Archives For Nathan Aaberg

We live in such turbulent times. Unfolding climate chaos. The worldwide pandemic. And now, with the murder of George Floyd, boiling outrage over racist policing and other manifestations of the centuries-old racist stain that continues to mar the ideals of the United States.

What else can be said that others haven’t already said very eloquently?

I just have one humble thought. As we try to heal, we will sometimes need to do positive things together. And by positive things I mean tangible, limb-moving, calorie-burning, body-engaging things that are not self-conscious moments of conversation and reflection.

Talking and reflecting in heartfelt ways are, of course, incredibly important things. But actually doing things together is just as essential. Actions taken together can imbed new ways of thinking and feeling even deeper into our hearts, minds, and the very fiber of our being.

And what are things we can do that make us feel whole and just human together? I’d suggest any engagement with God’s earth in positive ways.

Birding. Making and enjoying food. Gardening. Farming. Restoration of natural areas.

Creation takes us out of our distinction-making mindset between people and reminds us we are one set of beings and we enjoy and depend on one world. Creation takes us beyond words and our head space.

And, ideally, in that activity in Creation there is an encounter wtih God, consciously or unconsciously, that leads to deep humility.

A Novel Idea

I want to give you fair warning – I have begun writing a novel. In it I plan to further explore the ideas I’ve been exploring in this blog.

While I’m moved by the power of story, I have almost no experience writing fiction. So, to get over paralzying hangups about doing this well, I have made my goal just this – complete the first draft of a very bad novel. I am happy to report that I am indeed on pace (a very slow pace) to write one of the worst novels ever written. I’m guessing in fact that the secret guardians of literary quality are already planning to treat this work the way Russian authorities treated Chernobyl – entomb it forever in concrete.

Am I being excessively humble?

Not really. My characters, for example, all speak like they were clones of each other. Actually, and what is even worse, I think they all speak like they were clones of me.

Despite all that, I’m doing my best to accept where I am and to just plug away. Over time I hope to build some craft. I have other story ideas, too, all of which grow out of my passion for the topic of the abundant life Jesus offers, including a new relationship with God’s earth.

We only grow when we are out beyond what feels comfortable and easy. What new things are you trying this year?

Water Scorpions

A friend and farmer here at the Prairie Crossing Farm in Grayslake recently saw an unusual insect while he was working in a vegetable field. The insect was nothing like he had ever seen. It was about four inches in length, including a long tube-like structure coming out of its back end. It flew away later with wings that emerged from under armored covering.

A water scorpion!

Water scorpions are not even closely related to real scorpions. Real scorpions are arachnids with eight legs, while water scorpions are insects with not a bit of venom. The tube-like structure is actually a breathing device that allows the water scorpion to hunt in its favorite hunting grounds – underwater. In fact, it can pack bubbles of air on its abdomen’s specialized breathing holes and then use the bubbles later like handy oxygen tanks.

There is so much more that is fascinating about these insect. I encourage you to read more about them here. This world is truly amazing.

Water scorpion on hand

Water scorpion (photo by Wim Rubers)

 

 

Over the last four years, the following two questions have become pressing to me.

First, how have many Christians become so comfortable resenting reasonable* laws and rules designed to restrain the use of power to harm others and God’s earth?

And second, how do Christians continue to make up such a large percentage of President Trump’s supporters when his value system seems to be based more on Ayn Rand than Jesus Christ?

One example of President Trump’s bridling at restrictions is his firing of four inspector generals in short order. He also has a long history of working to weaken laws designed to protect people and God’s earth.

All of these actions echo the larger, unmistakable pattern of his presidency – the despising and resenting of restrictions and rebuke. The free exercise of personal and corporate power, even at the expense of justice and compassion, is clearly his highest good.

Fattori painting showing St. John the Baptist pointing at Herod and Herodias

St. John the Baptist rebuking Herod by Giovanni Fattori.  Herod imprisoned and ultimately beheaded John the Baptist because John rebuked Herod and Herodias for breaking laws.

This is not a Biblical approach to life. It is the celebration of power and the pursuit of individual prosperity over love, of valuing money over God. And prominent Christians, like Vice President Mike Pence, are going along.

