Receptivity.

Psalm 104.

I.

            Psalm 104 is one of the two great creation-centered Psalms; the other is Psalm 148.  For centuries, many Christians and monastic communities have recited these Psalms daily: 104 in the evening and 148 in the morning.  Psalm 148 was part of daily prayer in the Jewish synagogue even before the time of Jesus.  Jesus knew all the Psalms, of course.  And he probably knew these particularly well.

            That the people of God would habitually begin and end their days with hymns of creation should be instructive for us.  We Protestants have historically had a tendency to ignore or play down creation and nature, preferring to focus on what we consider to be loftier matters of faith and spirituality. 

            And yet the tradition seems to want to maintain as a kind of anchor this grounding in matter, where animals, weather, trees, streams, birds, and humans all respond to the presence and activity of their Creator, all the time.

            I suspect that if you were to ask people where they experience God in their lives, a very high percentage would say something about nature.  The glorious sunset, the flock of geese taking off in concert, the awesome power of a storm, the beautiful vista of a mountain lake, the miracle of our own bodies, or something like giving birth… without any theological training at all, many people encounter God in creation.  God seems more easily accessible in a forest than in an oil refinery or on the New Jersey Turnpike.

            Sometimes Christians who emphasize creation are suspected of getting too close to paganism.  But a Psalm like 104 comes to us as an explicit rejection and critique of paganism and pantheism.  The whole meaning here is that creation is under the dominion of the Creator.  God orchestrates the order, balance, beauty, and power of nature.  Creation is not God; but it is God’s expression, God’s handiwork, and, as Calvin said, the theater of God’s glory. 

            We meet God in creation.  God is reflected in the things that God has made.  And we hear God’s voice in creation.  The first place we need to pay attention to when we listen for God’s voice is creation.

            The Psalmist makes the point that God did not just create the earth and the rest of the universe, give it certain laws, and then let it go to run on its own like a machine.  This is the view of many of the founders of the Modern age most of us grew up in, before they dispensed with God altogether.  On the contrary, God remains intimately involved in nature.  God continues to act and intimately interact with creatures; it is by God’s will that the rain falls and the grass grows, that birds build nests and young lions roar for their prey.  Creation is not an inanimate object that God made; it is alive with God’s life and God still speaks in and through it.

II.

            Everything that God creates is inherently and essentially receptive to God.  That includes all of us creatures of dust as well.  We are made for receptivity, we are born to listen to God, to praise God, to thank God, and to bless God.  And as the creatures with somewhat more developed consciousness, we are in a position to do this.

            Or not.  We are also in a position to refuse to acknowledge God as Creator.  Instead of recognizing God’s Lordship and dominion, we aspire to exercise dominion ourselves, as we, in our characteristically self-serving and self-aggrandizing way, choose to understand it.  The dominion that God gives to people in Genesis is meant to be exercised as an extension of God’s dominion, with Jesus Christ, the truly human One, as our model and example.  And Jesus sees creation, not as something to be commodified and used up, but as a wonderful panorama of parables teaching us about God.

            Lilies, foxes, sparrows, fig trees, sheep, the sun, the sea and more, all figure in Jesus’ teaching.  They all tell us something about the God who made them.  They all communicate to us something of God.

            Notice that the Psalmist merely stands back in awe and wonder, respecting creation and celebrating its complexity and grandeur.  There is no sense of creation as an object for humans to dispose of as they please.  It is inconceivable that, after extolling nature’s beauties and harmony, the Psalmist wants to take a bulldozer to it.  There is even less sense that these are “resources” given to humans to exploit for the sake of economic profit.

            No.  Awe and wonder are the attitudes we need to cultivate here, with respect and love.  These are the prerequisites for any kind of listening.  The Psalm asks people to open the doors of their perception to nature’s marvels.  Watch.  Observe.  Listen.  Receive.  Partake.

            This approach is not passive and inert, but participatory.  God wants us to share in the creativity of creation.  Verses 14 and 15 talk about how we are fed by God through creation.  “You cause grass to grow for the cattle and plants for the people to use, to bring forth food from the earth.”  That describes a hunter-gatherer kind of life that receives from God directly and immediately what God has placed in nature for our sustenance. 

            But then the Psalm goes on and mentions “wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.”  Wine, oil, and bread, of course, do not occur naturally; they require human initiative and ingenuity.  Yet they still come from God who made the plants from which they are made, and the human heart which made them and benefits from them.

III.

            Wine, oil, and bread are also used sacramentally in worship by God’s people.  This says that our use of creation must be sacramental in the sense that it glorifies God and functions in harmony with God’s will and plan.  It participates in creation’s holiness and benefits life.

            When we listen to God in creation we have to realize that we are part of creation.  We cannot listen as if creation and God’s voice within it were something out there, apart from us; as if we were objective, disinterested, neutral observers.  Or worse, as if we were superior beings, analyzing and evaluating creation like some dead thing or object.

            No.  We are creation.  We were created on the sixth day with the animals.  We are dust, which is made more explicit in Genesis 2.  But God made all of life from dust, the soil, the various minerals of which the planet in made, mixed with water, and infused with God’s breath and Word. 

            We recently had two funerals related to our church family.  The funeral liturgy, as well as the service for Ash Wednesday last week, emphasize “you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  But this focus on dust does not denigrate or reduce in importance who we are.  We are not merely dust or nothing but dust.  For dust is made by God and God breathes existence and life into the dust of which we are made.  Dust is blessed and good and holy in itself, just by virtue of being created by God, even before God molds it into human form.

            We are creation conscious of itself to whom the Creator has been revealed.  The Westminster Catechism has that famous first question, which we now usually paraphrase: What is the chief end of human life?  And the answer is that the chief end of human life is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever, easily the best sentence the Puritans ever gave us.

            None of which makes any sense if we do not first listen with the attentiveness of the Psalmist to God’s voice in creation, which includes within ourselves, as animated dust, dust with life and soul, dust conscious of God’s breath and Word.  Dust on a mission from God.

            In order to achieve this listening we have first to be present, in the moment, in this space.  We have to turn off, or at least tune out, our chattering mind that is always somewhere else, always ruminating over the past, planning for or worrying about the future, imagining being somewhere else doing something else.

            Creation is here and now, and we can only glorify and enjoy God here and now, in the living present.      

              

IV.

            The first thing Jesus says when he begins his ministry is: “The time is fulfilled.  The Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.”  By saying that the time is fulfilled, Jesus is inviting us to take our minds out of the past and dwelling on what people said and did back then, and he is inviting us to take our minds out of the future, thinking about what will or might happen.  To say that the time is fulfilled means that the past is over and the future hasn’t happened.  Neither past nor future is real.

            By talking about fulfilled time, Jesus insists that we be here now, in this space, in this dust, in this creation.  Instead of looking ahead or back, Jesus would have us realize that God is always present.

            The Psalmist also blessed and praises and thanks God in creation in the present.  An astonishing number of the verbs in this Psalm are in the present tense; that’s what gives the psalm its immediacy, I think.  Even things that happened in the past, like God’s initial acts of creation, in this Psalm are happening now.

            The season of Lent has always been about reconnecting with our basic nature in the living present.  Disciplines like fasting serve to yank our attention back to here and now, as we become aware of habits we were performing unconsciously.  They take us off of automatic pilot, and put us back in touch with our dust nature, our physical being that gets hungry, feels heat and cold, becomes tired, walks, and breathes.

            Lent is not supposed to be about pain and discomfort.  But it is a time for realizing our body, our dust-self, and becoming present; bringing our minds back to here and now; connecting with the earth of which we are made; experiencing, feeling, sensing, and being.

            So in this first full week of Lent, maybe we could take some time and just be.  Feel and smell the air, watch the sunrise, listen for returning birds, watch for the first crocus, make a hopefully final cold, wet snowball.  Try to see the stars some night.  Taste food.

            And listen for God’s voice in it all.  We might hear God saying, “You are dust and to dust you shall return… and that’s not a bad thing.  I am in the dust that I made.  That dust is magic.  I send my Spirit, my breath, into that dust.  My son Jesus Christ took on that dust and sanctified it.  You are blessed to be dust… my dust.”

            Everything else in God’s whole creation is already glorifying and enjoying God by nature; we get to do it by choice and consciously.  Halleluia!

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