God’s Glory in Creation

Reflection on Psalm 104

Today is the Sunday of Earth Week, Earth Day was this past Wednesday, April 22. I appreciate it when the church marks holy days like this, especially days and seasons associated with creation.

You may know that there's actually a whole Season of Creation celebrated by many churches each September. And like other liturgical seasons, it has its holy days, including a moveable feast: the High Holy Day of the Honeycrisp Harvest at Crane's U-pick in Fennville (The one on the south side of the road 6054 – Crane Orchards U-pick & Corn Maze, not the north (6017 - Crane's U-pick). Two brothers, family fight. Long story)

Anyway, each fall I teach a class at Western Theological Seminary called "Liturgical Shenanigans: Ritual Theory and Christian Formation." And not long ago, for that holy day, I brought my class to the orchard. The assignment was to speak fitting words and do fitting actions to celebrate the "extravagant, prodigal fecundity" of the orchard.

Standing by a tree bent under the weight of its fruit, we considered all the creatures that shared in the abundance: deer, mice, raccoons, rabbits, bugs — as Psalm 104 says, "things creeping innumerable." We prayed thanksgiving for God's generosity. Then, holding apples high, we shouted together, in a pre-meal prayer tradition at Western:

"Are we thankful? / We are thankful! Praise the Lord!"

If Psalm 104 only encouraged us to say that every day, it would be enough.

But today I want to do just a bit more. I want to make four observations about this psalm, four ways it corrects what my friend John Witvliet calls "theological astigmatisms." And since I tell my preaching classes to give the congregation an outline if the sermon is going to be a "teaching" sort of sermon, let me give you the four points ahead of time:

1. God's Glory in Creation (Immanence)
2. God's Glory in Creation (Delight)
3. God's Glory in Creation (Anti-Anthropocentrism)
4. God's Glory in Creation (Transparency)

God's Glory in Creation (Immanence)

The psalm begins with images of creation – the elemental powers of nature – serving God's glory: light and wind and flame. Indeed, the whole psalm speaks of the immanence of God in creation, pointing us to a divinely enchanted world that we seem to have lost in the flatland of modernity.

Because today we are inclined toward an astigmatism that suggests God's creating work was something that happened long ago and is now completed. With God imagined as a distant and perhaps indifferent landlord, leaving the care of the earth in the hands of us, God's stewards, we feel every freedom to treat creation as "tap and sink" – a source of raw materials for humans to use up, and a sink for us to dispose of waste products.

But the psalm insists, as the famous Gerard Manley Hopkins poem puts it, that the "world is charged with the grandeur of God." And more than that: creation remains contingent on God's sustaining power, God's ongoing creation:

These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.

"Morning springs," as the poem concludes, "Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world springs / with warm breast and ah! bright wings."

The Glory of our Creator is in creation. And God glories in creation.

God's Glory in Creation (Delight)

When we say someone is "in their glory," we mean they're in their place of deepest delight. That's how God relates to creation: God glories in it, delights in it. This delight corrects the astigmatism that imagines creation's value is only its usefulness to us.

Yes, our delight can be useful - "forest bathing" helps mental health, for example, but that's beside the point. Creation is intrinsically good because God delights in it. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote:

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

She didn't say attention was like prayer. She said they are the same thing. And if she's right, then inattention is not merely a productivity problem. It's a spiritual one.

So one of the best ways to mirror the image of God in us is to attend to creation and delight in it. That takes a Sabbath posture—slowing down, cultivating wonder, savoring God's goodness not just in abstractions like grace or mercy or compassion but in the stuff of creation: the sherbet sun melting below the horizon, the mourning dove cooing its song in descending major sixths, walking a forest path, its air heavy with the dark perfume of decomposition.

Children are especially good at attention—their eyes are smaller, but wider. I still see it in my own children. On a walk along the beach, my Mia inevitably hunts for pretty rocks like she did when she was six. She's a completely grown-up 32-year-old doctor. You don't have to grow out of it.

I also love the detail in this Psalm:

God delights not just in abstract "living things." Not just trees, but a specific species: the Cedars of Lebanon, in mountain goats and rock badgers, (cave-dwelling coneys in another translation) lions roaring after their prey —and yes, Leviathan, whom God made “for the sport of it.” Elsewhere in Scripture Leviathan is terrifying, a creature from Babylonian and Canaanite myth. But to God it's a rubber duckie in the bathtub. In fact, the root of the Hebrew “sport” there is yitzack—laughter. God gets a belly-shaking chuckle over creatures being creatures doing their creaturely things.

You've seen the videos: whales breaching, dolphins surfing, flips in the open sea. My online algorithms feed me plenty of Nat-Geo-adjacent wonders. But imagine the amazement in the world's unfilmed corners: snuggling sea otters, gracefully galloping giraffes, the fractal intricacy of fern fronds, the shimmering shroud of a stellar nursery God's eyes see it, and delight in it.

And that gives us another clue to God's glory in creation: it's not us.

God's Glory in Creation (Anti-Anthropocentrism)

You see, even when we offer our most heartfelt praise to God, delighting in Creation and God's glory made manifest in it, we can fall into the astigmatism of anthropocentrism that imagines ourselves, human beings, as the star players in the drama of salvation and creation simply as the inert backdrop. For so many of us, creation has become scenery. And in the drama of salvation, scenery is easily mistaken as expendable.

But there are vast stretches of the earth, all the depths of the oceans, not to mention the immensity of space, and the microscopic commonwealth of the soil, which are all shot through with the glory of God, in which God delights, and which are created in no way for human appreciation or consumption.

I mean, Psalm 104 hardly mentions humans. When humans do appear more directly, it's as the wicked — and the psalm is quite direct about what it wishes for them: let sinners be consumed out of the earth, and the wicked be no more. I don’t know about you, but these days, that verse sings.

Perhaps in our day and time and place, where, as Bill McKibben writes, "environmental devastation stands as the single great crisis of our time, surpassing and encompassing all others" – in such a time, perhaps it is wise for us to remember with humility our place within the whole community of creation.

God's Glory in Creation (Transparency)

Of course, there is one other place where humans are mentioned. Verse 14 speaks of God's provision: God gives grass for cattle, and oh, yeah, food for humans – oil, wine, bread. And these things I suggest, point us to the most glorious thing of all in creation: the sacramental mystery of death and life.

These ordinary things – bread and wine – "fruit of the earth and work of human hands," become sacraments of God's presence, tools to combat the astigmatism of dualism. The sacraments shatter our temptation to divide the material from the spiritual, affirming the incarnational union of God and creation.

In baptism, water connects death and new life. In the Eucharist, we are remembered in the bread and wine of Christ's death and resurrection. They unite us to one another, and point to the eschatological feast. God chooses the simplest things as means of grace, so that we may see grace in all things.

Conclusion

In a moment, we will come to this table. Invited by our baptisms, we will feast on Jesus, the Bread of Life — bread to make the heart strong, wine to make the soul glad. We will do so in the company of the communion of saints, and indeed the whole community of creation: deer and raccoons and rock badgers, lions and leviathan, all of us swept up in the extravagant, prodigal fecundity of God's grace.

And we will lift up the cup and say: Are we thankful?

We are Thankful! Hallelujah!