How did we get to this point?

I believe part of the answer is that American Christianity tends to be incomplete.

The underlying assumption of this blog is my conviction that the Christian faith-life is both simple – life-changing faith in Jesus – and multi-faceted. Our goal is to have a whole faith-life that, over time, transforms how we think, how we feel, and how we act. Missing key ingredients of that whole faith-life is comparable to the impact on our body of not getting the right levels of iron or vitamin C. It causes our faith-life to be weak and sick. And that causes us to fall short of what God desires from us. It also causes us to mar the attractiveness of the Christian faith for others.

Here are three ways in which the faith-life of American Christians tends to lack key “nutrients:”

Christians tend to associate salvation only with the promise of life after death. 

In Acts 5:17-20, we read of the apostles being arrested for spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ, and an then angel releasing them. Read the passage below and consider the instructions the angel gives them:

Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. “Go, stand in the temple courts,” he said, “and tell the people all about this new life.”

Christian faith and discipleship leads to new life. Now.

Check out the meaning of “eternal life” in John 3:16 here.

Second, Christians generally don’t read the Bible.

And it is my sense that we tend to particularly avoid the Old Testament, despite the value of doing so. The Old Testament provides important “nutrients’ and “vitamins” for our our faith-lives.

One of the unmistakable messages of the prophets, for example, is that a symptom of a nation’s turning away from God is cruelty and injustice towards the poor and vulnerable.

Third, churches don’t comprehensively train people to go from believers to disciples.

In Beginning Well: Christian Conversion and Authentic Transformation, Gordon T. Smith rights:

The work of Christ makes conversion possible; even more, the actual focus and dynamic of conversion is that an individual comes to faith in Christ Jesus. Conversion is the act of believing in Jesus, choosing to follow Jesus and being united with Jesus as Lord and Savior. To be converted is to become a Christ-ian. And the purpose of conversion is that we may ultimately be transformed into the image of Christ Jesus.

Conversion is about justification and sanctification. But with a focus only on justification bringing the promise of heaven, Christians can be Christian without being transformed over time. They can have a Christian gloss even as they live as they’ve always lived. They can feel good about being “saved” even as they otherwise are carried along by values and culture that are incompatible with Jesus Christ.

Churches should instead train Christians in the Christian life. Some have.

God intends for every element of our life and being to be made whole and holy.

This is not easy. It means restraining ourselves for the sake of Jesus. It means having a heart that actually welcomes restraint and rebuke when they come out of good motivations. And it will put us on a collision course with princes and principalities motivated by different values and who, above all, hate the idea of restrictions on their use of power.

Early Christianity found itself at odds with the Roman Empire, which was built on a culture of power. Yet, the early church grew exponentially. What does that tell us?

 

* I want to be clear that not all laws are well-designed and reasonable. Governments can have a tendency to overextend their own power so that creativity and local autonomy are overly limited. The powerful can also craft laws that protect their interests. 

 

 

“Balaam smites his ass” by Philip De Vere

The story of Balaam’s donkey in Numbers 22:21-39 has fascinated me for some time. This and the story of the serpent in Genesis are the only places in the Bible where an animal speaks.

There are many Christians who don’t know the story at all. And some Christian thinkers are quick to dismiss the idea that the donkey actually spoke with its own volition. They write that God put words into the donkey’s mouth. Which is, of course, not what the Bible says.

I plan to write a future post that explores a number of overlooked nuances in this story further, like I did about the story of Jesus and the possessed pigs here and here. Today, however, I wanted to share one question my mind has been ruminating over.

Why didn’t the donkey just stop?

What the Donkey Was Trying to Do

If you aren’t familiar with the story, please do take a minute to read it now. The first thing that will surprise you is that the main character Balaam is not an Israelite and yet God speaks to him. You’ll also find that, even before it speaks, Balaam’s long-time donkey can see the angel standing on the road, but Balaam can’t. And the donkey takes evasive action in three different ways to avoid bringing Balaam into contact with the angel.

But the donkey never just stops.

