Sermon 10-21-18: Psalm 104:1-30

Dear sisters and brothers,
the Creator is renewing the face of the earth and this is good news! Because the earth is burning in flames. Sometimes quite literally with bullets flying across neighborhoods, wars ravaging nations, fires consuming forests, or quite simply with burning strife in our homes and families. The earth burns, so today how will we sing with the Psalmist: “Bless the Creator, O my soul”?

Creation is good, brothers and sisters, because the Creator is good! The Creator made it with such wisdom that only a poem or a prayer comes close to naming its glory. And right now, look around at each other and marvel. You are creation, and right now seeing the most immediate contact you have with creation is with one another. See yourself. Lift up your hand and trace the lines in your hand. Seriously. Trace them. Notice them. Notice the detail and subtlety of lines running like rivers through valleys in the palm of your hand. At the sound of God’s voice, waters flow through mountains and valleys and hands, giving life to all the creatures on the face of the earth.

For generations people’s around the world have known that water is life. Mni wiconi, water is life, chanted the Lakota Sioux Tribe as they protested oil pipelines through the land that poisoned the water. They knew that mni wiconi water is life because they knew that the Creator “makes springs gush forth in the valleys, making grass and plants grow for people to cultivate, bringing food forth from the earth.” Water feeds land, land feeds plants and animals, plants and animals feed humans, humans care and tend water and earth, and so on and so forth is the circle of God’s creation. And this is so good.

Our lives are completely dependent in quite literal ways. This is more than just another overs piritualized statements about how we’re dependant on God. The Bible doesn’t begin at the New Testament with Jesus, perhaps to the dismay of many of us Mennonites. The Bible begins with a word from the Creator. Day and night, the seasons, the sky, the land, water, fruits, vegetables, animals, humans, even time and space — all things are created by God. And they are created from nothing.

Many Christian traditions call this creation ex nihilo, which means that God created out of nothing. People become distracted with abstract philosophical or scientific questions regarding this doctrine. And quite honestly, important as some of those conversations may be, they kind of bore me. I’m more interested in the fact that creation ex nihilo means that everything good, true and beautiful comes from God. And that includes our interdependence as creatures. Creation’s interrelatedness is no accident or coincidence, but the result of divine love. We are interrelated beings who need one another to live.

We literally depend on one another to survive and to thrive. We are bound to one another, and this is God’s goodness to us! I can’t exist without you or you without me in the same way land can’t exist without water. Just like California yards and gardens withered, suffer and die in the drought of water, we wither, suffer and sometimes even die, in droughts of care, love and support. A harmony and balance exists in creation that must be maintained in wisdom if we are to live the goodness of God for us.

All creatures look to the Creator for food in due season and when he opens his hand, they are filled with good things. The Psalmist knows that the Creator will not hold his hand closed from the hungry creation. Food and water, the air we breathe, the spin of the earth, the warmth of the day and cool of the night, these are God’s open hand of goodness to us! God’s open hand feeding creation through creation. And this is good! But of all creatures there is one that is set apart and unique, different from the rest.

Humans are most honored of creatures because we are made in the image of God. We like God are able to open our hand and share with the rest of creation in intelligent and intentional and beautiful ways. But, if we have a moment of honest reflection, we also know that we are not good like God. In spite of what we tell ourselves day in and day out. We know that we do not open our hand to creation, but we close it. We close our hand to one another. We close our hand to other creatures. We humans are the most honored but
also the most destructive of all creatures. Breaking the circle of creation’s feeding and sharing, we inflict wounds in creation and wounds are inflicted on us. Wounds that tear through bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of people.

And sure, we try and compost and we drive Priuses and some of us even garden and have chickens (with wonderfully creative names!). But things are more complicated than our individual actions. Just this week I was reading an article that said 100 companies are responsible for approximately 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And also this week Lisa Finlay posted enough articles to depress me about the alarming conditions of our planet, that is quite literally burning up with rising heat levels. And we need not go to dramatic articles and documentaries though, we just need to remember our yards and gardens dying over the past decade with the drought. Or we need to feel our bodies complaining at the destructive things we eat. Humans: the most honored of all creatures, the most destructive of all creatures.

