Billionaire Blast Off: A Sunday Sermon

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

July 11, 2021

The Earth is God's intended vessel for humanity to sail the living cosmos.  

Billionaire Richard Branson launched himself into space today, immersed in a vanity competition with fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to commercialize space flight.  The Bible lifts up the virtues (esp. loyalty, patience, and quietness) subject to contempt by these atmosphere-assaulting blast offs of private spectacle and vice.

    Eccl 1.4 is a key text for directing conscience toward loyalty to the earth and our given place on it. The claim that the earth remains לְעוֹלָ֥ם (leʿôlām: “forever”) may signify either an eternal status for this aeon’s terra firma, or it may involve the vestiges of recollection of a terrain’s material agency in an individual’s existence that is networked into soul. Human loyalty accommodates, communes with, and commits to the terrain and atmosphere encountered during its earthly walk. There is no evidence that such a sustaining terrain and atmosphere exist for humanity in outer space so that we can trash this planet’s sustaining processes to get there. The lure of outer space is a deadly illusion tailored for our idolatrous age. Contrary to Elon Musk's assertion, outer space doesn't represent humanity's hope. Outer Space wants our death. Mars wants our death. Those devoted to and swallowed up by mammon demonstrate the idolatrous lure of self-exaltation that brings death.

      Isa. 30.15: “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” (Cf. the command to silence in Hab. 2:20 and Zech. 1:7). Silence and patience are aligned and life-giving virtues that counter the political economy of combustion-fueled haste and its ubiquitous, roaring din of engines. In quietness is not so much the absence of activity as the overflowing and healing presence of the Divine.

    Planet busting, death-dealing noise and heat (from aerospace combustion) are linked, in contrast with stillness and shade:

Isa. 25.5: The noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, 

    you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; 

    the song of the ruthless was stilled. 

    Loyalty to planet and place is an eschatological (restoration) virtue, the shalom in re-localization.The latter loyalty counters the commercialized promotion of exoticism, escapism, long-distance travel, and (the putative stabilization of global society by) the expansion of economic integration and scale through combustion-fueled long-distance, “free” trade in goods and services.  

Mic. 4:3–4 (cf. 1 Ki. 5.5) speaks of this restoration virtue embedded in place:

  3He shall judge between many peoples, 

  and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; 

  they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 

  and their spears into pruning hooks; 

  nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 

  neither shall they learn war any more; 

  4but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.

Loyalty to place is distinguished from and excludes nationalism which tends to idolatry and suspicion of outsiders, to militarism, and to loss of recollection of relationship and the operations of reciprocity, mutuality and shalom situated in the local. Loyalty to place is based, like all virtues, on charity and hospitality fostered by proximity, familiarity, and intimacy. Cf. Prov. 27.10b.

    Loyalty to place functions teleologically to solidify treasured relationships and the communion of natural and social features. Loyalty to place recollects the spiritual marks of material agency in our eternal destinies. Time and duration of proximity cement the meaning, significance, and value and outlook of permanence for what was prior considered impermanent, mortal, or evanescent. Christians serve eternity in the here and now for the “new earth” by loyalty to planet and place, with local terrains and biomes becoming foci for bioregionalism that integrates and incorporates nature’s neglected agencies—animate as well as inanimate.

    The virtues of loyalty, patience, and quietness counter the haste and noise of our inner life (and their projection by us onto social and ambient reality). Virtue develops both character/soul and neighborhoods. Virtue is simultaneously concerned both with moral consequence and with the development of self-initiated direction and growth. In the best case, these atmospheric virtues can roll back the specter of the planet’s (or humanity’s) death. They provide the praxis for self-direction and continuation to live morally and ethically under an outlook of existential despair occasioned by inexorable environmental and political decay exemplified in these vain and vicious billionaires. By virtue we demonstrate our awareness that God does not die even if creatures do. And a Christian’s commitment to demonstrating to God that she will until the end implement goodness and strength of Christian character *on earth* as the result of God’s bringing faith, joy and neighborhood into her individual and social locations. Christian demonstration of this commitment strengthens religious systems and testifies to others in the church’s social location—its neighbors and society—that faith, purity, and freedom shape the understanding of God’s ongoing reality and presence in Christian lives.

    Whereas nature is endowed with resources and environmental capacities that could deliver material sufficiency to all, post-reformation Western Civilization has grounded its political economy on satisfying unmediated appetites for consumption and accumulation by those most willing and able to pay--luxuriating appetites that neither limit themselves to the Creator’s intent for nature nor for the needs for sharing by marginalized peoples and future generations including those of other species. The result is rampant injustices: gender injustice, racial injustice, class injustice, and intergenerational injustice in the contemporary distribution of benefits and costs of the carbon-intensive economy. The Western economy of promoting combustion-fueled material growth to satisfy the private preferences of vanity weighted by the wealthy's ability to pay has created a society in conflict with Jesus’s gospel of the Kingdom of God and the New Earth. 

    The “whole Creation is groaning” (Ro. 8.22) under the weight of intensive combustion's injustices and environmental imbalances derived from an economy of ashes organized to satisfy insatiable desires by Western wealthy and the satisfaction of their unjustified, private, and autonomous preferences.

    Time is short for human civilization to turn back ecosystem collapse from Global Heating and Climate Disruption, as well as diligently and sharply to focus its attention, in light of God’s judgment, on the social injustices and environmental degradation from and idolatry of transgressive political-economic systems. Perhaps it is too late for civilization, which does not in any way vitiate the need to live faithfully, for virtue will be tested and refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet. The pursuit and embodiment of goodness knows no expiration.

The existential implications of human trusteeship inside nature and specifically of the atmosphere—and the imperatives to avoid (economic) idolatry--impel both the cultivation of the virtues and recognition of individual accountability. Accountability may be structured inside the divine immanent (as in the moral assessment of peers or the recollection of history) or transcendent (in one’s final destiny inside God’s eternal being assigned by the transcendent Christ). As the ethics of freedom, virtue brings individuals into alignment with divine reality and excellence, while accountability to the deep moral topography of processive revelation enlists the people of God into the applied work of maintaining the life-sustaining balances and cycles of the atmosphere and water-sustained biomes. Both in directive to virtue and trusteeship and in the teleological pursuit of well-ordered humanity and nature-based aesthetics, inscripturated morality for the aggregated people of God guides both individual lifestyle and social praxis for the fulfillment of the incarnate, sanctified cosmos as Christ becomes all-in-all (Col. 3.11).