My starting assumption about this story is that it has depth to it. So I’ve been reading books about donkeys and becoming more and more fascinated by them. Pertinent to my question, however, is this section from the book The Wisdom of Donkeys by Andy Merrifield in which Merrifield compares horses to donkeys:

Horses are faster, yet have much less endurance than donkeys, and are nowhere near as agile. They’re edgier, too, especially in tight situations. They bolt whereas a donkey freezes. You can usually cajole an anxious horse to do things against its better interests, frighten them into gallopig along hazardous, unsafe routes. Not so with donkeys who have a highly developed sense of self-preservation. Thus a donkey’s perceived stubbornness.

This theme of donkeys’ stop-in-their-tracks stubbornness is a common theme in what I’ve read. Yet, Balaam’s donkey doesn’t just stop in its tracks. In three different instances, it does something odd. It moves off of the road the first time. It squeezes along the wall to avoid the angel the second time. And it finally lays down.

If a donkey’s default in a dangerous situation is to stop, what do the donkey’s unusual actions tell us?

I believe the donkey was trying to get across to Balaam that there was something unusual going on.

This fits with what I’ve read about donkeys. They have excellent observation skills. They can hear exceptionally well.

And they are intelligent.

If the donkey had just stopped, we could easily assume the donkey was just being stubborn for some odd reason. One of the donkeys I read about, for example, was initially afraid of running water and would just stop dead when the donkey was led near to a stream.

Instead the donkey did three three unusual things in a row. And readers of the time, when agriculture was something almost everyone was involved in, would have understood those to be unusual behaviors.

In other words, the donkey was communicating to Balaam. It was doing so even before the angel revealed itself to Balaam and enabled the donkey to speak.

If Balaam had been someone who paid attention to the life of God’s earth and to his own donkey’s character, he would have quickly picked up that something strange was going on. But that’s not who Balaam was. For some reason, God has chosen to use and communicate with Balaam. The story of his interaction with his own loyal donkey makes clear he’s not been chosen because he is a wise, good, or spiritually perceptive man.

Deeper Meaning

And I believe we can take this situation a step further and say this – God was, in a way, testing both Balaam and the donkey.

Balaam failed his test. He didn’t pay attention to the signals his donkey was sending through its behavior. When asked by the donkey why he had beaten it three times, Balaam responds, “You have made a fool of me! If only I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.” He clearly cares most about how he is perceived by the Moabite officials and perhaps even by his own two servants. And the reader would guess that wealth was a close second.

The donkey, on the other hand, passed his test. But at a cost.

The donkey had to choose what it would do, especially after it was clear that Balaam didn’t see the angel. And not only did Balaam not see the angel, he was going to beat the donkey for not walking straight ahead into danger. Being beaten by Balaam was probably not something new.

In the end, Balaam beat his donkey three times for the sacrificial choices the donkey made to protect Balaam. From the donkey’s plaintive words, we also understand the donkey’s heart suffered as much as its body did.

There is much more to explore in this story. But I will stop here for now and encourage you and I to meditate on these questions going forward:

Are we, like Balaam, ignoring what the living things of God’s earth are telling us about ourselves and God?

If we, for example, have land and water under our care and they are sick and ailing, are we paying attention?

Are we, like Balaam, most concerned about our wealth and how we are regarded in the culture around us?

Do those concerns matter more to us than how closely our hearts are aligned with Jesus?

Cover of Wild Hope

My friend Jon Terry from the Au Sable Institute sent me a surprise gift in the mail – a copy of the book Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing by Gayle Boss. The book has six sections for the six weeks of Lent. Each section features the profiles of four animals, from the Chinese pangolin and black-footed ferret to the Amur leopard and golden riffleshell mussel. Each profile opens your eyes and heart to the wondrous qualities of the animal. Gayle also shares, in an understated yet poignant way, the challenges each species faces to survive.

Because Gayle is such a gifted writer, it’s hard to resist sharing a multitude of excerpts. Here are two from her introduction that get to the purpose of Wild Hope: 

“Attention to the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent. The season means to rouse us from our self-absorption.”

