PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 104                                                            To See This God-Enchanted World
Sermon April 18, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          The psalm that the Liturgist began in our Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures is a psalm rejoicing in God’s world.  The psalm continues:

          This Thursday our country will celebrate Earth Day, a time for all Americans to remember that with regard to the earth we are not just takers:  we are responsible givers as well.  In response to this secular day, the churches have made this Sunday “Earth Stewardship Sunday.”  But I don’t want to spend the next fifteen minutes repeating the words “should” and “ought.”  In line with the experience of beauty we feel in the natural world, instead of “ought” today I want to say “is.”  I invite you to see this God-enchanted world and rejoice with me. 

          My brother woke me up early that Labor Day morning, more than an hour before dawn, whispering so that we wouldn’t disturb our parents.  I slipped on some warm clothes, we loaded the shotguns into his car, stopped at an all-night restaurant for breakfast, and in less than an hour were out in the hills of Blount County, walking (me behind him) along a railroad track, away from the dirt road and the houses built by it.  In the gray pre-dawn light our breath was white in the cool, damp air.  There was no breeze.  The oak and maple and hickory trees mantling the low hills to our left and right stood silent, waiting for the sun.  We made our way along a ravine, climbing over a fallen tree trunk.  I took up my position, seated on a stump above a ravine.  My brother worked his way silently around the hill.  Birds began to chirp and chatter on the farther hill as the morning light crept down the tree trunks. Forest bees buzzed by, oblivious of me; and a hickory nut fell to earth, popping and cracking as it glanced off the tree trunk and bounced off several limbs.  It hit the leaf-blanketed ground with a dull “THUD.”  Across the ravine I heard what I had waited an hour for:  the “CHUCK, CHUCK, CHUCK” of  a squirrel.  It danced along a twelve-foot branch with a nut in its mouth, then stopped and sat on its haunches to cut through the tough hull and devour the sweet meat inside.  A great crow watched me and “CAWED” out his warning as I stood up to move around.  And that’s when I saw it:  the doe, ears alert, tail held high, stepping gingerly along the upper edge of the ravine.

          High up in the third range of the Great Smoky Mountains, two-thirds of a mile above the tourist highway, a mountain trail is interrupted by a fast-flowing creek.  Laurel Creek gushes out of a spring near the top of a mountain and flows in clear, cold, mountain style down to a hundred-foot cliff.  There it roars down in two waterfalls, one after the other; and between the two waterfalls a rock-bottom pool invites the hiker, for this is where the trail crosses.  You can step across on great boulders, or you can strip off your shoes and roll up your jeans and wade across.  She looked at me, standing on the slate shelf where the trail resumes; she smiled and said, “This is where I want my ashes scattered.”

          I watched out my airliner window as the earth fell away beneath us, and the children playing basketball in their driveway shrank to invisibility.  By the time the interstate highway had become a mere pencil-line, we had reached that altitude where you can look straight out and see the blackness of the pollution come to an end where the winds of the upper atmosphere have cleansed the thinner air.  It was a clear day, and the sun shown down on the mile-square chessboard that is the American Midwest.  There was water standing in some fields, where the rains of the past week had not yet evaporated or run off.  And the great Mississippi River snaked its muddy richness southward, draining a continent into the Gulf of Mexico.  What mankind has built—the roads, the towns, the fields—was visibly dependent for its existence on the grander thing that God had built:  for the enchanted creation sustains us all.

Four couples and a tour guide crawled out of a van on the eastern face of Hawaii’s Diamondhead volcano.  He had parked in a “scenic view parking area” to let us squint into the morning sun, gazing into a distant white haze.  First one of us, then another saw the craggy outlines of the island of Molokai, and beyond it Lanai and the mountains of Maui.  It’s a regular stop for the tour-bus company drivers.  But then something else happened—out in the bay:  a great, white spume of water shot up into the air; then another, and another.  Someone cried, “Whales!”  And there they were, the great gentle sea monsters—a whole pod of whales at the far edge of our vision.

          Here we are this morning, a people busy in our lives and our work.  I’m aware of our homes, our families, our jobs, our retirement, our leisure activities.  Some of us take the chemical elements of the earth, purify them and turn them into food, steel, glass, building materials and other things.  Some of us use those products to create houses, to install water lines and electrical circuits.  Some of us make or sell things that we put into our houses.  Some of us teach children how to get along in such a sophisticated world, and some of us care for people who get hurt either physically or emotionally.  Some of us keep life going for others and take care of the things that need care.  Some of us have gardens, plant trees, mow grass or keep animals.  Some of us provide food, and some provide tools.  Some of us do the kind of work that gets people and money and companies organized and operating.  And we do a hundred other things as well, all related to the world we have made; but it is a world based on the mystery of God’s enchanted world. There’s just no escape, nor any desire to escape this marvelous gift.

          I’ve been quoting portions of the 104^th Psalm.  I conclude with the 8^th Psalm:

          This world may be the place where we encounter difficulties and evil, but the world itself is enchanted by God, full of the mystery of Creation, never grown old, refreshed each morning, re-vivified every evening.

          It is our blessing and our calling to see this God-enchanted world that is before our eyes, and give thanks to God, and rejoice in the wonder-filled world we have received.  And (need I say it?) it is our ethical calling “to work it and to keep it,” in the words of Genesis—to protect it as we use it.

          Thanks be to God for such a Garden as this!

AMEN