We find ourselves on that Saturday of plucking up and tearing down,

WALTER BRUGGEMANN BEGINS his second lesson on Jeremiah with a longer prayer that lays out the topic of plucking up and tearing down as a reality.  Brueggemann does good prayers so I've done my best to transcribe it, though there were two places I really couldn't hear what he said so I've filled in what I think he said, I haven't marked those.   

You have yet the whole world in Your hands, that we do not doubt.
You are saturated with mercy, compassion, goodness and generosity,
That we do not doubt.

We are, nonetheless, haunted by the witness that You are a God with a ferocious will who will not be mocked.

We are vexed by the awareness that when You are mocked You pluck up and tear down.

So we ponder about Your ferocious will, Your being mocked and Your plucking up and tearing down, and we wonder in what ways we have mocked You and the ways You do your ferocious work.

We watch and wonder if You pluck up, we notice the ways in which our world is being plucked up by the roots.

Our institutions on which we have relied and certitudes that no longer seem to hold, our entitlements that we can't any longer protect, our growth economy that we can no longer cause to grow.

We wonder and watch if You tear down we notice the ways there is a tearing down among us, our security systems our social infrastructure that makes life possible, our solidity in church for which we can hardly pay anymore.

And then we remember that in ancient days You plucked up Your people out of the land You tore down Your Messiah on that dread Friday, You put your people into free-fall twice, more than twice, many more times than twice, with brutality and fear and greed and loss of neighborliness and injustice.

We are vexed and haunted by what we know of You and so we pause now to think about old texts, to think about present circumstance.

We ask You to pluck up our systems of greed and anxiety to tear down old walls of fear and exclusion to begin anew filled with Easter dance We find ourselves on that Saturday of plucking up and tearing down, we notice and we wonder and if it is not too soon, we hope.  Amen

It is one of the common ways of mocking the Bible and religion in general to mock some given instance when a natural disaster is used as an example of consequences for immoral behavior.   That is easily done in some instances when some preacher or would-be holy man or seer does it.   Using natural disasters in arguments does have its uses, though.  Bertrand Russell, I think in his History of Western Philosophy used the 1755 Lisbon, Portugal Earthquake in a similar way to mock Leibniz's philosophy often mocked because he made an argument that we lived in the best possible world of the kind of world we lived in - it's actually a more complex argument than the shorthand would lead you to believe. Leibniz was a far smarter guy than Bertrand Russell was, and he might have been one of his smarter critics.  Voltaire was not.  I think one of the reasons Leibniz was is so mocked is that it has religious content that has been objected to by many, though not all, of those who rejected the argument.  Russell was merely copying a long line of similar ideological use of it probably following the superficiality of Voltaire whose popular non-argument against it isn't in the form of a philosophical refutation but in a short novel that used only mockery, of a low kind.  Though there is a legitimate argument to be made that both Voltaire and Russell rely on a cartoonish distortion of what Leibniz said on the topic should count for more in its favor as an argument.  But that's not something I've got time to research to argue out.  No doubt what Brueggemann says here would be mocked similarly.

There are a whole range of consequences that come from our actions, from the most obvious and certain, those whose effects are obvious from their antecedents a car crash with death coming from drunken driving, those which are certain but are not nearly as obvious, humans burning fossil fuels and global warming, and those which are both more subtle and less obvious, such as the relationship between economic injustice and drought.  When you want to cite those more remote examples, you're risking both mockery and being wrong about it.  Pat Robertson claiming that a hurricane was the result of Disney World allowing gay couples to go there for "Gay Days" was just begging someone to note that the next one to hit South Carolina was his fault.   He did, briefly, take global warming more seriously, I am under the impression he suppressed that due to the politics of Republican collusion with oil billionaires but perhaps I do him an injustice.  If someone can point out his ongoing opposition to the accelerating environmental injustice - which is already back here biting human beings, the most vulnerable first - let me know.

In global warming we face an issue where what would certainly have seemed as remote as human evil,  injustice causing an earth quake to those mockers is something that science, some of the most important science being done, for all its perhaps inexactitude, in the history of human culture.  It has the potential to uproot all of us and is certainly uprooting many species, not to mention all of those things which Brueggemann lists in his prayer.  I don't see that the "enlightenment" culture of Voltaire or even the scientistic materialism of Russell has any better explanation of why we should, individually, as countries and as a species take responsibility for what we are doing and changing it.  I think seeing this as one of the most exigent choices we are presented in the same way that the prophet, Jeremiah preached, as the other Hebrew prophets preached, both in changing our behavior and facing what is upon us now and what is to come will prove to make better sense of it than the ridicule of Voltaire and the sarcasm of Russell. 

One of the things that I wonder is what human beings are that God would allow us to force this catastrophe on ourselves.  The evils that we have unleashed are embedded deeply into the structure of the universe, the basic physics that are the vehicle of delivering the consequential warming our transgression of the limits of tolerable consumption has brought about.  Why would God allow us to destroy so many species?   Knowingly.  And that is a question I have no answer for anymore than one of the smartest men in the history of Western philosophy could solve a more general consideration of the questions forced by human evil and the evils of our experience.  But I know atheism has even less of an explanation of it and no reason to care about it except how it impinges on us, personally.   Russell couldn't use his materialism to come up with an explanation of his anti-nuclear activities or pacifism.  I don't think Voltaire would have been that fussed, to tell you the truth.