, carrying two pails full of sap. Perhaps the trees whispered it to me. Could it possibly be that the 30 minutes of silence in heaven somewhat resembles our One Minute of Silence remembering a famous personality, in this case a silent tribute to the church that died. I don’t mean the one holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. I do mean the instituted church with its pope and cardinals, its preachers and doctrines. After all the Old Testament church ceased to be when the curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies ripped from bottom to top when Christ died.
What is sure is that everything is changing, including the church, now succumbing to Gnosticism and the Pursuit of Prosperity, while the main-line churches have become a fading gathering of gray-heads.

Can the church’s mantra still become MARANATHA, Lord come quickly?

MARCH 6 2016

WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!

I got an e-mail with the message: A SUPREME LOSS. I expected to read about the death of a dear relative, but, fortunately no, instead it was a memo forwarded from FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, a right wing movement, I believe, lamenting the death of Antonin Scalia, a judge on the US highest court.
Scalia. I don’t like extremes. Scalia did. Scalia was an advocate for women having lots of kids. He and his wife had nine, 5 sons, 4 daughters. He evidently, hated birth control and, of course, abortion. That’s why FOCUS ON THE FAMILY called Scalia death a Supreme loss, a play of words on his being a judge in the US Supreme Court.

Scalia’s death is not a supreme loss in my opinion. True the Roman Catholic Church, at least its conservative wing, lost a fervent promotor of male supremacy (he died far from his family in a hunting camp, a singularly male time-passing), and is, I am pretty sure, not an admirer of the current Pope.
This devout Catholic, so revered by the church, in 2000 cast his ballot for Bush, and his appointees, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, both supreme war mongers, who have been the primary cause of the chaos we now see in Syria and adjacent states, and co-responsible for millions of deaths and maimed, and also to blame for today’s refugees. Yes, he is the main reason why I, in faraway Tweed, head the finance committee to pay for one single family out of the millions now fleeing that once stable region.

This devout Catholic, an icon of the FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, was also co-responsible for the Supreme Court favoring corporations to funnel millions of dollars to the pockets of the preferred candidates who favored the rich, and so indirectly promoted supreme disparity, which, in turn, created the current revolt of the ignorant masses who, en bloc, have rushed to the fascist Donald Trump, the blustering demagogue on par with Adolf Hitler.
Supreme Loss? I’d say good riddance. It’s exactly men such as Scalia, who know exactly what God wants, who have God in their pockets, so to say, that have brought us where we are today both religiously and economically. Fact is that God cannot be known. To claim such is to be like God, and thus a form of idolatry.

Today, more than ever before, God’s face is hidden. Nothing is really black and white anymore: everything is sort of gray, because basically, God has disappeared from influencing human actions. In other words: we are on our own and God help us!
It was not always so. It seems that every 600 years or so a major religion is born. Moses and the birth of the Israelite religion belong to the Thirteenth or Twelfth Century before Christ. Then God was a visible presence. Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, founder of the religion by his name, is traditionally located in the sixth century before Christ. Confucius, in China, also dates from that period, and so does Buddha. Six hundred years later, in what we call the first century, God revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the start of Christianity. In the seventh century Mohammed appeared (563- 632) who died almost 600 years after Jesus. Perhaps due to the dramatic effect of the Black Plague which killed as much as one-third of the European population, the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a new form of religion inspired by Martin Luther, did not occur until the beginning of the sixteenth century (1517), preceded by much religious ferment.

We now are at the waning of all Christian thinking. We are entering THE AGE WITHOUT GOD. I do not count Pentecostalism as Christian since it is an offshoot of Gnosticism, basically having no regard for Creation, with speaking in tongues, uttering inarticulate sounds being a prerequisite for salvation and regarding Rapture, an escape from the earth, as its crowning achievement. It’s also the fastest growing form of worship. One of my good friends told me on the phone that he now is a pre-tribulation rapture believer, convinced that Jesus will dispatch him to heaven before all the real trouble in the world such as pandemics, wars, earthquakes, whatever, occur. He’s got a surprise coming!

WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!!

