July 10, 2005

Psalm 104 Rejoice!

In Genesis 1 we read that “God saw what he had made, and it was very good.” And so it was, and so it is. People who live where we live hardly need reminding how good is the world God made. If we open our eyes and look around the Island in mid-summer, we see abundant water and fertile soil, fields that overflow with potatoes and corn and tomatoes and salad greens, orchards full of fruit trees, vineyards laden with grapes, nurseries alive with plants and trees and flowers, miles of green sod farms. Just take a drive for half an hour east along Sound Avenue and take in all you see.

And around us lie the Sound, the Bays, the Ocean beaches. Thousands of people find pleasure in bathing, lazing in the sand, sailing, fishing. If you don’t care for close contact with the water, there are golf courses, and thousands of acres of woodland to ride a horse or walk or ride a bike. Add to all this the material abundance – the fine homes, the shops and businesses, access to the City – and you have one of the most desirable places to live in the USA. No wonder so many people want to live here!

Of course there are “buts” in any such description. Our world has been polluted, overcrowded, and in some places spoiled as a place to live through neglect and greed, and we have been slow to wake up to the damage we have done to our environment. It may be surprisingly resilient, but that is no excuse for polluting it more and more.

1) Nature and Creation

But how do we see the world around us? And perhaps more important, how does God see it? It satisfies us, but does it satisfy God? One way we have lost our perspective is by calling “Nature” what we once called “Creation.” A mechanical view of the world has robbed us of the sense that it is a transcendent place; there is more to all this than mere matter. Even as we have become environmentally aware, we have made ecology into a science, and lost the sense the ancient world had that the interconnected parts of all life and being have their origin and continued existence in God.

A Psalm like Ps 104 is there to remind us of a view of life that is ultimately theological and not mechanical – in the sense that a person looking at Creation can see there the handiwork and the sustaining power of God, and should praise him for it and rejoice in it. Psalm 104 begins “Praise the LORD, O my soul” – just like its partner Psalm 103, which celebrates God as the Savior who forgives his errant people. But Psalm 104 celebrates the

LORD who is also the Creator and Provider for all his creatures, and this too should make us praise God from our hearts.

The Psalmist – probably David, given the affinities with Ps 103 – gives us a reprise of Genesis 1, but in even more poetic language. He sees the order and design in God’s Creation, and how he provides for the needs of animals, birds, fish, humans. There is abundant food and water, there is vegetation for herbivores and meat for carnivores; there is bread and oil for mankind, and wine that “gladdens his heart.” Sunrise and sunset mark out times for work and rest – a rhythm we need to stick with if we are to flourish! The limits hold and the earth is secure because God reigns over the earth. All life depends on God – it is only his presence and sustaining power that keeps his world going. It is the Spirit of God who creates and renews all creatures.

2) So?

Well, you may respond, so...? What are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Where does it take us? What difference does it make whether I think of “Nature” or “Creation”? The biblical view is that seeing Creation for what it is should evoke praise and gratitude from God’s people. We should not only ourselves rejoice in the goodness and beauty of the world around us, but we should also cause God to rejoice in our response.

But this does not often happen in our world. Even among believers, there is little appreciation for what God has made and what he expects we should do with it. The environmental movement has for decades been bereft of Christian involvement, and indeed the “Green” movement has often been hostile to it. The widely read and much quoted article in the journal Science in 1967 (The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.) argued that Christianity in fact was responsible for the environmental troubles that were becoming visible; it was, argued Lynn White Jr., because the “sacred scriptures of Christianity” gave humans a “mandate to have dominion over the earth” that the Western world in particular had exploited the planet and polluted it.

White had little historical perspective, and could not know then just how the atheistic Communist world was outdoing everyone in environmental pollution. But there were no Christian environmentalists around in 1967 to refute White. Instead, Christians were more likely to be arguing about how God created the world – in six literal days 4000 years ago, or over great spans of billions of years. But one pioneer Christian environmentalist observed years ago: “When we get to heaven, God will not ask us ‘How did I make the world?’ but rather ‘What did you do with what I created?’”

