Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part 9.

                                                             DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

Last week I cautioned that, in preparation for eternity, our current life style must much more focus on the way we treat creation. Every scrap of paper comes from wood pulp; every kilometer we drive harms all of creation, but especially the flora section of the environment.

I am more and more beginning to believe that we can only be part of the New Creation – and we are speeding toward its coming witness the turmoil everywhere, both environmentally, politically and economically – when we now regard God’s work of art as sacred, which, naturally, must also include the animal world, and the question:  Do Animals have rights?

My wife and I have been almost exclusively vegetarian for many decades. It all started in 1972, now more than 40 years ago, when I bought a book Diet for a Small Planet where I discovered that it takes many pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. Realizing the plight of billions who go hungry, we went off meat then and there. It helps that meat eating is not very healthy: fatty, full of pesticides, often saturated with antibiotics, making us more susceptible to infection. Physically we have done well on our meat-less diet, eating a lot of green stuff and many bean varieties, basically in line with the Mediterranean diet.

Just like trees, animals too are an important part of creation, and just as we have to learn to see trees as our indispensable allies so too we must see animals as friends and companions, creatures from which we can learn.

Job was of that opinion. Here is a quote: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hands is the life of creature and the breath of every human being.” Job 12: 7-10.

 One of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights?,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Rene Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” His opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.

Is he right?

We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. Last year a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

In Genesis 2 God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were, in turn, given the task to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.

At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees, actually the only creation-friendly way for permanence. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

I am sure these ‘biblical’ animals were free-ranging, and the fish was not raised in off-shore fish-farms. Now most of what we eat is mass-produced in cages, closed pens and force-fed for quick maturity.

All this commercial raising of eggs or broilers or calves or fish is only possible because of cheap and abundant energy, either fuel oil or propane. The recent disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, train derailments lately and the production of Tar-Sand oil are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller, with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution is growing by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead. Just as heat at the hint of a hand or cool at a computer command is conditional upon carbon availability, so the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the Peak Oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will vanish.

 We need new approaches to living

As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the green grass pastures where they can thrive naturally.

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.

However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

Elephants are an excellent example of community living.

I found an amazing article in the Winter/Spring edition of The New Atlantis, some 22,000 words, too long to reproduce here.

Here is how it started: “The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life.

“After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. Welcome to the world: This newborn hasn’t yet stood up and stretched its legs, let alone figured out how to use its trunk.

 Its appendage is flailing off its face to breathe, drink, caress, thwack, probe, lift, haul, wrap, spray, sense, blast, stroke, smell, nudge, collect, bathe, toot, wave, and perform countless other functions that a person would rely on a combination of eyes, nose, hands, and strong machinery to do. Once the calf is weaned from its mother’s milk at five or whenever its next sibling is born, it will spend up to 16 hours a day eating 5 percent of its entire weight in leaves, grass, brush, bark, and basically any other kind of vegetation. It will only process about 40 percent of the nutrients in this food, however; the waste it leaves behind helps fertilize plant growth and provide accessible nutrition on the ground to smaller animals, thus making the elephant a keystone species in its habitat. From 250 pounds at birth, it will continue to grow throughout its life, to up to 7 tons for a male of the largest species or 4 tons for a female…..

When this new-born elephant is twelve or fourteen, she will go into heat (“estrus”) for the first time, a bewildering occurrence during which her mother will stand by and show her what to do and which male to accept. If she conceives, she will have a calf twenty-two months later, crucially aided in birthing and raising it by the more experienced older ladies. She may have another every four to five years into her fifties or sixties, but not all will survive.

Some more excerpts of this article.

 From a religious, anthropocentric perspective, it might be said that while animal virtues do not entail morality for the animals themselves, they reveal to us the goodness in creation; as the medieval theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena (that same person I mentioned in my Gnostic Article, The Real American Religion a few weeks ago) wrote, “In a wonderful and inexpressible way God is created in His creatures.” From a more biological view, it might be noted that people mostly do not choose their dispositions either, that behavioral tendencies are more determined than we like to tell ourselves, and that blame and credit for such things are often misapplied in human contexts too…..

One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical — a matriarch’s recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water — to the passionate — grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend…..

