John Stott’s going-home-to-glory was announced yesterday.  I wrote the piece below last September, but the thoughts are just as valid if not more so now.  If you haven’t read Uncle John’s farewell message to all of us, please do so.  There’s a link at the bottom of the post.

There are few leaders in the Christian world greater than John Stott.  I first heard him preach at Urbana 1970 – forty years ago, when I was a senior in high school.  [You can read the actual talks here - I don't think the recordings are available on-line.]  I’ve followed his ministry career ever since, though almost always from a distance – we shook hands perhaps twice or three times, but my memory fades a bit at this point.  John is now at the end of his life, though he has not yet ended his service to the church and her Lord.  He has written one last book that is intended to be his farewell to those of us still here – and you need to read it. 

I’ve known many leaders who ended their careers in scandal.  I’ve known a fair number now whose ministries were cut short by illness or death – they left us too soon and without warning, without the benefit of any last words of wisdom to carry us forward.  There have only been a few who, knowing they were leaving, took the time to share with us from that unique and precious place that is halfway between earth and heaven.  Those who have lived their lives well, and know they are about to leave for another, better place – they deserve to be listened to. If you had an opportunity right now to spend a few hours with John Stott, knowing he is at the end of his life, wouldn’t you do that?  So get this book…

Stott has called this last message The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling. Like all of his teaching, his thoughts are disarmingly simple, and unarguably biblical – and because of that, dangerous to read.  Having read, you can hardly say you didn’t understand what he was getting at.  And if you are someone – as I am – who wants to build his life on the Bible, Stott leaves you with precious little to defend yourself if, as probably will happen, it turns out that you have been neglecting some of these aspects of discipleship yourself.

So what are these neglected truths that are important enough to be this man’s farewell message to his sisters and brothers? Here are a few quotes from the first four out of a total of eight:

1. Non-conformity: The church has a double responsibility in relation to the world around us. On the one hand we are to live, serve and witness in the world. On the other hand we are to avoid becoming contaminated by the world, So we are neither to seek to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world nor to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world. Escapism and conformism are thus both forbidden to us. (p 17)

2. Christlikeness:I remember vividly the major question that perplexed me (and my friends) as a young Christian. It was this: What is God’s purpose for his people? Granted we had been converted, but what next? …I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth. It is this: God wants his people to become like Christ, for Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God. [p 28-29]

3. Maturity: [Stott sees "growth without depth" as one of the greatest dangers the worldwide church faces today.  But what is this depth, or maturity?]  Paul’s most common way of defining Christians is to say that they are men and women “in Christ,” meaning not inside Christ as when our clothes are in a wardrobe or when tools are inside a chest, but rather as the branches are “in” the vine and our limbs are “in” the body, that is, united to Christ. So then, to be “in Christ” is to be personally, vitally, organically related to him. In this sense, to be mature is to have a mature relationship with Christ in which we worship, trust, love and obey him… [p 42]

4. Creation Care: [Surprised to find this listed alongside Christlikeness and spiritual maturity?]  The Bible tells us that in creation God established for human beings three fundamental relationships: first to himself, for he made them in his own image; second to each other, for the human race was plural from the beginning; and third, to the good earth and its creatures over which he set them. Moreover, all three relationships were skewed by the Fall. …It stands to reason therefore that God’s plan of restoration includes not only our reconciliation to God and to each other, but in some way the liberation of the groaning creation as well. [p 49-50]

That last happens to be the central theological pillar on which Care of Creation’s ministry is built – and fascinatingly his brief outline of three broken relationships (God, others, creation) restored by redemption is completely consistent with the  four relationships (God, self, others, creation) that I have made a key part of my own teaching and writing.  The fact that Stott has made it the first of his “application” truths reflects both his life – he has been one of the world’s most famous birders – and, I believe, his deep understanding of the wisdom of God and the word of God.

