Jonah 03 – Not one, but two second chances

 ⁴ Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” ⁵ The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

⁶ When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. ⁷ (Read the rest of the chapter, here.)

Nineveh’s Second Chance: A Metaphor for Climate Change

Let’s start with the second second chance of this chapter: In a rare instance of power listening to prophets before calamity strikes, the Ninevites take Jonah’s message of impending doom to heart and institute a citywide act of repentance. Everyone puts on sackcloth, fasts, and even causes their livestock to fast. God takes notice of their contrition, and has compassion on them.

I think the story of the Ninevites is an excellent metaphor for how we, collectively, should be reacting to climate change. The prophets have been warning us of impending doom for some time now. Warning signs – melting ice caps, wilder hurricane seasons, even migrating trees – have been shown to us as well. What if, like the Ninevites, we actually listened? And not only listened, but did something about it? And what if our politicians listened to us, like the Ninevite king did to his people? What if we instituted an official policy of reducing our footprint on the earth and not just giving lip-service to that idea? Like the king of Nineveh I say, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn Xyr fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

Good on you if you bike to work, eat local, and have solar panels on your roof. I really do think that’s great. But to be perfectly frank, our personal actions only account for part of the equation: They help create a culture of eco-awareness. But in order to effect real change, we need to see things done on a national and even global scale, instituting a policy of eco-awareness.

I’ll use an example with my personal eco-bugaboo: food waste. If food waste was a country, it would be third in the list of greenhouse gas emitters after the US and China. If we reduced food waste, we not only would reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted by rotting food, but also the amount of water, land, and other resources used to grow or create something destined to just be thrown away. We can create a culture of combating food waste at home by buying responsibly, making just enough and eating it all, and composting what we don’t or can’t eat (like egg shells or banana peels). But this does nothing to address the institutional food waste of grocery stores, large cafeterias, or the entire prepared food industry. And while our consumer choices certainly can influence how those places view food waste, their participation in reducing food waste remains entirely optional at a time when we need it to be mandatory. A little encouraging aside: The Food Recovery Act tackles food waste, and has already been introduced in Congress. But it has languished in the Health subcommittee since 2017. Now that we have a new administration coming in and a COVID vaccine on the horizon, perhaps this is the time to call your representatives to let them know you want to see this bill passed in the new year, making it policy to reduce food waste.

Back to those solar panels and other potential solutions to climate change: We could make renewable energy a reality. And make plug-in cars ubiquitous. And focus on keeping our food systems as local as possible. And reduce our reliance on plastic packaging. The list goes on. If plug-in cars replaced gas-powered vehicles, and solar/wind/hydro- power replaced coal and fossil fuel plants, we would keep millions of tons of greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere annually. If we focus on (and provide the support for) people to eat local, we reduce the resources needed to distribute said food. If we tax plastic bags their usage (and environmental impact) goes down 40-90%, depending upon the area being surveyed. But in order for any of this to happen we need it to be policy. Culture alone will not do it. Civil rights were not protected until the Civil Rights Act (and there’s still work to be done, but it was a start). Same with the right to vote. Same with child labor laws. Same with the ADA, the protection of endangered species, access to affordable housing, and so on and so forth: Trailblazers worked within a culture of caring and passion, bringing attention to the wrongs of everything from eagles to wheelchair access. But change isn’t fully actualized until it becomes policy.

So once again, with a new administration coming in and COVID (hopefully) becoming less of a concern in 2021, we can all call our representatives to tell them we want action on climate change. Those of us who are able can donate to Citizen’s Climate Lobby, Idle No More, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. We can urge the companies we work for and shop from to do the same thing. We can protest in the streets. Whatever it takes to make action on climate change the dominant policy. With God’s help and good grace, I firmly believe it is never too late for us to start instituting real change.

Jonah’s second chance and God’s never-ending patience

And just who is responsible for leading that change? If a culture of eco-awareness (or any other sort of awareness) isn’t enough, it is easy for us to give up and let ourselves off the hook. And that’s not very different from some of the prophets of the Old Testament. Jonah runs away from his charge to warn Nineveh. Moses, arguably the most important of prophets in the Old Testament, hems and haws and argues and bargains with God at length before going back to Egypt. Jeremiah and Gideon were also reluctant. But God is patient, and listens to all their fuss and bluster – and even lets them run away a bit – before gently insisting on Xyr ways, reminding each of these prophets, “I will be with you.”

