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The Wall
Sometimes, it’s just so big. You look up, and it never seems to end in that direction, you look to your right, and see it fade in the distance, to your left the same depressing scene plays out. That wall, however, is stopping you from reaching your goal. That wall must come down.
And with a nod to the great poet Lewis Carroll, how do you eat a whale?
I was at work today and made an offhand joke about saving the environment to a co-worker of mine that is a prodigious right wing christian. Were she to read this blog I wouldn’t doubt her thinking I was the anti-christ himself, but that would be giving me too much credit, not enough people like me for that. (On a similar vein, if I hear one more reference that Barack Obama is the antichrist, I might snap). Back on track now, she had the retort “Only one person can fix the environment, and your not him.”
After my brief “What the f…” moment I lost my opportunity for any sort of retort, so I just let it ride. But let’s upack that statement, and it’s implications if we can.
The most obvious implication is that we fixing our world on our own, becuase it’s the destiny of the world to die. While I’m not denying the evidence of a New Earth written in the New Testament, I am questioning the veracity of this opinion that we should be doing nothing about it now, becuase it’s all going away later. To simplify my response to this as much as humanly possible lets throw this out…
You’re going to die. That is an optimal truth, an inescapable fact. You’re body has come down with a sickness, do you seek to cure it, or do you continue on your merry way knowning full well that you’re going to die eventually?
The next implication is that we are not capable of fixing what we’ve destroyed. While this may be true on more ethereal ideas such as sin, the state of the physical world, while no doubt stemming from a “sinful society,” is something that we can attempt to fix. Maybe the idea is that God wants us to stubbornly continue in the path we’re currently taking and wait for God to fix things, I’m not quite sure there is any Biblical support of this idea it does seem to be quite popular. While, undoubtedly, we are called to wait upon the Lord. Numerous Biblical references can be applied here) we are also called to action (as far as the earth goes the most poignant is in Leviticus 18:
24 ” ‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
If anything we’re called to protect the Earth, and as Christians we should be at the forefront of Creation Care, instead of being swept up in the coat-tails.