Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-020 (Expository Sermon)

GREEN SPIRITUALITY Psalm 19:1-4

by Rod Benson

I am by accident and by choice an urban creature. I love the energy and amenity, the congestion and culture, the libraries and cafés of a large city like Sydney. But there are certain things a city cannot deliver.

One of these is a good view of stars on a clear night. The stars are there – you just can’t see them (or very many of them) for the dull glare of the artificial light reflected on billions of particles of exhaust emissions.

But my family and I had the privilege of spending the last two nights of our recent holiday just outside a country town far from the big smoke. The nights were clear, and I indulged in a bit of real star gazing. Do you remember the awesome beauty of seeing the Milky Way in all its dazzling splendour? Like milk, as its name suggests!

In The Pleasures of God, John Piper describes a holiday he took in rural Georgia. Late one night he took a kitchen chair outside, sat down and looked up.

The moon was almost full. The gray-orange face was pocked with beautiful gray blemishes. I sat there and soaked again in the lavish beauty of the sky and the droning crickets and tree frogs, with the soft breeze on my face and the smell of pine; and I marvelled that God, who is spirit and cannot be seen or touched, would make an ocean of physical reality that smells and shines and feels and tastes and sounds.

THE SIGNATURE OF GOD

Each of us is moved to wonder and worship by various things. For some it is singing with a huge crowd in a giant auditorium. For others it is the power of an intellectual argument, or a time of solitude and silence, or encountering a great work of art.

For many it is observing nature, and this is what occupies David’s attention as he composes the opening lines of Psalm 19. He looks up at the visible heavens and the sky, and sees abundant evidence that they have been shaped by God (see verses 1-4).

I suppose David had many opportunities to observe and consider the natural world as a child and young man tending his father’s sheep on the hills outside Bethlehem, long before he became King of Israel and author of such psalms as this.

Sun and moon, stars and planets, the incredible amount of matter gathered into these heavenly bodies and scattered as particles of dust in the vast emptiness between the stars: all these bear the signature of the Almighty Creator God, and attest to his power and wisdom. They declare his glory.

To a secular world intrigued by the beauty and diversity of the biosphere, even as it creaks and groans beneath the crushing weight of human development and exploitation for profit, but a biosphere from which God has been erased, these verses offer a startling new perspective.

To a secular world aware of sophisticated ideas such as green science, green religion, creation spirituality, Gaia and deep ecology, Psalm 19 offers an equally startling alternative vision.

The heavens declare the glory of creation but they also say far more: the heavens declare the glory of God. To worship nature, or to transform nature into a sacrament that brings us into communion with God, is to miss the core truth David is commending in the opening verses of his psalm.

Most of us who are Christians are not in danger of exchanging our worship of God for the worship of nature. But we do need to recognise, on the other hand, that the non-human creation is more than a mere backdrop to God’s saving work for fallen humanity. When Jesus died for our sins on the cross, he was also redeeming nature from the effects of human sin (cf Rom 8:19-21). And nature can, I believe, help connect people with God.

What lies above our heads is not God – that would be pantheism. Nor is God somehow contained in nature and also beyond it – that would be panentheism, a doctrine promoted by some liberal theologians and celebrated by the World Council of Churches.

When we look carefully and sensitively at the world around us, and in the skies above our heads by day and by night, what we see is not glimpses of God. What we see are signs pointing us to God’s greatness and goodness and glory; clues that help us understand that God is, and what he is like.

A SYMPHONY TO GOD

All kinds of people ascribe glory to God – from tennis players to boxers to politicians. Les Murray, probably Australia’s greatest living poet, dedicated his Collected Poems (2002) not to family or friends or mentors but “to the glory of God.”

Here, in Psalm 19, sun and sky revel in their created bliss, living out their intended purpose, and every second that passes, every degree the sun moves in its daily journey across the sky, they cry out in harmony, “Glory to God! Honour and praise to our Creator, to the One who thought of us and spoke us into existence! Now we speak his worth!” Creation is not merely giving knowledge about the creator to us: it is giving continuous and unending praise to its Creator.

Psalm 19 reads like two psalms stitched together, or one in which the cadence changes with the change of theme at verse 7. Certainly the psalm has two parts, dealing with what we know as nature and Scripture, or what theologians call “general” and “special” revelation.

Verses 1-6, on which we are focusing today, speak of nature – the wordless book, the silent declaration of God’s existence, character and worth. General revelation is God’s self-disclosure to all of us, wherever we are, in every time. General revelation discloses to us that God is, and helps us to learn a little of what he is like.

But general revelation has its limitations. By examining nature I cannot discover that God is revealed as three Persons, the Trinity. Nature tells me nothing about the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the manger at Bethlehem, or why he came, or what he accomplished on the cross three decades later. These important doctrines, and many more, are only disclosed to us by Scripture – that other foundational self-revelation of God.

But as I reflect on the natural world, I can certainly form the conviction that God exists, and change in response to this knowledge. Delving deeper into the “book” of nature, I may learn that God is self-sufficient, transcendent, immanent, eternal, powerful, wise, good and righteous. God has indeed left a profound signature on his creation.

I feel sad for the secular astronomer who knows all there is to know about the universe (and more besides), but who remains deaf to its vibrant message about the God whose glory it declares. I feel equally sad for the modern astrologer who seeks to enlighten superstitious clients with more information than the heavens actually declare.

A CHALLENGE TO THE OBSERVER

Nature has a voice – a powerful and meaningful voice – but we need to be ready to hear it. And when we do hear it, and learn of God’s glory, it is wise to respond to God in humble, prayerful worship.

So take opportunities to enjoy nature, and learn to read God’s golden signature there. Reflect on his creation, and ask what he might want to teach you about his person and his ways.

Help others too to hear God’s voice in nature. Find ways to use natural phenomena (and not just storms, earthquakes and plagues!) as you share your faith. Nature informs intelligent evangelism and apologetics in many ways.

Do what you can to respect and preserve God’s creation. If the heavens declare the glory of God, and proclaim his creative power, then to deface or pollute or misuse nature is to mar or obscure its witness. That seems to me to be a serious sin.

And, as the rest of Psalm 19 reminds us, don’t ignore God’s written revelation, the Bible. As Isaac Watts’ classic hymn observes,

The heavens declare thy glory, Lord; In every star thy wisdom shines; But when our eyes behold thy word, We read thy name in fairer lines.

Read nature and Scripture together, as God desires us to do, and you will grow and mature in your Christian faith and spirituality in ways that are otherwise impossible.

As we encounter the wonderful self-revelation of God in Scripture and nature, and discover the power and wisdom, the greatness and goodness, the glory and grace, of our God, we respond in faith and affirm his sovereign claims on us, his conscious and free creation. And we take up the words of Psalm 19:14 and speak them prayerfully to ourselves and to God:

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock, and my Redeemer.

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E112 Copyright (c) 2003 Rod Benson. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: New International Version (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980).

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