“The promise of Lent is that something will be born of the ruin, something so astoundingly better than the present moment that we cannot imagine it. Lent is seeded with resurrection. The Resurrection promises that a new future will be given to us when we beg to be stripped of the lie of separation, when the hard husk suffocating our hearts breaks open and, like children, we feel the suffering of any creature as our own. That this can happen is the wild, not impossible hope of all creation.”

I highly recommend this book for you and your family. You will more deeply treasure God and God’s Creation. Your heart will also go out to the men and women who are dedicating their lives to preserve the life of God’s earth. Gayle’s writing will affirm your own convictions and heart for the life around us. You’ll be struck by the beautiful art of David G. Klein. And the book will move your heart in new ways during this Lenten season

I’m grateful to Gayle for writing this book. She generously took time to respond to four questions I had for her.

Nathan: You write in the introduction to Wild Hope, “I didn’t hear all creation groaning when my sons were young. I was oblivious to the millions dying, their kinds never to be seen on the earth again.” Can you share how you came to be a Christian, a writer, and a Christian writer called to communicate about the life of God’s earth?

Gayle: I grew up in a church-going family (the Dutch Reformed tradition) and loved all-things-church, even as a teenager! It seemed to me the one public place where what really mattered—who we are and why we’re here—got talked about. That impulse to talk about what matters also drew me into a writing life.

I’ve tried my hand at nearly all creative literary forms, from long-form journalism to haiku. In my early forties I wrote a 535-page failed novel. The wish to write about animals and how close bonds with them make us more deeply human grew on me so slowly I’m not sure I can trace it.

This much seems true: When my sons were young, their love of animals woke a long-dormant attention to animals in me. I remembered how I would cry when my father and uncles hung up deer they’d shot from the branches of a big oak tree to bleed out. And I remembered how the rest of the family laughed at my tears. The venison was part of our winter food supply, my food supply, too.

Led by my children, I let my original tenderness for animals rise again. I noticed how good that felt, even when I experienced an animal suffering. I felt more alive, more free. I now believe that’s because I reconnected with the One Love planted in all things at their creation; the love at my core calls to the love at their core. Restoring that connection is a path back to our deepest selves and back to the beloved community of all created things that we call Eden or The Peaceable Kingdom, where “They will not hurt or destroy in all (God’s) holy mountain.”

Nathan: Please share what your goals were for Wild Hope and why you believe attentiveness to “..the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent.”

Gayle: As with All Creation Waits, I wanted to wake, or fan, in readers the kind of love for animals that was dormant for so long in me—a love that doesn’t “cute-ify” them, but sees each one as “a word of God and a book about God,” as Meister Eckhart said. In that first book, I wrote about animals that many of us see regularly, like skunks, raccoons, and chickadees.

In Wild Hope, I describe animals most of us will never see in the wild, from orangutans to olms. I wanted to describe their magnificence and tell their stories, including the stories of their suffering on a planet we’ve made unlivable for them. I thought that if I could tell their stories in such a way that we readers would be drawn into their worlds, our defenses could melt, and we could grieve their suffering. We could see them as expressions of God’s own self and God’s own suffering—at our hands. Which is the white-hot core of Lent.

It’s important to me that we readers respond to the animals’ stories first with love, not shame and guilt. Because we’ll only make the radical life-changes that will protect the earth for all animals, including us, if we’re motivated by love. Guilt-motivated change may work for the short term, but it can’t be sustained. Over the long haul, we only protect and save what we love.

Gayle Boss in woodsNathan: What animal of God’s earth most captivates your heart? Why?

Gayle: Of course you know that I’m going to say I’m smitten by every animal I see and learn about. And it’s true, I really am!

The “episode” of each animal’s story that most undoes me, though, comes when, faced with impending death, they desperately do everything in their power to protect their young. While researching and writing Wild Hope, I saw that episode occur over and over: The mother polar bear struggling to keep her cubs afloat in seas without ice floes, and failing; Laysan albatrosses watching their chicks sink into lethargy from plastic poisoning, and die; the pangolin mother curling around her baby when the poacher pulls her out of her den. As a mother, to recognize that my actions, our actions, inflict the worst suffering I can imagine on other mothers was almost more than I could bear.

