2022.06.12 | Praise We Now
“Praise We Now”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
Jun 12, 2022 - Trinity Sunday
If you have ever had the honor of sleeping under the Milky Way in some place far from city lights, Psalm 8 will speak to you of awe and wonder.
The Psalmist looks at the magnificence of the starry, starry sky above him and he has three thoughts:
The first is to praise God for what he sees above him:
How majestic is God’s name!!
Here is God’s essence.
Here, he sings, is God’s glory on full display for all to see.
But it is not just beauty and majesty. The Psalmist senses God’s strength and power in what he sees around him in nature.
Perhaps because he feels weak and childish in comparison, he praises God with hopeful words: surely the praise of children and infants is how God protects us from our enemies.
In the face of God’s power, which even children recognize, the Psalmist sees that we are weak, we are insignificant, we are vulnerable.
Pondering both God’s power and our own vulnerability, the Psalmist arrives at his third thought and asks God:
Why are you mindful of humans and why, oh why, have you given us so much control over your Creation?
The magnificence of nature evokes awe first, and then wonder: who are we in this scenario. We appear to be both terribly weak and limited and yet charged with responsibility for what we see around us.
Ponder this conundrum under a night sky and you might come to a peaceful conclusion that each of us individually and all of us collectively are rather trivial in the grander scheme of what God is accomplishing in this universe.
Our time on earth is short, like the flower, and our importance, our impact is not likely to be either great or permanent.
There is comfort in this conclusion, for we can rely on what Jesus said: God cares for us as God cares for the sparrow and the lily.
To know your place in the universe can feel like putting down a huge burden. One of the gifts of faith is to know that though we are small, we are valued.
Another conclusion is to focus not on the night sky or our role but on the idea that God has given us control, rule, or dominion over everything God’s hands have made.
Many have concluded and built empires upon the idea that everything in the natural world is ours to cultivate, excavate, extract, and use as we see fit.
A useful conclusion for us economically and technologically, often at the expense of the planet as a whole.
As many have noted, this view, however, keeps us looking at our hands rather than the majesty of God’s creation.
What does God think of us? What does God want from us? Are we to live peacefully in faith, knowing that we are a small but valued part of God’s grand scheme? Or are we to live as if we are God’s agent on Earth?
Each of us have to answer this question again and again as we travel through life.
It can be confusing for us. As the journalists say, we are embedded in a greater human response to the conditions that surround us. We cannot always opt for a peaceful faith life when the engines of capitalism continue to grind around us, both for our benefit and against our future.
Yet, choose we must or the choice gets made for us.
There is perhaps another way. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a third way of thinking about God, humans, and nature.
At the heart of her world view, forged from Native wisdom and environmental biology, is the idea of reciprocity and gift giving. Stated most simply, she believes that the earth gives us gifts and that we in turn should give the earth gifts. From our mutual gift-giving, the earth and its people will be sustained and will flourish.1
She says take only what you need and use what you take and remember that what comes to you is a gift and you should be motivated to make a gift in return.
There is a man in Oregon who planted a forest on land that had been clear cut for lumber.
He planted 13,000 trees and before he died in 2004, he said: “I may heal the land. Yet I have little doubt of the direction that the real benefits flow. In restoring the land, I restore myself.”2
I hope when you look at the night sky, you will be filled with awe and wonder and I hope you will praise God for both beauty and majesty.
As you ponder the question the Psalmist gave us 3,000 years ago, may you decide that your life is a gift and all that you owe anyone is to make the gift of yourself to the world. Amen.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Ibid, page 290.