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A Sermon for Rooted & Grounded: A Conference on Land & Discipleship, Elkhart 2018 By: Benni Isaak-Krauss
 I don’t remember a time when climate change was not a part of my reality. I grew up with movies like The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth. In the build-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, I organized a flashmob at my high school as part of a global mobilization to call our politicians to act decisively and limit carbon emissions. Yet Copenhagen came and went just like many other small and big summits without leading to the kind of radical cuts in carbon emissions we need to stay within an “acceptable” level of rise in global temperature. Awaiting each summit I allowed myself to hope and after each summit I felt myself becoming more desperate about the future. And it’s not just me. The cognitive dissonance between the growing awareness of the climate crisis and the stalwart refusal of politicians and corporations to address it meaningfully have created a climate of despair. Just look at the movies. The only future we can imagine is bleak; the word often used is “post-apocalyptic.” But despite what most people—including people in the church—seem to think, the word “apocalypse” does not mean “end of the world.” “Apocalypse” is Greek for “unveiling.” Biblical apocalyptic literature, for example, is created by people living under the shadows of empire that threaten their ecosystems and traditional ways of life. Like a bifocal, it unveils two realities simultaneously: It exposes the realities of violence and injustice and it reveals the possibilities of another world. The purpose of it is to create hope, not fear, and to inspire steadfast resistance to the death-dealing powers of empire. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, apocalyptic literature offers a powerful antidote to the climate of despair which the politics of denial have bred. This is especially because, contrary to another popular misunderstanding, apocalyptic texts are full of ecological concern for the integrity of creation. What better place to begin than with this text from Isaiah which stands at the beginning of this apocalyptic tradition. We shy away from apocalyptic texts because we do not know how to read them. They are hard for us to understand. But if we just listen, don’t these old words sound oddly fitting to the trouble we’re seeing? We know that “the earth dries up and withers” because we have polluted her in a myriad of ways. We know the earth is utterly broken; we feel her staggering like someone drinking to forget the hurt and we are afraid that when she falls she will not rise again. We fear that human-caused climate change will open the windows of heaven and cause the very foundations of the earth to tremble and break, making the planet uninhabitable. Maybe this is what actually makes this text hard for us: it’s not that we don’t understand; it’s that we fear it might be true. But this radical truth-telling is also the reason we need apocalyptic texts. Only in their radical critique can we hope to get to the root of our ecological crisis. The text leads us to ask: Who is causing this destruction? Is it God or humans? The first verse states that it is “the LORD ... about to lay waste to the earth and make it desolate.” But haven’t we been talking about human-caused climate change this whole time? Is this text excusing humans? Can text like this help us to think more deeply about climate change? Yet, if we look closely, the text isn’t excusing humans at all. It clearly states that it is humanity, it is us, who “have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant” which in turn brought about “the curse [which] devours the land.” These two terms —“curse” and “everlasting covenant” — are keywords. They take us back all the way to the very beginning of the story: to Genesis. They remind us how at first, adama and adam, earth and earthling, humus and humanity were intimately connected, made of the same stuff. They remind us how the land first became polluted: when it was drenched with the blood of Abel, the first shepherd, shed by his brother Cain, the first farmer. They remind us how God listened to the cry of the earth polluted by Abel’s blood and how Cain, the first murderer, was exiled from the land and founded the first city-state. They remind us how these city-states lived off the backs of their surroundings, exploiting land, animals, and people until God heard the cries of the groaning creation and sent a flood. They remind us how God chose Noah and his family to protect the animals of land and air from extinction by building the ark and how, after the flood, God unilaterally disarmed God’s self by hanging the rainbow in the sky and making an eternal covenant with humanity, promising that “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Put in the terms of modern climate science: God promises a stable climate. “Curse” and “everlasting covenant” then remind us that even though it was humanity which first polluted the earth by bloodshed (and continues to do so), God has been acting consistently to limit the damage we cause to the rest of creation and ourselves and bring us back to ecological sanity. What if, in reading the rest of Isaiah’s apocalypse, we look for the ways in which God is restraining our capacity to pollute and calling us back into relationships? From this perspective we notice that the city which is destroyed here is called the “city of chaos.” Here, the Hebrew word used for ‘chaos’ is ‘tohu.’ Those who study Hebrew might know the term ‘tohuwabohu’ — the ‘formless void’ of the earth before God’s creative act in Genesis 1. In the ancient Near East, ‘chaos’ was the opposite of ‘creation.’ ‘Creation’ was the ordering of things by separating them from each other, as God did in the creation account, or, like a city wall, separating the ordered inside from the chaotic outside. But if cities are places of order, what’s a ‘city of chaos’? By calling the city a ‘city of chaos,’ Isaiah claims it is a kind of “anti-creation.” It might appear ordered and orderly and people might talk about the importance of “law and order,” but Isaiah says that this “order” of the city of chaos is antithetical to creation and will lead to the end of life itself. To understand the symbolism here, we need to ask: What’s so bad about cities? In the ancient world, cities were the places where resources and power could be concentrated, where water could be dammed and channeled, and from where the exploitation of people and land could be organized through sword, debts, and entertainment. Another name for this dynamic is empire. Today’s cities are more ambivalent. They can be places where empire is visible and has its mailing address—think of Wall Street—or they might have been abandoned by empire decades ago—think of the South Side of Chicago or much of Elkhart. Throughout history, empire has been remarkably adaptable and has had many shapes. Today, empire largely takes the shape of capitalism and of multi-national corporations that have no grounding and make all places do their bidding. Today, the city of chaos is present when oil companies like Exxon and Kinder Morgan continue to get government permits to build pipelines even though remaining fossil fuels need to stay in the ground to keep global warming to acceptable limits. The indigenous Water Protectors at Standing Rock and now at Bayou Bridge and other pipelines were inspired by a Lakota prophecy about a black snake that would slither across the land, desecrating the sacred sites and poisoning the water before destroying the Earth. They see this black snake in the pipelines that invade their lands. By this we could talk about the pipeline of chaos. By destroying the city or the pipelines of chaos, God is putting an end to the ecological devastation wrought by empire. The destruction of the City of Chaos is good news to all who stand on the side of creation, just as it is good news when these pipeline projects are stopped or go bankrupt. Don’t let me be misunderstood. To call the end of a death-dealing industry good news is not to disrespect the workers in these industries. It is a form of mourning for the way poverty and lack of alternatives have forced poor people to sacrifice their own health and the health of the planet to provide for their families. In fact, climate justice begins with mourning, as our text knows. It’s easy to miss the tears God wipes away or to trivialize them into a general human condition. But what kind of tears are these if not tears for all of us caught in the city of chaos? The “shroud” and “sheet” God destroys in the text are associated with mourning, similar to the ash and sackcloth the inhabitants of Nineveh wore after Jonah prophesied the destruction of their city for their imperial sins. And as with Nineveh, the sincere mourning of the faithful has profound consequences. The presence of specific clothes indicates not just spontaneous mourning, but a practice of mourning. Mourning is different from despair. Despair freezes up the body while mourning is a way to break out of the cycles of despair and trauma that keep us frozen. Mourning is a way to face the truth without getting paralyzed. It can be scary to open ourselves to mourning. There is so much to mourn: all the people, ecosystems, entire species we have already lost; our inaction in the past; our obstacles in the present. And, given that our inaction has caused an irreversible degree of climate change, we know there will be more cause for mourning. In mourning, we commit ourselves to remembering those we have lost as well as to fighting for the living. More importantly, without mourning and processing those emotions, we will not be free to address the actual causes of climate change: our addiction to perpetual growth. This addiction is fueled by the availability of fossil fuels but, more existentially, by our colonized imagination that believes the myth of scarcity: of a world in which there is not enough to meet everyone’s needs. Without mourning it continues to be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The Feast – Cultivating Abundance and Joy in the Midst of Crisis The myth of scarcity is vital to the health of the empire. Without the myth of scarcity, empire would not be able to control us the way it does, making our existence and flourishing conditional. This myth of scarcity is another way in which empire is the antithesis of creation. We see this nowhere clearer than in the manna stories of Exodus: after hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt’s empire, Israel is needing to learn to rely on God for provision. They don’t know how