Let All Creation Sing!
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Text: Psalm 96
This past week I have spent most of my days in Ottawa, involved in meetings on Parliament Hill, intense meetings and discussions. In the midst of those discussions I thought it was important to take some time to reflect and to meditate and to be quiet. Meeting politicians and ministers, you can imagine there was not a shortage of words! I wanted some peace and quiet, so I went to one of my old haunts from the years when I ministered there. I sat by the rapids at the Ottawa River.
I just quietly reflected. There I was behind a bustling city, looking across at the traffic going over to Quebec, sitting and listening to the sound of the waters cascading over the rocks. It was a lovely time. It was as if there was a stillness about it that could be overwhelming. But it wasn't totally quiet. The rapids made noise and there was rhythm to them.
I felt the same thing but on a grander scale when I visited Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and listened to the mighty Zambezi cascade over a great chasm, again a wonderful pounding sound, a sound you don't forget once you've heard it. Or, Niagara Falls, if you go very early in the morning when the crowds are not there, and you listen to the two great falls thundering down. There is a sound, there is a noise about the water cascading that is quite moving.
When I was by rapids, I thought, “You know, in many ways nearly all the elements of music are here.” I listened carefully. There was the rhythm. There was a melody which kept changing, a harmony from the different sounds and undertones. It was like a key, a key that seemed to be fairly constant. There was a texture to the music. There was a form to it. And the more I listened, the more it seemed to me that the very sound of that water cascading over those rapids was actually a song.
To those who have no belief or faith in God, they would hear the same sounds, and they would be wonderful and marvellous and comforting, since there is nothing quite like the sound of water. It is one of the reasons people buy devices for their houses that have cascading water within them in order to be able to be at peace. But for those who believe, there is something more. There is this sense that the sound that is being made is to someone or to something. It is not just the ripple of nature; it is something more.
If you think that this might be fanciful far-be-it! If we look at the psalmist today, and Psalm 96, in that marvellous passage there is this overwhelming sense of the praise of God and the role of nature within.
It starts by affirming the goodness of God in making creation. One of the things that the psalmist does that I think is quite outstanding is he contrasts what he calls the pagan view of the world, and that of a theist, the monotheist, the person who believes in one God. He suggests, if you read it very closely, that those who are pagan, those who worship idols, are actually worshipping the elements of the earth, but those who believe in God, believe that even those elements have been created by a higher power: that they have been created by Yahweh, the Lord himself.
Here is the distinction that he makes. In a nutshell, it is as if humanity often worships nature. Earliest religions worshipped the sun and the moon and the stars, worshipped the fertility gods often called, even in the time of the writer of the Psalm, the “council of the gods”, and worshipped the things that were made, whereas those who believe in God understand that nature itself worships God. Let me be clear here: the pagan worships nature; the person of faith believes that nature worships God.
You can see that in the way that he describes the whole of creation making a sound, a noise of praise to the Lord. He says, for example, “The seas roar with their praise of God.” That was what I was hearing on a lesser scale on the Ottawa River. He says that “the fields exalt.” In other words, the growing of things in the field, and growing up is a sign of all creation worshipping and praising the Lord, the Maker. “The trees” he says, “sing praises.” Often, when you go into the woods, you hear a wind blowing and whistling through the trees. This I think is what the psalmist had in mind: that even the trees sing to the glory of God.
For the psalmist, the whole of creation worshipped the Lord; there is nothing that is not subject to the worship of the Almighty. What an image this is! What a radical image this is for us to grasp. It is not just our voices, it is not just our great music and song; it is the whole of creation, as if God, the Lord, the Sovereign, hears what he had made singing back to him in praise and adoration and glory. What an image! What a concept! What a faith! But, there is more than that.
There is a profound sense that there is within all of this a hope that is beyond hope. A great Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, once said and wrote in his commentary on the Old Testament that what the psalmist is doing here is reminding us that our responsiveness to God is not just limited to ourselves, but to the whole world and because of that we have, he suggests, a responsibility to take care of what God has created.
I thought of that this morning when we brought our pets into church at the earlier service. I will never forget when I got my first Poodle, Tracey, I was a young boy, and my parents said to me that when I get this dog it is a lifetime commitment, and I am sure you have heard this said many times, “Don't just get a pet for Christmas, because you have got that pet for many, many more Christmases to come.” You have a responsibility, just like a child, to nurture it and to take care of it, and to see it in your hands as something precious.
It is not always easy, just like being the parent of a child to bring something up in this world and to live with all its peculiarities and difficulties. It is not easy for us to care for the world and the earth we have been given, with all its brokenness and all its dangers and all its problems and its weaknesses. Nature, at times, is very, very strong, and at other times, it is very, very vulnerable, just like us.
That is why I have always been concerned as a Christian for the fact that there are, on this earth, creatures that so easily can become extinct. In fact, the numbers are becoming so staggering that every year there are about 950 animals and species placed on the on the endangered species list. Every day one species disappears from the face of this earth - one a day! It is staggering when you think of it. Close to extinction now is one animal that I have always liked, maybe because I see in this animal something of myself, and that is the Orangutan - don't laugh!