And the truth is that after the Industrial Revolution we became very lax in the way we polluted. We imagined that since there were so few of us, while the earth and the atmosphere and the oceans were so vast, we could not affect them adversely. Now we know we can and do affect the environment in profound ways, not only locally but globally. I still recall with horror the decades in biological and physical science when we thought nothing of pouring heavy metals like lead and uranium down the lab sink and so eventually into the groundwater, or how organic solvents or radioactive isotopes were routinely dumped into the ground. Do you recall the days when we dumped spare paint, used motor oil, old solvents in the back yard? It has been time-consuming and expensive not only to clean up what we have spilled, but to re-educate a whole generation of people, including scientists and engineers. And we have a long way to go still to educate manufacturers.

So what should our view of “Creation” do for us as Christians? Make us “green Christians.” Make us careful of our world. Make us careful of all the creatures God has put in it. Make us careful of the way our consumption affects other people. Our leaders seem slowly to be awakening to the thought that if other nations around the world develop economies like ours, there will not be enough oil for everyone. Every Chinese person who forsakes his bicycle for a car adds to the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Every Indian who needs electricity for his computer or his international telephone connection uses more natural gas. And every American who leaves their lights, their TVs, their air-conditioning running day and night adds to the acid rain and the global warming that will one day change all our lives.

We are all in this together, and we cannot escape our responsibilities for one another and for the world we leave our children. It is not a Christian attitude to Creation to say that we will have “enough oil for our lifetimes.” It is not enough for Christians to say “our job is to save souls because the world will soon come to an end.” If “the Lord tarries” for another thousand years, we will be responsible if our children’s children have to scavenge for food and clothing in a bankrupt economy, and have little or no time to think about their souls.

3) Rejoice

Christians and Jews who call the Psalms “Holy Scripture” are obliged to take seriously the call of the Psalmist to see the world as God’s place, designed for his creatures and his glory, and to treat it accordingly. We are called to rejoice in the God who provides for us, and to praise him and thank him for his goodness to us.

We should be ready, like the Psalmist, to “sing to the LORD all my life; to praise my God as long as I live.” Our goal should be that God’s glory will endure and be praised, and that as we rejoice in his goodness, so he in turn can rejoice at what he sees in his world.

So a challenge for you and for me is to look around us with eyes that are shaped by faith, and see what God has done and does do every day for us. We are richly blessed, and surrounded by beauty, and we should respond in generous gratitude, but also with proper care and respect for the home God has given us. It is no good our saying “On my own I make no difference.” Each one of us makes a difference. Auto manufacturers are now under huge pressure to change their product lines because gasoline prices have risen 20% in a year. If a few more people decline to buy a monster vehicle and opt instead for a “hybrid” that gets 5 times the gas mileage, in 5 years the ratio of those vehicles on our roads will change beyond recognition. In the UK, where gas is over $5 a gallon, there are almost no SUVs. In this country, a shift of opinion of 5-10% of the population on any topic is considered “a landslide,” a 10% decline in sales a disaster. A few people can make a big difference!

Can we rejoice in God’s provision? Can we acknowledge that he is the Creator of all life, and that therefore every life is precious to him and should be to us? Can we grasp that our souls exist here in human bodies, and that what we do with the world around us affects our souls too? Do we imagine that people who are starving to death and scavenging through garbage dumps for food are especially open to hear the gospel? Do we suppose that people around the world who think American consumption is directly linked to American Christianity are thereby attracted to Jesus Christ?

Is God pleased, is he rejoicing, in what we are doing to “our corner” of his world? Are we daily praising God for his gifts: of life itself, of food and shelter, of beauty and order, of family and friends, of faith and forgiveness. One of the worst sins against God, I suspect, is ingratitude; because it is so often linked to its wretched brother, pride. We did not make ourselves, or our world; the good LORD did, and we should daily thank him, for as long as we live.

Let us pray...