Creation care is not simply “one more nice thing to do”.  It is central to the message of the word and to the mission of the church, because it is a key part of God’s redemptive work in the world.

So let’s get to work.

[For completeness, the remaining four truths Stott expounds are Simplicity, Balance, Dependence and Death.  I won't take the time to develop those - you really do need to read this book!]

William Wordsworth’s most famous work is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Reflections of Early Childhood.” It is one of my favorite poems, exploring the lost pleasures of childhood that Wordsworth believes are hints of the immortality we left behind:

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

And again,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Setting aside theological mysteries and controversies for another day, what has preoccupied me for that last month and a half has not been immortality, past or future, but increasing intimations of mortality:  My own,as I have experienced an unusual and thought provoking spell of genuine illness, something unusual for me; but also increasing intimations of mortality in the world in which we live, highlighted by the Gulf oil spill but buttressed by a host of other events.

First, my own encounter with mortality:  Around the first of July I started to experience unusual intestinal symptoms.  No, not what you are likely thinking but rather the opposite:  My entire system began to shut down – a phenomenon known in the medical world as ‘paralytic ileus’.  This continued for the better part of a month, and included several doctor’s visits, one trip to Urgent Care, one to the Emergency Room of our local university hospital, 24 hours in-hospital “observation” (whatever that means), and finally laparascopic surgery for an obstruction that turned out not to be there.  At the end of the experience, all I had was ‘Maybe you had a virus – and the surgery slowed your recovery.’

In the process, I lost 20 pounds in about two weeks.  I missed two conferences for which I had done much of the planning and in which I had significant leadership roles.   I would have told you 3 months ago that these events were among the most important things I would do all summer.  Instead I found myself just trying to get from one day to the next.  You will note that this is the first post in almost two months – now you know why.

The lesson I’ve taken away from this?  The reality of my own mortality.

Let me explain.

I had great plans this summer, important things to do.  People were depending on me. But all it took was a paralyzed intestine to blow the schedule to bits.  I have talents and abilities, thoughts and dreams, just as you do.  But it all depends on a body that works.  When the body doesn’t work, I don’t get much done.

There’s a bigger lesson here – the mortality of the human enterprise.

Consider the BP oil spill.   A company decides to drill for oil in deep water.  They’ve done it many times before, they know there is a lot of oil on this site.  They are convinced that chances of something going wrong are almost zero.  And if something were to go wrong, it’s almost impossible for them to imagine anything more than a minor problem that will be taken care of almost overnight.  But everything does go wrong.  The well explodes.  The “blowout preventer”, an expensive and intricate piece of equipment designed to be the final and fail-safe preventer-of-disaster of last resort turns out to be useless.  The result is more than 100 days of oil exploding into the Gulf of Mexico, billions of dollars lost, one of the world’s most profitable companies reduced to insolvency, hundreds of thousands of human lives disrupted, and unknown damage to some of the richest ocean waters in the world.

Of the millions of people living and working on the shores of the Gulf on the 19th of April, 2010, not one expected that their entire season – tourism, fishing, even oil drilling – was about to be canceled.  But it happened, and looking back from the vantage point of the present, it is hard to understand why we all didn’t see it coming.  Our economy, indeed our entire lives, rests on a foundation much more fragile than we want to think about.

And now bigger things are happening that should call us to the same caution about our biological foundations.  Hundreds of wild fires are blazing in Russia, amid a heatwave that the Russians claim is the worst in a thousand years. Torrential rains and mudslides in China that have wiped out a city and killed hundreds – maybe thousands.  And in Pakistan, a ‘super monsoon’ greater than any ever recorded before has affected more than 10 per cent of the population (15 million is the current number but that is certain to rise).  The flood has wiped out half of Pakistan’s agricultural land in the last two weeks (see the map).  Crop losses alone are in the billions of dollars after the first flood wave, and another is on its way as I write.   No one is yet able to calculate the cost of replacing roads, bridges, oil refineries and power plants.  One UN official guesses that this disaster is worse than the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and the Haitian earthquake combined.

