If you want to learn about God, where should you look? It’s an important question. If we want to grow in our faith, if we want our children to have faith, if we sincerely believe this world is better when it lives out its faith, where do we direct our attention to learn about God? I can think of four places. We learn about God through scripture. We learn about God through the rituals and worship of church. We learn about God through the testimony of our hearts. And we learn about God through the witness of the world. Think of them as four stations on a guided spiritual pilgrimage. On this pilgrimage, you ask about God, so you are first led to a room and introduced to the bible, where you read the scriptures about creation, exodus, the law and prophets. You read about Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul, the walk of faith and hope of a new heaven and a new earth. But you know that God’s voice is not restricted solely to the pages of the bible, so you leave that room.
You are led into a sanctuary, and among a diverse congregation of people, you pray and sing. You are washed in baptism and fed in communion. You sense the deep mystery of the faith, but you also know God is not restricted to the walls of the church. So you are taken outside to a busy street in a busy city. You watch people come and go; you see acts of compassion and acts of violence. You see vulnerable children as they go off to school; you see older adults slowly pass by who struggle with daily pain and loneliness. You want all things to be well, and in your heart, you know that there is good and evil in this world, and that the good comes from God and is to be trusted. But then you worry that these feelings are too naïve and subjective, and they should not be considered the only way to learn about God. So your guide leads you to a green field with a panoramic view of nature. And in the silent contemplation of all you see, you learn a lot about God.
More could be said about each of the four locations in the spiritual pilgrimage I just described, but Psalm 19 focuses on that last spot: The heavens are telling the glory of God. However, the first few verses reveal that this is a psalm of paradox. The heavens are ‘telling’; the sky and firmament ‘proclaim’ God’s handiwork; and yet there are no words; no voice is heard. Nonetheless their voice goes out through all the world and their words echo to the end of the earth. Words spoken, but not heard, yet which go throughout all the earth. How can this help us learn about God?
To answer this question, I need you to find your inner child for a moment. Allow yourself with childlike wonder to imagine that everything in all of creation has the ability to acknowledge and praise its creator. Every tree moving its branches is whispering a song of praise to God. When every flower turns its head toward the sun, it is saying a prayer. Every hopping frog, every tiger burning bright, every ladybug, stone and babbling brook – imagine each has the capacity to stop and offer a prayer to their God in heaven. This type of personification is not uncommon in scripture. Four chapters in the book of Job expound on the wonder of God’s creation: how the morning stars sing together and how God’s glory is seen in the lion and mountain goat, the hawk and the Leviathan of the ocean’s depths. The prophet Isaiah tells how the mountains and forests break forth in singing and every tree joins this chorus of praise (Isa 44:23). Even Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field and the tiny sparrows sold two for a penny who receive God’s loving care.
There is something wonderful in this type of personification of nature – imagining that the rustling leaves are the trees’ hymns of praise or looking quickly at our pet dogs and cats to try and catch them mouthing a prayer to the Lord. Well, maybe not the cats… But it is an exercise we cannot sustain for very long, because we know far too well how we treat all of nature. What if our abuse of nature, our acts of pollution and causing species to go extinct, was truly silencing literal voices praying to God? That would be too hard to contemplate. It would be too cruel to imagine. And yet we should be concerned about how our destruction of nature actually silences living witnesses to God.
We asked ourselves: “How do we learn about God?” We answered that we learn of God through scripture, through worship, and through the testimony of the moral-ethical heart within us. But before all that existed, there was the testimony of nature: earth and stars, sun and moon, expressions of life fearfully and wonderfully made. In harming the earth and its creatures, are we destroying the oldest and most universal witness that exists of the glory of God? The other day, my car happened to be very clean – which doesn’t happen often; but later I noticed a thin layer of dust on it. Sediment from the air had coated my car, even though I wasn’t aware anything floating around me. Worse, I had been breathing it into my lungs and my family was breathing into their lungs. Last week I read a newspaper report about the poor air quality in cities around the world. For example, in Beijing, they have an air quality scale that goes from 0 – 500. A score of 500 means that the air is 20x above what scientists consider safe to breathe. One day a few years ago, the meters went above 500 and the weathermen didn’t have words to describe this, except to say that the air was “crazy bad.” Well, two weeks ago, the papers reported that the Beijing air quality score had actually hit 755, meaning the entire city was like an airport smokers’ lounge or worse.
The heavens are telling the glory of God – but what happens when the heavens are no longer visible? What happens when the haze and smog hide the starry, starry night that speaks of God’s eternal decrees? So often we are told to be careful with how we treat God’s good earth – that we shouldn’t pollute, that we should recycle and cut down on waste; that we should protect the ecosystems for wild animals, preserve the rain forests and wetlands, and be careful about what is dumped into our rivers and streams. These types of “green” arguments are all important, and though their speakers are full of passion on these topics, they are seldom full of religious spirit. Yes, we protect our rivers and forests so that we have clean water to drink and beautiful parks to enjoy. But the deeper religious truth is that we protect the environment because it is a living witness to God. It is part of how we grow in our faith. Caring for the soil unites American, Pakistani, African, and Chinese people of faith on a fundamental level. Seeing the heavens above as a place of God’s handiwork of miraculous complexity, and not a space junkyard or parking lot for killer satellites or long-range nuclear missiles, is a form of global prayer.
The psalmist is right. The heavens and stars may not communicate with words and speech, yet their voice, their silent witness, goes over all the earth. The heavens move by God’s immutable laws at the heart of their being – the same laws that move in us, that make us wise, move us to righteousness, truth and lasting joy. That is why the psalmist begins with the physical laws of creation and moves to the moral-ethical laws of the Lord, and celebrates how they both serve the same spiritual purposes that are “more to be desired than fine gold, and sweeter than honey dripping from the honeycomb.”
But who can fully keep these physical and moral-ethical laws? Who is not guilty of hidden sins and errors? That is why the psalm moves from the heavens above to talk about God’s heaven-sent Spirit within us, that part of God that knows us completely, cleanses us of transgression and makes us anew. It is then that we close our eyes and offer the psalmist’s daily, no, hourly prayer: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you. You, O Lord: my rock – my Grand Canyon, my Sequoia, my distant, spinning galaxy, my all in all – and my redeemer – my healer, my Christ, my Lover, Embracer and Amazing Grace-giver, my all in all.
The author Norman Maclean once wrote: “One of the chief privileges of humanity is to speak for the universe.”1 Given the silent witness of the heavens above, we small beings in a very, very big world have the privilege of speaking for the universe. All such speech should be a prayer – not politics or pragmatism or eco-friendly press releases – but a true, deeply-felt, spiritual prayer. And what should we pray? We are to pray to learn more of God’s natural laws, such as the law of sustainability, for that is what we learn from nature. The earth’s ecosystem is a closed system. Nature recycles everything so that what is wasted or used up becomes part of what is needed for the next cycle of life. Not cradle-to-grave, but cradle-to-cradle designs are how the world works – and so should we.2
Also, we pray to remember to be attentive to details, as God is lovingly attentive to all details in this created world. Remember: We are to supply our local needs first and use local resources whenever possible. When you think of Pittsburgh, or your community within Pittsburgh, include the land, water, air, birds, flora and fauna in your self-definition. Be neighborly towards all things, giving special attention to the old and young. Remember that if the goal of “labor saving” means poor quality, unemployment for others, and any kind of pollution, then it is simply not worth it. Really.3
Final word: A character in Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel asked this question: What is the use of saving a world that has no soul left in it?4Our faith turns the question around and asks us, “Might not we find our souls by working to save the world?”
AMEN