A Easter Day Psalm 148 BFC 2020
Psalm 148
April 12, 2020
Last
week I began my Palm Sunday sermon talking about how the individual agency and
collective power of people sprung to life with the 1964 earthquake in
Anchorage, Alaska, and the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. This week the resurrection story begins with
women going to the tomb and an earthquake happens. The earthquake, that calamity and disaster,
is a mythological and material symbol that we cannot return to normal. Normal doesn’t work. The overt and low-level violence done by the
system cannot continue. The world needs to be overturned.
Ecologist
Carl Safina recently published an article in The Guardian that
communicated how animals in the wild communicate culture from generation to
generation, in a way that provides knowledge and skills that allow for
adaptability as climate change happens faster and faster. Scientists have discovered this knowledge and
these skills are not in the genes of wild animals. Rather, survival skills are learned from
their elders who learned from their elders.
Fish
follow elders to feeding, resting, and breeding areas. Other animals learn from their elders crucial
migration routes and destinations, where to find food, and how to avoid danger.
As a
population of wild animals moves toward extinction, however, their diversity
narrows, their special cultural knowledge begins disappearing, and this creates
an exponential decline. “When
populations plummet, traditions that helped animals survive and adapt to a
place begin to vanish.”
And
there is such divine learned wisdom and skill that is passed on from generation
to generation, from elders of one generation to the would-be elders of another
generation.
. . . [P]igeons and sparrows have learned to
use motion-sensors to get inside enclosed shopping malls and forage for crumbs.
Crows have in some locales learned to drop nuts on the road for cars to crack.
In at least one area they do this at intersections, so they can safely walk out
and collect their cracked prizes when the light turns red and the cars stop.[1]
The
way these wild animals show wisdom and adaptability, how they teach future
generations—it offers praise to their Creator—in the dialect of their local
bird song, the call of American and European cod, the social organization of
orca.
I don’t say these things to wax
poetic or transcendent. I say these
things because I believe God is involved in the very material bases of our
lives. I don’t buy a religious faith
that has me reciting creed or construct to get me into heaven--and that’s all
faith is; that’s all God cares about. I
think what the Psalms are trying to teach us is that relationship with God is deep
into our doubt and suffering, our pain and lament. God wants for all of creation a just world
where we and trees are resourced . . . and provide fruit in interdependent
ways.
As I have read and dialogued with Christian thinkers
over the past few weeks, there seems to be an almost universal understanding
that this virus is an apocalypse—as we said in our Revelation study, a
revealing of the raw violence of the American economic system and American
exceptionalism and how, after it turned its long teeth on the rest of the world
how it has turned toward us. The idea
that it wouldn’t affect us, that we were somehow unconnected, not
interdependent with the rest of the world, is now killing us. One of my colleagues posted, “Coronavirus has
exposed the lie of American exceptionalism.
The
US has more resources than any other nation in the world. We are dead last in
the effort to slow the spread of covid-19.”[2] Others wrote and found written in graffiti on
the wall of an American hospital parking lot, “If Covid-19 is the virus, then our
economic system, based on competition, destroying the least and the last in
pursuit of profit, and a refusal to share resources, is the pandemic.” There must be a new normal.
In the Psalms, it is Creator who flows and winds and
bends into creation with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness so that we
might believe all deserve meaningful work, to be fed and housed, to have health
care, and that, as Psalm 52 says, we
might be like olive trees flourishing in the house of God, trusting in God’s
unfailing love. That’s not for some
otherworldly space. It is for a space in
the here and now where we might have rest and share in lying in the green
grass, finding joy in a cup that overflows with goodness, and being led beside
still waters.
Bad religion has told us again and again that it is
God who has instituted the status quo.
Way back on the 1st
of March we began this Lenten journey, on the First Sunday of Lent, with Psalm
1. Read for the first time, without
reading any other Psalm, Psalm 1 can appear to be simplistic. Follow in the way of God, walk in God’s
paths, then we shall prosper and succeed.
Ridicule the righteous, sit in the seat of scoffers, and, like all the
other wicked, refuse to stand up for justice, that person will wither and
perish. As we have moved through the
Psalms through Lent, we have heard Psalm 1 over and over again. We are like
trees that choose to be re-planted by a stream.
In Psalm 1, God is our water source, Mni Wiconi, water is truly
life, our resource for the tough times, the difficult times when drought
comes. There is a hint in that
understanding that life will not always be so easy.
Also
hear in Psalm 1 not only the mythological way that God is our source of life
but also the material way water is meant to be our source of life and
sustenance and goodness. In Psalm 148, as
that river is healthy and sings its praises to Creator, as all of creation does
so, even the traditional parts of creation considered outside God’s reach, the
sea and the sea monster, a cosmic symphony is lifted from beneath the earth and
above the earth,
All through Lent ,
in between Psalm 1 and all of these psalms that shout praise and glory and
hallelujahs to God at the end of the book, including our reading for today,
Psalm 148, we have been reading Psalms which scream out to God in complaint and
lament and cries of anger and frustration.
