THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
Prayer of the Day: Blessed Lord God, you have caused the holy scriptures to be written for the nourishment of your people. Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that, comforted by your promises, we may embrace and forever hold fast to the hope of eternal life, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1-4.
This psalm is one of my all time favorites. It begins with a lyrical expression of the many and diverse ways God’s glory is reflected in God’s creative handiwork. Each day “pours forth speech” while “night to night declares knowledge.” Yet “though it goes out through all the earth,” theirs is not a speech readily intelligible to human ears. Still, for those who are attentive, the sunrise is not merely a daily occurrence. Each new day is like the beginning of a marriage, filled with joy, promise and hope. It is the starting point of a great race across the heavens by the strong yet benevolent athlete, God’s agent of life and growth whose warmth reaches every corner of the earth.
Creation has a good deal to teach us if only we have ears to listen. As Jesus points out, the flowers of the field and the birds of the air testify to God’s generosity and the confident faith in which God’s good gifts are to be anticipated and received. The mustard seed illustrates the tenacious growth of God’s reign. The wind is a symbol of God’s Spirit that blows where and when it wills with gifts of healing and renewal. The cycle of seedtime, growth and harvest are pregnant with illustrations of faith, patience, hope and resurrection. The world’s wonders do indeed tell the “glory of God” and “proclaim his handiwork.”
Halfway through, the psalm changes its focus from the witness of Creation to God’s self revelation in the Torah. While this might strike modern readers as abrupt and discordant, I believe the poet was intentional here. The psalmist understands the commandments of God to be woven into the very fabric of creation. Just as the sun chases away the darkness of night bringing light and warmth to the earth, so the law of the Lord “is perfect, reviving the soul.” Just as the heavens proclaim the glory of God, so “the commandment of the Lord is clear.” Just as the light of the sun enables one to see one’s way, so God’s law is ever “enlightening the eyes” of all who rely upon it to guide their ways.
The lessons for this Sunday are weighted heavily in favor of the written word. Jesus preaches from a text of Isaiah the prophet announcing the liberation of the poor and oppressed; the healing of the blind and lame. Under Nehemiah and Ezra, the Hebrew exiles returning from Babylon are instructed in Torah with an eye toward establishing a renewed community. As a Lutheran protestant whose tradition has always emphasized the primacy of the written word and which has been suspicious of “natural theology” or knowledge about God derived from the natural world, I have usually made the written word the focus of my preaching on this particular Sunday. But these days I often wonder whether perhaps I have neglected and undervalued creation’s witness to God’s beauty, wisdom and compassion. That is one of the reasons I have sought to bring my reflections into dialogue with the reflections of poets. Too much of our preaching, I believe, is doctrinally correct, theologically sound and analytically coherent but lacking in beauty and imagination.
Much of our worship and hymnody tends to denigrate creation. One of the hymns we used to sing in the church of my childhood begins as follows:
I’m but a stranger here, Heav’n is my home;
Earth is but a desert drear, Heav’n is my home.
Danger and sorrow stand Round me on every hand;
Heav’n is my fatherland, Heav’n is my home.[1]
In some respects, the hymn resonates. Sometimes life feels as though one were living as a stranger in a “desert drear.” To the degree it validates the experience of people struggling through dark times and assures them that they do in fact have a home in God’s infinite love, the hymn is a genuine expression of lament. Nonetheless, equating the entire earth with a lifeless desert through which one regrettably, though necessarily, passes as a stranger in order to reach one’s true heavenly homeland takes things too far. The earth is God’s good creation, a sphere of which we are an integral part and a place where we ought to feel at home. However many scars God’s human creatures have inflicted upon this good earth, it remains good and filled with wonders telling of God’s glory. Who are we to turn our noses up at it?
As children of the Enlightenment, we are engrained with a rationalistic mentality that regards the earth, its oceans, forests and varieties of non-human life as “things.” Mystery, awe and wonder have no place in the lab where nothing that cannot be empirically verified is true. In our economy, only that which can be monetized has value. For the machinery of capitalism, the world is only a ball of resources to be exploited for profit. The sun is neither a bridegroom nor an athlete. It is simply a ball of burning hydrogen. Plants are either crops to be devoured or weeds to be poisoned. Animals are bred for food, pets, game or, if sufficiently exotic, maintained on preserves for the wealthy to view on safari. In this stale, stuffy and confining worldview, poetic imagination languishes.
Our psalm for this Sunday, as well as the Bible as a whole, opens up a deeper understanding of reality. Through metaphor, simile, analogy, parable, song and story a much richer view of creation becomes visible. Through scriptural testimony to the holiness of the earth and its creatures, God’s glory is revealed in all of its wonder, beauty and power. By the power of the Holy Spirit and eyes to see and ears to hear sharpened by attention to the wonders all around us, that glory transforms our hearts and minds.
Here is a poem in which the poet looks beyond dead rationalism and seeks to discern speech that “pours forth” from creation.
Eavesdropping
Long years ago
I stood beneath
A group of firs
And heard the breeze
Whispering secrets that were hers.
For though I strained to comprehend
I couldn’t find within the wind
A single syllable or hint
Of what the hidden language meant.
But as I watched,
The ancient trees
Took up the issues in the breeze
And without words or any speech
Conversed among themselves.
And as each
Shared his sagacious view,
His branches swayed as hands will do
When beings of our race confer
On topics that their souls bestir.
The others rocked as if to bow
In reverence and to say just how
They’d never heard it said so well,
Then turned to hear another tell
Just how he thought the matter stood-
All of this in that darkened wood.
I was then a child of tender years
Eavesdropping on speech
Beyond young ears.
I’m older now with hairs of gray
But none the wiser to this day
Regarding the awful mysteries
Discussed that night by
The ancient trees.
Source: Anonymous
[1] “I’m But a Stranger Here” by Arthur S. Sullivan, published in the The Lutheran Hymnal (c. 1941 by Concordia Publishing House).
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 