Learning the stories of these animals swelled my love for them, and love wouldn’t let me look away from their suffering. It made me fiercer in my commitment to change parts of my life that contribute to their suffering. We only protect and save what we love.

Nathan: What role do you believe art can play in inspiring Christians to understand God’s love for the whole world (including our “nonhuman kin”), to act on that understanding, and to somehow work through the despair and grief we experience as we see our nonhuman kin suffering?

Gayle: I don’t believe we’ll ever “understand” God’s love for all created things. Understanding is a motion of the mind, and God’s love for all things is way beyond our minds. It can happen, though, that we’re grasped by God’s love for all created things. Somehow, that “beyond us” Love that created the universe finds an opening in the hard husk of our egos and “cuts us to the heart,” as It did those who heard Peter tell the Jesus-story at Pentecost. Once Love has got hold of our hearts, it changes how we see everything. And when we see differently, we behave differently. “If your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light,” Jesus says.

At their best, stories, visual art, dance, and music bypass the mental constructs we use to defend ourselves and our walled-off ways of living. True art is the dart Divine Love uses to cut to our hearts. Suddenly or slowly, it reveals a new way of perceiving a world we thought we knew. Think of how differently the night sky appears once we’ve been struck by Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” What was static is suddenly full of energy and motion and presence.

It’s important to say that art doesn’t always pierce our thick husks with what we find beautiful. Sometimes art seems ugly or threatening, troubling. Van Gogh’s neighbors did not think The Starry Night” was beautiful. They thought he was a crazy man making unpleasant, offensive paintings – that’s how new his way of perceiving was.

But for those of us who can allow even a crack in our armor, God can use art to peel the scales from our eyes and show us a universe pulsing with Presence, with creative energy unbounded. That vision becomes so compelling, we want to do everything we can to make ways for God’s always-creating energy to manifest in the visible world. “Working for change” isn’t a burden we bear but a dance we cannot help but do. As Paul says in the fifth chapter of Romans, “We rejoice in the hope of sharing in God’s glory.”

At the same time, we also suffer more deeply with the suffering. But as Paul goes on to say, “We rejoice in our sufferings,” because somehow suffering leads to a hope that “does not put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

My limited experience tells me that in suffering we sink more deeply into the heart of God, into the Love that is at the core of the Universe—at our core—and know ourselves to be truly alive. Sunk in that Love, we also know that it is the truest thing in the universe—it’s the origin of the universe—and that Love cannot but have the final say. We carry on in the irrepressible hope that God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.” (Romans 4:17)

That’s the Wild Hope at the center of the book Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. I hope the stories reveal the pulsing presence of God in each creature and the drive of Love for that creature to survive. That’s a drive I want to join.

My son and I are continuing our reading journey through the Bible, and we’re now deep into the words of the prophets. They wrote their words more than two millennia ago. Yet, I’m finding they resonate deeply with what we face in climate change today.

The reading, I must admit, is not easy. These are all books replete with repeated, vivid expressions of anger, desperation, grief, judgment. Calamity was going to come, the prophets declared. And then it came in the form of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Isn’t climate change, and all that it is bringing, very similar?

Despite many warnings for many decades, climate change is underway. And change is not even the right word. What is happening to the climate of God’s earth change is not at all similar to an oil change or changes to a baseball team’s lineup. What we are really beginning to see unfold is change bringing chaos.

The world, both the people and the earth itself, is already suffering as a result. Much worse is yet to come.

There is a great deal to write about climate chaos and what it means for God’s earth, our lives as Christians, and the future of the Church. But for now, as a way of entering the topic, I want to highlight three points of resonance for me between the prophets and the situation we face today.

The Prophets Were Ignored (and Worse)

The people of their times, as far as I can tell, largely ignored the prophets. Those who didn’t ignore them tended to persecute them. Jeremiah in particular suffered for speaking God’s judgment.