The orangutan is very near to extinction in Samoa and in Borneo barely surviving, just hanging on a thread. Yet these orangutans - and this is something that I learned from my days in Africa with the Baboon - will take a bay leaf and after they have finished eating will treat it like a napkin and wipe their face. This is an animal that will take other leaves and wrap them around their hands before handling something prickly in order to protect themselves. Here are creatures that can actually be taught to row a boat and to bring it back to shore. They are incredible! And they are made by God, yet they are at the point nearly of extinction.
As a Christian, as a person of faith, I look at this and I share God's sadness, for all the creatures that God made are there to join a song of praise. Unfortunately this sense of compassion and concern for the welfare of the world often appears only to be espoused by those who worship the creation and worship the earth, as if somehow because they worship the earth and the elements they are closer to what God has made without much thought of God.
For those who believe that the whole of the created order has come from the hand of the Lord himself, how much more passionate should we be for the world and the creatures and all that is around us? This is not some toy in the hands of humanity to move things around without any care. This is a sacred trust to those who believe in the Lord Almighty, “the Maker of Heaven and Earth” words that are right there in the Apostles Creed that David and I are teaching our Confirmation Class.
Sometimes, the church in its left wing talks about the importance of the earth without really advocating or extolling it as nature in the hands of God, and those on the right are more concerned with eternal things than they are with temporal things, at the exclusion of concern for the earth and the world. It is not one or the other. For those of us who agree with the Psalm, “the rivers roar, the fields exult, the trees sing praises,” we join them in our praise.
There is something more, and that is what psalmist really holds out, and it is his belief that in fact this world is in God's hands, and someday will be seen in God's hands. That is where the Book of Revelation comes in. We sing it at Easter with the Hallelujah Chorus, “the world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of our God.” This is straight out of Revelations 11:15. This recognition that the world is redeemed by and loved by the Risen Christ himself by coming and dwelling as a full human being in this world and of this world. It is he who reaffirms the importance of this world, and that through him all the world and all of nature will be redeemed. For us, then, the world is our concern. It is our concern because Christ is Lord of it, and rules over it, and is Sovereign over it, as he rules and is Sovereign over us.
What I love about the Psalm is that it asks us, it invites us, to praise God's name. It was originally used to celebrate the coming of the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. That is when Psalm 96 was sung. It was sung on the enthronement of God in the heavens, and in praise of the Lord and the Maker. It was sung to remember God's graciousness to Israel by bringing them out of the land of Egypt and restoring them. The words in fact echo the words of Moses and Miriam in their praise of God for setting Israel free. In other words, at times of praise, this Psalm was used, and this Psalm asks us to praise and to adore God.
As believers so often we do not take praise seriously in our lives. We celebrate many things. We celebrate the joys of the earth that are around us, we celebrate the things that the earth gives us, and we honour them, but that can become idolatry, unless it is to praise God. What is needed in the Church, and what is needed in all of us is, like the psalmist, this sense that all the nations and all the people should be truly praising God. We are almost embarrassed to do it. The word, the language of praise is something that doesn't resound with us very easily because we are reserved people. Praise needs to come from our soul and the recognition that there is nothing, nothing that we have, nothing that we are responsible for, and nothing that we have been given, that has not come from the hand of the Lord our God, and our praise should join the praise of creation in hallowing his name.
It was fascinating this week talking to politicians of all stripes. Without exception, we were able to discuss with them the sovereignty of God, and that God's presence and God's power is everywhere. Even those in positions of power and authority are still subject to the reign of God. They are no different than all of creation. They are no different from you and me. We owe our existence to God. In good and in bad, when nature is broken or whether it is healing, whether it is “beside still waters” to quote the Psalm last week or the torrent of the waters of the Ottawa River, it makes no difference: God is worthy of our praise.
I read a marvellous story in a magazine called Evangel about a farmer called Stan Scull, who moved to Arizona to begin farming. He built his farmhouse, henhouses, and many different things on a wonderful farm with a beautiful supply of water. He loved Arizona until he discovered how dangerous the weather can be. One day, a windstorm came along, and with it water and hail and his farm was devastated. In the middle of the night the roof came off. He could hear the crashing of wood and timber and he hunkered down through the night as the sound and the pounding of nature humbled him.
He woke up in the morning and he couldn't believe the devastation that was around him. He went to the henhouse that he loved so much and built with his own hands, and it was completely flattened. He thought of all the creatures that were in it that died and he shed a tear. Then he heard this rustling sound and under the beams and through the netting and the wire emerged one rooster. The rooster had lost its feathers - they had been blown off! He was wet and had a limp, and could barely make it out, but he survived and on that dawn of that morning after the cataclysm, the rooster climbed to the highest platform that he could find and he stood there and crowed his head off, just like he had done every day of his life to meet the new dawn.
Scull said that if that rooster could get up early in the morning and praise God with his crowing, how much more should we? Even though his family seemingly had lost everything, how could they not praise the Lord? He said, “Isn't that what faith is about? Isn't it the rising every morning, along with all of creation, and singing a song of praise to the Lord our Maker, the Sovereign of this world?” Amen