Like humans, most traumatized elephants do not become violent, but just absorb their hurts in confusion and sadness and respond to them in other familiar ways. In The Dynasty of Abu (1962), the zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson recounts the story of an elephant named Sadie, who was practicing but failing to learn a circus routine. Finally she gave up and bolted out of the training ring, causing her to be chastised (not cruelly, he stresses) “for her supposed stupidity and for trying to run away.” At this, she dropped to the ground and dumbfounded her trainers by bawling like a human being. “She lay there on her side, the tears streaming down her face and sobs racking her huge body.”

In almost half a century of close association with the Abu [elephants], including and even after reading a substantial part of the vast literature concerning these majestic creatures, I have not encountered anything that has moved me so greatly, and I write this in all seriousness and humility. Its ineffable pathos constantly brings to mind that most famous verse “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). What on earth are we to make of a so-called “lower animal” crying?

But the latter idea — that humans, although capable of conscious self-direction, are as mutely carried along by the force of selection as your friendly neighborhood amoeba — simply elides the question, while the former raises many more; the tiger is as much God’s creature as the lamb. In any case, the capacity for “choosing” is a binary conceit that gestures at something much fuller, an inner realm of awareness, selfhood, and possibility. In other words, a soul.

So far these quotes. Questions abound. That we can learn from animals is a biblical concept. The truth will become evident in the New Creation.

In my book Day without End animals are our friends. There you will find a scene describing a soccer game between lions and tigers with elephants as goal posts and huge grizzly bears as goalies. Find out who the referee is.

Go to Lulu.com and look for the book below.

In my next blog I will conclude this series with: The Rise and Fall of Christianity.

Day Without End

Price: $2.50 (downloadable ebook) or  $7.54 (paperback)

A brief description

God is nothing without his creation, is nothing without His earth, is nothing without the human race. We too, we are nothing without God. God needs the earth to show who He is and what the meaning of his creation is. We can only prove that we love God when we show love for his creation, while God’s love is evident in our love for fellow humans. Day Without End shows that we have learned our lesson, that we, with God’s law written on our hearts, are finally ready to live in God’s creation, to explore his infinite Body, in the way it was originally intended. Of course, to accurately visualize a renewed earth under a renewed heaven is impossible. Yet if we don’t think about the Hereafter, we cannot have one, because it’s exactly there where we all will have our final destination. In the mystery of God becoming a human being, it is evident that this earth and not heaven is God’s permanent dwelling place.

 

 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part Eight

  

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

(Revelation 22: 2.)

 

About four years ago one of our five children gave me on Father’s Day a remarkable book: The Global Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. From it I learned that trees not only breathe and communicate, provide shelter, medicine, and food but they also connect to everything else in nature, even influence our minds: the very sight of trees has a healing influence on sick people, and invigorate us all.

The author also relates something ominous. It involved a sacred dream making its way in the world today. It came from an elder of the Hopi people. It is a vision quest of death. Before he was about to die, the elder asked that the people of all nations pay attention to the trees of the forest. One such tree entered his dream. It held a circle of light in its trunk. The light came from the power of the sun. This was transferred to all the creatures of the earth as a life force. This dream is a warning to all people to respect nature, beginning with the trees of the forests, because the web of all life as we understand it depends on the tree.

We live in an era of the great rape of creation. The universal loss of forests foreshadows the finality of life. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees.

The most astounding happening in the last 100 years has been how Hitler in 7 short years, from 1933-1939, rose from a relative nonentity to the greatest threat of the 20^th century, a grave peril that took 6 years to overcome. Now it certainly looks that the 21^st Century will be dominated by our very own self-induced disaster: Climate Change, which already in 2014 has become a world-destroyer. It is our utmost duty to fight this menace as well. Will we? Or are we too dependent on our carbon slaves? When the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

Here’s what is happening. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. Two years ago, in urban Texas, the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees and mega millions more in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are decimating the rain forests. Should I mention that millions of hectares are clear-cut there also to make room for soya beans and other crops? Trees also fueled Australia’s fires during this year’s record heat, and the same is true in California, where forests fires now are a year-round event.

Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming as trees breathe oxygen and inhale CO2.  Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming Mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation. Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.

The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “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 everything in it will be laid bare.”

My particular emphasis this week is on that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter where the presence of trees restores what we have destroyed:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes. Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and that healing also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.

The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.

The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom a day is as a thousand years.

We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.

For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.

We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.

But trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungi, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals, providing an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. The sum of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.