Dominique Antoine Magaud

The book of Jeremiah depicts leaders and officials defying the judgments and warnings God was providing through Jeremiah (depicted in the painting above by Dominique Antoine Magaud) in astoundingly cavalier ways. In chapter 36, for example, we read of King Johiakim calling for Jehudi to get the scroll of Jeremiah’s words and read it to him. Here’s what follows in verses 22 through 24:

The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll, and Jehudi brought it from the room of Elishama the secretary and read it to the king and all the officials standing beside him. It was the ninth month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him. Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire. The king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes.

Likewise, many people do not want to listen to the prophets of climate change and the chaos it is bringing. Online trolls harass scientists like Dr. Katharine Hayhoe and others. The Trump administration is actively hostile to climate science and to the U.S. government staff who study it and warn about it. The administration and its supporters are, in effect, modern day Johiakims.

What’s even more disturbing is that climate change has become, more than ever, a partisan issue. Republicans, many of whom are Christians, refuse to make common cause with Democrats to address it.

Why the resistance?

The kings and people of Israel, especially the people of power, enjoyed the status quo. They couldn’t imagine having to give things up or admitting they had trespassed against God’s will or had worshipped other gods.

Similarly, we don’t want to give up the many rewards of the way our economy runs today. We don’t want the rules of the game to change. And in the case of climate change, the rules we don’t want to change are, ironically, a lack of rules and restraints. Like the people of Judah, we resent constraints on how we live and do business.

Isaiah highlighted the uselessness of idols in chapter 46:5-7 in a striking way. God asks:

With whom will you compare me or count me equal?

To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?

Some pour out gold from their bags and weigh out silver on the scales;

they hire a goldsmith to make it into a god,

and they bow down and worship it.

They lift it to their shoulders and carry it;

they set it up in its place, and there it stands.

From that spot it cannot move.

Even though someone cries out to it, it cannot answer;

it cannot save them from their troubles.

It occurs to me that the idols that the Judeans worshipped at this time actually, in all probability, had a compellingly tangible appeal. The stone and woods idols were things they could see and touch. There may have even been some artistic flair to them. There was, on the other hand, no tangible representation of the true God in their culture. Worshipping an intangible God and living out a complex set of requirements took persistent faith and commitment that made them, well, weird in the world they lived in. In contrast, the concrete imagery and heft of the idols likely required less faith and were easy on the heart. The idols rewarded the desires of their worshippers.

Likewise, we can see and touch all of the tangible benefits of our current economy and technology. They meet our desires and even create new ones. We have not shown the ability to restrain ourselves from unquestioningly accepting all technologies and systems.

Our desires have become our idols. Resisting our desires out of love and duty to our invisible God is something we don’t want to do. This would require persistent faith, commitment, sacrifice, and tenacity of heart in countercultural ways.

We are, actually, not so different from the people the prophets criticized so harshly.

Face-to-Face with Shattering Realities

I encourage you to read this essay by Leonie Joubert entitled “End-of-life anxiety and finding meaning in a collapsing climate.”

Leonie writes of the similarity between the person who receives the diagnosis of an incurable cancer from their doctor and the person (like herself) who has paid attention to unfolding climate science and recognizes that:

We’ve already dumped so much carbon pollution into the atmosphere that we have a “baked in” temperature increase of 3°C, regardless of whether we shut off all emissions right now or not.

What do you do if you are the person receiving that grim diagnosis of cancer? You may well go for end-of-life therapy, whether that’s through a therapist or through a pastor or other wise person, to process all of the intense feelings that well up.

Where do you go when you come to realize our trajectory is towards ever more dramatic climate change impacts that will bring misery for the people and planet God loves?

Therapists are beginning to realize that they need to know how to respond to people with that recognition and the accompanying despair. But it’s not exactly like helping the person with a cancer diagnosis. Leonie describes how the therapy field is wrestling with these challenges:

How does it respond to people living in an unrepairable situation? Therapy’s function is to heal the individual. How does it respond when the illness is society-wide? It focuses on healing what has happened in the past. What do we do when today’s illness is because of what will unfold in our personal and collective future?

It strikes me that the prophets were also dealing with society-wide illness for which there was both personal and collective responsibility.

This takes me to a fundamental question – why were so many words of the prophets preserved and not, for example, the words of the kings of their times? The prophets were, after all, the ultimate outsider radicals of their time.

