When Donna and I attended the Calvin Institute of Worship Annual Symposium in Grand Rapids in January, I participated in a workshop entitled “Preaching from the Other Book.” Going into it, I was intrigued.
I felt that I was fairly well acquainted with the primary book from which a preacher would preach, that is, the Bible. However, I was curious about this “other” book. What was it? Was it something I had missed along the way in seminary? Was it some new-fangled, politically correct notion of where to go to read what God is all about?
It turned out, of course, that it was neither of those things. The “other “ book was not preaching primer that was collecting dust on a shelf in the Yale Divinity School Library. And it certainly was not some post-modern approach to getting to know what God is all about. The “other” book, it turned out, was creation. That’s right – God’s creation – the natural world all around us.
Creation and the Word – two ways of learning about who God is. And in spite of the decades old environmental movement and the more recent concern about global climate change and its effect on us as a species and on our world, learning about God through creation is not one of these fashionably contemporary ideas that some of us turn up our noses at as being too liberal, too modern, too tree hugging.
Learning about God through creation goes back to at least the mid-fifth century CE, to the time of St. Patrick. The idea that God chooses to reveal God’s sacredness to us human beings in not just one but two ways (scripture and creation) is foundational to Christianity as it first developed in Ireland, Scotland, and England.
A character in Kathleen Norris’ novel, Dakota, puts it well. This young schoolgirl who had recently moved from Louisiana to North Dakota observed in wonder, “The sky is full of blue and full of the mind of God.”
Embracing this duality in experiencing God does not come naturally to us in our New England protestant churches. Enclosed within our four walls here, we focus on the mind piece rather well, much less so the blue sky. And yet, Lutheran Old Testament Scholar Fred Gaiser writes about “the rich way in which creation and law, nature and word, complement each other, together bearing fuller witness to God than either alone.”
It is Psalm 19, which we just read, that conjoins and affirms these two ways of seeing and understanding God, these two different ways through which God is revealed. As Baptist theologian Greg Earwood cautions, “We must become bilingual, fluent in the two languages of creation and torah (or scripture). The speech of creation is visual, a kind of “sign language.”
In a very different language torah (or scripture) instructs us in the wisdom of the Lord. From the psalmist we learn that creation and torah (or scripture) join together in testimony to the Lord God. They speak different languages, but have the same intent. One interprets the other, yet both point to the same God.”
At first glance, Psalm 19 is like two separate meditations abruptly consolidated in the middle. One might even wonder whether they were originally two distinct pieces of poetry.
You see, if you read only the first half of the psalm, you find a praise song of creation. Similarly, if you reflect only on the second half, you discover a Torah psalm, that is, a psalm in praise of God’s law.
One part without the other is certainly not bad. However, what makes Psalm 19 unique is the marvelous way in which the songwriter interweaves these two parts, so that we praise not only creation, but also torah – or the law – or scripture in the same breath. The result is that the two seemingly divergent segments fit together incredibly well.
The first six verses of the psalm are a marvelous testimony to the glory and splendor of God found most vividly and vibrantly in creation. The images fling us to the farthest reaches of the universe, and there we find the heavens themselves declaring God’s glory and the skies proclaiming the work of God’s hands.
We envision the sun – day in and day out - emerging from the tent that God has pitched, as loving as a bridegroom, warming all the earth without fail. What a marvelous word picture, one which we will reference again in the hymn we will sing together shortly.
However, God’s glory is not only revealed in the outer reaches of the cosmos. As the Psalmist tells us, “their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world,’ even reaching our ears. If we are open to the beauty and mystery of creation, we learn something about who God is. All of creation – all of it – reflects the magnificence of God Almighty.
Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
O God, how great thou art!
Now, if all the psalmist wanted to express was a deep gratitude for God the Creator, then Psalm 19 would end with these glorious images of sun and stars. However, Psalm 19 continues and suddenly changes its focus.
The natural world is no longer at the heart of the poem. The psalmist shifts from describing the God who is revealed to us through creation to characterizing the God who is revealed to us by another means. Our focus deviates from the limitlessness of all creation to something that is far more concrete.
The Psalmist labels this second way that God is revealed as the law.
Now it is important to remember from last week’s sermon that we do not mean law in a legalistic sense. The word is better translated as instruction, God’s instruction to humanity, God’s way and truth.
The law that the psalmist refers to is not a bunch of rules restricting us. The essence of the law is living as God intends for us to live, existing and prospering “in harmony with God’s will—with God’s justice and mercy and love,” as Presbyterian pastor Alan Brehm puts it. He goes on to say that “the bottom line is that torah (or scripture) like creation, is a means for helping us to “mind” God—i.e., keep in mind the things of God, the ways of God, God’s truth and God’s justice, God’s love and God’s mercy."
Psalm 19 proclaims to us that within the law or within God’s sacred instructions, we have everything we need to return to the life God intended for us.
“The law of the Lord is perfect,
refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right,
giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.”
The law, scripture, this set of instructions (call it what you will) is not a burden, but rather a gift that has the potential to bring transformation, restoration, and renewal to us and to our world.
What we have so far then is a psalm declaring that God reveals God’s glory through creation, and God reveals God’s character through Scripture. Use your five senses and look to the natural world for God’s power and genius. Then use your mind and look to the law, to Scripture, to tell you in another way what God is like and how God wants us to live.
Some people – quite a few these days actually – say that they do not need to read the Bible because they can worship God just fine in nature, with their golf clubs, in their boats with a beer. However, Psalm 19 points out a certain lack of depth to that brand of spirituality.
The Psalmist communicates clearly that the power and splendor of God in creation, whether that is experienced as the summer morning tee time on the golf course, the ripple of waves beneath the boat, or the way the beer heats up in the sun, is only part of the story. To begin to understand God in all of God’s sacredness, one must search for God also in scripture, in Torah, in the Word, in the sacred instructions. The God who is revealed in creation challenges us to learn the other part of that God’s story in scripture. It is in scripture that we will discover the Way, God’s way.
As Fred Gaiser, writes, “hearing the voice of God in creation, hearing the voice of God's law that gives us life, we can join the voice of the psalmist in the psalm's final section, appreciating the law's warning and its intention of keeping us from falling into transgression, praying at last that our words, our voice, (translated into our actions) be acceptable to God.”
And what would those acceptable actions be? Put bluntly, they are the ways we choose to take care of God’s stuff – from the world around us right down to our next door neighbor. More precisely, those actions would include, for example, considering your environmental footprint – and not immediately shutting down because you think that terminology is all liberal claptrap. It could include something as small as bringing your own mug to Starbucks or Tim Horton. It could include caring enough about senior citizens and others with inadequate health care in our communities to take action to influence our own state legislature.
The words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts, which are translated into our intentional actions, means taking care of God’s stuff – the whole of God’s creation – as God teaches us to do in Scripture, as Jesus demonstrated in his own ministry. Listen to the voices of God – and, as Christian Reformed pastor, Ken Gehrels’ writes, “remember how it felt the last time your neighbor let his dog do its business on your lawn and just walked away without cleaning it up? Remember how mad you were, how insulted you felt? How we treat another person’s stuff tells us a lot about what we think of the other person. Including God. And God’s stuff. “ All of God’s stuff.
O God, may these words of my mouth, this meditation of my heart, and the actions they cause me to take, be pleasing in your sight, God, my Rock and my Redeemer.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine
www.rvccme.org
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