“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”

The leaves absorb the CO2 but the unnatural extra supply of Carbon Dioxide and a rapidly decreasing number of trees has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The leaves themselves are marvels of ingenuity. Many trees have leaves that differ from one species to another. This diversity is found in the leaf’s anatomy. Some leaves have a waxy cuticle on their upper surface. These leaves repel water and attract particles that are water insoluble. The undersurface of the leaf is downy. This down is composed of thousands of fine hairs, all only a few microns in size. These hairs are multiplied in the full canopy into trillions of fine hairs. All this holds the answer to the curse of pollution of whatever kind because this microscopic world of the leaf within the tree canopy acts like a fine-toothed comb for the air.

The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.

So what else do I know about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.

Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life: Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 this time: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.”  Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Before the humans can return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!

So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

What does this mean for “How Should We Then Live?”

Every piece of paper comes from a tree. Every kilometer we drive brings pollutants that affect trees adversely. I know it is not possible to live ‘without sin’, and yet…. Revelation 22, that very last Bible chapter, verse 11, has some strange words: “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

Those are mysterious words. They suggest to me that we must redefine sin. We must include sin against trees as part of our lives, clothe ourselves in other garments, so to say, live by different standards, change our entire mindsets, orient ourselves away from the realm of death, which is the current orientation, and embrace hook, line and sinker, the shalom of eternity, the Way of Life Eternal which awaits us in the New Creation.

These words also suggest to me that, while sinners persist in their evil behaviour God’s people will grow in grace. It reminds me Deuteronomy 30: 19: “I call the heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live….”

 

Next week Part Nine: Where do animals fit into the larger picture?

 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE – Part Five

COVENANTS

Recap

In Part One of How Should We Then Live?, I concluded that Francis Schaeffer’s attempt to outline a new approach to Christianity in the USA had been a colossal failure, because it was high-jacked by the Religious Right, resulting in the Tea Party and the New Republican Party, waging war of the weak, leaving the poor poorer and the rich richer. The Law of Unintended Consequences at work.

Part Two dealt with the Lost Gospel of the Earth, showing how religion in general was instrumental in speeding up Creational deterioration by preaching that the elect go to heaven, while leaving the sinners behind, the total opposite of what the Bible teaches in Matthew 24:39.

Part Three exposed the Real American Religion, a Gnostic mix of irrelevance, seeing the earth as the enemy, the body as evil.

Part Four concentrated on Prophesy, how most people ignore the signs of the times, preferring not to rock the boat, refusing the face reality and falsely assuming that all will end well, even though numerous signs point to multi-faceted collapse, confirming that American Christianity does not have the answer:  on the contrary: it is part of the problem by following a false faith.

The remaining parts will be more positive, outlining a new way of life, beginning with Covenants, an instalment which came in at about twice the length of previous ones.

What is a Covenant?

The idea of Covenant has intrigued me for a long time. As a youth I often heard the word. My parents called themselves ‘Covenant Children’. I grew up in the Netherlands where, during the war 1940-45, there was a serious theological dispute concerning the Covenant and Baptism. This ecclesiastical controversy was so severe that families split, congregations were torn apart and new denominations emerged. I had a first-class seat in all this, as in the college I attended the sons and daughters of the ministers most intimately involved in this hair splitting, were my classmates. This experience gave me an early taste of religious intolerance when teenage boys refused to be exposed to the school opening prayer of teachers who attended the church whose synod had not approved of the actions of the dissidents.

In my youth Covenant applied only to baptism. I remember that in my church, whenever a child was baptized, we would automatically sing after the ceremony Psalm 105: “Jehovah’s truth will stand forever. His covenant bonds he will not sever… The Covenant made in days of old, with Abraham he does uphold.” That covenant had significance beyond generational lines never entered into the picture.

Yet the Covenant has aspects we seldom explore just as God himself has characteristics we rarely reveal. Both God’s sense of humor and his humility are evident in the Covenant.

Frederick Buechner, in his Telling the Truth, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale gave me a lot of new ideas. Thank you. For instance: that God has a real sense of humor is not a trait that the church has discovered. If ever it does, the church might become a more saleable commodity. That’s why I call this part of my series

“The Comedy of the Covenant.”

Here’s why. God made a covenant with Abraham and the first child born under the Covenant God made with Abraham is called “Laughter.” Laughter sets the stage of the Covenant. It means that all children of the Covenant are also children of Laughter.

And we have a lot to laugh about. Suppose that Queen Elizabeth, reputedly a very rich woman, worth multiple billions, would tell your extended family, all 20 of them, including spouses, children, and grandchildren: “I will have a contract made up, a Covenant. All my possessions, my castles, my land holdings, my stocks, shares, and crown jewels, everything I own, I will share with you. One condition I will make however, you must also share all that you own with me.”

