Third Sunday of Advent

Lectionary: 7​

The desert and the parched land will exult;

the steppe will rejoice and bloom.

They will bloom with abundant flowers,

and rejoice with joyful song.

The glory of Lebanon will be given to them,

the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;

they will see the glory of the LORD,

the splendor of our God.

Isaiah, like all the Hebrew prophets, saw the hand of God in the weather. The Lord blessed his people with good weather for crops, when all the elements cooperated to reward the farmers and shepherds for their hard work. Or the Lord punished his people for their infidelity with droughts, floods, disease, pestilence, storms, cold, and excessive heat. They had no doubt that human behavior affected the weather. Virtue was rewarded and vices were punished.

In recent times, our advanced culture eliminated God from discussions about the climate. Unfortunately, they also dismissed the idea that human behavior could affect the weather. Beyond seeding the clouds for rain, a dubious exercise, nothing we did could change the weather. So they supposed.

But, despite our lack of faith, the blessings of fair weather for virtue and ecological upheaval for wickedness remain. They hover not over this or that city, but over the entire world. 

Recently, some  people recognize the penalties for polluting air, water, and earth; penalties which cannot be cancelled by a year of virtue. Aerosols in the atmosphere and chemicals in the soil don't just go away. It may take centuries to undo a half-century of dumping plastics into the world's oceans,

We slipped into these awful habits supposing the planet could absorb the abuse, but we failed to calculate how much abuse it could absorb. Even before the twentieth century we had some experience of waste and its consequences. New England farmers burned thousands of acres of land as they marched westward, cutting forests, opening new fields, leaching the soil, and abandoning the land to scrub pines. By 1900 Americans had overrun the continent and its arable land. Dust storms in the 1930's, taught us the effects of careless exploitation.

With that experience we might have anticipated air, water, and soil pollution; we might have expected the disappearance of fish and whales in the ocean.

But we were blinded by our relentless competition with one another. The Earth might be important but we had to eliminate the Nazis, Japanese, and Communists first. And any other race that threatened our freedom. We had a blind faith that technology would compensate for the losses; and the Earth -- if not God -- will always provide for His Elect.

The Hebrew prophets knew better. They knew that God punishes his own more severely. In Deuteronomy 28, Moses listed many ecological blessings for virtue, and many more curses for infidelity. As Abraham said to the rich man in Jesus's parable, "They have Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them​​!" Anyone who believes "The Word of the Lord endures forever!" should take these warnings to heart.

During Advent, the Christian should be especially aware of these portentous warnings since we have long known that the culture of consumption is destroying our world. Excessive shopping contradicts everything about the Child who was born in poverty. It flouts the basic principles of charity as it saps resources that must be shared equally by everyone. Many shoppers salve their consciences by giving discarded clothes and toys to the needy, while ignoring their rights to housing, education, work, and health care.

Advent invites us to find the Messiah in a manger and promises prosperity to those who hear the word of God and keep it:

The desert and the parched land will exult;
the steppe will rejoice and bloom.
They will bloom with abundant flowers,
and rejoice with joyful song.

It's not too late to hope that God will save the Earth from us.