Deep and Wide: Thoughts on the Gulf Oil Spill

Gulf Oil Spill

Job 38:16 "Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?"

I may just be a pessimist, but I believe the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will cause permanent harm to our environment and in ways that have not yet occurred to anybody.  Why haven't they occurred to anybody?  Because we know less about the depths of the sea than we do about the moon. 
 

Everybody is focused on keeping the oil from coming ashore, and surely that will cause incredible damage both environmentally and economically.  By all means...try to keep it off the shore.  But nobody seems nearly as concerned that way down deep in the ocean, where there are probably species of life that no scientist has ever seen or catalogued, toxins are gushing.  We don't know what goes on down there--it is unexplored--and we don't know how what goes on down there affects what we do and experience up here.  In the coming months and years, we will find out. 
 

There.  Nothing like a little doom and gloom. 
 

So how are people of faith to respond?  I think the book of Job gives us some clues.  The passage I quoted above comes from God's response to Job's challenges, and God points out for four full chapters of magnificent poetry how very little Job knows about the planet on which he lives.  Job responds with repentance.
 

Today, thousands of years after the book of Job was written, we know more about our earthly home than Job did, but we still cannot answer that we have "walked the recesses of the deep."  Robots have, but we have not.  And yet, we decided to send drills where we could not walk, tapping into the unseen under the ocean floor.  Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, our arrogance has resulted in tragedy. 
 

What we want to do is blame...blame BP, blame the government, blame those promoting offshore drilling.  And to be sure, there's enough blame to go around.  But we must not neglect our own call to repentance.
 

Whether we were in the crowd shouting, "Drill, Baby, Drill" or whether we were fighting that effort tooth and nail, we all came back from our rallys and lived a lifestyle dependent on fossil fuels.  We drove our cars, watched our tvs, used our computers just as much as we ever did, ready to go out with our blaming signs again if our supply or lifestyle were threatened.  We all continued to want it all without paying for it, and now here we are.
 

One of the themes woven throughout the Bible is the call to recognize that we have limits.  We can't build cities on major fault lines or below sea level and expect to be tragedy-free.  We can't poke holes in the unknown depths and expect to have solutions when things go wrong.  We can't live as if limited resources were unlimited and not hit a wall.  We can't ignore the war and terror that infects our world without having it one day infect us as well.  We can't expect that corporations of any kind will be so completely free of human sinfulness that they need no external checks and balances.  And yet we have.  We need to repent.
 

The word "repent" doesn't mean saying "I'm sorry."  It means turning and going in a different direction.  It implies that we understand the consequences of our behavior by acting differently from this point forward.  Oil companies need to change their ways.  The government needs to change its ways.  Wall Street needs to change its ways.  But so do we.
 

We live here on earth together.  It's the only home we've got.  God charged us all with tending the Garden Earth long before we got commandments about anything else.  Let's repent and be up and about our Father's business.