Not a bad deal, we would say and we would be utterly foolish not to take her up on it; because suddenly each one of us would have a net worth of many millions of pounds. In addition, we all would be princesses and princes and wherever we went we would travel free and others would pay our hotel bills and meals. This unlikely situation would certainly be a cause of great merriment and laughter.

Well, that is the Comedy of the Covenant. The funny part is that it is not fiction but reality. God made such a contract with us, with all of us humans. He first made it with Noah, extended it through Abraham twice, then with Moses, David, and finally renewed and sealed it in Jesus Christ. In this contract with us God promised to share with us, as rightful heirs, as his daughters and sons, this whole universe, the entire creation, the gold it contains, the diamonds, the lakes and rivers and sea front, the mountains and meadows, the houses and forests, the birds and the animals: all that the world contains, a gift much more valuable than the Royal millions. And in addition, things the Queen cannot give: perpetual peace of mind, eternal life amidst loving people, a life without disease or death, no dead lines, only life lines to pursue. The only condition on our part is that “We do justice to his creation, love mercy, honouring all creatures and walk humbly with the God Creator.”

Is that what the Covenant is all about? Read on.

As is plain from the example, a Covenant is a treaty, a contract, where two parties agree to do something together. A Covenant is thus a sort of bonding, a welding together of lives, a promise to be faithful to each other and to all aspects of creation, no matter what comes. A marriage is thus a Covenant. Ideally a marriage is a life time arrangement between a woman and a man to stay together, to share the good and not so good times, in riches and in poverty, till death part them.

Curiously, the word ‘Religion’ also means ‘binding together.’ Thus, in essence, Covenant and Religion, are one and the same thing. And is Religion like a comedy? You must be kidding! It’s more like a tragedy the way we witness it. The religion we usually experience is solemn and serious, a matter of death and sickness more than life and enjoyment.
Yes, both Covenant and Religion are like a comedy.

The place to start is with a woman laughing. She is an old woman, and, after a lifetime in the desert, her face is cracked and rutted like a six-months’ drought. What’s so funny about this?

Let’s retrace our steps a few thousand years. The scene is the area of present-day Israel, or, as it was called in those days, Canaan. This woman, pushing 91, is laughing. She is laughing because she has just been told by an angel that she is going to have her first baby. Now, I must admit, today this is medically possible, but certainly not recommended for a woman pushing 100. Even though it was God’s angel who told her, she can’t control herself and her husband can’t control himself either. He keeps a straight face a few seconds longer, but he ends up cracking up, too. They are laughing at the idea that their baby will be born in a nursing home. They are laughing because the angel not only seems to believe it but seems to expect them to believe it too.

They are laughing because laughter is better than crying and may not be all that much different. They are laughing because if by some crazy chance it might just happen to be true, then they really would have something to laugh about.

Abraham, so goes one account, laughed until he fell on his face, and Sarah? She hid behind the door of the tent. Actually it was her laughter that got them all going.

According to Genesis, the Bible book which records this story, God then interrupted and asked about Sarah’s laughter. Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. But God insisted, “No, but you did laugh,” and, of course, he was right.

The most interesting part of it all was that God, far from getting angry at them for laughing, told them that when the baby was born he wanted them to name Isaac, which in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’ So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter, but blessed it and, in a sense, joined in, which makes it a very special laughter indeed. Here we have a snapshot of God and humanity laughing together, sharing a glorious joke in which we all are involved.

What is all this laughter about? The laughter is about the Covenant. Some 25 years earlier, when Abraham was 75 year sold and Sarah, his wife, a mature 65, barren and thus childless, they were both living in Mesopotamia, the present Iraq.

God, out of the blue, called Abraham and said, “Abraham, I have something special in store for you. You see the world around you? People are doing well. They are growing rich and comfortable and somehow this causes them to forget me and go their own way. I want you to be different and treasure my way and I want you to leave your family and friends and cozy position and go to a country where I will make a great nation out of you, even though you have no son as yet. I will make your name great and will bless those who bless you and all people on earth will be blessed through you.”

God, in other words, made a contract with Abraham, a Covenant. Remember, he then was 75 years old, Sarah 65, and incapable of having children. Even for those days, when people did live long, this was a pretty advanced age for child bearing. And, I’m sure, Abraham figured that, once he had settled in Canaan, the present day Israel, matters would soon fall into place and his heir would come along.