And God will. He will not abandon his own. Jesus in John 17 foresaw this situation. His words: (verse 15) “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” God’s guidance is still there, somehow, but on a personal level.
Let me trace how God dealt with men and men with God from the very beginning.
Adam and Eve. God had to even provide them with clothing as their fig leaves, or whatever they used, weren’t very effective. They were like children. Noah received explicit instructions how to build the Ark which, when finished, was personally closed by God. Next: Abraham. He dared to challenge God. When Noah was told by God that he was bringing the flood, Noah did not argue or question God’s decision. Abraham dared to argue that it would not be right for God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the righteous there. “Let my Lord not be angry…” as he bargained with God. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, fought with GOD and prevailed.
So there is progress: Adam disobeys God, Abraham argues with God, Jacob fights God. People are confronting their creator. And then there is Moses, who more than once successfully persuaded God to relent and actually change a divine degree. Exodus 33: 11 tells us that Moses spoke with God “the way a man speaks to another man”.

All this leads to our day and age, 2000 years after God came to us in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer, while in prison, in a letter to a relative, uses the term “mündig gewordende Welt” translated as a ‘world come of age.” In a sense it indicates the situation where we are supposed to be mature enough to meet our Savior as the redeemed of the Lord. For that to happen we have to have the condition as outlined in Deuteronomy 31: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” The word ‘end’ indicates ‘their distant future’ on the way to eternity.
Jesus in John 17 alludes to that condition. In the prayer to his father he asks him to protect them from the evil one, with the help of God’s spirit which came on Pentecost. God is like a wise parent who allows children to become independent, to learn from their mistakes and so slowly mature. That stage is necessary in order to be fit for eternity.

Of course this does not mean that you and I are no longer guided by God. On the contrary, as churches fail to educate people for eternity, fail to see the intimate connection between the created Word – the world we live in – and the written Word, life in general becomes more and more an encounter with the divine in any form, miracles, prayer, spiritual revelation, all matters not shared or witnessed by the masses.
Yes, it increasingly looks to me that we are on our own. The day and age for personal conversion is not over – but is becoming more and more unlikely, because the church no longer has a clear-cut message. Rehashing biblical stories does not do the trick anymore. Only a direct translation into concrete action involving the betterment of all of creation, including the human part, must take its place.

The real SUPREME LOSS today is not the death of a conservative Catholic who, in spite of being Pro-Life, was indirectly instrumental in causing millions of death and growing inequality. The SUPREME LOSS is the failure of the church to prepare its people for eternity, for making them ready for the New Creation.
That the USA – the most ‘religious’ Western country – has lost its God is plainly evident in voting for Trump, the perfect symbol of overweening pride. Without God all is permitted, something that clearly applies to today. Revelation, the last Bible Book, tells us that, prior to the Lord’s coming, everything will become more chaotic.

The rise of an anti-establishment mentality reeks of a rudderless revolution and is a sign that all institutions are in danger. All this will generate an Antichrist figure who appeals to humanity’s basic sinful desire for greed, easy living, something for nothing: chaos, as opposed to cosmos.
Admit it: increasingly the world is becoming ungovernable. Increasingly institutions are failing us. If fellows like Donald Trump can generate such a following, then it seems to me that the days of the Antichrist are not far off.

Already the scene is set for global disorder. What we see today in Europe with millions on the march to a better life, is only the beginning. The world is radically splitting in two camps, the few ‘haves’ and the overwhelming ‘have- nots’.
The Bible warns us that The End will be chaotic, symbolized by that number 666, a number understood only when it is about to come. If you follow the current financial news, you will have noticed that many important people connected to both big government and big banks are calling for the abolishing of cash, for the simple reason that credit and debit cards leave a record, so there is no cheating on tax there. In the next few years when governments everywhere will need the maximum tax revenue, the call for abolishing cash will become more pronounced. It will leave each citizen who buys or sells at the mercy of the big machines, which all operate via numbers. Then nobody will be able to buy or sell unless they use the government or bank sanctioned card. The machines will use either use the hand, via finger prints, or the head, an eye scan, for verification, exactly as Revelation portrays it. With security measures increasing all the time whether there is reason for it or not, we will quickly lose all freedom. I am not paranoid, but I see that what the Bible now already mentions may soon become reality. Better start preparing for a barter economy.
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the Antichrist. He wrote a book by that name. He predicted the coming madness, now evident in Climate Change, money mayhem and the Trump phenomenon. Nietzsche wrote that the loss of God entails madness, which has implications for a society which has lost God. A society that prefers a Trump has become mad.

