First Hebrew Scripture Reading: Isaiah 24: 3-12
Second Hebrew Scripture Reading: Isaiah 35: 1-3
At the Biesbosch national park in the Netherlands, there is a nature center where parents can take their children. A writer for the New Yorker named Elizabeth Kolbert visited the center a few years back. At the time, the center “was running an exhibit on climate change.” They had decorated the ceiling with large black umbrellas. In the background played the soundtrack of a church bell tolling to evoke “the traditional Dutch flood warning.” One part of the exhibit included an interactive display where children could turn a crank that then released floodwaters drowning a miniature countryside. This was a simulation of what is predicted to happen by the year 2100 in a country where a quarter of the land is below sea level.
I have been trying to figure out how one could make a similar interactive display for the United States where the main danger is severe drought, especially in California, the nation’s breadbasket. Maybe there would be a switch where children can turn on an oven light that causes miniature plants to shrivel up. In the Netherlands, companies are enthusiastically gearing up for an emerging “flood market” by developing such novelties as “buoyant roads and floating greenhouses.” People are already living in “amphibious homes.” These are homes built on “hollow concrete pontoons” designed to weather floods. Maybe our capital campaign should look into this. Then, we’d really be an ark.
The government of the Netherlands has helped get its people ready for future floods by airing public service commercials featuring a celebrity weatherman. In one of them, he is “shown wearing a business suit and standing by a bathtub.” He turns “on the shower full blast” and says, “These are our rivers. The climate is changing. It will rain more often, and more heavily.” As the tub overflows with water and splashes onto the floorboards, one can hear his wife screeching below. The message is that the rivers should be widened to give more space to water. In writing about this public service campaign, Kolbert notes, “Its tone was consistently lighthearted…either in spite of the fact that, or maybe precisely because, its message for the Dutch was so devastating.”
In the Netherlands, the government has already concluded that people need to begin adapting for an unpleasant future. But what about here in the United States? When a scientist who specializes in predicting droughts asked a group of water-resource managers in California about whether they could adapt to the predicted droughts if CO2 levels doubled, they said, “Well, if that happens, forget it.” There was nothing they could imagine doing.
For a preacher, or for anyone else for that matter, global warming is a tough topic to tackle. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and full of despair. How can we possibly do something about so massive a problem? How can one talk about such a doom and gloom subject without feeling as if you have compelled an entire cocktail party to seek conversation partners on the other side of the room? “Oh, I believe I see my friend over there by the punch bowl.”
The author Scott Sanders speaks to a similar experience. He writes of going hiking with his seventeen-year-old son Jesse in the Rocky Mountains. Their day “had started out well.” They “talked easily” and joked with each other, but then at the base a waterfall, they locked horns. Like many other times over the previous year, they were quarrelling once again. Scott had refused to consent to his son’s desire to hike to a camp where they would have to spend the night sleeping on snow. By having to sleep in the lower foothills instead, Scott’s son Jesse felt like he was missing out on seeing the true wilds of nature. He felt like everything had been ruined by yet another one of his father’s “hang-ups.” For the rest of the hike, the beauty and excitement of nature was lost for Scott. When they got back to their car at the end of the hike, he asked Jesse to tell him what exactly his hang-ups were that ruined everything. Jesse explained that his father was out of touch his world, that his father hated everything that he, Jesse, found fun. Jesse said, “You hate television and movies and video games. You hate my music.” Scott insisted that he liked some of the music. He just didn’t like it loud. Jesse then continued, “You hate advertising. You hate billboards, lotteries, developers, logging companies, and big corporations. You hate snowmobiles and jet-skis. You hate malls and fashions and cars.” He said, “You look at any car, and all you think is pollution, traffic, roadside [trash] crap. You say fast food’s poisoning our bodies and TV’s poisoning our minds. You think the Internet is just another scam for selling stuff. You think business is a conspiracy to rape the Earth.” Scott defended himself saying, “None of that bothers you?” Jesse responded, “Of course it does. But that’s the world. That’s where we’ve got to live. It’s not going to go away just because you don’t approve.”
The two debated whether or not anything could be changed. Jesse then said, “Your view of things is totally dark. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet’s dying, and people are to blame, and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get along without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise, what’s the point? Why study, why work, why do anything if it’s all going to hell?”
