Psalm
18:1-31
Lent
5
April
7, 2019
William G. Carter
I
love you, O Lord, my
strength.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and
my deliverer, my God,
my
rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my
stronghold.
For
who is God except the Lord?
And who is a rock besides our God?—
the
God who girded me with strength, and made my way safe.
I
am old enough to remember when the phenomenon of music videos began to sweep the
cable networks. MTV and VH-1 realized that our culture has gone increasingly
visual. So enterprising musical entrepreneurs put music alongside video
footage. It’s not a new idea; it’s at least as old as film versions of West
Side Story or Oklahoma. But Generations X, Y, Z bit down hard. They loved it.
At
some point, the Christians decided to get involved too, especially the
Christian recording artists. Like the secular stars, some of them showed
footage from live concerts. But something else happened too. When
Christian singers would praise God, they would show footage of nature: tall
cascading waterfalls, steep blue mountains, bronze sunsets, green pastures and
still waters.
One
Sunday night, I put my feet up, picked up the remote, and started flipping
through the channels. It was the same old story, 400 channels and nothing’s on.
Somehow I stumbled upon the Christian praise show. Well tuned Nashville singers
were melodiously offering praises to the Lord. If I had turned off the audio,
it would have looked like the National Geographic channel. They were praising
God by looking at nature.
Now,
the people who work with me know I have ambivalent feelings about this. For
instance, I have quietly decreed there will be no nature scenes on the front of
an Easter worship bulletin. No lilies, because I’m developing an allergy to
them. No robins returning to announce the beginning of spring. Easter is not a re-occurring springtime; it’s a radical break with the cycle of nature. Nature says that
dead people don’t come back to life. So I don’t want to confuse the
astonishment of Easter with the arrival of daffodils (and I do love daffodils).
At
the same time, I’m an old Eagle Scout. I love to go outside. Some of my most
profound spiritual experiences have happened, not inside a church, but on the
top of a mountain or admiring the light show of a beachside sunset. God has
given us a beautiful planet to spend our days.
It
is no wonder why the ancients took in the view and then spoke of God as our
rock. They listened to the thunder claps to hear God’s voice. Moses perceived
God as a pillar of fire by night, a cloud of smoke by day, and heard God call
him through the voice in a burning bush. None of that happened in a sanctuary.
Now,
this was not lost on the Celtic Christians. If you’ve ever been in the British
Isles, particularly in the outlying territories, you know why. The winds off
the North Sea are so fierce that on some islands there is no vegetation above
three feet high. The power of God was obvious in the power of nature.
As
someone notes, the Celtic world “knew very little of worshipping in enclosed
spaces. The common practice was to gather outside around high-standing crosses…
This was to know the boundlessness of the Spirit. This was to be renewed in the
context of earth, sea, and sky. This was to seek renewal in relationship to all
things.”[1]
All
of life is connected. As the Gospel of John declares, God is the source of
light and life. Everything that lives comes from the God of life. Everybody who
understands bears the light of God. The life of God infuses our planet’s life. God’s
fingerprints are everywhere. God’s breath brings everything alive.
Because
of this conviction, the Celtic way has never been to divide spiritual from
material. Nor does it declare much of a difference between “sacred” and “spiritual.”
God is the source of everything. God’s Spirit can breathe anywhere. As George
Macleod, founder of the modern-day Iona community, was fond of saying, “Christ
is vibrant in the material world, not just in the spiritual world.” Matter
matters. Our sacraments are performed with bread and wine, and water. God’s
invisible Word took on human flesh and blood; the Incarnation dignifies the
creation and intends to restore it.
So
it’s a no-brainer for me to take care of what God has made and is still making.
And I realize this is not a unanimous opinion.
A
week or two ago, a friend chuckled when we were sitting in a restaurant and I
refused a plastic straw. My wife and I are doing that more and more. He said,
“One straw, what difference does that make?” I replied, “Have you seen the
pictures of what these are doing to our oceans?”
I
know some people who didn’t give up chocolate for Lent; they gave up plastic.
They are discovering how difficult it is to do. We have become a plastic
society in all kinds of ways. These manufactured materials may seem more
convenient, but in the long run they could choke us unless we change our ways.
My
friend didn’t say any more. One plastic straw? Sure, that a small thing. And paper
straws don’t work very well. But why should we have straws at all?
Ever
since corporations and municipalities have gotten on the recycling kick, it
seems there’s a lot more stuff being produced that needs to be recycled. Have
you noticed that? The issue is more than bundling up old newspapers or putting bottles
and cans in a bin on the curb. It’s confronting the sheer amount of paper,
bottles, and cans we continue to crank out.