But God’s time-scale is different to ours. So the years rolled by until finally, when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah 90, 25 long years after God called them, the angel arrived with his shattering announcement. Then they laughed. They were going to have a baby after all. The strangers who appeared at the door turned out to be not Jehovah’s witnesses but God’s very angels. Who else could have possibly set up such a scene and arranged it to give such astonishing news? It all happened so freely, so hilariously. What could they do but laugh at the craziness of it all. So they laughed until tears ran down their cheeks.

And so the child born under the Covenant God made with Abraham is called laughter. And because we are all part of that covenant, we too are children of laughter. I think the joke is on us.

God chose us. That’s quite comical to start with. I don’t know about you, but I do know that God made a pretty foolish choice to include me as a child of the Covenant.

Marriage, of course, is a covenant. Covenant is a matter of the heart. So is marriage. In a marriage we also make vows to be faithful. Often a name change is involved as well, as was the case also when God made a covenant with Abram who became Abraham and Sarai became Sarah.

Why did God choose the Jewish people? Again God’s sense of humor. Why not the sophisticated Greeks, or the clever Egyptians, or the dominating Romans? I think he chose the Israelites because, as somebody has said, they are just like everybody else, except more so – more religious than anybody religious, and when they are secular, being secular as if they invented the concept. What applies to the Israelites then, and the Jewish people now, certainly applies to contemporary church people as well, I am sure.

Also if you look at the Christian Religion a bit more closely it really is a ridiculous affair. The Bible tells is about a king who tramps around the country side with a bunch of uneducated fishermen as his support group. The Prince of Peace, as he calls himself, looks more like a Prince of Fools, who, in spite of his miraculous powers, is not taken seriously at all, and ends up being hanged as a common criminal with only 120 followers present at his final farewell. Today it’s no wonder that people find Christianity a ridiculous affair, and I can well see their point. Just listen to these lines taken from Luke 6: “Blessed are you when you are poor.” Tell me, do you want to be poor? “Blessed are you when you weep.” Who wants to be unhappy for Pete’s sake? “Blessed are you when people hate you.” Well, don’t we all want to be liked and respected?

Yet, there is comedy in all this. Comedy is being different. We laugh not at the usual. What is common place is not funny. God makes those people part of the Covenant who are different, are not afraid to stand for justice, justice in creation, justice in the nation, who place communal interests above personal desires, all for the coming of the Kingdom. God does not want people who, in the eyes of the establishment, do the commonly accepted thing. God wants atypical people, people who are different, also by the way they live and eat and drive. Just imagine Abraham going out on a limb, leaving friends and relatives, on a promise to become a father of a great nation. People who met him 20 year later reported that he had sired a son by his wife’s slave. “Some heir!” they reported. Today, all of us would call Abraham a fool.

Talking about fools: how about Noah! There’s a crazy man. He starts to build an oceangoing ship in the middle of the prairies. Noah who did not know a rudder from an oar, who had never seen a ship or an ocean in his life, this fellow, a farmer, a wine grower who loved to imbibe of his own vintage, started to build a ship in the middle of nowhere. Hilarious. Just something you expect from a wine-bibber. He became a tourist attraction and you should hear him thundering to the people: “if you did not turn to the Lord Creator and ask for forgiveness and mend your ways, you will all drown”. There’s where everybody burst out laughing: the punch line. Best show in town! And when it all happened, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, Noah knew he had been right.

Both Abraham and Noah possessed a curious thing, a thing we all have, but not in the same way. Noah had faith in God’s promises. All people have faith, but usually in finite things, such as science or money or their own sense of superiority. Because Noah believed in God, his family was chosen to make a new start in creation. For that purpose God made a Covenant with him.

Basically this Covenant, as related in Genesis 9, is a Covenant with Creation. Six times in this short passage God repeats that the Covenant made here with Noah, is with every living creature and with the earth. In essence God says here: “People of the earth, I am the Creator. Here I now pledge to form a triad, a Covenant with three parties (1) With the Earth, (2) With you as my image bearers, and (3) With me, as the Head of the Covenant.”

“Remember,” God said, “the line of the Covenant is not vertical: first me, then you, then the earth, with the earth not really in touch with Me. No, no, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the bees and buffaloes, all are my creatures, the works of my hands.”