The entire world is already godless. When in the next few years the world economy falls apart due to excess of monetary and environmental debt, and severe hardship will be the result, the disasters so plainly stated in the book of Revelation of John, will not be far away.
Basically we are blind to all this. We prefer a willful blindness, generated by false optimism and a wishy-washy religion that fails to consider the implications of what it means to be a Christian.

I repeat, it is the failure of the church to “seek first the Kingdom’, and to strive first and foremost for the welfare of creation, and so be prepared for the New Creation to come that is at the heart of the problem. That’s why Christ died on Calvary. John 3: 16, says it all. This text is almost always abused by the church to read that “God so loved humanity etc.” No, it says “God so loved the cosmos” for which he gave his life. The cosmos includes all that lives and moves and has a being. “The Four Living Creatures” representing all animals, plants, trees, natural beauty, so prominently featured in the book of the Revelation of John must become central to our lives, because without the animals, the trees, the coherence of it all, “The Kingdom” is not possible.
A thought: in the Lord’s Prayer the plea to ‘forgive us our trespasses’, refers to our ‘sins against creation’. Think about that and act accordingly.

Ora et Labora, Pray and work.

February 28 2016

OUR EARTH IS IN THE DEVIL’S DEADLY GRIP.

Never mind the song “This is my Father’s world.” Never mind contemporary testimonies that state that “Our world belongs to God”. Never mind us singing “Beautiful Savior, King of Creation.” All this sounds very pious, and, yes, ultimately all this is true, but today these lines are simply incorrect, deceiving us, giving us a false sense of security and sending the wrong message to the masses.
Fact is that ‘our earth is in the devil’s deadly grip’. Never mind what the churches proclaim. The church’s message has, by and large, become so ineffective that people are quitting them en masse, and part of the reason is that the church no longer calls a spade a spade. All evidence shows that things here, down under where you and I live, are getting worse by the day. You want an explanation for the Holocaust and Climate Change, for Cancer and continuous conflicts? Look no further than the devil. All signs indicate that what used to be God’s world is now under a curse, a curse so bad that even Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, admits that it needs a miracle, something beyond the power of humans, to rectify the situation.

The trouble is that the church reads the Bible wrong. It has been blinded by Greek philosophy, which has proved more enduring and more incisive than the Scriptures. The one cardinal text in the Bible that I think has been constantly misinterpreted is John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son (as a ransom to buy the world back) that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Yes, our everlasting life depends on the correct interpretation of this text.

So what does this text really mean for me? To me it indicates that ownership of the world, the cosmos, had been transferred to the Devil, who now is in full possession, but that, in principle, Jesus’ death on the cross bought it back, the transfer to be implemented when his Kingdom comes in the New Creation.
Compare this situation to a real estate deal. For some 10 years in my 40+ years of business life I have been a Real Estate Broker. Here’s what I did: I listed a property, put up a sign, advertised it, had an offer with some conditions such as financing, and when these conditions were met within a stated time limit, the deal was final. Only then would I stick up a SOLD sign on the property. I would receive my commission upon closing when the new owners would move in.

Back to John 3: 16, which also involved a Real Estate deal, this time the entire earth, the cosmos, as the Greek word has it. In the Garden of Eden God gave the earth to the human race. Psalm 115: 16 simply says: ’The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.’ Period. Then something strange happened: Adam and Eve gave it away. That clever fellow, the Devil, tricked them to transfer ownership, with the result that everything changed: thorns and thistles instead of edibles. There’s where Jesus entered the picture. He didn’t come to rescue you and me from eternal death – that too – but his PRIMARY MISSION was to wrest creation out of the hands of the Devil.

Back to that Real Estate deal. On Calvary Jesus paid the price: His life. That made the sale final. We now live in that limbo stage between the point in time when the deal became final, and the closing of the sale when the new owners move in. It is in this particular interval that we now live: between Calvary when Jesus suffered the most horrible death and his return which is now imminent. The closer we get to the Second Coming, the worse things will get for the planet, and for us.
Of course with the old owner still in possession of the property – the cosmos in this case, the world and those who dwell therein – the Devil is not the most cooperative of owners. On the contrary: he hates Jesus. He is the ultimate enemy. He knows that he is on the losing end. He knows that once Jesus returns, he’s had it. So, as the most vindictive of all creatures, he is busy inflicting the most possible damage to the house, and, even though he cannot totally destroy it, he is busy gutting the inside so that very little good remains.