Scott felt like his son had caricatured his views, but he worried that maybe he had deprived his son of hope. He agreed with his son that hope was necessary. He asserted that he hadn’t give given up. He explained, “I don’t think we’re doomed. It’s just that nearly everything I care about is under assault.” As Scott later reflected on his conflict with his son, he realized his son was caught in a tough situation:
He was caught between a chorus of voices telling him that the universe was made for us, that the Earth is an inexhaustible warehouse, that consumption is the goal of life, that money is the road to delight—and [then there was] the stubborn voice of his father saying [that] none of this is so.
Scott realized that for his son to see him as being right would mean that his son would have to see that “most of what humans babble [about] every day—in ads and editorials, in sitcoms and song lyrics, in thrillers and market reports and teenage gab— is a monstrous lie.”
Scott didn’t change what he thought about the world after his quarrel with his son, but he did realize he himself had to change. He said:
If despair had so darkened my vision that I was casting a shadow over Jesse’s world—even here among these magnificent mountains and tumultuous rivers—then I would have to change. I would have to learn to
see differently. Since I could not forget the wounds to people and planet, could not unlearn the dismal numbers—of pollution and population and poverty—that foretold catastrophe, I would have to look harder for antidotes, for medicines, for sources of hope.
I wonder if the person who edited the book of Isaiah had a similar conversion experience. In our first scripture reading for today, it’s nothing but doom and gloom. It says, “The earth shall be utterly laid waste and utterly despoiled…The earth dries up and withers…the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants.” I don’t know about you, but after the first verse, I think I might have said, “Oh, look I see an old friend by the punch bowl.” Isaiah was a bit of a downer, but at some point the person editing the book of Isaiah must have said, “We got to add a bit of life to this party. We can’t have everyone feeling like there’s no hope.” So, then in our second reading, Isaiah says, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” The flowers shall sing. That’s the party I want to go to. That’s probably where Jesse is hanging out.
But, I think there is something that can be learned from both passages. In the first one, I am imagining someone who is trying hard to make sense of the pain and suffering that takes place whenever Israel is hit by a drought. They didn’t have science back then. What they had was a theology of the covenant. If you messed up your relationship with God, there was a price to pay, and that price was inflicted by a curse. Now, today, I am guessing many of us probably think that kind of theology is just plain bad. It portrays God as this vindictive being who would punish an entire people with a drought causing horrific suffering and death. Today, we are a little more advanced in our thinking about God and the world. Science can explain to us why droughts happen. If droughts really do strike our country, we might indeed point the finger of blame at ourselves, but that’s different than saying God is punishing us. It’s saying there are real and serious consequences for our actions, or inactions, as the case may be.
Well, enough doom and gloom, even though I think part of being a responsible Christian is confronting the gloomy realities of life. So now for the happy hope stuff. According to Isaiah, hope can be seen in the springtime. It’s when everything is beautiful and green and flowers start to blossom. Here is the part where I think I am tempted turn the rest of the sermon over to you. I want to hear from the seasoned veterans of Vancouver how we finally get to spring! Is it finally here? I know some of you have been wondering how Pastor Brooks is going to adjust to weather in Washington after having lived in sunny California. Yep, I am ready for spring. Let’s have it.
So, in order to talk about spring in an informed and educated way, I had to do a little bit of research. A writer named Parker Palmer said something with which I quickly identified. He said, “Before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck.” He continued, “I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.” In case you thought getting to hope was as simple as driving across town to a big party, Parker tells us in effect that it’s not. Those plants out there in the mud have some work to do. They have to resist the cold weather. “The smallest and most tender shoots” have to “insist upon having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again.”
Our country is in a winter period right now. It looks as if the ground won’t grow anything. It looks as if we are doomed, but all around us are living beings struggling to survive. Public opinion polls tell us that most people want a cleaner and healthier environment. They want a better world to give to their children. The real question confronting us is whether we are going to fulfill our mandate to be little seedlings that grow, that start off small and sprout, that resist the cold, that insist upon being seen and felt by the rest of the world, that stretch upward and out until pretty soon our tree is too big to ignore, our blossoms are too beautiful to overlook, our fruits are too good to put down. Spring is coming, it’s almost here, if only, we can realize our true nature. Amen.