Picture a triangle: God occupies the top and on the other two corners are we and the earth, with lines both extending to and from each corner as we all are inter- dependent. The Earth gives life to humans, but also receives input from them. We are dependent on the earth, but can also enhance it. God gives life to us and the earth and all praise God in return. Read Psalm 19, a beautiful hymn of praise.
In other words, if we look after the earth and after ourselves and our fellow creatures, caring for the crocodiles in the jungle and our neighbours next door, then God will look after us.

This Covenant, said God to Noah, will endure throughout eternity. God, People, the Land: an inseparable Triad. To seal it all, God sent his Son, as the New Head of the New Covenant. Jesus, God’s Son, Jesus, the heart of our religion, the Head of the Covenant.

The Covenant sealed with blood

Covenant. Some people call it the Blood Covenant, because in the old days a Covenant between people was always sealed with blood. Here is a Davidic example. In 1 Samuel 18 we read that David and Jonathan made a covenant. As a sign of the Covenant Jonathan, the crown prince, took off his clothes and gave them to David. He also surrendered his sword and other weapons, even more personal and valuable than clothes. And David did the same. They completely exchanged their personal belongings, as a sign and symbol that they were one. They also did something else, not related in the Bible, but part of the general rule of personal Covenant. This ritual required an incision in their wrists. Both parties would then raise their wrists to heaven and let the blood mingle. In the incision they would rub dirt to leave a scar as a permanent sign of their mutual allegiance. They then would sit down, make a list of their possessions and exchange those lists with the promise that whatever the one part owned would become the rightful property of the other. In order to seal all this they would walk in the figure of an 8 around two altars as a sign of eternity. Then the two parties to the covenant would eat a special Covenant meal, a lamb and unleavened bread, with each party bringing his own bread and offering it to the other. They did the same with wine, pouring the wine of the one into the goblet of the other. Jesus, as Head of he Covenant, did the very same thing. His blood flowed for us. His wounds are still visible as an eternal sign of the Covenant, an everlasting scar on the God of the Trinity, that whatever is God’s, is also ours. The Lord of Creation gave it all to us. He is the God of the Universe. He signed over the ownership of this cosmos to the people of the Covenant, those who confess Jesus to be their Lord.

What a comedy! The comedy is that through Christ, God and God’s people – you and I – come together, become equals. The comedy is that God shares God’s Infinity with our finite being. There is an unfathomable even greater contrast between God and ourselves and between the Queen of England and us.

Yet God and we have become one in Jesus Christ. Look at the Lord Supper. There Jesus says the familiar words: “This is my body, given for you, and this cup is the New Covenant in my blood poured for you”: now not God but Jesus us the party of the Covenant. God has disappeared from the scene and Jesus is now at the centre. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves with the cloak of righteousness, with the Lord Jesus Christ, and so become a new creation, for God has reconciled the cosmos to himself in Christ’s full-bodied Covenant language.

So the Covenant idea is woven throughout the entire bible. In essence the Bible is the Covenant story. God made a covenant with us and with all creation. The covenant between God- Jesus- and humanity, all of us men and women, is therefore the intimate foundation, the meaning and purpose of creation. Creation is the visible basis of the Covenant, its ultimate realization. Creation is there because God in Jesus desires to enter into a Covenant with humanity. We, as human beings, exist because God continuously calls us to the Covenant. God makes us discover our existence more and more as the daily experience of living in the Covenant, in his creation. All this is derived from the loaded expression of “created in God’s image and likeness.” Our day-to-day life refers to God. Our life resembles God because we, as men and women, as conscious persons, experience our living as participants in the Covenant. We realize the meaning of God’s self-revelation in creation through the Covenant. In the created world, we are the visible representatives of the invisible God.

Christ is the First born of creation. He was the first human being: the perfect creature, after whom we have been fashioned. Yes, physically we look like Christ. The Image is real. Colossians 1 relates how all things exist in him.

Jesus is the original human pattern, the prototype of all human existence. God, in his plan of salvation, revealed himself fully in Jesus, who represents humanity for us and in this way completed creation and attained the perfect life in God.

We are created after the pattern of Christ. Through the Covenant we experience that likeness to God in a personal response of love. As Children of God, as his heirs, through the Covenant with God we share our humanity with the Son, who is the Lord of all that exists, and through whom the universe was made. The entire creation is there because it is permanently willed in Christ by the Father, because the Father loves it as the Christ.

