Today’s Scripture Reading (March 16, 2020): Nahum 1
Gretta Thunberg
has a message for the world. Our climate is collapsing in on itself. It doesn’t
really matter whether or not we are the reason for the collapse, of all of the
occupants of the earth, we are the only ones who can understand what is
happening, and we are the only ones who have a chance of fixing it. It is a
heavy message that weighs on Thunberg’s soul. It is the nightmare that wakes
her up at night, and the future that makes her cry when she confronts us with
her message. But the environment is Thunberg’s burden; it is a weight on her
spirit that ties her down like an anchor does to a boat. Thunberg also believes
that she has a responsibility to lift her burden and spread the message with
every fiber of her being. And so she shares the word in every way that she
knows how.
Is she young?
Yes, and with that youth comes the natural tendency toward naiveté. She is an idealist,
like everyone else her age. She doesn’t have answers; she needs the rest of us
to come up with those. As a young person driven by a single issue, she underestimates
the roadblocks that are in the way of solving the problem. She sees only the
catastrophic climate problem that is staring us in the face, and not that we
have come to rely on the very things that are destroying our environment. But
not only that, our financial and defense structures are intimately dependent on
the things that are causing our climate challenge. We are like heroin addicts.
We know, deep down, that what we are doing is wrong, and yet we still live for
our next fix, and can’t see a future without it. All of which can make solving
the problem seem almost impossible. Personally, and Thunberg vehemently
disagrees, I think that the only possible chance we have is a slow change. We
are not going to achieve zero oil consumption overnight (to name just one area
that needs drastic change). We need to develop substitutes that will keep our
personal, national, and financial worlds functioning while we wean ourselves
off of the things that are killing us. A disaster awaits us, that might be just
as bad as the rampant climate change that we are trying to stop, if we do this too
quickly. But Thunberg is right; we need to act now, even though acting is
scary. Don’t hate Thunberg for sharing her burden, it is the only reaction that
makes any sense to her, and whether we want to hear it or not, we need to be
confronted with her message.
We have no idea
who Nahum was or where Elkosh might have been. Elkosh was possibly in Galillee,
because Capernaum, on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, is actually named
after the prophet (Kephar-Nahum means “City of Nahum”), but that is just a guess.
From his prophecy, we can date Nahum’s ministry to the height of the Assyrian
Empire. Nahum mentions the destruction of Thebes (Nahum 3:8-10) which we know
happened in 663 B.C.E. But by 612 B.C.E. Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire have
been dismantled, so Nahum probably had his vision somewhere in the fifty-year
space between those dates. It seems likely that Nahum’s vision dates closer to
the destruction of Thebes, and the destruction of the Egyptian city might have even
been the catalyst behind Nahum’s prophecy, or sometime soon after 663 B.C.E.
But it was more
than just a vision; it was a heavy message. Nahum calls it a “massa’” (what the NIV translates as prophecy.) A massa’ is a
heavy burden that must also be lifted up. The vision Nahum had received had weighed down his soul; it was the
source of his nightmares in the middle of the night. But Nahum knew that the
only way through the vision was to lift it up and tell others. And so that is what
Nahum decides to do. He takes what has weighted him down and records it is a written
prophecy that can be shared throughout Judah, lifting his burden up so that
others can be aware of what God has said to him. What we do with Nahum’s
message (or Thunberg’s) isn’t up to the prophet. That is on us. All prophets
can ever do with a massa’ is to share their burden with those who will listen. The
rest is up to us.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Nahum
2
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