I find this reassuring. It is easy to be distracted from what God is calling us to do. We can even convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing in running away. We are not “the right ones” for the job, no one will listen to us, we don’t have the right experience, the time, the money, the influence, and so on. And there are always other important things that need to be done, right? I, for one, am a champion procrasti-cleaner. Because really, how am I to be expected to do anything important when there’s five loads of laundry to be done and there are dishes in the sink and the downstairs hasn’t been swept in a week? And yes, those things need to be done, too, but the house doesn’t have to be perfect before I take a moment to call my representatives, before I work on the employee handbook for a new responsible-farming apprenticeship program we’re forming on the farm, or before I keep speaking my truth over here on my little corner of the internet.

The time is always right, and we are always the right person when it comes to making the world a better, more just, more green, and more sacred space. If there’s one final message I want you to take away this week, it is that we all have our part, however small it may seem, and that we don’t need to go it alone. First and foremost, God is with us, and that alone is a big thing. We might make mistakes along the way (Remember tires-in-the-ocean-to-make-reefs intitiative? Ooof!), but we should keep going. Keep speaking up, keep encouraging others, keep the myriad injustices of this world from being swept out of sight. The more we speak, the more others will see, and the more actions will be taken. Whether it’s racial, environmental, gender, workplace, or some other sort of justice – listen to what God is calling you to do, and then go do it! We always have a second chance to act in God, and we should use it to the fullest potential whenever we come across it.

Psalm 65 – A Blackberry Sea

⁹ You care for the land and water it;
    you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
    to provide the people with grain,
    for so you have ordained it.
¹⁰ You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
    you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
¹¹ You crown the year with your bounty,
    and your carts overflow with abundance.
¹² The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;
    the hills are clothed with gladness.
¹³ The meadows are covered with flocks
    and the valleys are mantled with grain;
    they shout for joy and sing.
(Read the rest of the chapter, here)

This past spring, I was walking through the farm with the girls, meandering and exploring. We walked behind the fence-line of field four, a part of the property that had been timbered a few years ago. The undulations of the land were completely festooned in sprays of blackberry flowers. It was a sea of white and green. Since then, I have been eagerly watching roadside berries grow and turn dark, knowing that the same thing was happening in my secret blackberry sea. Last weekend, we went to pick some and were not disappointed.

I was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of the land, a land that had been used for its resources and left as a ravaged wound. When we arrived here a few years ago, what is now a blackberry sea was a hot, depressing place: raw dirt, old stumps, and piles of brush baking and bleaching in the sun, with nothing to break the heat and wind but the occasional scraggly clump of weeds. Now, in addition to the blackberry, there is wild grapevine, shiso, and milky oats. On the perimeter, there are young paw paw trees already producing, and what I have a suspicion are persimmons too young to produce fruit yet, but full of promise for future years. I felt like I was in Eden.

God is so generous, Xe gives us solutions to problems of our own making. My blackberry sea is but one example. The other one that had me marveling anew this week was the fact that oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are inadvertently growing huge reefs of those wonderful water filterers – oysters – on their charged, underwater metal equipment. And I think I’ve shared before that trees sequester carbon (up to forty-eight pounds per mature tree), provide oxygen, and literally seed clouds – yes, more trees equals more rain.

I do not think this means we get a “get out of jail free” card when it comes to caring for our wonderful island planet. Nor do I think that “letting nature be” is necessarily the best approach. Certainly, there are some areas of the wild that need to stay just that: completely wild. But if you remember, our original role in the Garden of Eden was gardener, so Biblically, you could argue that is humankind’s original and preferred vocation. There is constantly unfolding research about the Americas that show pre-Colombian populations were those edenic gardeners: tending the lands on a broad scale to make God’s fertile gift even more abundant. Early explorers were astounded by the park-like settings of eastern forests (which still had bison roaming through them) and the overwhelming number of fish in the Hudson river. 1491 and Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America are both excellent books if you are interested in learning more about how humans have actually, at least at some point in time, been beneficial to the earth.

What our role in caring for the Earth should be is something I’m sure I’ll revisit in greater detail in future posts, since that is what our farm is all about (and my husband, Chris, writes about it with more knowledge and eloquence than I, here). Today, though, I just want to celebrate the amazing abundance that is earth, from the cancer-fighting properties of ancient algae to the oxygen-producing capabilities of the Amazon Rainforest, and everything in between.

I thank God for the shade of the oak trees, the sweetness of a strawberry, and the puffs of dandelion seeds that delight my girls. (If there was ever proof that God loves play I think the answer lies in the irresistibility of a dandelion head to a small child.) I thank God for volunteer squash in the old pig paddock, the ever-forgiving and ever-cheerful zinnia blossoms, and the meteoric growth of my ten foot high corn. I thank God for the surprise stand of persimmons at the end of the driveway, quietly growing for a decade from seeds thrown there by my father-in-law many years past and just fruiting now. I thank God for the lush grass in the well of my front yard – a marsh in the winter but perfectly evergreen and inviting in the summer, where my girls run and roll and play with the dogs. I thank God for wildflowers. I thank God for gentle, rolling hills. I thank God for cool rivers and warm summers. I thank God for my blackberry sea.

Book Review: God of Earth

I hate preamble, but I must share some background on this book and my relationship to it.  I promise most of my upcoming book reviews will not have so much back-story.  In fact, you can read a much more straight forward bonus book review of N.T. Wright’s God of Earth on my GoodReads page. Oh my, I’ve managed to preamble my preamble.  If I have any readers left after such a sin, let’s get to it:

I met author Kristin Swenson through the farm (for those new to the blog, I’m a farmer when I’m not writing or mom-ing) when we were starting out in Charlottesville.  She gifted us her book God of Earth shortly after it was published in 2016, when I was six months pregnant with Betty.  I got about halfway through it, then had a baby, and it got buried on my nightstand through no fault of its own.

I’ve picked it up several times in the intervening years, and I’ve read (and enjoyed) the first half many times now.  I brought it with me when visiting family last Christmas and finally made it three-quarters through the book, and now have finally finished it for real!

I want to reiterate, my slow reading has nothing to do with the readability of this book – which is an easily-digestible 139 pages – and everything to do with the external pressures of kids and livestock.  It flows gently yet insistently, like a spring creek, and strikes the perfect balance of wonder and urgency discussing ecological issues in Christian terms.

God of Earth brings God, particularly Jesus, into a sphere where I have (in my admittedly limited reading) rarely seen him: in and of the Earth in the most physical way possible.  This book reminds us again and again of Jesus’ visceral nature, challenging us to do the same:

The Earth is not out there, a discrete entity in splendid isolation but enmeshed in all sorts of relationships just as Jesus was with family, friends, and disciples. The God of earth, like the biblical Jesus, is relational. The friendship works boths ways.  What makes a friend to the God of earth, to the Jesus beyond Jesus incarnate in the earth itself?

If we take this question to heart, we will marvel at the world around us anew, and also be moved to attend the myriad ecological crises we face with new determination.  Swenson takes time to marvel throughout the book.  One of my favorite quotes coming from the beginning of chapter five:

The cellular wisdom of dynamic nature (what makes a rose smell like a rose and guides giraffes to evolve long necks), the energy of weather both relieving and terrifying, the urge to love and be loved, the source of all stories and art and surprise, the architect of death and keeper of mystery–that which both contains and transcends everything, the only One worthy of all worship through all time–became of earth-stuff one day, undeniably small, and absolutely vulnerable.

She goes on to describe Jesus coming to earth as a baby, miraculous and normal as any other baby.  It made me think about God in a whole new way, as discussed in this post here, where I reference her baby analogy in greater length.  It made me want to hold the whole earth tenderly in two hands.

And to behold the earth as such a precious object, I am motivated all the more to be part of the solution to climate change.  I have a long way to go, as I’ve discussed before, as I guess you do, too.  Swenson urges us to do better for sure, but she offers us this much needed grace:

“If you already care at all, if you are trying to live responsibly on the plant, then you and I, dear reader, are hardly the ones pounding in the nails.  So, if we spend our time attacking each other, already acting with ecological sensitivity, then we have let Rome–the greater world powers [oil companies, lobbyists, the shipping industry…]–load onto us their far graver sins.

This does not, of course, excuse inaction, and no one could accuse Swenson of saying so.  What this book does do, however, is provide hope where hope is needed, acknowledge grief and sadness both personal and global, and overall speak encouragement.  If you feel overwhelmed by climate change and what your role could possibly be in helping to combat it, this is the book for you.  If you need a new, organic way to think about our Christian God, this book will breathe fresh air into your beliefs.  I encourage everyone to pick it up and read it, it will do good for your soul.

This is my first book review, and I aim to do one a month from here on out in addition to my regular Bible reading.  If you are enjoying what you read please follow the blog for more!  Click the folder icon in the upper left corner of the menu, and you can follow via WordPress or email.  And don’t forget to check the blog out on Instagram and Twitter, too!  If you want to see what else is on our reading list, follow me on GoodReads and check out our post 36 Minority Writers for you to Add to Your Reading List.