to live on the land on which they’re wandering and are wanting to go “back to the meat pots of Egypt.” But God provides them enough food and as they learn to take only what they need, to live within their limits, they slowly realize there is abundance even in the midst of the desert. In the Isaiah text, the meal God provides is antithetical to the scarcity that characterizes the city of chaos. In the city was a lack of wine, but here God provides “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” And this feast is not just for a well-selected group of VIPs; there is no bouncer here. God’s feast is for everyone, especially the ones who made it out of the city of chaos! This is the vision Jesus had and embodied and which got him the reputation of being a drinker. Jesus celebrated feasts like this one repeatedly with crowds ranging from a dozen to five thousand, cultivating abundance where others only saw scarcity. Jesus invited those suffering from affluenza to share generously what they had and make reparations to those whose suffering had built their wealth. Jesus’ parties were spaces where people cried and tears were wiped away. Following Jesus means celebrating and cultivating abundance and joy where others only see scarcity and despair. Waiting on the Lord We’ve seen how apocalyptic texts act as bifocals, exposing the hidden (or not-so-hidden) violence of empire and revealing the world of shared abundance on its way. But what do we do in the meantime, while the city of chaos still seems to reign and rage? I must confess that the part of the Isaiah passage that gives me the most struggle is the last part: “Behold, this is our God, for whom we have waited so that God might save us.” What does waiting for God in the anthropocene look like? Is it not precisely our waiting and our inactivity that keeps this crisis going? Should we not rather be actively trying to change things? I have two points to these questions: One is a counter-question: Is it really our inactivity that keeps the crisis going? Or is not it precisely our over-activity, our daily life as a part of a society addicted to fossil fuels? What if part of ‘waiting on the Lord’ is cutting our own carbon emissions by insulating our houses and churches and cutting down on meat consumption? What if ‘waiting on the Lord’ means practicing a carbon sabbath by biking, walking, or at least car-pooling to church? What if ‘waiting on the Lord’ means allowing the land to rest by restoring our lawns to more native flora that need neither mowing nor sowing (as we did on campus with the prairie)? What if ‘waiting on the Lord’ means making a collective covenant to not use air travel? What if ‘waiting on the Lord’ means divesting our personal and institutional capital from all fossil fuel-related companies and investing our wealth in respectable, environmentally-worthy jobs in the poor black and brown communities that have been most impacted by countless forms of environmental racism? What if we practiced mutual aid through no-interest loans for households seeking to better insulate their homes or install solar energy panels? If the church collectively committed to these practices of carbon sabbath, we would be a city on a hill and a light to the nations in this ecological crisis. However, we would still need to stop the laying of pipelines of chaos. We would still need to stop the greenhouse covenant from being broken through the burning of fossil fuels, unleashing the curse of an uninhabitable planet. As I learn more about the depth of the “wicked problem” we are in, I find hope in the growing movement of people of faith and conscience who read the signs of the times correctly and decide to take courageous action at personal sacrifice. Steve Heinrichs, the director of Indigenous-Settler Relations for Mennonite Church Canada was recently sentenced to seven days in prison because, together with representatives of other faith traditions, he had joined indigenous land protectors in blocking the expansion of a pipeline. I was moved when I read his statement to the Mennonite church (read it here); he wrote about taking action on many of the things I just suggested but realized, as he listened to his indigenous friends, that individual action within a consumer mode was not enough. He knew where Jesus would take his stand. This is my second point: ‘Waiting on the Lord’ means waiting for Jesus in the places and with the people he would be around. If Jesus had been born in the Anthropocene, he probably would have been born in Bangladesh and become a climate refugee. He would have recruited his disciples from among those hurting from the consequences of overfishing and pollution. ‘Waiting on the Lord’ happens everywhere we plant seeds for the future and wherever we put our bodies in the way of the black snake, the death-dealing tentacles of the city of chaos. In light of the dire reality, we put our trust in God who since the fall has worked tirelessly to defend creation against us and nudge us toward ecological sanity and reconciliation with our fellow creatures. May we have apocalyptic faith to expose and tear down the city of chaos, lifting up the new feast of the Lord that nourishes us, taking us from despair to having a fierce love for all of creation as we wait for God who will save us. May it be so.
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