At night, I close my eyes and I can see the oil exploding out of the damaged pipeline. It comes to my mind in spare moments, when I am least expecting it. JD has taken to opening up his laptop at night and just staring at that live image. Oil infiltrating water, covering animals, killing the oceans organisms. I cannot look at it for long. I realize that I am praying. I am asking God to make it stop and I am asking God to show us how to live less destructively.
Everybody wants to blame everybody else for the oil spill. It’s BP’s fault for sure, but it’s also the fault of our government or the fault of the consumer who wants oil or the fault of ecoterrorists. It has to be somebody’s fault. The reality is that it is all of our faults. The complexity of the human relationship with the creation is so overwhelming. We have made so many mistakes. We have made so many mistakes.
I am not interested in prescribing whose fault this is, or whether or not we should have offshore drilling or what kind of car you should drive or not drive… What I am interested in is this: How do we begin to think of this environmental disaster from a theological perspective? What does it tell us about God and our relationship with God? And what does it tell us about who we are as human beings?
In the second book of Samuel, David is King of Israel at the height of the golden age. This was the highest moment in the history of Israel. David had united the kingdom and defeated all their enemies. He was a wonderful, powerful king. He was fierce in battle and had the love of the people behind him. Everything was good in his life. Everything. But he was not satisfied. He wanted more.
We see this phenomenon with our celebrities. They have more money than most of us can imagine, they have beauty, they are adored. But they want more. Often they buy things in great excess, or take drugs, looking for something more to fill them. Suicide rates skyrocket, strangely among those who seem to have everything.
David had everything. Then one night, he saw something that he couldn’t have. He was walking along his rooftop to get away from the heat. The king’s rooftop was above all others, it was a sign of his prestige and rank. So David could look out and see all the rooftops below him. And there, on one of the rooftops, was a woman. It was her time of the month so she was bathing, naked. And he wanted her.
David had more wives than the Bible cares to count. He could have had any of them, but instead he wanted the wife of Uriah the Hittite. And so he took her, even though she was married. He knew that this was wrong, but he wanted to satiate his desire. He wanted her more than he cared about what was right.
When Bathsheeba gets pregnant, David invites her husband back from war hoping that he will sleep with her. But Uriah is a virtuous man, a man with discipline, and he follows the custom that teaches that a man should not sleep with his wife when his men are in battle. So David has Uriah sent back to the war, to the front of the line, and there Uriah is killed.
Desire becomes Adultery. Adultery becomes murder.
And then the sin begins to spread. Sin is viral, you know. If it is not acknowledged and treated, it affects generations-generations feels the effects of failed relationships, of anger, jealousy, cruelty. David’s children end up fighting. One of them is raped by her half-brother, another is murdered. David’s life goes from glory to a chaotic bad soap opera and all because he could not keep his hands to himself. All because he took what did not belong to him.
When the prophet comes to David and tells a story of a little ewe lamb that is taken by the man who has so many lambs, David is incensed. Then the prophet reveals that it is David himself who is the man. And David suffers from that day forward.
Why do we suffer? We human beings suffer because we do not know how to curb our desire. We want more than we need. We take what we do not need. And our world suffers. Our planet suffers.
If every human being gave away ten percent of his or her income to the poor, the world would be altered forever. Hunger would be alleviated. It would be over.
But we cannot stop taking and wanting and wanting and taking. It all reaches back to that moment in Eden when Eve took something that God had forbidden her to take. Things have always been out of balance since that original fall.
We did not fall by having sex or drinking, but by taking.
So what do we do with our condition, the condition of wanting more than we need?
We begin by knowing that God loves us and has filled our need. God gave us the ultimate gift in Jesus, a gift that, once we fully understand it, should fill every need.
You no longer need anything. You have everything that you need. Everything.
The Pharisees did not know that, but the poor woman did. She knew that Jesus gave her everything, even though her whole life had been a mess. She knew that he alone could bring her joy.
So she poured oil over his feet. It ran down his ankles, between his toes, on the floor, and its smell filled the room. She wiped his feet with her hair, making it oily and messy. She looked like a fool for him. And she did not care.
God doesn’t ask you for anything. Not for anything. God just gives and gives. Even as oil pours out of the burst pipeline, God gives. We really don’t need to give anything in return, but when we get the gift, we want to give another kind of oil. We want to pour out our hearts to him and give him everything.
Strange isn’t it? We have already been filled to overflowing by God’s generosity in Jesus. And yet, out of habit and ignorance, we continue to act as if we need to be filled. But God has already given us everything. EVERYTHING.