I can think of a number of reasons. One was as a warning of God’s anger towards those given a special mission by God who willfully turned away from what that mission required of them.

Another was to forcefully make the point that the natural leanings of human nature – towards comfort and tangible personal and national benefits – are not what God calls us towards. Instead, we need our hearts to be remade by God so that what matters to God matters to us above all else. Even when what God wants forces us to choose the harder path.

Yet another reason was to compel those who read the words to think twice before silencing and persecuting those who question the status quo and see doom at the end of trends unfolding in our time.

Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonia Army by Jan Luyken. What art will be produced of the results of the chaos coming from climate change?

And I wonder if perhaps the vivid, shattering depictions of prophecies and events were meant to explode our hearts  and to resonate with what we would feel as we encounter ever more grim realities in our time. Some of the most shattering images of impending chaos and destruction can be found in the prophets.

Read, for example, Lamentations’ description of the fall of Jerusalem. Here’s just a taste of it from chapter 2:11-12 (I’ve used The Message’s translation):

My eyes are blind with tears, my stomach in a knot. My insides have turned to jelly over my people’s fate.

Babies and children are fainting all over the place, Call to their mothers, “I’m hungry! I’m thirsty!” then fainting like dying soldiers in the streets, breathing their last in their mothers’ laps.

The prophets are records of deep, collective trauma. Perhaps in some mysterious way they will be therapeutic for the deep, collective trauma that is to come.

Messages of Future Hope

Even Lamentations has words of hope for the future. Isaiah’s words of hope are incredibly beautiful and include God’s earth. The hope is generated not by expectations that people would suddenly become good and just. What generates the hope is the love and commitment of God.

I struggle with this. Is it possible to have hope for future joy and restoration when the world God loves and I love faces destruction?

It is all too easy for Christians to set up camp in the happy place of faith and hope in God. This leads to ignoring of the plight of the oppressed and the continued crushing of the vitality of the life of God’s earth. There is no sense in the Bible that future hope for tomorrow excuses us from acting out of devotion, compassion, and active love today.

Yet, the prophets and the Gospels, without question, also give us hope. We cannot camp out exclusively in the place of despair, hopelessness, and desperate urgency either.

The prophets remind us that our faith and faith-lives rest on paradoxes. They require us to have the ability to hold two different concepts in tension at the same time.

And paradox is where climate change and the prophets leave us.

Are we alarmed and active or are we hopeful? We need to be both.

Consider this scenario. What was the average devout Judean person supposed to do when they heard Isaiah or Jeremiah crying out on the streets and actually believed what the prophet was saying? What would he or she do when they got home? What would they say to their family?

I imagine them recommitting themselves to being devout by following the rules of their at that time. If they had idols, they would have destroyed them. They would have redoubled their focus on worshipping God and praying to God. I imagine them doing so even in the face of ridicule from neighbors worshipping their idols.

Their faithfulness to God would inevitably have made them compassionate to the vulnerable around them. The prophets highlighted vulnerable people, like widows and orphans. I want to believe that they would naturally have treated animals kindly as well.

To the degree that they had influence with their tribes, friends, and neighbors, I believe they would have called on them to follow God in their lives as well.

I imagine the family cherishing the Temple, knowing that it was facing destruction and would be no more. I imagine them cherishing the land they owned and farmed and the larger landscape that God had given their people. They knew they would be taken away from it, assuming they even survived. It would have been even more dear to them.

And I imagine them, paradoxically, preparing their family for chaos and disruption ahead even as they poured into their children the promises of hope that the prophets included in their warnings and promptings. “Do not forget!” they would tell their children. “And do not let your children forget!”

Alertness to the true condition of the world.

Devoutness and prayer.

Mourning.

Cherishing the beauty of what God had given them.

Active preparation for chaos to come.

Urging society, family, and friends to repent and change.

Compassionate actions for the vulnerable.

Deepening of their faith commitment.

Hope for the ultimate future mixed with grief for the immediate future.

This set of responses, seemingly contradictory at times, is what I imagine people of the prophets’ time doing out of conviction and belief.

As a Christian in a time of climate change, these responses make sense to me today as well.