So in light of all this, what do we do when we read that the psalmist blesses the Creator for the magnificent harmony of creation? How does this Psalm speak to creation and not just about it? How is this good news to a creation severely out of balance? Some will say it’s a utopian vision of a society we need to make happen exclusively by our owns efforts and strategies. Others will say it’s good reason to reject creation care because “God will take care of everything at the end.” Yet others will say that it’s a beautiful poem but it’s out of touch with the larger scale issues we face today. If we choose any of these options, then we need to take things fully into our hands, completely give up on creation care, or just read
the passage for aesthetic delight. Either way, none of these give should give us comfort or hope because either God can’t help, God doesn’t care, we can’t help, we don’t care, or any combination of those. More importantly, none of these is satisfactory, because we are Christians. And we believe that God is active and alive and speaking ever anew.

In a creation deeply out of balance, fractured by the greed and hypocrisy and violence and selfishness of human creatures, this Psalm opens up new horizons to us. It reveals the origin and goal of God’s creation. And more importantly perhaps, it reveals the creating God who does not abandon creation to its own destruction. God isn’t like a clockmaker, creating and setting things in motion, and then letting them run their course. No. The God of the psalmist, of Israel, of Jesus–our God–erupts in our midst, active and alive and inviting us to enter his circle of harmony and balance.

The psalmist prays to God saying, “When you send forth your spirit creation is birthed, and you renew the face of the earth.” In this brief prayer we have God’s action in the biblical story. God’s spirit hovered over the waters of chaos at the beginning of time and birthed creation out of nothing, giving humans the task of caring for other creatures so that they may in turn be cared for by those creatures; God delivered Israel from Egypt, giving them land for common care, and promising a renewed life after exile; this promise was made flesh in Jesus whose life is renewal, unfolding God’s harmony and balance into fractured creation; and this unfolding renewal began radically expanding beyond Israel at Pentecost, and continues today, here, now through the Spirit.

Brothers and sisters the world described in this psalmist’s prayer is not a utopian world, but God’s world. It’s the world possible for creatures living within the circle of God’s creation, feeding one another generously and freely. This world belongs to God, who in love shares it abundantly with us so that we may share with one another, feed one another, open our hearts and hands to one another filling them with good things.

Many parts of creation may literally and figuratively be burning, but God has begun his new creation of harmony and balance, where the needs of one are felt by another, and the resources of one are shared with the other. In God’s new creation mni wiconi/water is life, vegetation grows and animals are cared for (and yes, they are even named with funny and beautiful names because they are us and we are them, creatures of God), and humans share all things with one another because “my” stuff is not “my” stuff but “our stuff.” Because it’s God’s stuff.

In our little pocket of space and time, in this place we inhabit at this time in history, as small as we are in the grand scheme of things, God is renewing the earth in harmony. The Creator has not abandoned his creation, and this means nothing less than that God is active, inviting us to enter his circle of harmony and balance proclaimed in this Psalm.

There’s a phrase I saw on the street a few weeks ago that I couldn’t stop thinking about in the preparation of this sermon. It said, “None of us are well until all of us are well.” That is the truth of God’s interrelated creation, including our community here at PMC. So let us open ourselves to God and one another. Open your hands again brothers and sisters. Really, open your hands again and this time look into the hands of your sister or brother sitting next to you. Look closely and notice the lines and how they flow through our hands like rivers in a valley ready to open up and feed others. Sisters and brothers, may our hearts and hands become one in the circle of God’s creation so that harmony and balance exist between us. Because thank God we belong to the Creator of all things, who opens his hand to us, sending forth the Spirit and renewing the face of the earth. Amen.