This Changes Everything: No Longer Business as Usual – Dennis Ormseth reflects on Jesus inviting the common folk to join him in his struggle to overturn the existing order.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary
Readings for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year B (2015, 2018, 2021, 2024)
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:5-12
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
“For those who are in Christ, creation is new. Everything old has passed away. Behold, all things are new.” II Corinthians 5:7 (translation by David Rhoads)
“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:14). Jesus is on the move. So this Sunday, we are invited with Simon and Andrew, James and John, to enlist in Jesus’ campaign to restore God’s creation. To be sure, that Jesus’ mission had to do with the healing of all creation was not clearly envisioned by the author of the Gospel of Mark. His focus, as Ched Myers proposes, is more properly understood as “a fundamental reordering of socio-economic relationships.” And here at the beginning of the Gospel, we have before us only “the first step” of that reordering, the crisis in which the “world” of Jesus’ disciples is overturned with an “urgent, uncompromising invitation to ‘break with business as usual.’” But make no mistake: as Myers puts it, “The world is coming to an end, for those who choose to follow. The kingdom has dawned, and it is identified with the discipleship adventure.” It is that “moment which reoccurs wherever the discipleship narrative is reproduced in the lives of real persons in real places. This disruption represents the realization of the apocalyptic ‘day of the Lord’” (Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988; pp. 132-33). And so for us “who are in Christ” at this moment of earth’s all-encompassing ecological crisis, it is indeed a moment which calls for an entire “breaking with business as usual,” yes, precisely “a fundamental reordering of socioeconomic relationships” which, if it encompasses both human and ecological systems of our planet together, could lead to creation’s restoration.
In her book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), Naomi Klein also calls for an end to business as usual in a thorough reordering of socioeconomic relationships from the bottom up. She describes the moment in which we live in the terms of a “stark choice: “Either we “allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.” The challenge, she continues,
“is not simply that we need to spend a lot of money and change a lot of policies; it’s that we need to think differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely possible. Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change. Cutthroat competition between nations has deadlocked U.N. climate negotiations for decades: rich countries dig in their heels and declare that they won’t cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in the global hierarchy; poorer countries declare that they won’t give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all. For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention” (Klein, pp. 21-22).
The “thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing,” Klein insists, “is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders.” The actions required, she argues,
“directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more). They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known—the oil and gas industry, which cannot survive in anything like its current form if we humans are to avoid our own extinction.”
We are, she concludes, “locked in—politically, physically, and culturally”—to this “world” of ours, and “only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free” (Klein, p.63).
Kleins’ description of our situation is, of course, entirely secular. Her analysis is not that of a person of faith. It is, however, one to which a Christian understanding of creation and human responsibility can respond helpfully and powerfully. Our reading of this Sunday’s texts, we believe, substantiates this claim. An intriguing feature of Klein’s analysis is that “climate change represents a historic opportunity” to build a social movement on the scale of the New Deal or the civil rights movement which would advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up”—a “People’s Shock” as it were,” which unlike the corporate world’s exploitation of the earlier crises which she documented in her book Shock Doctrine, would “disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces.” The transformations she describes would, she claims, “get to the root of why we are facing serial crises in the first place, and would leave us with both a more habitable climate than the one we are headed for and a far more just economy than the one we have right now” (Klein, p. 10). To the extent that this is true, we believe that there is consonance between her call to action and that of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. Because Jesus’ call to discipleship is pitched to the “real people and real places” of first century Palestine, as Myers shows, it also speaks powerfully to the crisis of our people and our moment in history. As we shall see, with the promise of a whole new world to replace the world whose “present form is passing away (I Corinthians 7:31b), Klein’s transformations do anticipate the new creation which those in Christ envision and hope for.