And what would happen if the Covenant was broken? Genesis 15 gives an illustration of what happens then. There it is related how God and Abraham covenanted. Abraham is asked to cut animals in two and both God, in the form of fire, and Abraham in person, pass through these severed animals. The cutting of these beasts illustrates that if the covenant is not kept the bodies of the parties concerned would be cut in half as punishment. Later when the Israelites abandoned the agreement, the 10 tribes were banished from the earth never to be heard from again. In essence the people of Israel were broken up for ever.

So the Covenant is not for all. Those who abide by its terms will, when Christ returns, share in his glory and complete the work of creation: an eternal assignment, because Creation is Infinite as God is Infinite.

 

Next week: Celtic Christianity: How should we then live in creation? Part Six.

 

JANUARY 26 2014

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE (Part Four)

PROPHETS

CASSANDRA TIMES

Over the last five years, almost every advance in climate science has painted a more disturbing picture of the future. The reluctant conclusion of the most eminent climate scientists is that the world is now on the path to a very unpleasant future and it is too late to stop it. Behind the facade of scientific detachment, the climate scientists themselves now evince a mood of barely suppressed panic. No one is willing to say publicly what the climate science is telling us: that we can no longer prevent global warming that will this century bring about a radically transformed world that is much more hostile to the survival and flourishing of life. This is no longer an expectation of what might happen if we do not act soon; this will happen, even if the most optimistic assessment of how the world might respond to the climate disruption is validated.

This section is taken from Professor Clive Hamilton’s new book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.

In The New York Times, the Thomas Friedman column, January 22 I found this quote: “In the future, who will help a country like Syria when it gets devastated by its next drought if we are in a world where everyone is dealing with something like a Superstorm Sandy,” which alone cost the U.S. $60 billion to clean up?”

In line with these assessments, should we act as if nothing is the matter?

I have given this Part Four the title of PROPHETS, subtitled: Cassandra Times. What’s that? In Greek drama, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he ordained that her prophecies would not be believed.

Why are warnings not heeded? Al Gore’s documentary and book The Inconvenient Truth were well received by the public, but since implementing its recommendations involved measures that would inconvenience peoples’ life styles, they are not acknowledged. The key reason that Hurricane Sandy came with a colossal bill for the taxpayer was simply optimistic inertia: it will never happen on the New York-Jersey coast. The financial meltdown in 2008 was predicted by many, but The Market was seen as infallible. Of course the same is the case with the two substances on which we have built our life: not faith in the Infinite God – that too for some- but faith in an infinite supply of oil and faith in Infinite Growth.

“We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up,” wrote the over 90 year old Dr. James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s climate in crisis and the fate of humanity. Curiously Lovelock, who is not a Christian, starts his book with a quote from Jesus: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:24). A gnat is the tiniest of unclean animals. He refers here to political and environmental measures that are for appearances only but really have no substance. In essence he is saying what Peter writes in 2 Peter 3: “Since everything will be destroyed in this way – the elements destroyed by fire – you ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of the Lord and speed its coming.” Yes, an unbeliever can be a true prophet.

Why Prophets are unpopular

Prophets are unpopular because they question the status quo.

Prophets are unpopular because people hate change.

Prophets are unpopular because people are comfortable.

Prophets are unpopular because politicians avoid controversy at all cost, hate to be bringers of bad news, even though they know better.

Prophets are unpopular even in the church as it plain from even a cursory reading of the Old Testament prophets, where both the major and minor ones reveal that organized religion in the days before Christ resembled today’s rulers: they want to please everybody. And not much has changed in the ‘after Christ’ institutions.

What is a prophet?

The average human thinks that a prophet is a special person who speaks for God or one who foretells the future, at least that’s what my dictionary tells me, but I take issue with that explanation, because it would limit the office of prophet to crackpots, since nobody can predict the future.

Let me go back a more than few years when I attended the Young People Society in my home-city Groningen, where our Sunday-evening meetings were geared to students, and chaired by a university graduate. There some 20 young men, after having attended two church services of at least 90 minutes in duration, debated topics of general Christian interest, introduced by one of the members. There I learned that we as Christians have a three-fold office: that of Prophet, Priest and King. These weekly 2 hour Sunday- evening gatherings in the early and mid- 1940’s, shaped my outlook on life.

So I am a Prophet, Priest and King? That’s a core Calvinistic declaration, but one that I don’t hear much about anymore. I am even chided when I say that I am a prophet. Perhaps the words of God to Ezekiel (chapter 2: 2-5) apply to today as well: “I am sending you to a rebellious nation that is obstinate and stubborn. And whether they listen or not they will know that a prophet has been among them”.

