Webmaster's Note: William P. Brown is a Columbia Theological Seminary professor completing a year-long study of biblical resources for environmental stewardship. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is an ordained PCUSA minister. At Columbia, he is a professor of Old Testament focusing on wisdom literature, creation theology and prophets. This is a sermon he preached at Edgewood Presbyterian for Earth Sunday, April 20, 2008.
The Passion of the Creator: God’s Joy to the World
William P. Brown
Sermon given at Edgewood Presbyterian Church
April 20, 2008
John Calvin, that great, austere, resolute founder of the Reformed faith clearly had a favorite verse in this psalm. It’s the one he spilled the most ink on. But it isn’t the verse I would have suspected. It’s not the one referring to God resplendently wrapped in light or God’s thunderous rebuke against the waters or the psalmist’s call to extinguish the wicked, however tempting it might have been for Calvin to use against his enemies.
No, Calvin’s favorite verse is the one that begins:
“wine, which cheers the human heart . . .” (v. 15)
And here is what he had to say:
In these words we are taught that God not only provides for [our] necessity . . . but that in his goodness [God] deals still more bountifully with [us] by cheering [our] hearts with wine and oil. Nature would certainly be satisfied with water to drink; and therefore the addition of wine is owing to God’s superabundant liberality.
Wow, “superabundant liberality,” what a great phrase to use for God! Calvin clearly enjoyed his glass of merlot as much as Luther enjoyed his dark beer. But as Calvin was quick to point out: there is, and I quote, “nothing to which we are more prone than to give way to excess.” And so the rest of his commentary on this one verse, nearly 70% of it, is spent on the virtues of temperance. Of course, God’s gifts are to be enjoyed in moderation, as one would expect from this resolute, tenacious, but perhaps not so austere a figure. After all, Jean Cauvin was French!
But one doesn’t need to be French to savor the earth’s bountiful provisions. For what cheers the heart, brightens the countenance, and strengthens the body are all gifts of God. They also happen to be gifts of the ground. Calvin recognized, as did the psalmist centuries before him, that what the ground produced was for both sustenance and joy, as well as for the exercise of our responsibility.
The psalmist praises God for the grape, the olive, and the grain. These were the prime agricultural products of the Fertile Crescent in ancient times. Now you can find bananas, citrus fruit, and watermelons grown in the Middle East. In any case, the fruit of the earth is not simply to be used and consumed, but to be savored and enjoyed. Indeed, is savoring not the flipside of moderation? The slowing down and lingering over a simple taste or sip and being sufficiently satisfied. Certainly it’s the antithesis of “fast food”!
Well, perhaps we’ve lingered enough over this one verse. Wine, oil, and bread are the signs of God’s superabundant grace. Grace is what this psalm is all about. And it begins with God, enwrapped with light and unfurling the heavens like fabric, the Fabric of the Cosmos (to borrow from the title of a recent book by string theorist Brian Greene.) And if you think that is a startling image, wait till you get to the end of the psalm, where something quite unique is claimed about God.
After calling upon the congregation to rejoice in the LORD, the psalmist exhorts God to “rejoice” in creation.
May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in creation! v. 31
The psalmist humbly requests God to find joy in God’s handiwork, to savor it, to enjoy it. The psalmist commends God’s rejoicing in creation, not just our rejoicing. The language of unabashed joy is rarely attributed to God in the Bible. Typical subjects of “rejoicing” include the individual (104:34) and the community (126:3), and even the extremities of the earth (“coastlands,” 97:1). But nowhere is God said to rejoice, much less exhorted to rejoice! Except here. What does it mean for God to rejoice? What would that sound like? If we take this psalm as the “word of the LORD,” as said in response to its reading this morning, then the psalm is nothing less than God’s fanfare for the common creature! Complete with blaring trumpets and, perhaps, French horns!
But whether we read the psalm or hear it or sing it, we find that much of it is devoted to giving warrant for God’s enjoyment. It gives the reasons why God should enjoy creation, and the main reason is found in creation’s diversity. “How manifold are your works, O LORD! You have made them all in wisdom. The earth is stock full of your creatures!” The psalm presents a shamelessly positive portrayal of the natural world, including the wilderness, which was traditionally considered threatening and chaotic. Instead of “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”, it’s “lions and tigers and bears, AMEN!” (along with those coneys, onagers, and mountain goats). The psalmist celebrates the animal planet and the God who sustains it all in joy.