Already in this season of Sundays after Epiphany, we have seen that Christian discipleship includes care for creation (See our comments in this series on the readings for the previous two Sundays). This Sunday’s readings deepen this perspective by showing how certain social and cultural factors support an expectation that followers of Jesus might join the movement to “break with business as usual” with respect to care of creation. Ched Myers shows us that the location and occupation of the first people called as disciples is significant for understanding the nature of Jesus’ mission. Sea locales alongside wilderness, river, and mountain, he points out, are primary topological sites in Mark’s narrative. Here in the first part of the Gospel, “the sea (of Galilee) is a prime positive coordinate; by it the discipleship narrative commences (1:16; 2:13), and consolidates (3:17)” (Myers, p. 150). It is, obviously, the context in which fishermen recruited for Jesus’ following could be expected to be found. That the nature of their work is important is clear, both from Mark’s emphasis on it—“he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen,” and from Jesus’ use of that vocation in describing their future role in his mission: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” (1:17).
But the image, Myers emphasizes, “does not refer to the “saving of souls,” as if Jesus were conferring upon these men instant evangelist status.” The image is rather carefully chosen from Jeremiah 16:16, where it is used as a symbol of Yahweh’s censure of Israel. Elsewhere, the ‘hooking of fish’ is a euphemism for judgment upon the rich (Amos 4:2) and powerful (Ezek 29:4). Taking this mandate for his own, Jesus is inviting common folk to join him in his struggle to overturn the existing order of power and privilege (Myers., p. 132.)
Belonging as these men do to an independent artisan class for whom “the social fabric of the rural extended family was bound to the workplace,” the call to follow Jesus requires not just assent of the heart, but a fundamental reordering of socio-economic relationships. The first step in dismantling the dominant social order is to overturn the ‘world’ of the disciple: in the kingdom, the personal and the political are one. These concrete imperatives are precisely what the rich—Mark will later tell us—are unable or unwilling to respond to. This is not a call ‘out’ of the world, but into an alternative social practice. Thus this ‘first’ call to discipleship in Mark is indeed “an urgent, uncompromising invitation to ‘break with business as usual’” (Myers, pp. 132-33).
What Myers’ exposition leaves unanswered, however, and indeed, even unasked, is the question as to just why these fishermen are apparently both able and willing to respond as positively to Jesus’ call as they do. What exactly is it about fishermen, to pick up on Mark’s emphasis, that renders them open to Jesus’ call and able to make the break? Isn’t it that it is in the nature of their work and its domain, the sea of Galilee, to foster such readiness and courage? Theirs was a daily encounter with both the great bounty and the threat of the sea. While harvesting that bounty, they move at the edge of chaos. Contrary to the rich people dwelling in the cities of the land, for whom their wealth was a guarantee of continued well-being and purchased safety, and therefore a cause of resistance to Jesus, the fishermen’s entire dependence upon the sea for their livelihood could make them acutely aware of their dependence upon God for both their sustenance and their safety. Indeed, we can imagine them singing with firm resolve the psalm appointed for this Sunday: “For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:5-8). People of this spirit, it seems to us, could be quite ready to respond quickly and affirmatively to Jesus’ summons.
This reading of Mark’s narrative is provocative, furthermore, because contrary to our usual concern to show how Christian faith might help foster and sustain care of creation, we find here that a particular orientation to creation helps to form and foster a relationship of faith to God and commitment to God’s purposes. Aware as they would have been of changes in their circumstances due to Roman domination of the seas and Jerusalem’s collaboration with Roman authorities, their relationship to creation renders the fisherman ready to see in Jesus God’s messiah. They agreed with Jesus: the time was fulfilled. Business as usual could no longer continue for them. As we have come to expect by virtue of our practice of baptism, water and the Spirit of God together stir up faith in God, so that even the “unclean spirits” amidst the great crowd that eventually gathered by the sea, when they saw Jesus, “fell down before him and shouted, “You are the Son of God” (Mark 3:7-11). But perhaps this is not so provocative, after all, at least in more extended biblical perspective. That the creation itself assists in the stirring of faith and consequent action would actually seem a lesson to be drawn from the fabled story of Jonah, revisited in our first reading for this Sunday. It is the great fish’s role, after all, to redirect the reluctant Jonah to his calling. Is it not congruent with this “natural fact,” perhaps, that the animal population of Nineveh quite freely joins the human population in donning sackcloth and ashes?