After this introduction, I better clarify what I perceive as a prophet’s profile. A prophet is a visionary, a seer. In the Bible they were called ‘seers’, not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events, not staring what’s going on in isolation, but grasping the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the current moment. A prophet sheds unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present. By doing so he or she links heeding to hearing and action to understanding. A prophet casts his/her eye on what’s going on and connects the dots.

Thus a prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a prophet is first and foremost a person who is convinced that a new present requires new thinking and different approaches.

A prophet is first and foremost a person who openly and unabashedly dares to look to what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, fully embraces his or her responsibility for the immense challenges evident in our quickly changing society.

A prophet is first and foremost a person who has the courage to critically look at past decisions, including those involving political and ecclesiastical policies, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a person who from his or her perspective on contemporary life dares to look to the future to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and also strives for a society in which young people feel at home.

A prophet is especially a believer who sees Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation and believes 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 believing 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 Christian 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.

A daring step?

If I may be so bold to cast myself in the role that I have described above, will I be condemned for doing so? Probably.

Looking back how we have arrived at the circumstances we are in today then I detect that the economic boom that made America in the 20^th century the globe’s largest economy and the envy of the world, can be traced to some fortunate circumstances: where Europe and the rest of the world suffered ruinous wars, North American industrial hinterlands were not only spared destruction, but benefited immensely as producers of war materials and the providers of the black gold in Texas and elsewhere in its territory: the United States at the mid-20^th century produced more petroleum than all the other countries on earth put together. The oceans of oil on which the US floated to victory in two world wars made it the economic super power of the by-gone era. That domestic oil-flow has now been reduced, even with ‘fracking’ boosting the output for a few years. Fact is that global supplies are shrinking at exactly the same time when expectations of billions of destitute people are rising, thanks to ubiquitous television.

With the inevitable approach in our finite world of Peak Oil, stagnant growth, ever higher mountains of debt and dangerous weather it is not difficult to predict for those who have ears to hear, eyes to see and minds to embrace, that the big challenge facing today’s industrial societies is managing the end of abundance, rather than the onset of greater wealth for the Rest of the World.

It is foolish to believe otherwise: the brief period of cheap and plentiful energy, now ending, which, for an all too short a period was in itself an exceptional occurrence in historical terms, has been nothing else but a tremendous acceleration of human history- of which the more than tripling of the number of humans in my life time is just one example – so that the Coming of Christ would be sooner.

Does the End of Growth mean War?

A realistic look at what’s happening makes plain that the period of unprecedented prosperity, extraordinary extravagance and gigantic growth, is ending, perhaps even suddenly. That means that society has to relearn the lessons of more normal and less unusual times, times where we have the opportunity to again truly and purposely honor creation. Perhaps even wartime conditions. 2014 is exactly 100 years after the onset of WWI. Many informed people see scary parallels between 2014 and 1914. The last thing our aging planet needs is another destructive war. Do cynical politicians and eager generals see war as the solution to global youth unemployment? China has 116 males for every 100 females!

Keep eyes on the Kingdom

We assume that at least The Lord’s Prayer is well translated. Think again. There is a line there, repeated every week by millions of church-goers: “Give us this day our daily bread.” In a classic book I have: A History of Christianity, The first 3000 years, I read (page 89) that “The Greek word epiousios, translated as ‘daily’ does not mean ‘daily.’ The most likely learned guess seems to be that it refers to a special bread that will be needed the next day if the kingdom should happen to come overnight. Dr. Herman Ridderbos, in his The Coming of the Kingdom, also says that ‘daily’ is most likely incorrect, and leans to “belonging to the coming kingdom.” This, in my totally layman’s opinion, fits in with the general apocalyptic nature of the prayer (Thy Kingdom Come) and thus the request to “Give us this day our daily bread” could well read “Give us the wherewithal to prepare ourselves for the Coming of the Kingdom.” By the way that also is the principal task of the church. The coming Kingdom is The New Creation. Get ready. All over the developed world politicians and economists are doing everything in their power to enhance economic growth, even though perpetual growth is impossible. When it does happen, as in cancer, it ends in death. Efforts to maintain an inflated standard of living in the face of a contracting real economy have only caused mountains of debts. Today’s policy makers are driven by a two-pronged faith commitment: (1) that policies that failed last year will succeed next year, and (2) that the pursuit of ever newer and ever more expensive technological tools will assure an even grander future.

However, collapse is in the cards. The Kingdom is coming.

 

Next week: How should we then live? Part Five: Covenants.