Jeremiah 8 (10) BFC
2018
Jeremiah 11:6-8,
8:12; 12:4; 13:23; 14:11-12
November 18, 2018
As I have related in former sermons
during this series, Jeremiah is referenced as the “weeping prophet.” Throughout the book of Jeremiah it is
virtually impossible to tell when Jeremiah is weeping and lamenting himself, or
Jeremiah is portraying God as weeping and lamenting, or even when the land is
weeping and lamenting. Jeremiah, Creator,
and the land are indistinguishable. In
chapter 12, Jeremiah says, “The land mourns.
The grass withers. Animals and
birds are swept away. The nation’s
leaders say, ‘God does not see what we do.’”
The Babylonian Exile led to many of
the Jewish people carted off to a faraway place with unfamiliar landscapes, gone
were the animals and birds they knew, desolate was the land that was the sign
and seal of God’s covenant with the people. Psalm 137, written in the midst of
exile, speaks of the Babylonians humiliating the Jewish people, asking them to
sing one of the songs of their homeland.
Entertain us! Sing us one of spirited
slave songs, one of those Indian prayer songs.
And the psalmnist asks, presumably in tears, “How can we sing one of the
songs of our homeland in a foreign land?”
As a result of climate change,
scientists are exploring the grief and mental health risks of losing valued places,
ecosystems, species, and landscapes.[1] Innuit people in Northern Canada ask, “Innuit
are people of the sea ice. If there is
no more sea ice, how can we people of the sea ice?”[2] Farmers in the Australian Wheat Belt, who see
their soil become nothing but dust react in much the same way, “It’s terrible
to know that the soil has been there forever, since the beginning of the Earth,
and your greed and mismanagement makes it blow.
It’s really a terrible thing to see . . .”[3]
“Losing the farm would be like a
death. Yeah, there would be a grieving
process because the farm embodies everything the family farm is . . .And I
think if we were to lose it, it would be
like losing a person . . .but it would be sadder than losing a person . . .”[4]
Scientists refer to this loss of place
and the resultant effects as “ecological grief” and they encourage further
exploration of how this is going to lead to greater risks to mental health as
climate change marches on. Scientists
Ashlee Consulo and Neville R. Ellis write, “[C]limate change is just not an
abstract scientific concept. Rather, it
is the source of much hitherto unacknowledged emotional and psychological pain,
particularly for people who remain deeply connected to, and observant of, the
natural world.”[5]
Grief is hard. It requires a resilience to suffer loss of
relationship and connection only to enter relationship more profoundly,
connection more deeply.
Deep within the mythology of the
Jewish people is the understanding that the Babylonian Exile was one of the
most terrible and evil times in their history.
It was not only a loss of their leaders, killed or carted off in chains,
and the Temple, the particular landmark that was to be the special place of
God’s abiding, it was also a loss of place, landscape, species, all similar to things
being brought on by climate change. The
land was the place of promise, God’s sign and seal of covenant with the people
and represented their pledge to be good neighbors to one another. To remain on the land defined their
relationship with Creator and neighbor.
Who then were the Jewish people without it? With the land’s loss, lament and grief
expressed by the prophet Jeremiah came to define a whole people. The Bible is replete with the lament and
grief of the Jewish people as they later, followed Jeremiah to groan in
exile.
Easier to avoid and not think about
it. Easier to not talk about it. Easier to forget. Easier to lose your call to countercultural
lives and just adapt and adopt to Babylonian ways.
If we are, as a people, to turn the
tide on climate change, we are going to have to develop a more intentional
relationship with this good earth. We
need to practice that faith daily and make it part of our children and
grandchildren’s lives. For the grief we
are experiencing, the depression that seeps into us as we intuitively sense
loss and death, and the real loss we see displayed on the television through
hurricane and fire, calls for us to use intentional self-care, to risk grief
through relationship and connection.
Not surprisingly, doctors on
Scotland’s Shetland Islands are beginning to prescribe outdoor time as
treatment for chronic health issues.
High blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, and depression can be treated
with outdoor activities like hiking, birdwatching, kayaking, or even meditating
in a forest. We must speak to the grief
and depression that is creeping up on us by intentionally deepening our
relationship with the earth. Across the
United States, doctors are now making prescriptions for outdoor activity. In the United Kingdom, doctors are
prescribing visits to Green Gyms, outdoor sessions run by a conservation group. And in Australia, a medical conference
convened to discuss the health and medical benefits of their public parks.[6]
But again, I think it is more than
just getting outside. It is about
knowing that the only way we can be an ally for the land, for God’s great
creation, is to have an intentional relationship with it.
Scottish health authorities have even published a
seasonal calendar[7]
I have printed it off so you can take it with you. Because it is for the Shetland Islands, it
will, of course, have to be adapted to Billings, Montana, and for what works
well for you and your family. For
example, in January your encouraged to visit the Braer site; to walk the core path
at Lunga water—look out for the mountain hares!; go looking for seabeans after
Westerly gales. In Billings, maybe you
could go out to the Four Dances site and imagine the pre-Columbian landscape or
to the Rims and spot purple liatris. Some
of the things listed for November you can do in the seasonal calendar
are: talk to a pony; borrow a dog and
play some games; and create rock sculpture.
During the recent veterans’ medicine wheel
commemoration at MSU-B, Walter Runsabove shared a beautiful theology of the
stones we were to use to fashion the medicine wheel. For the first time in my life, as I picked up
a stone and carried it, I meditated deeply on its long life, its weight in my
hands, and how it spoke to me of people I remembered. And suddenly, I was related to stones in a
way I had never been before.