There’s where we are at. Jesus really wants us to refrain from being implicated in this ‘wrecking’ business, but the sad truth is, believe it or not, we all are the Devil’s willing allies. The church, in some ways, is the leader in this by teaching the crowd that our ultimate destination is HEAVEN. So who cares! Thrash the joint. “Get in line, get in line, follow the ‘to heaven’ sign!” was a song I was taught in grade- and Sunday school. There’s hardly a hymn in my (Presbyterian) church’s songbook that does not somehow allude to the glories and beauty of heaven, all pure Gnostic nonsense, distancing us from the earth.
Yes, the Bible is full of texts that indicate the Devil’s present hold on creation. Take Matthew 4: 8-9, where it says: “Again the devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor: the great pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum in Rome, the great wall of China, the Taj Mahal, just to name a few, and said: “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus did not dispute that claim. He didn’t say “This is my Father’s world.” He did not quote “Our world belongs to God.” Nothing of that sort. Actually, in John 17, when Jesus intimately talked with his father just before his final trial and death, he confessed (verse 15): “My prayer is not that you take them (my followers) out of this world but that you protect them from the evil one.” The evil one is what Jesus calls The Prince of this world, the real ruler here. Verse 16 also is often misinterpreted as well. “They are not of this world (the world belonging to the devil) as I am not of it.” The heaven-heretics interpret this to mean that neither Jesus nor we belong to this world but have heaven as our future. Jesus actually says the opposite: neither he nor we belong to a world dominated by the Devil. The apostle John is very emphatic on this score: in 1 John 5: 19 he explicitly states that “We know we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

Need I say more?

Walter Brueggemann in his book, “INTERPRETATION AND OBEDIENCE” makes the point that new times need new approaches.
Here’s what Brueggemann writes – and I fully agree with him -:”The case for theological education cannot be made once and for all. It needs to be made again and again because what theology and theological education are called to do varies in each social setting and cultural circumstance……….We live in a culture that in its dominant modes is committed to a reading of reality that is false and will finally dehumanize and destroy……I suggest that the church in our cultural setting is largely contained in and seduced by that false reading of reality so that it has little energy or imagination, not to say courage for its mission.”

Looking at the church in my more than eight decades of faithful attendance I have not noticed an iota of change in the way the church operates. The only difference from the 1930’s is that today the sermon is 15-20 minutes long while in my youth I often endured 45 minutes of preaching, and that twice on a Sunday.
It is my contention that today we live in a unique time, a time never before experienced by the human race. Everything today has an expiry date in it, yet we live as if the earth is infinite. Just last week I saw an article that outlined how close to 90 million acres of forests in North America are under threat due to Climate Change and the beetles. As the forests go so do we. And that is just one example.

That brings me to the point I really want to make: churches are failing to do their task; churches are telling us that this world belong to God. That is true in the sense that God created it, just like the Nacht Wacht belongs to Rembrandt who painted it in 1650 or so, but is now the possession of the Dutch Government. God created but now this world belongs to us, and we made a mess of it by transferring it to God’s enemy.

Yet, we are in this world to stay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about soil and the earth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theology professor in Berlin and totally opposed to the Hitler regime. He was hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany collapsed. He was then 39 years old and the author of many books. I have his A TESTAMENT TO FREEDOM a 530 page volume containing his essential writings. In it he takes the church to task as it has moved away from the earth and has embraced the pagan-idea of heaven, increasingly seeing the earth as evil. Here are his words: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the earth in other worlds beyond: he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”
Bonhoeffer calls this ‘heaven message’ pious secularism. His words: “The Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth is pious secularism which also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things.”

In his CREATION AND FALL he is again very outspoken. There he writes: “The soil and animals over which I have dominion, are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule…. I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” So far Bonhoeffer, my kind of theologian.