Jesus embodies this broken love as he screamed the words of Psalm 22
from the cross on Good Friday, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Love is not a
victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a
broken Hallelujah. That we might know
our doubts, our complaints against the way the world and the wicked are
treating us, maybe even our cries against God, our struggle with both the
absence and presence of God, are part of the faith story found in the
Psalms. We are encouraged, in our
spiritual life, not to be naïve or simplistic or lacking in any real life
struggle. No. We are encouraged to be honest and truthful
and real and know that struggle can sometimes be a sign of our faithfulness.
God . . . can handle
our honesty, our truth, and chooses again and again to be in the midst of our
struggle. So that when we are lying on
the floor of life, we might know the presence of God, and utter the words of a
cold and broken “Hallelujah.”
Bad religion has
told us that God does not placed our joy in the interdependent, interconnected
cosmic creation so we had better get ours now.
We had better hoard and clutch and grab so that the world might see us
as the winners. Then we can proclaim
that God is on our side. And this bad
religion seems to have no fear about repercussions for what this inequality and
greed does to our sources of life in the material world, hedging our bets, and
hoping that we have enough of a buffer that if things go wrong with the world,
we’ll be well enough off to weather the storm in our castle, with our moat, and
our wall.
As the cosmic praise
in this ancient psalm teaches though, the world was founded on an
interdependence, an awareness that as we break our relationship with the
material world, we break our relationship with God.
Psalm 148 is an
antidote to all of that. The material
world, not the angels and archangels in transcendence, but the material world
as it functions and moves and adapts and seeks life joins in a cosmic chorus to
offer praise to Creator in full relationship.
In ten days the next
Earth Day will be upon us with a 72 hour livestream being shown nationally to
help us remember that things cannot return to the way they are. As this pandemic should be teaching us and
as we should know from the 50th Earth Day, we cannot return to
normal. Returning to normal only leads
to more death and destruction. The first
day of the livestream seeks to center indigenous or Native voices. I believe some of that is because there is a
general recognition that Native people have an understanding and theology of
the strong interfamilial relationship and interconnection we have with Mother
Earth.
More and more
environmentalists are recognizing that for us to make any headway with the
enormity of the task at hand, like Native people have done historically, we
have to develop a deep relationship with the sources life, sustenance, and
goodness that in our immediate area.
What might a courageous congregation do that lived in a city where a
river runs through it?
In a material way, in a city that has one of
the most famous rivers in the world running through it, how are we caring for
the Elk or Yellowstone River?
In the Environment Montana
Research & Policy Center report issued in the fall of 2019, microplastic
film and fiber was found at the Elk River as it made its way around Riverfront
Park.[3] What
might a congregation do to phase out single use plastics in Billings, encourage
reuse through water refilling stations like they have in Whitefish, developing
a green infrastructure like Bozeman’s boulevard infiltration system,
incentivize businesses away from plastics, and setting goals for all of us to
make better purchasing decisions?[4] How do we become advocates for making sure
oil spills are not part of this source of life, sustenance, and goodness
reality up or downstream? So that as the
river flows, like our circulatory system through the world, reaching Billings
and flowing back, those waters might flow in praise to Creator. How do we make sure that pesticide and
chemical agriculture run-off do not flow into this, our sister?
What we learn from
Psalm 148 is that all of creation has a sentience, a wisdom, a capacity for
praise in relationship with Creator that reminds us of our
interdependence. Psalm 148 completes the
circle that began with Psalm 1, reminding us that when we are right and
resourced with God’s good earth, we live fully in this interdependence and
interconnection.
Easter begins with
an earthquake, with a recognition that we cannot return to business as
usual. There must be a new normal—a new
way in which we recognize the life, the sustenance, and goodness all of
creation brings to us in interdependence and interconnection. We are the elders. We must be the elders who teach to the
children the wisdom or skills we have learned in seeking to be a faithful
people who live out our lives in joy raising our voice with all of creation in
praise—so that we are a source of life, sustenance, and goodness. So that they will then be the elders of a new
generation. And sometimes we will need
to allow the children to teach us how to be in a new and adaptive world.
Creator has willed
and longed for that day. We may not be
pigeon, cod, or orca, but we are a beautiful part of this wondrous planet, teaching
that water is life. Creator has willed
and longed for our wisdom and our sentience to recognize that day. Amen.
[1] Carl Safina, " The secret call
of the wild: how animals teach each other to survive,” The Guardian, April
9, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/09/the-secret-call-of-the-wild-how-animals-teach-each-other-to-survive-aoe?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
[2]
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Twitter, @wilsonhartgrove, March 24, 2020. https://twitter.com/wilsonhartgrove/status/1242543519018950656.
[3] Environment
Montana Research & Policy Center, “Microplastic in Montana: A Study of Fifty River Access Sites,” October
2019. https://environmentmontana.org/sites/environment/files/reports/Microplastic%20in%20Montana%20%28final%29.pdf
[4] All
recommended by the Environment Montana Research & Policy Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment