ecology

Psalm 121

Psalm 121 is “A Song of Ascents.” Eugene Peterson (The Message) calls it “A Pilgrim Song.” It is a psalm sung by the people of God as they made their way to the temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built on a plateau; no matter how you approach it, you’re traveling uphill. The temple was located on the highest part of the city of Jerusalem, so the entire journey was a journey uphill. The psalms were not just about the worship life of the people of God, however. The psalms were about all of life, every aspect, all goings and comings. The psalms remind us that our whole life is about how we worship God and how we abide in God’s presence, not just on holy days or on Sunday mornings, but at all times and in all places. As Wendell Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

A form of the Hebrew word for “keep,” shamar, appears six times in the eight verses of Psalm 121. Clearly, God’s “keeping” is the psalm’s focus. What does it mean for God to “keep” God’s people? We might be tempted by the facile notion that if we trust in God, nothing bad will ever happen to us. “[God] will not let your foot be moved” sounds as though that may be the case. But we know that bad things happen to good people (and to bad people, and to all people) all the time. So, what does this “keeping” mean for us today? What does it mean for us to commit ourselves to God’s keeping, to trust in God’s keeping?

Verse 2 of the psalm gives us a clue:
“My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.”

It is central to this psalm that God is the author of Creation; as Psalm 24:1 puts it, “The earth is the LORD’s, and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” We are part of Creation; we are of nature, not in it. The world God created sustains us with all we need to survive and thrive: food, water, clean air, rest, companions, our rational judgment, our compassion, and so much more. God’s creation “keeps” us; it is the “help” that God provides to every single one of us.

You might argue that not everyone has sufficient food and water, sufficient rest, sufficient companionship, and so on. God’s intention to “keep” us is threatened, not by anything God has done, but by human choice and action. The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development notes, “’The foundational moral experience is reverence for the human person, and her/his environment.’ For centuries, Christian moralists have focused almost exclusively on the first part of this statement – ‘the person.’ The current environmental crisis extending from the later 20th Century to the present raises numerous challenges to that focus and other traditional approaches to Christian Ethics.”

It is impossible to have reverence for “the person” or any other creature without reverence for the Creation that sustains them. We always assume God cares that we stay within moral and spiritual boundaries. What about the moral and spiritual boundaries that preserve and care for God’s Creation? In an interview with Krista Tippett, biblical scholar and professor Ellen Davis said, “[T]he best index in the Bible of the health of the relationship between God and Israel or between God and humankind is the health of the land of Israel or the earth as a whole, its fertility. And I think at the root of it is the notion that we are a part of an intricate web of physical relations, which are at the same time moral relations.”

Our relations with the rest of Creation are moral relations. So doesn’t trusting God to “keep” us include reverence for God’s Creation? Doesn’t it mean committing ourselves to those boundaries that allow God to continue to sustain us, to “keep” us? Boundaries that value our fellow creatures, rather than driving them to extinction? Boundaries that ensure that our own species will survive and thrive? The question becomes not, “How does God ‘keep’ us?” but “Will we allow God to continue to ‘keep’ us?”

In the psalm, when the pilgrim lifts his eyes, he is making a choice (Psalm 121:1). He is choosing to look towards God, to worship God. There is no definition of worshiping God that does not include reverence for God’s Creation. We, like the pilgrim, are faced with a choice, a choice to live as though there are no unsacred places.

In this vein, the United Church of Christ reworked Psalm 121 as a Lenten prayer:

Living Psalm 121—Second Sunday of Lent

I lift up my eyes to the snow-capped mountains-
The green-sloped fields and the cliffs by the bay.
Oh, beautiful world!
Where will our help come? I cry to the skies.
Our guidance comes from God, our Co-Creator of heaven and earth.

Even as we sleep, our Maker will not rest.
Even when we turn our face away from creation’s needs,
God will continue to call us.

God who molds and carries the lands of
Israel and Palestine, United States and Mexico,
Russia, Botswana, Bhutan, Ecuador, and Australia
will neither slumber nor sleep-
Not as human walls are crafted, as sea levels rise, as land burns.

Our Maker offers us shade and tools
when temperatures climb and as hate surges.
Even as Creation burns with fevers,
we’re gifted the sun’s comfort and the moon’s compassion
to accompany us around the clock.

God our Maker will call us from all evil.
“Children, care for one another.
See this world as an extension of me and you,”
God will beg us.

And as we extend our hands to our neighbors,
to the grass below and sun above, we will see that God our Maker will keep our going out and our coming in
from this time on and until Heaven and Earth pass away.

Amen.

Resources:
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship-planning/selah-life-in-a-minor-key/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-lectionary-planning-notes/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-preaching-notes
Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,” in Given (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005).
https://interfaithsustain.com/to-care-for-the-earth-ethics-and-the-environment/
Ellen Davis, in an interview with Krista Tippett, https://www.dailygood.org/story/2497/the-art-of-being-creatures-krista-tippett/
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/living_psalm_121_creation_justice_lent_2/

John 1:1-18

This time last year I blogged about the traditional Epiphany passage in Matthew’s gospel (https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/12/30/which-story/). This year I’m drawn to Sunday’s lectionary passage from John’s gospel, commonly referred to as the Prologue to John’s Gospel. What I’m writing here is a work in progress for me because I’m still developing my thinking around this, but what fascinates me is, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

John’s gospel begins with, “In the beginning…,” reminding us of verse 1 of Genesis Chapter 1, the first creation story and the very first words in Scripture. John intends for us to make this connection but then changes it up: “In the beginning was the Word,” or in the Greek, the Logos. The Logos is God’s creating and speaking power, always with God, through which God created everything. Remember in Genesis where God speaks, and it is so? That’s the Logos, the Word of God. When John tells us that this Word of God became flesh and lived among us, he is describing the Incarnation, the belief that the Word of God existed with God from the beginning and became a human being, Jesus Christ, who lived among us, giving us the best picture of who God is and what humankind can be.

I am drawn to this text because of some reading I’ve been doing (as well as reading I continue to do and plan to do; thus the work in progress) about the Christian faith and anthropocentrism or “human supremacy.” On the recommendation of a dear friend, I read Daniel Quinn’s 1992 book, Ishmael, a philosophical novel exploring our cultural biases that Earth was created for humanity, and that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. Once you’ve noticed this bias, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the catastrophic consequences for humankind, other species, and the environment that follow. Quinn posits that at one time, humans were just one of the many creatures inhabiting Earth, living as part of Creation, but we’ve stepped outside of the natural order of things. We’ve given ourselves the power to decide what is right and wrong for all life, and what is “right” generally means what we human beings want or believe we need, without regard for other species or the sustainability of the planet. In a nutshell, we behave as though the Earth belongs to us, and this has led to the problems we face such as global warming, mass species extinctions, food shortages, and overpopulation.

Quinn is not alone in this concern. Among other writers, Christian author Thomas Berry discusses this issue in his book, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth (2009). Ecologist Derrick Jensen tackles this concern head on in his book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016).

What does this have to do with John’s prologue? Verse 5 states, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” Cody J. Sanders challenges us to take this verse seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation. He writes, “This may very well open our perspective – as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing – to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.” He notes that Margaret Daly-Denton reminds us that the Word becomes flesh, not man. Daly-Denton writes, “’The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’” In a similar vein, Mary Coloe writes, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.” Sanders continues, “While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.”

It’s heavy stuff, right? But what we have been doing – treating Creation as though it belongs to humanity as opposed to treating humanity as though it is part of Creation – isn’t working. In Genesis 1:28, God tells the as-yet-unnamed first human beings, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” One could argue that a literal reading of this verse supports a conclusion that humankind is supposed to be in charge of all life on the planet. The simple fact that this hasn’t worked well for humanity or any other part of Creation weighs against such a literal reading; could anyone believe that God wants environmental degradation or catastrophe?

So what if, instead, we take Psalm 24:1 literally?
“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it.”

And what if the Word became flesh, “a far broader reality than humanity”?

Resources:
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (New York: Orbis Books, 2009)
Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016)
Cody J. Sanders,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-11

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

How Does God “Keep” Us?

The Word Became Flesh