PENTECOST SUNDAY
Acts 2:1-21 or
Prayer of the Day: Mighty God, you breathe life into our bones, and your Spirit brings truth to the world. Send us this Spirit, transform us by your truth, and give us language to proclaim your gospel, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
“May the Lord rejoice in his works….” Psalm 104:31.
Here the psalmist prays that God may rejoice in God’s works-a puzzling expression. We might wonder, to whom is the psalmist speaking? Who other than God is capable of causing God to rejoice in God’s works? Yet the expression is problematic chiefly because we protestants tend to view prayer as a one way transaction. We pray, praise, supplicate and lament. God is the recipient who may or may not respond in a way we desire, hope or expect. As the Psalms demonstrate, however, prayer is dialogical. To be sure, the complete range of human experience of awe filled worship, longing, despair and hope are given full expression in the Psalms. But the voice of God is also heard encouraging, rebuking and instructing. The voice of the wicked and the oppressor are also heard. It is occasionally difficult to discern who is speaking in the Psalms. Sometimes this unclarity results from difficulties in translating them from the original Hebrew. But for the most part, the alternating voice in these prayers reflects the Hebrew understanding of prayer as a boisterous and uninhibited interchange. The Psalms are as messy, conflicted and mysterious as life itself.
So what does the psalmist mean in praying that the Lord will “rejoice in his works?” In the first place, the psalmist is affirming that God delights in all that God has made. More than that, God is intimately involved in caring for the earth’s inhabitants, humans and all other living things. Thus, in addition to providing bread to sustain human life and “wine to gladden the human heart,” God gives water to the wild ass, vegetation to feed cattle, refuge in the heights for the mountain goat and trees to shelter the birds. Psalm 104:14-18. God carefully balances night and day so that diurnal and nocturnal creatures can pursue their livelihoods without conflicting with one another. Psalm 104:19-23. All creatures “look to [God] to give them their food in due season.” Psalm 104:27. God cares deeply about the earth, its climate, ecosystems and the wellbeing of all of its creatures.
Second, in spite of what some of our poorer theological work reflects, human beings are not the center of the created order. If one goes back to the second chapter of Genesis, the first human being was entrusted with the task of tilling and keeping the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:15. We humans are the earth’s gardeners, not its lords.[1] If you were to hire a landscaper to care for your yard, you might give her some discretion. If, like me, you are not big on yard maintenance, you might trust her to select shade tolerant plants for areas of the yard that do not get much sun. You might let her select flowering plants that bloom at various times throughout the growing season so that your yard is always adorned with blossoms. But if you were to return home and discover that your landscaper had decided to store her collection of non-functioning vehicles on your front lawn, I suspect you might not be happy with her. I expect God feels the same way about our strip mining, fracking, deforestation, industrial discharges of waste into the air and water. Such conduct on our part not only exceeds, but violates our mandate to care for God’s earth.
Third, God grieves over the wounds God’s human creatures inflict upon God’s good creation. The most horrible distortion that has arisen out of western enlightenment culture is the objectification of the natural world. Modern industrial society views the earth as a “thing,” a ball of resources to be exploited for whatever can be sold for profit. In the words of conservative commentator Ann Coulter, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” In the biblical view, the land is not a “what” but a sentient “who.” Like people and animals, the land is entitled to a sabbath rest. Leviticus 25:1-4. The land suffers from and mourns the violence and exploitation of the people inhabiting it. Hosea 4:1-3; Isaiah 24:20; Jeremiah 4:28; Jeremiah 12:4. The land possesses a degree of agency and will not tolerate abuse and exploitation indefinitely. Should the wickedness of its inhabitants become extremely excessive, the land will “vomit” them out. Leviticus 18:25-28. The land is one of God’s creatures and the object of God’s deep affliction. As much as God delights in the beauty of the created world, God laments the wounds inflicted upon it by God’s human creatures. It is the psalmist’s prayer that God may at last rejoice in all that God has made without any cloud of grief.
In our second lesson, Saint Paul tells us that “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” Romans 8:22. It is now beyond dispute that our relentless exploitation of the land, our excessive reliance upon fossil fuels and other unsustainable means of production, transportation and development are wreaking havoc on our environment. The world literally groans as it “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Romans 8:19. One way to read this passage is to understand that the well being of the earth hinges on the redemption of its human creatures. When human beings, transformed by the Holy Spirit, cease their quest to conquer, dominate and exploit God’s good earth and learn to live faithfully within their creaturely limitations as devoted caretakers, the earth will be liberated to become the garden God intended it to be from the beginning.
Here is a poem by Wendell Berry imagining how a redeemed humanity might make way for the redemption of the good earth and the very unredeemed human inclinations standing in the way.
The Dream
I dream an inescapable dream
in which i take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.
I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish
in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.
I must end, always, by replacing
our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,
the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,
trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge
to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.
My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness
growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.
I see that my mind is not good enough.
I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.
I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,
a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.
I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all
that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.
Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?
Source: The Peace of Wild Things, Berry, Wendell (c. 1964 by Wendell Berry, pub. by Penguin Random House, 2018) p. 21. Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.
[1] A great deal of mischief has been unleashed by the misinterpretation of a single verse in the first chapter of Genesis in which human beings are commanded to “fill the earth and subdue it.” That one passage has been lifted out of context to justify wholesale rape of the environment by commercial entities for profit and a tragic indifference to the natural world by Christians convinced that God will rapture the righteous out of this world and leave it for the devil to wreak a ruinous “tribulation” upon it. We need to understand that the Hebrew word “CABASH” translated in Genesis 1:28 as “subdue” is the same word employed in God’s command for Israel to subdue the land of Canaan. Numbers 32:22; Numbers 32:29; Joshua 18:1. The subjugation of the land meant more than merely driving out Israel’s enemies. Very specific commands were given to Israel directing the people to care for the land and its non-human inhabitants. For example, trees were to be spared from the ravages of war. Deuteronomy 20:19-20. Egg producing birds were to be spared from slaughter. Deuteronomy 22:6-7. The sabbath rest mandated for all human beings, from king to servant, extended also to animals. Exodus 23:12. Moreover, the land itself was to be given a year’s sabbath rest from cultivation every seven years. Exodus 23:10-11. God was worshiped not only as the provider for human beings, but for all living creatures. Psalm 104:10-23. The Bible is big on ecology. In fact, insofar as the New Testament declares that God’s goal for the universe is the reconciliation of the world in Christ (II Corinthians 5:19), you could say that the Bible is all about ecology.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 