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The other day while I was eating my big bowl of purple gruel for breakfast I read an article about a recently completed study on Arctic climate change put out by the American governmental agency known as the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The authors of the study, Laura Landrum and Marika Holland, set out not just to determine the extent of climate change in the Arctic in the last four decades, but they were working with the question of “is the climate of the Arctic now a new climate.” This means, “Can we predict what the Arctic will look like next year or in another decade according to patterns that were in existence 40 years ago?” They found that we cannot. The Arctic ice melt has been so severe the last four decades and particularly since 2007 that what we all called the Arctic Climate when we were studying 8thGrade science – a climate which had looked the same for thousands of years, just ask the Native populations – that Arctic Climate now longer exists. The Arctic Climate is a new climate now.
The global impact of this new climate in the Arctic is astronomical. Sea water levels rise. Storm systems that originate over the oceans become more powerful and destructive. Human communities built in coastal areas have to do something to protect themselves against the rising waters and storms. Inland temperatures rise, things get dryer, and wildfires really get unimaginable. Windstorms are windier. Rainstorms are rainier. We are beginning to notice something’s wrong on planet earth. It’s different than it was just 40 years ago.
Let’s think of this Arctic climate change in terms of weight loss. Who among us is weight conscious? I weigh about 215lbs. That’s about 35 pounds more than I ought. I have to do something about that. What if I start losing weight at the same rate per year that the arctic has been losing ice per decade the last four decades? That’s a rate of 12%. Next year this time I would weigh in at 189lbs. With the exception of a bunch of loose skin, I’d look good, feel better, and yet still remark about how I wish I could lose another 15. Another year of losing weight at that rate goes by and I weigh 166lbs. Now, wait a minute. It would be impossible for me to get to that weight in a healthy manner without having lost some significant muscle mass and had a bunch of that loose skin removed. I might look buff, but I wouldn’t feel good. Another year goes by, I manage to continue that rate of weight loss except now I’m losing bone mass, organ mass, and more muscle mass to weigh in at 146lbs and another year goes by and I weigh 129lbs. Something’s wrong, wouldn’t you say? Even if it took me forty years to lose that much weight it would not be healthy. It would kill me. That’s what cancer, drug abuse, and concentration camps do to the human body. But, that’s what’s been going on in the Arctic the last forty years due largely to our consumeristic, industrialized lifestyle. The climate of the Arctic has become something different than it was 40 years ago.
We all have these pictures in our minds of what the Arctic is supposed to look like based on our memories of 8th Grade Science – Ice, snow, polar bears, seals. Friends, that Arctic climate is now gone. We can no longer simply think that all we have to do is curb our greenhouse emissions and the Arctic will stay the way we imagine it to be. We need now to be thinking a lot more about how to live with the immediate consequences of this new climate in the Arctic. There’s a new climate in the Arctic and by mid-century it will be evident what this new climate will be in its full strength and global impact. We have blown it for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. If we want planet earth to still be liveable in 100 years, then we have got to stop doing life the way we’ve been doing it. We have got to get our governments to stop thinking economy first, which amounts to making the rich richer so that everybody can get rich, and start thinking ecology, which means finding a sustainable way to live on this planet where everybody has enough. If we continue the way we are going, Mother Nature is going to kick our B-U-T-T-O-C-K-S’s in a way like humanity has never seen before. We’ve seen earthquakes and tidal waves, but never has the entire global climate said, “it’s payback time”, but that’s what’s coming.
Well, let me change gears and start talking Bible before everybody tunes out. Studies show that we can only tolerate about eight minutes of talk about the environment before we tune it out. After God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and got them out into the wilderness, he had them wander and wander and wander and wander some more – 80 years in all – in order for them to learn how the economy of his reign works as opposed to the economy of Pharaoh so that when they settled in the land God had promised to give them, their society would be fair and equitable and even environmentally friendly. Let me compare Pharaoh’s economy and to God’s economy.