A friend was in the town of Gilgit, in the far north, when the floods hit.  Here’s his description:

All roads are blocked – to Hunza, to Ghizar & Chitral, to Kohistan and both Kaghan routes. The estimate is it will take 3-4 more weeks to re-open the [main highway]. So supplies are low – no diesel and increasingly less food. We are fine at the Serena but many people are suffering. Local floods and landslides have destroyed and damaged houses as well as taken lives, and the water channels people depend on for daily life as well as their crops have been heavily damaged.

In a phone conversation with another friend in the area I learned that in the same town banks are closing.  Why, are they out of cash?  No, they are running out of fuel to run their generators.

What is the long term outlook?  Here’s the first friend’s analysis:

The talk in Gilgit-Baltistan is about whether or not we are entering a phase of sustained environmental instability. The spectacular Attabad slide / dam from January followed by a summer unlike any seen for a long time raise questions about the stability and predictability of life in this region. Global warming is mentioned though some also mention a history of patterns like this, the previous one being almost a century ago. There is little doubt, however, that this level of natural activity, if sustained, will require significant human adaptation. For example, keeping any roads open to China and down country will become difficult. And now life here depends on those roads, unlike 50 years ago.

To summarize:  We modern humans have developed an increasingly complex society on the same fragile biological foundation we have always had to work with, without remembering how fragile that foundation really is.  ‘Six inches of topsoil…’  We have assaulted our foundation in a variety of ways, not least of which is, of course, climate change or global warming:

NEW YORK — Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says – although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. [AP via Wash Post][Picture is smoke from the Russian fires from a NASA satellite - click for larger image]

What is the solution?  When talking about climate change, scientists and policy makers usually speak of two different but complementary approaches: Mitigation and Adaption – and these approaches work with a variety of human problems:

Mitigation means trying to prevent  a bad, difficult or unpleasant situation from happening in the first place.  Adaptation means learning to cope after that situation has already happened.
In terms of my intestinal difficulties, mitigation involved trying to find the source of the problem and using various techniques to resolve the issue, up to and including my unsuccessful surgery.  Adaptation meant changing what I ate until I found something (like beef broth) that would go down and stay down and still provide me with some nutrition.

Mitigation with regard to the oil spill might have involved extra safety devices as are already in use in many other parts of the world, more inspections or even a decision not to drill in some places even if we can because the cost of a possible accident is simply too great.  Adaptation is what we’ve been watching for the last 100 days – and that experience alone is a valuable lesson that adaptation is always more expensive and more difficult than mitigation.

In terms of the climate change driven phenomena we are seeing this summer, it’s already too late to mitigate.  While we should do all we can to avoid additional green-house gas driven climate change, these fires and floods have already happened.  What these events show is that sometimes it is not just difficult, but actually impossible to adapt.  There is no way to prepare for a flood like that now devastating Pakistan, and you cannot do anything to lessen the impact of the hundreds of fires in Russia.  Both of these are minor events compared to many other predicted effects of climate change, like  increases in sea level.

What does all this mean?  It means we – the human race – are already reaping the harvest of centuries of abusing God’s creation.  We need to prepare for a difficult time ahead.  And we need to repent.  Perhaps God will hear:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.  2 Chronicles 7:14

[See also How Do You Pray About an Oil Spill?]

This post is the Christmas letter my wife and I have just sent out to our friends and financial partners in our ministry.  Suspecting that a few of the regular visitors to Our Father’s World might not be on our distribution list, here are our thoughts this Christmas season.  Note that the first half is a devotional – we’ve been doing this in our letters for at least 15 years – and the second contains brief news about our family.  You are welcome to read both – we’d love to have you meet our family in this way, if not in person!  And feel free to contact me directly if you’d like to be added to the direct distribution list or click here if you would like to partner with us by donating to our ministry.  Our work is mostly provided for my small-ish gifts from ordinary people. –End of Commercial– !