Then there is J. H. Bavinck

Bavinck too has written about this. In BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END: A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION Bavinck, talking about Jesus, the Son of Man, humanity personified, wrote: “Numer¬ous nations still maintain the ceremony of treating a small child with special rituals when it first gets into touch with the fertile earth. This contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging – as Jesus did on the cross – breaks the contact with the earth. Hanging places a person outside the great cosmic unity and puts him all by himself as an exile, outside the wider context of God’s glorious creation. That is why hanging is an eloquent expression of being expelled from God’s kingdom. When suspended above the earth, humans are placed outside the contact with the earth. Exiles, lonely and lost souls, humans are carried outside the powerful context of God’s life-energizing grace. Such is the signi¬fi¬cance of that dreadful death, death on the cross. The Scriptures, rather than emphasizing that death on the cross is pain¬ful, point out that it foreshadows the cruel reality of carrying God’s curse.”

Walter Brueggemann concludes his book THE LAND with these words: “The gospel is about the coming of the new age, the new kingdom, the new land.”

Jesus died not to save our souls on the way to heaven. No, no, no. He died to force the devil to let go of the earth and to restore it to its original perfection. That’s why loving God is expressed in loving the earth, his precious possession. It’s here where we will enjoy eternal life. It’s the church’s task to prepare people for this.

FEBRUARY 21 2016

THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE DISSOLUTION OF TODAY’S INSTITUTIONS

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Second Coming is a poem composed by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919 just after the War ended. One hundred years later, the Second Coming is that much closer.

Let me first say a bit about the Tower of Babel. Genesis 11 relates that even then, some 6000 years ago, people were technically quite advanced. They had the expertise to mine big blocks of granite, to transport them to a central place, and to hoist them high up into place using bitumen for cement (this was in the Middle East where there was then and is now loads of that tarry stuff).

To build a tower of that magnitude called for a strictly regulated organization, required a structure of command, and lots of ‘slave’ labour, as well as an intricate monetary system to finance this all. The unified language the Bible mentioned also implied a singleness of purpose, a pyramid of power, with dictatorial tendencies, where human freedom was made subordinate to the overall goal of building a world empire.
It is exactly that sort of governance that the Lord wanted to prevent from existing. Therefore God, by personal intervention, confused their language so that they could no longer communicate. I also imagine that among those dispersed were true believers who saw God’s plan and took with them some of the truths still evident in many an indigenous folk tale.

Back to today.

We now live in a situation described in Deuteronomy 31: 17: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” Yes, today we live a life without God’s universal guidance, all too evident everywhere, leading to certain cultural death.

We again have a universal language: English. We now have built not one but twin Towers of Babel, coming to you in the dual forms of the Carbon Age and the Internet, both amazing structures that allow us to communicate instantly with people all over the world and reach any point on the globe in a few hours. That actually is a boon for the Gospel and its world-wide proclamation, fulfilling one of the requirements before the Lord’s return: Matthew 24:14 tells us that “the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the entire world, and then the End will come.” Brace yourself.
Yes, we have built our own towers of Babel in the forms of our Carbon fueled life and the WWW, the World-Wide-Web for good and ill. The Lord used the old Tower of Babel to create a multi-lingual and pluralist society, expressed in Jesus’ words: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
Now the new Towers of Babel are crumbling, testing the faith of all believers. Climate Change is causing the weather to go weird and World-Wide communication has generated world-wide confusion and dissatisfaction and universal surveillance.

Look at American politics. Bizarre. Bernie Sanders, a 72 year old Senator of independence status, from Vermont, is challenging Hillary Clinton, who, more or less, represents the status quo. Sanders’ success shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and sick of seeing the rich become richer and the poor poorer. He intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending the establishment, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.
Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). He advocates free healthcare and free higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights. That’s the situation on the left.

The ‘religious’ right reminds me of Adam and Eve. Just as the first human pair easily fell for the ‘ great deceiver’, so too the Christian segment of the USA are flocking to Trump and Cruz, succumbing to a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam and anti-Christian discourse and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people.

Today we see the revolt of the masses and the threatened dissolution of age-old political institutions. This is also evident in Europe where similar movements are at work and nihilism is also gaining ground.
It is true: for many in the USA the current conditions are not working. Especially the Republican Party has made it its main message that government is not the solution but the problem. Don Trump’s success is extra scary as he appeals to the worst in human nature. In spite of his atheistic language, ridiculing his opponents, blaming minorities for taking jobs away, the so-called Evangelical section flocks to him, exposing their basic ignorance of Christian values. Of course it was no different in Canada where the fundamentalists too voted for Harper who had no regard for God’s creation whatsoever, preferring the profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism: the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

Are Christian Institutions also vulnerable?

