NOVEMBER 2 2019
UNDER THE WEATHER
The phrase under the weather is a nautical term from the days of sailing ships. Any sailor who was feeling ill would be sent below deck to protect him from the weather.
I have all the Hornblower books by C. S. Forester, dealing with sailing warships during the England-France-Napoleonic wars. Great reading. I also have some of the Patrick O’Brian series, covering the same period, also featuring a ship’s surgeon, Stephen Maturin, a brilliant physician who thought that below deck was actually the worst place to heal, as hundreds of sailors were confined there and infections were rampant: above deck under a tarpaulin protected from sun and rain, breathing fresh sea-air was far healthier.
The weather.
Matthew 16: 1-4 tells us something about the weather:
The Pharisees and Sadducees came up, and testing Jesus, they asked Him to show them a sign from heaven. But He replied to them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ “And in the morning, ‘There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times? “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” And He left them and went away.
Nothing very polite about this answer. Jesus could be very abrupt, especially when dealing with the clergy, who, of course, knew all about Jonah.
So, what is ‘the sign of Jonah?’ And what are ‘the signs of the times today?’
The best way to learn about Jonah is to sing about him. So I once made a song in Jonah on the tune of Psalm 8, “Lord, oh Lord in all the earth How great thy name.” I know this song is not very good poetry, but it can be sung with gusto.
REFRAIN
Whale, oh whale in all the sea
The greatest whale
With its double-steepled tail
Swallowed Jonah in travail:
Oh what a tale!
- God,
the Lord to Jonah said:
Go to Nineveh the bad
Jonah did not like the charge
Instead to Tarshish did he march
Set out to sail. REFRAIN
- Jonah
caused the storm they got
Sailors then did cast the lot
In the sea they threw the male
And at once it stopped the gale
But not the whale! REFRAIN
- In
the belly of the fish
Jonah made a fervent wish.
Then the Lord spoke to the whale
Who spew Jonah on the shale
Quite pale and frail. REFRAIN
- On
the Nineveh he went
Telling all now to repent.
When they did he got so mad
Calling God e’vrything that’s bad
How sad, how sad. REFRAIN
- Jonah
tired and angry
Sat himself under a tree
Which the Lord for
him supplied
But the tree grew sick and died
And Jonah cried. REFRAIN
- Then
the Lord to Jonah said
If one dead tree makes you so mad
Don’t I then have
equal right
To be concerned for Nineveh’s plight:
Don’t be so trite! REFRAIN.
So, what is the sign of Jonah? The above verses pretty well cover the Jonah story. So, what do I deduce?
- Jonah refuses to preach the gospel of judgement “Repent or else!”
- Jonah did not want Nineveh to repent: they were Israel’s sworn enemies. Nationalist Jonah said to himself “The Lord is wrong”: the people of Nineveh don’t belong to God’s crowd, only we, the sons of Abraham, do”.
- When Jonah was buried alive this gave him time to change his mind, also a sign of what was going to happen to Jesus.
- Not repenting means Total Destruction. That is true for today as well.
Thus the sign of Jonah was political, religious and ecological: the religious leaders of Israel saw salvation only for their own people. Jesus came for all, a lesson his followers of all times have to learn as well. He also hinted at his own death. Not repenting meant destruction.
Today we see something similar: white supremacy, nationalism and misdirected religion: the gnostic heaven heresy, anthropocentric salvation, while honoring God’s cosmos has little significance for the church. Unless we repent, en bloc, we too will suffer the fate Nineveh was to undergo.
Down Under
Australia is also known as “Down Under”. Last week I read that: “Drought is weighing on economic growth, and the dire conditions have prompted Australia, a major wheat exporter, to import the grain for the first time in 12 years.”
“Down under” is “under the weather”. Rivers are running dry. Fish are choking by the thousands, and sheep are dying for lack of pasture.
Today the whole world is UNDER THE WEATHER, not only Down Under, pointing to severe food inflation in the years to come.
California: a sign to come!
Already California is experiencing pre-industrial conditions – no electricity – because for millions electricity is cut off to prevent live wires from igniting more fires. California has always been a trendsetter. Whatever first happens there soon will happen everywhere!
Fragile.
