“If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14
This was put to music in a song our Baptist Student Union Choir sang in the late 70’s (when many people began to see the signs of what would become a very relevant description of what makes for repentance in our time). And if we are faithful in our prayer, we are moved to act as if our prayer is being answered.
“Humbling ourselves” = “Surrender” and “turn from our wicked ways”. Our “wicked ways” = among others, and towering above most everything else, our hubristic overshoot of our ecological home, with consequences for all of life.
Ths passage from 2 Chronicles (read “second Chronicles, not “Two Chronicles,” by the way) speaks of God saying “then will I hear from heaven”….. I hate how we in Western culture just read this as sanction for private spirituality; “between God and me”…..but if we read with New Testament eyes, through the eyes of Jesus, Jesus ” taught us to pray” for God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. Heaven, as the late, great Walter Wink often taught, is a ” parallel” for our work in the Kingdom of God. The activity of God is that which also is being played out in heaven, as our driving story. So we pray, so that “God hears” and “forgives, and heals.” We are not called to do this in “retreat” , but in participation with God’s redemptive purposes. That healing is an invitation to participate, rather than an answer that falls into our lap. indeed, the “Answer” comes embedded in our response.
Something striking occurred to me, in “accidentally” reading the verse just before “If my people”, in 2Chr. 7:13
When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land, or send a plague among my people, …
Right there, the imagery common to passages of consequences/judgement for “turning away”, and that, just after the introduction:
I have heard your prayer and chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices
(“this place” being the temple Solomon, who is the recipient of this message, of which he had ordered and overseen its construction).
The goal of worship here is that God’s people humble themselves under the burden of drought and plague, and turn from their “wicked ways”. In a context of 21st century, and the anthropocene we have wrought, we find that our ways have been complicit with the project of humanity to ” be as God”
Why else was God concerned to , in addition to “hear from heaven and forgive their sins”, to also “heal their land” ? Is it not a theological oversight of Western Industrial Civilization to ignore the importance of seeing our land healed along with sins forgiven?
