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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Elise Harboldt

The Theology of Trauma: God’s Radical Response to the Mistreatment of His Children

But all of you look great, all of you that I knew before.

I Wasn't sure if I was going to be able to fly out.

And thankfully, well, then all of a sudden I realized, oh, I need to get a flight.

And I thought, I'm going to save Abnett Hope some money.

I bought the flight and then yesterday when I woke up I thought I'd never heard of that airline before what is this airline and I looked it up and just so you know Context I have really bad flight anxiety like even on the best airlines.

I struggle with flight anxiety I know that flying is safe I know that it's highly regulated, But my nervous system will always feel like flying is very dangerous.

There is something very unnatural about being catapulted through the air in a giant metal tube.

And if I am sitting next to someone I know, I will grab their arm.

And if I'm by myself, I have little rituals that I do to help calm myself down.

Lo and behold, there's all these concerns about the airline mentioned.

They only have 4 planes in all of the United States in their fleet.

They have Boeing 757s, which are almost as old as me.

And I thought, oh my goodness, I don't want to get on this plane.

I tried to find a different plane, but I couldn't.

Like, everything was outdated, the fonts were outdated.

Someone went into the laboratory and came out, and the door wasn't closing.

It was making this creaking noise and the flight attendant was like, oh it's okay.

Or this is this like a, does this represent the state of the entire plane and our impending doom?

And it was a very noisy turbulent flight.

During landing, I heard sounds I've never heard before on an airplane.

And finally we landed and I thought, whew, I made it.

Everything's going to be fine from here on out.

And unfortunately, I locked myself out of my bedroom.

And so it was about 8 o'clock, and my phone was in my bedroom, my computer, my presentation, my clothes, everything was in my bedroom.

So I ran across the town to Calvin's house, Calvin from Australia, and I pounded on his door and kept ringing the doorbell until he woke up.

And thankfully, he had his phone, and we called the locksmith.

We tried to drill the door off, but it didn't work, so the locksmith came.

And I was able to get in just in time to get dressed, and I didn't fix my hair, but here I am to talk to you.

And so I hope you appreciate, not to be manipulative, but I hope you have some appreciation for the toll that this has taken on my nerves, and I hope that you will show your appreciation by paying very close attention to my message today.

Okay, so before I give the sermon, I want to tell you a little bit about something I'm very excited about that I've been researching in my master's project, and that's animal welfare in Ellen White's writings and teachings.

Okay, I can only talk about this for a few minutes, but I'm excited.

We know that Ellen White promoted vegetarianism for human health.

She talked about the benefits to human, physical, and spiritual health.

And because of that, I think the latest data that I saw, I'd love to know if there was more recent data, but an estimated 51% of Adventists in North America and 19% of Adventists globally are vegetarian.

However, something that hasn't been emphasized very much when Adventists talk about vegetarianism or when we talk about White's advocacy of vegetarianism is animal welfare.

However, from the beginning when Ellen White wrote about vegetarianism starting in 1864, after she had had the comprehensive health vision in 1863, she mentioned the impact of meat-eating on animals and she wrote with great sensitivity about animals.

Now I was curious about this because I had read in Ministry of Healing, for example, some statements about animals and how meat eating impacts animals.

And so I decided to look at this in my master's research.

And what I found was, I found a lot more than I thought I would.

The historical context is that the animal rights movement was developing in the United States in the mid-19th century, and interestingly, many of the same Christians who had been involved in abolitionism efforts then became involved in animal welfare, And they appealed to some of the same arguments about sentience, about individual rights, to protect the rights of animals.

And that's when the first animal rights legislation was introduced in the United States.

And you can find in early Avenist periodicals in the 1860s, or as early as the 1860s, mentions of animal welfare, how people should treat their horses, the impact of meat eating on animals, bullfighting, etc.

And in Ellen White's personal correspondence in some of her sermon transcripts and in multiple things she wrote, she mentioned animals.

She mentioned the impact of the meat industry on animals.

When she lived in Australia in the 1890s, she would pass near the stockyards in Sydney, and she personally witnessed a lot of animals suffering, cattle and sheep, and she wrote about that.

And although her own individual efforts to become vegetarian begin in the early 1860s when she first started promoting vegetarianism, back in that time it was more difficult to be vegetarian and so occasionally she would eat meat at times when traveling or when her cook didn't know how to cook vegetarian food.

So occasionally she had eaten meat, although her pattern was to be vegetarian.

However, the event that finally made her say, okay, no more meat on my table was a woman in Australia, a Catholic woman, confronted her about the impact of meat eating on animals.

And so she wrote to Kellogg and she said, I have seen this issue in a new light and I don't want any more meat on my table.

She had also, even when she was eating vegetarian food, had allowed people in her household to have meat.

And so she said, I've seen this issue in a new light and I'm gonna be more careful.

So I think it's important because When we think about an avidness philosophy of vegetarianism, we need to think more broadly, right?

It's not just about our own health, it's about the health of animals, it's about the health of all of creation.

And currently, there's a lot of people talking about the impact, about meat eating being 1 of the biggest causes of harm to the environment, etc.

So I like to think of the Avenis philosophy of vegetarianism as compassionate eating.

It's compassionate for our bodies, it's compassionate for the animals, it's compassionate for the environment, and we also need to be compassionate to people who eat differently than we do, right?

Because people develop habits, we all grow up in such extremely different environments.

And Ellen White was so careful to, that we shouldn't be the consciences of others, that we shouldn't judge others for what they eat.

So compassionate eating I think is kind of a framework that can help remind us of the most important things when it comes to food choices.

So I wish I had more time to talk about this and to get more into specific things that she wrote and said about this.

But next week I will be with David Ashkirk doing an interview on this topic.

We're going to have a long discussion about my research, what I learned, and that will be up on his YouTube channel and his Instagram Live will be doing that probably next Sabbath, sometime next weekend.

So if you're interested in learning more, you can look at that.

Okay, now I would talk about that the whole time, but I got asked to share a different message with you, and I will transition to that now.

First, why don't we just bow our heads for prayer?

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for helping me come here even though so many things happened that made me worry that I wouldn't make it.

Thank you for the love you have for all of your creation, even the little sparrows when they fall.

But thank you that you value us even more than the sparrows and that you're so deeply interested in our well-being.

And Jesus, there's so many people in this room and I think of the the verse that says that when you saw the multitude that you had compassion on them and I pray that out of the compassion you have for the people listening today that you would speak through your word, that you would work to encourage, to comfort, to guide our thoughts.

You know, we're talking about a difficult topic.

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The Theology of Trauma: God’s Radical Response to the Mistreatment of His Children

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