Christian institutions have benefited from the modern Tower of Babel to build churches and Christian education on all levels. Their continuance depends on maintaining these cosmos-killing conditions: in other words, they are relying on the Tower of Babel syndrome, in spite of paying lip service to more ecologically sound measures. Yet it is our Christian duty to promote the death of our secular civilization, by abandoning the Tower of Babel’s destructive practices because they imperil God’s Primary word, Creation. John 3: 16 makes it abundantly clear that loving creation is the Christian’s primary duty. Strange as it may seem, the building of all these Christian institutions, seen as necessary at the time, has now become a hindrance to adapting to the new reality: the coming collapse of the world economy will force them to abandon the entire network of educational institutions. The trouble with physically building churches and schools is that we are making an absolute statement that this is how it always will be. Already the youth is shying away from these human enterprises in record numbers, imperiling the institutions from within because the current Tower of Babel built on fossil fuel is crumbling, while the WWW is as fragile as the electricity supply.
God, in his goodness and omniscience, is now forcing us to seek out a new course as financial and environmental constraints will compel us to do so.

“In our Father’s House there are many mansions”.

Our truth, our perspective, our Judeo-Christian-Western values need a thorough re-examination, seeing our world not just with Western eyes but with Indian and Chinese eyes and Inuit eyes, not just only with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho-salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.
Today we are on the cusp of experiencing the dissolution of all institutions, finding ourselves on the eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either. It’s all in God’s plan to prepare us for the New Age to come, where Christ will be all and in all, where he will be the Primus inter Pares, the First among equals, all children of God and sisters and brothers of Jesus.
That means that THE SECOND COMING is not far away, evident in the disintegration of all that has made our life so different from our forebears.
For most of human history life has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The fortunate coincidence of factors that drove the unprecedented improvement in living standards following the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the period after World War II, has been unique, an historical aberration. Now, different influences threaten to halt further increases, and even reverse the gains. Yet, we have experienced how materially benevolent life can be, a foreshadowing of Eternity, the New Age to come in God’s Kingdom.

Now all signs point to looming shortages of critical resources, such as water, food and energy due to manmade climate change and extreme weather conditions. Europe is currently struggling to deal with a few million refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. How will the world deal with hundreds of millions of people at risk of displacement as a resulting of rising sea levels?

Today we live in an age of ‘extend and pretend’, whereby authorities choose to ignore the underlying problem, cover it up, or devise deferral strategies to ‘kick the can down the road’. The assumption has been that government spending, lower interest rates, and the supply of liquidity or cash to money markets would create growth. It would also increase inflation to help reduce the level of debt, by decreasing its value. Human wisdom hasn’t worked: global debt has increased, not decreased, in response to low rates and government spending. Banks, considered dangerously large after the events of 2008, have increased in size and market power since then.
The policies have also set the stage for a new financial crisis. Easy money has artificially boosted prices of financial assets beyond their real value. A significant amount of this capital has flowed into and destabilized emerging markets. Addicted to government and central bank support, the world economy may not be able to survive without low rates and excessive liquidity.

Authorities increasingly find themselves trapped, with little room to take a different tack and unable to discontinue support for the economy. Central bankers know, even if they are unwilling to publicly acknowledge it, that their tools are inadequate or exhausted, now possessing the potency of shamanic rain dances.
Politicians know all this, but are unwilling to openly discuss the real issues. They argue that the problems are too far into the future to require immediate action, fearing electoral oblivion, but in so doing they are merely pile up the problems.
It is not in the interest of bankers and financial advisers to tell their clients about the real outlook because bad news is bad for business. The media for the most part, accentuate the positive. Facts, they argue, are too depressing. The priority is to maintain the appearance of normality, to engender confidence.
So the Twin Towers on which our economy depends are slowly disintegrating, until they reach a sudden point of collapse. For the moment, the world hopes for the best of times but is afraid of the worst. The world has postponed, indefinitely, dealing decisively with the challenges, choosing instead to risk stagnation or collapse. But reality cannot be deferred forever. Kicking the can down the road only shifts the responsibility for dealing with it onto others, especially future generations.
The lesson here is that we should not grow too attached to institutions or confessions or even contemporary statements of faith: the all will disappear.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!