This week The
New York Times printed an article titled, “Your children’s Yellowstone will
be radically different.” Marguerite
Holloway writes that over the next few decades, climate change may have a
devastating effect on the plants and animals in the park as habitat changes so
rapidly they will not be able to adapt.
Increased fire, less forest, less snow, shallower and warmer waterways,
and more invasive plants may kill off or drive out all we know of Yellowstone
National Park today. Ann Rodman, a park
scientist said that the more you study how quickly climate change is affecting
Yellowstone, the more aware you become just how fast the park is changing. Cheatgrass and madwort, invasive plants, have
taken over and replaced native nutritious plants at the north entrance to
Yellowstone in Gardiner. Cheatgrass has
already spread into the Lamar Valley. “Then
you begin to go through this stage, I don’t know if it is like the stages of
grief,” Ms. Rodman said. “All of a sudden it hits you that this is a really,
really big deal and we aren’t really talking about it and we aren’t really
thinking about it.”[8]
In 2016, the Yellowstone River, 183 miles downstream
of the park, was shut down because an outbreak of kidney disease killed
thousands of fish--the shallower waters from less snow and the warmer waters
from high temperatures and less shade making transmission of the disease
easier. Dan Vermillion of Sweetwater Fly
Shop in Livingston referred to it as a canary in the coal mine. Creator must certainly be grieving as we
willfully destroy these gifts.
Jeremiah grieves as he sees creation’s order and
purpose coming undone through the unsustainable values of his nation’s
leaders. He grieves. For the world
eventually becomes what we practice. If
we do not collaborate with God to do other, the violence we practice makes for
a whole world consumed by violence and war—it bleeds into our schools,
churches, and synagogues. If we do not
collaborate with God to do other, the media are manipulated to the point where
everything is relative and point of view—the Truth cannot be discerned and
those who speak prophetically persecuted.
If we do not collaborate with God to do other, the wealth we hoard
destroys public places we share and devastates the poor—the land mourns and the
vulnerable find no community.
Jeremiah grieves
because, as Lisa said last week, it is the other side of love. His grief signals
something or someone has been or is being lost.
Jeremiah sees the leaders of his country as leopards. Their values are so intrinsic to how they
govern that it is impossible to imagine them changing. “Can a leopard change its spots and still be
a leopard?” Jeremiah asks. If a leopard cannot change its spots, then a
new relationship with other values, or leaders who are not leopards must
replace the current regime. The
community or nation must transform from a leopard to something radically “other.”[9]. But the royal consciousness of Jeremiah’s
time shows no shame. Jeremiah says that
they do not even have the ability to blush.
The leaders of Judah disconnect themselves from the losses which might
transform them. Grief holds out the
possibility of hollowing us out for the possibility of a deeper, more mature
love.
As the British psychiatrists, C.M. Parkes and H.G.
Prigerson write:
. . . [G]rief can . .
. bring strength. Just as broken bones
may end up stronger than unbroken ones, so the experience of grieving can
strengthen and bring maturity to those who have previously been protected from
misfortune. The pain of grief is just as
much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for
love, the cost of commitment. To ignore
this fact, or to pretend it is not so, is to put on emotional [blinders], which
leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our lives . .
. .[10]
Many
of you are already strongly connected to the earth, love the land and have a
profound relationship with it as Creator intended. But we are headed into a time of deep grief
as the consequences for our leaders acting too often as leopards is decimating
God’s good earth. In the Wheat Belt of
Australia, the United Kingdom, Scotland’s Shetland Islands, the sea ice of
Northern Canada, and across our own country, health care providers are
recognizing that Creator made us for profound relationship with the land,
animals, landscapes, the soil.
The world becomes what we practice. As we know that we will continue to lose
species, landscapes, places, and even the land itself through climate change,
we must enter into our ecological grief with the intent to deepen our
connection to provide a resiliency that might return us to values that are
“other” than our leopard-like leaders.
Our connection will make us allies for the struggle, collaborators with
Creator in returning to values and practices that bring life and love to soil,
animals, water, land, landscapes, and places.
Let us join with Jeremiah, Creator, and the land in grief, so that our
whole world might sing a new song. May
it be so. Amen.
[1] Ashlee
Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, “Ecological grief as a mental health response to
climate change-related loss,” Nature
Climate Change, Vol. 8, April 2018, p. 275, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0092-2.epdf?author_access_token=UJYCnlw0zZieuYACw3AJQtRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MZ8cLxe72VDW0esMFb0zEFM26k9KCrjCPa-wqxJcwmMgcIei5y7ci3SN_gtpLunMy-I9r_Qst3A5V3rz96ScHSGy2dP3IB1DKK9qNem8yIrw%3D%3D.
[2] Ibid, p. 276.
[3] Ibid.
[5]
Ibid, p. 279.
[6] Sandy Bauers, “Doctors’
new prescription: ‘Don’t just exercise,
do it outside,’” the guardian,
February 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/health-prescriptions-doctors-healthcare-fitness-exercise-parks
[8] Marguerite Holloway, “Your
children’s Yellowstone will be radically different,” The New York Times, November 15, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/15/climate/yellowstone-global-warming.html
[9]
The Zapatistas in
Chiapas refer to their work as the “other” campaign so that their work does not
get appropriated by the royal consciousness.
[10] Cunsolo, “Ecological
grief.,” p. 279.
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