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Dear Friends,

Of all the common Christmas carols echoing in shopping malls, elevators and on the radio – not to mention in churches and on our music players – surely the most interesting and subversive is “Joy to the World.”

You’re not in the habit of thinking of Christmas carols as subversive?  Take another look at this carol:

Joy to the World , the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Have you noticed that this carol is not about Christmas at all?  We are not singing here about what is commonly called Christ’s first advent – angels, shepherds, manger, magi.  No, this song is a look into the future – when Jesus returns to establish his kingdom of righteousness and justice on the earth.  Far from being sweetness and light and romance, this is a song of triumph and of victory over evil.  Its message should make the powers that rule this world quake with fear!  And – not coincidentally –  it is perhaps one of the best expositions of a major theme in my own teaching, that redemption is more than salvation!  “Heaven and nature” are singing.  “Fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains” are echoing the sound.  Thorns will no longer “infest the ground”.  He – Jesus – will be present and will “rule the world with truth and grace”.  All of this is profoundly biblical (check out Romans 8:21, Psalm 148 to start with).

So why do we sing this at Christmas?  Because Christmas is only one chapter in the long story of God’s work in human history. The first Advent and the second Advent are two parts of one great plan.  As beautiful and romantic as the Christmas story is, it only becomes meaningful when we see the connections.  The baby is Savior.  The Savior is King.  The King is coming to restore his Kingdom.  And we, his subjects, demonstrate that by preparing for his coming by allowing him to rule our lives now.

We give meaning to Christmas and we prepare for the coming of our King by bringing his rule into our present in anticipation of this great future.  We learn to love the King and to accept his love.  We allow his Spirit to work in our lives to be more like him.  We practice our love for him by loving each other in family and in community and reflecting that love to all those in need around us.  We learn to live in God’s creation in a way that the “rocks, hills and plains” will rejoice and “heaven and nature” will sing, not just because King is coming, but because we, his people are already here, preparing the way for Him!

That, in a nutshell, is why this interesting and subversive Christmas carol is and should remain part of the standard list of carols we sing.

It’s also why we do what we do with Care of Creation!

And we thank you for your interest, partnership in and support of our life and ministry.  It is now almost 5 years since we sent out our “Sometimes you have to leap, and build your wings on the way down” letter marking the beginning of this adventure.  We now see a genuine movement beginning in the evangelical community – in the US and abroad – and we find ourselves right in the middle of it:

• Urbana09 – in St Louis right after Christmas –will feature an evening focusing on environment as an issue and no less than 9 seminars (workshops) on creation care, half of which will be taught by Care of Creation staff or our close ministry partners, Renewal and Eden Vigil.
• A new Zondervan book release – Zealous Love – features a chapter by me and Susanna on our call to the ministry of creation care, and Our Father’s World continues to sell moderately well.
• We are involved directly or in partnership with the Creation Care Consultation, a fellowship of like-minded organizations; with the National Association of Evangelicals, the Evangelical Environmental Network, the Evangelical Press Association, the US Committee of the Micah Challenge, and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).
• Our recent experience of bringing the Our Father’s World seminar to the Philippines and Japan is opening doors to many other countries.  It is our goal, everywhere we go, to seek to lay the foundation for a self-sustaining, biblical creation care movement.  This is already happening in the Philippines.

[But we’re still building the wings to sustain all of this.  Our current financial situation is precarious – personally and organizationally.  We anticipate losing our largest supporting church in February due to their own budget difficulties.  We need you!  Thanks for taking a look at the enclosed response form…]

Family wise, it’s been a good year.  We had the whole family together in June for a few brief days at a cousin’s wedding.  Tim even came from the Dominican Republic, where he is well into his second year with the Peace Corps, along with his lovely girlfriend Kim Dykwell.  He will end that service in May, and has been heavily engaged in submitting graduate school applications.  Other members of the family will also be transitioning in the coming year: Katrina graduates from University of Wisconsin in May, is also looking at grad schools and would like to do her Masters degree in China.  Amy will graduate from the University of Minnesota the same weekend and is still deciding what God has in store for her next year. She’s loved being a Nanny this year.  Melanie changed her position at Cornerstone Christian Academy in Philadelphia where she’s been for a number of years.  She’s now working in Administration, which she seems to be enjoying, and has been active with some significant leadership positions in her church.