We have built a society based on essentially one single power source: electricity. Everything depends on a steady supply of this magic substance that heats and cools and provides light and makes internet and computers function.
Today’s climate abnormalities everywhere tax an already fragile system through increased energy requirements triggered by extended periods of heat, drought, or cold. If the power grid were to collapse, we all would experience disastrous consequences.
- Loss of perishable foods and
medications
- Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
- Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
- Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
- Loss of public transportation systems
- Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
- Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power
A rise in insect-borne disease is another potential danger. China is trying to contain African Swine Fever, so far only affecting the small farmers. Still some 200 million pigs have been killed because there is no known cure for this.
If a highly infectious disease were to emerge, there are only very few places in the world with sufficient social cohesion and a strong public health system to respond adequately.
We live in a world that is becoming totally abnormal. For weeks now Alaska has been 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, accelerating the de-icing of the Arctic, where trillions of tons of METHANE are on the verge of emerging, jumping the Global Temperature by at least 5 degrees Celsius. But the USA Mid-West, where corn is grown, is covered with ice and snow in October, burying about half the corn crop.
UNDER THE WEATHER.
One of the laws of ECOLOGY is that “everything is connected to everything else”. We all know that when one part of our body is sick, it affects our totality. The same is true for our planetary body. We have abused it for centuries and now we, who are part and parcel of creation – soil we are and to soil we shall return – will suffer.
A short history.
The Garden of Eden’s idyllic, fruit gathering, state did not last long. Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control: our Capitalistic Society has been the result, stretching back some five thousand years, coming to us, after many collapses.
In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.
In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential, as human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth, while at the height of the British Empire a century ago, there were two billion, now we have nearly eight billion, thanks to electricity, fully carbon-fueled. While population increases are slowly declining, consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. True, the outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India, yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion.
Will they too see better lives? Not likely. Predicted consequences of global warming — blighted coral reefs, melting glaciers, spreading deserts, and extreme weather — are already upon us.
Yes, we, our own children and grandchildren will face growing pains. We have saddled us and them with creation-loath luxuries and frivolous gadgets while we squander away what’s left of the wealth and wonder of the God’s dearly bought Earth.
We are leaving them monstrous debts, having colonized both past and future, having drawn energy, chemical fertilizer, and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto us and our progeny and other species, many already bankrupted and extinct.
We, the human race, have become the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. Fortunately awareness of our predicament is spreading as we are beginning to see the world dying before our eyes, as global protests are mounting.
The failure of democratic governments to stand up for the greater good over the long run is fueling disillusionment with democracy itself. There is something badly wrong with an economic regime in which 26 mega-billionaires own as much as half the world’s population. Such extreme disparity has never been seen before. Inequality is the main driver behind rising population and consumption. The highest birthrates are in the poorest places, mainly Africa and the Indian subcontinent. At the other end of the seesaw, obscene wealth — the kind which owns mansions around the world and gigantic yachts with helicopter pads — has a colossal footprint, while its undue influence amounts to a dark tyranny.
Of one thing we can be sure: if we fail to act, nature will do so with the rough justice she has always served on those who are too many and who take too much.
Given the history of humanity, so briefly outlined above, the story of Jonah is relevant today. He was unwilling to go to Nineveh and plead for conversion, until God intervened and made his trip successful, even though he resented the outcome.
Then it was more or less a local conversion, and one that proved to be only temporary, as today’s Nineveh, located on the outskirts of Mosul in Northern Iraq was almost totally destroyed while wrested from the oppressive regime of ISIS, that fanatical Muslim regime.
UNDER THE WEATHER
The entire world is UNDER THE WEATHER, is sick to the core.
Jesus urged us to discern “the signs of the times.” We instantly know the weather, often days in advance. Jesus does not care about the immediate future: he always wants us to look beyond tomorrow and into eternity. There is where our future lies!
Life today is merely proving grounds for eternity. That also means that, if we love Christ, we must emulate his life, which was perfectly reflected in his love for creation, so beautifully expressed in John 3: 16, the Bible’s most important text, certainly today when our actions totally contradict this.
It bears repeating:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
That LIFE will be lived on the earth from which we are taken: God’s Holy Earth, because he created it and called it good SEVEN TIMES.