Destroyed by Fire Next Time (or Trudeau Approves Pipelines)

This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; in them I am trying to arouse your sincere intention by reminding you that you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken through your apostles. First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless. (2 Peter 3:1-7)

Remembering, this is the practice that produces a people that are faithful to the knowledge they have been given. Remembering the failures and successes of humanity so that we can see clearly the world that lies before us. It is easy to adopt the position of the scoffer; to fail to do the hard work of remembering and casually assert the general well-being of everything that is. But the scoffer does not remember as the faithful remember. The scoffer is a creature of lavish appetites, remembering the harvest, the holiday, and the feast but forgetting the soil, the creature, and the ordinary. The memory of the scoffer is short and muddied, knowing only the world as it appears to the heroic individual. The faithful are called to a more intense remembering. The faithful recognize their own blindness and require the wisdom of the elders and prophets of the community. By attending to the stories of the community and the land, the faithful remember the situation of those whom history books do not speak, the poor, the vulnerable, and the ordinary.

The modern world is ruled by the scoffer and thus lacks memory. Memory has been replaced by data - that most impersonal collection of facts and figures that allegedly make sense apart from the stories in which they are at home. Newsmen speak of "breaking stories," stories that appear briefly across the television set and break apart with the next news cycle, failing to imprint on our memories. Our best story tellers are forced to intersperse their tales with messages from sponsors; interruptions to narratives that create desire and destroy memory. And so we live, numb, desperate and alone with our desires - buying, consuming, and forgetting.

St. Peter warned the church of this kind of forgetful living. It is only the community that forgets the destruction of water that is vulnerable to the destruction of fire. Across the ancient world, large and advanced civilizations met their demise through the systematic application of irrigating floodwaters to the soil that gave them all the gifts of life their way of life required. As humans that require the health of humus to survive, forgetfulness in the care of that soil is a sure route to destruction. As the irrigating floods brought prosperity, desires and lusts increased. Never satisfied, the wealthy demanded more, storing their wealth in pyramids and hanging gardens that were built with the labour of the poor whose connection to the land had been severed by the rising waters. These civilizations are no more, and the lands they occupied have become desert wastelands. The bones of their wealth rise out of the sand as a witness against the folly of inequality.

But we have forgotten these failures. Both Napoleon and Victoria thought the relics of antiquity spoke of an age of greatness that could be realized again. And so, we have come into the age of fire. Our machines run along the earth, fire raging in their bellies. Black snakes of fuel crisscross the land, belching their toxic blood onto pristine indigenous lands, preparing for the fire that will consume and despoil the land. The more fire we apply, the wealthier we become and our governments believe the scoffers and climate change deniers who assert that "ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!”

The fundamentalists are half right, the world will be destroyed by fire, but St. Peter never promised that the fire would originate with God, only that it has been foreseen. God saved a remnant from our floodwaters last time and promised that he would never again destroy the earth (Gen 8:21). Yes, the earth will be destroyed by fire, but it is fire of our own making. We have forgotten the poor. We have not listened to the wisdom of the apostles and prophets. We have forgotten our own ability for self-destruction. We have chosen the lusts of the scoffers and unleashed fire upon the earth and not even God will save us this time.