Did
you hear about that beached whale they found in the Philippines two weeks ago?
It had 88 pounds of plastic in its belly.[2]
Further evidence that we are not merely using God’s world; we are using it up and
not living in harmony with it. What would it take to reduce our footprints? To
live in peace with the earth?
The
first thing to do is to get outside. I’m ready – how about you? The more time
we spend in nature, the more we notice about it. The more we see, the more we respect.
The more we respect, the more we make room for others to flourish.
Friday
night, my wife was standing at the kitchen sink. Suddenly she pointed through
the window and said, “Look! Cardinals at the bird feeder.” It was enough to get
our grown children to look up from their phones.
One
of you announced you spent three hours in a garden yesterday. Another photographed
a downy woodpecker in your back yard. There’s beauty out in the back yard.
And
there is a savage wildness, too. It comes with the territory. My friend, the
church organist in Cooperstown, NY, took pictures yesterday of enormous bear
tracks in her back yard. She saw them in a fresh glaze of snow right after one
of her cats went out to sniff around. Fortunately the cat came back.
This
week, somebody else we know was diagnosed with Lyme’s disease. We know about
that in our family, because it’s a disease that is hitting my nephew pretty
hard. Matt uses crutches to get around, in between his infusions. Yet in his
down time, he volunteers at the animal shelter and befriends rescue dogs. “If
you show them some love,” he says, “you get it back many times.” He has a
healthy respect, both for the creatures God is making and the fierceness of nature
gone bad.
So
all of this, all of this, points us to the affirmation of Psalm 18. The poet of
the Psalms goes outside in search of something solid, dependable, immovable,
something we can stand on. With all the danger out there (and it sounds like he
is well acquainted with danger), he looks for the God who is beneath it all,
the God who is the source for all this. And he declares, “The Lord is my rock.”
No matter what else happens, we stand on that.
I
suppose some might sneer, call him a nature worshiper or a tree hugger. But
there’s nothing “new age” about this; instead something Old Age, ancient age.
God is the source of all that there is, both seen and unseen. To describe the
attributes of God through the things God has made is an act of profound respect.
God is not a chunk of granite, but God’s hands are all over that stone.
And
we learn something deeply when we honor the stone, or the soil, or the black
bear, or the Labrador retriever, or the deer tick, or the water, or the bread
and wine. This rambling sermon today is a reverie to praise the Creator. God
was here before all of this. God will outlive us all. And one day, thanks to the
faith of Jesus, God will call us up out of the soil to live again.
I
think some of this is what it means to say God is our rock.
Belden
Lane is a retired theology professor who goes backpacking in the wilderness. He
tells of the day he was hiking in a box canyon in the high desert of New
Mexico. When he was a few miles out of reach from civilization, suddenly the black
clouds conspired above him and the rain began to fall violently.
As
he considered his options, he noticed that the dry stream bed was now filling.
The water was raising up within the steep canyon walls. There was nowhere else for
it to go but up. Belden says there was nowhere else for him to go, either. He
scrambled up the rock wall, picking his way through the boulders, until he
found an indentation. A small cave, really. He hid himself there as the
torrential storm roared on.
The
trail he had hiked was washed away as he watched. The narrow path of his ascent
up the cliff was erased, as a flash flood pushed some boulders to the canyon
floor. There was a frightening power at work in that storm.
But
he was OK. He was soaked to his
skin, but in the cleft of the rock, he remained safe. As Belden tells the
story,
As the rain passed, and the rock slides ended, I crawled out
of the cave. The winds quickly carried the storm clouds away, and before long
the sun was out again, shining on a world perfectly new. Water droplets on
every leaf and rock were lit by the sun. The air was clear as crystal, cleansed
by rain. Silence had come again… Everywhere I walked, life burst out of the
ground before and behind me. The desert after a furious rain is incredibly
alive . . .[3]
So what’s
the point of that story? I have no idea. With God so busy bringing the desert
back to life, that story might not have anything to do with us.
Or maybe
it does. Maybe the point of it all is the truth beneath our feet: that God is
our rock. And if God is our rock, we don’t have to be afraid.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] John Philip Newell, A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth, and
the Human Soul (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011) p. 55
[3]
Belden C. Lane, “Encounter
at Ghost Ranch: Reflections on Desert Spirituality,” Spirituality Today, Summer 1992, Vol.43 No. 2, pp. 161-173. Access
the article at https://bit.ly/2ORe8dU
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