And the parents are hanging on to the empty nest with glee.  (Most of the bedrooms have been repurposed so it stays that way.)  Susanna came through knee replacement surgery in April better than expected, and is now more mobile than in many years.  With improved health she has steadily added activities, including a bible study for three young(er) women, and involvement with some of the needy people on our street.  And I (Ed) keep on keeping on, grateful for good friends, health and strength sufficient (usually) for the demands of the day.

Thank you again for your love, prayers, and partnership.  We appreciate every one of you.

Ed and Susanna Brown

“

Wendell Berry (courtesy David Aaron Marshall)

That’s probably appropriate – Berry himself would not claim credentials as a professional in this field.  But he does occasionally wander onto theological meadows, and the result is as satisfying as the rest of his work.

I ran into this section in his essay “Economy and Pleasure” that is included in “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry” (Norman Wirzba, Editor).  It is perhaps more than a little ironic that I did so in the departure area of the Cincinnatti airport while waiting on a delayed flight – about as far from the agrarian ideals of Berry as I could get – but that irony is best left for another day.

Here’s the piece that struck me (the emphasis, of course, is mine):

“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837.  We may assume that to most of them it sounded odd, as to most of the Harvard graduating class of 1987 [date of this essay] it still would.  But perhaps we will be encouraged to take him seriously, if we recognize that this idea is not something that Thoreau made up out of thin air.  When he uttered it, he may very well have been remembering Revelation 4:11: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”  That God created “all things” is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things above others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so.  That God created all things for His pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please him, is formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible from the “anthropcentric” utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find in the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians.

Berry goes on…

…God’s pleasure in all things must be respected by us in our use of things, and even in our displeasure of some things.  It suggests too that we have an obligation to preserve God’s pleasure in all things, and surely this means not only that we must not misuse or abuse anything, but also that there must be some things and some places that by common agreement we do not use at all, but leave wild.  [pp 214-215]

That last thought is one that Sigurd Olson, one of the founders of the wilderness preservation movement in the United States, would surely have agreed with.

Alan Paton wrote his novel in 1946, published in 1948.  It is set in South Africa.  What is startling about the book is that the first two pages could have been written about Kenya – and could have been written yesterday.

The lessons from today’s reading are painfully clear:  1)Environmental degradation is not a new problem.  Abuse of God’s creation is, apologies to Paton, as old as the hills.   As ancient as human nature.  If you’ll allow me to quote myself in Our Father’s World, ‘environmental problems are sin problems.’

And, 2)Why don’t we learn?  If it was obvious that people were destroying the very land they needed to live on more than 60 years ago, why do we keep acting surprised?  Why do we think we can solve this with more fertilizer or another loan from the World Bank?

Here’s the reading.  (Pick up the book here)

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.  These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it…

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh.  The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth.  Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man.  They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children.  The men are away, the young men and the girls are away.  The soil cannot keep them any more.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof.  It is well-tended, and not too many cattle fee upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil.  Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator.  Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.  Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  But the rich green hills break down.  They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature.  For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs.  Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it.  Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet.  It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men…

Did you read this far?  Then it’s time to close the lap top or turn off the monitor, get yourself outdoors for a bit, and do two things:  If you can see good healthy soil, ground that still has the capacity to ‘keep men’, rejoice and give thanks to God for his mercy.  And at the same time, weep and repent for what we have done to God’s creation, and for those now suffering and dying because ‘the soil cannot keep them any more.’