I
am constantly amazed at what some people consider to be entertainment. Many pastimes
that amuse other folks simply leave me wondering, “What in the world is the
attraction of that?” Horror movies fall
into that category for me. I never have seen the sense in paying good money to sit in a dark, crowded theater and
have the liver scared out of you every 10 or 15 minutes! But lots of people
enjoy that sort of thing. They sit on the edge of their seats, pulses racing and
nerves tingling, eagerly waiting for a zombie to thrust his moldy arm through
the window and snatch some unwary teenager. These people love them all: aliens,
poltergeists, and chainsaw-wielding madmen!
Now,
I will admit that there is one big attraction to horror movies. The experience
is under our control! When the movie is over, we walk out of the dark theater
into the comfort of the daylight, secure in the knowledge that the horrors we’ve
just seen are going to stay on the movie screen. After all – they’re not real! They’re
just made up for our entertainment. The vision that Jeremiah saw, though was a
horror that he couldn’t escape (Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28). It was a Technicolor,
surround-sound, 3D disaster, like a nightmare from which you can’t seem to
awake. As Jeremiah stood by horrified, he watched the very fabric of creation
come unglued. Image followed dreadful image like the tolling of a funeral bell.
God took the world apart and returned it to the state that existed before
creation began. The mountains swayed back and forth like a man after a drunken
binge. The birds fled, leaving creation as silent as the grave. All the cities
collapsed like houses of cards. Finally, the world dissolved into black,
formless chaos.
What
in the world caused God to dismantle his beloved creation? What was so bad that
God threw up his hands in despair and said, “The heck with all of it! I’m
starting all over again!” Why, the people didn’t know God! Even worse, they became
experts in evil! The Hebrew text literally says, “They are wise in the ways of
evil.” Instead of trying to be good, they were working at being bad! They
established Evil State University, a school that offered majors in
Exploitation, Oppression, and Greed. And oh, how well they learned their
lessons! They earned advanced degrees in selfishness, greediness, stupidity,
and arrogance; and creation itself paid the penalty.
The
writers of the Hebrew Bible knew that creation is always a player in the cosmic
drama. They understood that the well-being of creation and people are
intimately joined. That’s something that many people have forgotten in this day
and age. They talk about living “in the world,” as though we aren’t really a
part of it. They look at creation as just a background for their activities. If
creation is damaged because of the way that we live, well, that’s too bad; but
it’s unavoidable in the long run. It’s “collateral damage,” something that just
got in the way of progress! But the reality is that creation and we humans who
are a part of it are as intertwined as the threads of a garment. If one set of
threads breaks, the other set becomes weaker, too. All the threads must stay
strong or the garment will fall apart. If we think that we can separate
ourselves from the creation that surrounds us, we’re only fooling ourselves
Jeremiah
might have the same vision if he were living today, because Evil State
University is still enrolling millions of students, still teaching its lessons
of selfishness and stupidity, still graduating lots of experts in greed and
arrogance. There is a difference between Jeremiah’s time and ours, though. Today,
God doesn’t need to destroy creation. We’re doing a good job of that all by
ourselves. We’re taking creation apart, one piece at a time, because of our
greed, arrogance, and stupidity.
One
of my close friends, Rev. Robin Blakeman, is a Presbyterian pastor who is a
native of West Virginia. She feels called to a ministry of increasing
environmental awareness. Several years ago, she described the effects of
mountaintop removal mining in her home state:
“The
most urgent wake-up call of my life was delivered during a plane flight in
June. For the first time, I got to see those majestic mountains from a bird’s
eye – perhaps a God’s eye – view. Just outside Charleston, reality struck. The
number and size of mountain top removal sites were astounding! Giant sites
extended in every direction to the horizon – some worse than others. The sludge
pond behind Marsh Fork Elementary dwarfs the school. It was enough to make this
preacher want to cuss! A mining company in our region has defended their
practices by posting a scriptural quote on their website: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made
low. (Isaiah 40:4) What arrogance! Will we allow mining company executives
and the politicians who are beholden to them to play God with these ancient
mountain habitats, and with the ancient texts of the Holy Bible? West Virginia
used to be (in the words of John Denver) ‘almost heaven,’ but now we are [just]
‘open for business.’”
Even
if we don’t live in West Virginia, we can all see effects of human greed on the
environment. We remove wetlands so that we can build homes close to the beach, and
whole ecosystems disappear. Fertilizer runoff is killing fish and wildlife in
south Florida. Monarch butterflies are no longer plentiful because we are
destroying the milkweed that they need to live. We seem to think that
regardless of what we do, creation will continue to putter along just fine the
way it always has. And we’re wrong.
So
where does that leave us? How do we move beyond these catastrophic predictions,
dire warnings, and despair? Is there any good news here? There is, indeed! The
good news is that God will never leave us in despair. In the midst of
Jeremiah’s horrifying vision of creation’s destruction, one verse glimmers with
a ray of hope: “Thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be desolate; yet I
will not make a full end.” Much of the earth is indeed desolate today; but God
has not given up on us! God continues to call men and women to heal and nurture
the creation that God loves so much. Pope John Paul II once commented, “The
earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship.
We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by
future generations.”
Protestant
and Roman Catholic churches alike need to take Pope John Paul II seriously. Can
we Christians be like the flower that grows through a crack in the asphalt to
bloom in the most barren of surroundings? Can we set an example to the rest of
society? We can recycle paper, cans, and bottles. We can set a goal to decrease
the amount of energy that our facility uses. We can continue to offer our
recreation park for groups that want to experience creation first hand! Oh, we
may not be doing big things like the Cincinnati Zoo; they’re trying to save
entire animal species! But we can do small things; and lots of small things add
up to big things!
Like
the people of Jeremiah’s time, we have a choice to make. We can continue to
follow the ruinous way that Evil State University has taught us; and friends,
it has taught us well. As long as we do,
we will have a front-row seat in that dark movie theater, and we will watch
horrors of our own making come to life right in front of our eyes. But there is
another way: we can wise up. We can come to our senses and choose to do things
God’s way and love creation as much as we love ourselves! If we do that, we
will leave the darkness of the horror movie theater behind us, and walk
joyfully into the light of God’s good creation.
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