Red Sky at Morning

The wider world of God’s creation isn’t always a cozy place. The biblical texts assigned for the third week in the Season of Creation offer a stark reminder that we’re dealing with a bit more in this season than just a soothing tableau of endearing animals or even a beautiful painting of a static landscape we can admire from a distance.

We are embedded in this world, a world alive with the presence of God—a world to which we can, and must pay very close attention.

Crewing a tall ship on my days off I’ve learned from the ship’s captain what it means to attend carefully to one’s surroundings, not only what’s happening on deck, among the passengers, or with the sails, but also out on the distant horizon where storm clouds might suddenly sprout. On the Great Lakes, storms can form quickly and move rapidly and take careless sailors by surprise.

The third Sunday of the Season of Creation features the sky, and everything in it—sun, moon, and stars, as well as the clouds, which can sometimes paint the sky with multi-colored cotton balls and sometimes darken the sky with portents of disaster.

The old maritime adage would serve us well this week: red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Matthew’s Jesus actually quotes that old adage (Mt 16:2), and he does so to berate his own religious leaders for failing to read the signs of the times properly. James Gustave Speth urged modern readers to do that very thing back in 1980, and even more directly concerning the signs of the environmental times. His book—Red Sky at Morning: American and the Crisis of the Global Environment—was Speth’s attempt to ring the collective alarm bell about climate change. He also was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and his warnings have gone mostly unheeded.

In this world alive with the presence of Creator God, the skies, the land and sea, humans, and all the other animals are all interconnected, all of them offering signs that we must learn how to read.

To modern Western ears, paying that kind of careful attention to the world of nature can sound rather unsophisticated, certainly not very “scientific.” And yet, many environmental scientists today—stretching back to Speth’s work and earlier—sound very much like biblical writers from many centuries ago as they urge us to wake up and pay attention to the living world around us, a world in which we are inextricably ensconced. It’s from Earth that we learn the most about divine blessings as well as judgment.

The ancient Hebrew prophets repeatedly exhorted their readers to notice what Earth and sky might be telling them about how they were living, and especially about the judgment they were bringing on themselves by their own misguided actions.

The seasonal lectionary this past Sunday gave us a startling passage along those very lines from Jeremiah, a passage not only bleak but brutal (4:23-28). After the people of Judea, in stubborn arrogance, refused to heed his warnings about impending war and an invading army, Jeremiah writes as if he is the sole survivor of a catastrophe, the devastating effects of which are inscribed on the land itself.

He describes the shocking extent of this devastation as mountains quake, and hills are torn apart, and farmland turns into desert.

“I saw the earth,” he writes, “and, look, welter and waste…”

That’s the very same Hebrew phrase (from Robert Alter’s translation) that lectionary gave us two weeks ago in the first verse of Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth. Jeremiah quotes that story verbatim twice more in this week’s short passage, suggesting a terrifying reversal of God’s creative work—the creation itself is unraveling, reverting back to its original chaos.

In Genesis, God looks on each day of creation and calls it good.
Jeremiah looks on each stage of earth’s destruction with horror.

Jeremiah is not enumerating only metaphorical devastations. The intensity of human violence and warfare always and quite literally disfigures the heavens—just as the intensity of human violence against the planet renders the air unbreathable. Thick smoke obscures the skies, the stench of spilled blood and death chokes all those still living, and even all the birds of the air flee.

Silence accompanies the darkness in a bird-less sky, as Jeremiah portrays the desolation of earth, as if the sky is speechless with grief over the wreckage wrought by human violence—just as Mark also portrays a bleak and somber sky as Jesus dies in that portion of the Gospel for this past Sunday (15:33-39).

The descent of darkness in Mark’s account of the crucifixion frames dramatically the heartbreaking journey Jesus is taking into every greater isolation—his own religious leaders condemn him; his closest friends abandon him; imperial forces torture him; even God seems tragically absent—and the skies refuse to give any light as the heavens enter a time of celestial grief.

Like Matthew and Luke, Mark includes another curious detail in this story: the curtain in the temple, the temple veil is torn in two at the moment when Jesus dies.

We might recall that the tearing or rending of garments was a sign of deep grief and mourning in that society, and still today for many. Pair this with what we can learn from first-century historian Josephus: the temple veil, or the temple’s own garment, as it were, was woven with four distinct colors to represent the four foundational elements of the Universe. God’s creation tore its own holy garment in grief over the death of Jesus.

Yes, these are grim readings. But if we pay attention to the Earth, and especially to the sky, as these same readings note, we can still find a thread of hope. In Psalm 19, also read for this week, the psalmist depicts the skies as having their very own voice. The movement from night to day, the changing of darkness to light is a form of speech. Their voice is not heard in words and yet they speak, and they praise God their maker.

Just as many others in the ancient Mediterranean world imagined the movement of planets and stars creating their own music, the psalmist sings about the skies declaring the very glory of God.

More than this, the psalmist then makes a connection between the divine glory of the skies and the divine glory of the law, the ordinances of God for righteous living, for reviving the faint of heart and giving wisdom with vision—more desirable are these ordinances than fine gold and sweeter by far than honey, the very color of the shining sun.

God’s law for life, for the very sake of life itself, is written into the fabric of God’s creation, and this alone is reason enough for our gladness and joy—even in times of deep distress and debilitating darkness.

This is what Paul is writing about in the portion assigned from his letter to the Philippians (2:14-18). Paul is in prison as he writes this letter, and the Philippians themselves have been suffering and undergoing persecution. Even so, he says, hold out the words of life to a world that has lost its way. Live like shining stars, he says, in the darkest of nights.

Do this remembering that God is faithful. Even Jeremiah holds out hope that God’s faithfulness will not permit the utter destruction of Earth. Only by holding fast to this hope can we act for the sake of life, holding out believable words of life for a world that has lost its way.

God is faithful. That’s the only reason Jeremiah would even bother to prophesy at all. Bleak and brutal as his text can be, he rants precisely because the people have forgotten what will not change: divine faithfulness. And this is likewise the only reason Paul would ever bother to embrace a life of gladness and joy.

God is faithful. The Church must declare this like we believe it; and then live it as if it matters—because it does, now more than ever.

In our believing and from our living we must offer the words of life for the healing of the world, for a world that has lost its way. Then we will shine like the stars at night.