In Pharaoh’s economy, God’s people were slaves. They belonged to Pharaoh, everything they had belonged to Pharaoh, and everything they worked for belonged to Pharaoh. In Pharaoh’s economy, one rich and powerful man who thought he was a god owned everything. In our culture, the pursuit of wealth is the Pharaoh who enslaves us all. It has turned us into consumers who believe we are nobody unless we have the comforts of the wealthy which we believe we deserve but that they are also scarcity for which we will pay dearly to have and so we toil away. The result is that the cost of living always goes up leading to a growing enslavement to debt. Some of us, a very small number of us, may be personally free of debt, but debt still affects us. Show me a nation that does not have a national debt weighing over its citizenry. That one affects us all. The Corporations from whom we buy all their stuff have debt but they manage it by getting us to gamble our retirements on their profitability. We need to rethink this stock market thing.
In the wilderness where God’s economy was in effect, there was no Pharaonic pursuit of power and wealth and therefore no enslavement. God provided everything his people needed to live. God even listened to their complaints. Everyone had enough. Nobody hoarded. In fact, if you tried to hoard, it would rot. God’s people lived one day at time and God provided what they needed. What would our world be like if we simplified and satisfied ourselves with having just what we need for today instead of this enslaving lifestyle of hoarding resources? God provides enough, abundantly enough for everybody. But when people start hoarding wealth something rotten breaks into the system – poverty, disease, famine.
Yes, this simpler lifestyle that’s required of us in God’s economy led to some complaining by God’s people and as I said God listened and responded. They complained that God had brought them out into the wilderness to kill them with thirst and hunger; and, “if only the LORD had killed us in Egypt were we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill”. But, memory is flawed. Nostalgia is flawed. Ever thought of what a fleshpot is. It sounds like they ate a hearty stew everyday, but rethink that. A fleshpot was a stew of food wastes provided by your taskmasters. It had meat – entrails, rats, animals that died of disease. We wonder what goes into a hotdog. Fleshpots were way grosser than that. They were like cooking up the food wastes you find in a dumpster.
In God’s economy in the wilderness, God provided bread, manna, and quail; abundantly enough for the day and hoarding was not allowed nor needed. Imagine if we could simplify our lifestyle and let ourselves by satisfied with the daily bread God provides. I don’t know. That might be unimaginable. Some might take offense and say it sounds too much like socialism or communism. But seriously, what do we have now? We have rampant obesity and are largely unhealthy and have to take drugs to counteract what are essentially dietary issues. We humans throw away 25-40% of the food we produce while almost 800 million people, 10% of the global population, mostly women and children won’t get enough to eat today. Upwards of 6 million children a year globally die due to malnutrition. That’s the end result of our Pharaonic pursuit of wealth and power.
In Pharaoh’s economy everybody had a job producing the stuff that made Pharaoh look wealthy and powerful and there was no rest from their labours. In the wilderness under God’s economy, the people were united in their purpose of getting to where God wanted them to be even if it did seem like purposeless wandering and God made sure there was a day of rest. In fact, the first labour law in history was God’s provision for the Sabbath; every seventh day was a day of rest. The Sabbath laws even grew in scope once they got into the Promised Land to include the land itself. Every seventh year a field was to be left to rest. Today, due to technology, internet, and smartphones work is everywhere our smartphone is. There’s no time off. We used to have an economy where people worked five days, Saturday was chore day, and Sunday was rest day. But, our debt-encrusted pursuit of wealth has done away with that weekly routine…
…and…
…its killing the planet we live on. We can talk about reducing Greenhouse gases to stop global warming and save the planet, but until we are willing to put aside our own individual pursuits of more wealth and simplify and resolve to live on the abundance of the “enough” that God daily provides and find a way to make God’s economy the way our global economy works, we are not going to solve the global climate issues we’ve created. If we want to curb a global pandemic, then we each need to make the simple lifestyle changes of wearing a mask and keeping physical distance. If we want to curb the coming global climate crisis, then we each must make the lifestyle choice of living according to God’s economy rather than Pharaoh’s. Amen.