The lesson is timely for us: With benefit of only the slightest prompting on the part of the prophet of God, the ancient, sinful city of Nineveh repents of its alienation from God because of the sign of the fish. The reluctant prophet of God will himself eventually repent of his reluctance, but the change does not come easily. A parallel might be seen in the slowness of God’s church to attend to the crisis of creation, while the secular community of the world, educated about nature by the sciences of ecology and climate change, turns from its hugely destructive ways, and begins to do the hard work of restoring God’s creation.
This is to suggest, accordingly, that the fisherman’s characteristic relationship to the creation plays a significant role in the unfolding of this narrative. Their entire lives are so oriented to the unfettered dynamic of creation that “business as usual” in the socio-political realm of the temple-state has little hold on them. It is interesting that as Naomi Klein surveys our society in the search for willing and ready participants in the movement beyond the culture of “extractivism,” as she characterizes our industrial, fossil fuel dependent economy, she ruthlessly rejects a number of significant players: big green (collaborators with big business), green billionaires (messiahs with broken dreams), geo-engineers (“the Solution to Pollution Is . . .Pollution?”). The problem with these big boys, she thinks, is that they really do not want at all to break with business as usual. Their strategies persist in the illusion that we are called to “save” the Earth, “as if it were an endangered species, or a starving child far away, or a pet in need of our ministrations.” It is an idea that “may be just as dangerous as the Baconian fantasy of the earth as a machine for us to master, since it still leaves us (literally) on top.” The truth lies elsewhere: “It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely” (Klein, p. 284).
In the place of these collaborators with business as usual, Klein would accordingly nominate as her “climate warriors” participants in what she calls “Blockadia”—’not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.” United in resistance to mining and fossil fuel companies as they push “relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local ecology (in particular, local water systems)” these are basically local groups of shop owners, professors, high school students, and grandmothers. But they are building a ‘global, grass-roots, and broad-based network the likes of which the environmental movement has rarely seen” (Klein, p. 294-45). Generally speaking, these people live in the “sacrifice zones,” formerly the traditionally poor, out-of-the-way places where residents had little political power, but now increasingly also located in “some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world,” to the immense consternation of “many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very longtime: how is it possible that a big distant company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk?” (Klein, pp. 312-13). New alliances are thus being formed across traditional social barriers. Corporate assurances are no longer accepted on blind faith. The language of risk assessment is being “replaced by a resurgence of the precautionary principle,” as blockadia insists “that it is up to industry to prove that its methods are safe,” something that “in the era of extreme energy . . . is something that simply cannot be done” ( Klein, pp. 315-335).
Particularly striking is Kleins’ observation regarding two “defining” features of these groups. There is, she notes, a “ferocious love” of “an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their granchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice” (Klein, p. 342). And secondly, especially significant is a common concern for precious sources of water; in Kleins’s view, this is the “animating force behind every single movement fighting extreme extraction”: “Whether deep water drilling, fracking, or mining; whether pipelines, big rigs, or export terminals, communities are terrified about what these activities will do to their water system” (Klein, p. 345-46). The reason for this is clear, of course: “extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive—water—just to keep extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.” Coming at a time when freshwater supplies are becoming increasingly scarce around the world, people are becoming more and more aware of certain disturbing truths of their experience:
Growing in strength and connecting communities in all parts of the world, [these truths] speak to something deep and unsettled in many of us. We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need (Klein, p. 347).
From the divestment movement which seeks to defund the companies that enforce this imprisonment, to local groups seeking to democratically recapture power over their communities, and indigenous tribes defending their rights to land and a way of life grounded in it, it is their relationship to the earth itself that inspires and empowers their liberation from bondage to business as usual. Perhaps most significantly, their love for their habitat and their deep concern for water put them in touch with what Klein calls the regenerativity of nature’s processes: we can become, she concludes, “full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.” There is in their company a “spirit” that is already busy at work promoting and protecting life in the face of so many life-negating and life-forgetting threats (Klein, p. 447-48).
Can the church join this movement with integrity? Yes, because disciples are called to serve creation, and it is the creation itself, in its newness, that is giving supportive voice to that call.
Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2015.
dennisormseth@gmail.com