As a whole, Psalm 104 presents a panoramic sweep of creation from the theological and the cosmological to the ecological and the biological, all bracketed by the doxological. (Now that was a mouthful!) But in its vast coverage of creation, the psalm sets its sights primarily on biology: mountain goats, storks, coneys, lions, and Leviathan all populate the world of the psalm. All are lovingly detailed in a tone of rapturous praise to the creator. Even the trees have standing in Psalm 104:
The trees of the LORD are well watered;
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees. vv. 16-17 (cf. v. 12)
The psalmist lingers admiringly over the mighty cedars of Lebanon, which in his day were the highly prized commodity of ancient empires. Armies from Mesopotamia would march westward, conquering cities and territories in their path, to get to the cedar forests near the Mediterranean seaboard, to cut them down and use the timber for constructing their monumental building projects. These trees once grew in dense forests on the slopes of Lebanon’s mountains. Few trees remain today because of the ravages of ancient imperial regimes.
The psalmist prizes these trees not for their lumber but for their majesty and their power of accommodation, their hospitality. You see, the cedars are literally for the birds! The seemingly minor reference to trees in the psalm is actually crucial to understanding the psalmist’s view of creation as a whole. Most commentators have identified the central theme of provision in the psalm, and appropriately so. God provides drink to wild animals (v. 11), “waters the mountains” and “the trees” (vv. 13, 16), causes “grass to grow for the cattle” (v. 14), provides bread, wine, and oil for human beings (v. 15), and supplies “prey” for the lions (v. 21) as well as food for all creatures “in due season” (v. 27). Provision marks God’s ongoing work of creation. Creation is providential because God is the provider.
But in addition to provision, there is another feature, for which the cedar trees offer but one example. And the clue lies in God’s first act of creation. In the beginning God created a home, a habitat for divinity, and, in turn, established domiciles for every living creature: streams and trees for the birds (vv. 12, 17), mountains for the wild goats (v. 18a), and rocks for the coneys (v. 18b). Even the waters have their “appointed” place (v. 8-9). The lions have their dens, just as humans have their homes (v. 26). The earth is not just a habitat for humanity but habitat for all living kind: “the earth is stock full of your creatures” (v. 24), so the poet proclaims. Indeed, human beings are scarcely mentioned at all until v. 23 (cf. vv. 14-15), and only then along with the lions. You see, the only difference between humans and lions within the created order, according to this psalm, is that the lions just happen to take the “night shift” to pursue their living, whereas most of us go forth during the day to our labors. Day and night, the diurnal and the nocturnal, are all part of creation’s natural rhythm, a rhythm in which each creature has its time and its place. The earth is created to accommodate. Creation is made in the image of habitation (imago habitationis), and joyfully so, because God is creation’s passionate provider.
Indeed, of all the creatures mentioned in the psalm, there is one that seems to inspire God’s joy the most. And like all God’s creatures featured in Psalm 104, this one also has its home in the created order:
There is the sea, both vast and wide . . .
There go the ships, and voila! there is Leviathan,
with which you fashioned to play. vv. 25-26
The vast sea accommodates a multitude of living beings, including the greatest of them all, Leviathan, the monster of the deep. Ship and Leviathan make quite a pair here. Both are bona fide creations, one “man-made” and the other divinely wrought. One skims the surface; the other dwells underneath. Both share the sea, but only one actually inhabits it, and does so solely at God’s good pleasure.
Leviathan’s reputation as a monster of the abyss precedes its appearance in Psalm 104. Elsewhere in biblical tradition, Leviathan is a multi-headed Hydra, God’s mortal enemy destined for destruction. It is a creature clearly not for play but for combat, and its defeat is deemed a necessity for the world’s sake and for God’s. But not in our psalm. No hint of combat is present. God’s alleged enemy is actually God’s playmate. Leviathan is God’s rubber ducky! And can you just imagine how the psalmist imagined God and Leviathan frolicking together in the ocean? I, for one, would want to keep my distance!
And as for humankind in this psalm, we are certainly not the dominant species on the planet, let alone the culmination of creation, because we are not the earth’s only inhabitants. Creation is a shared habitation, and if there is a perfection or ideal presumed in the psalmist’s world, it is the perfection of biodiversity, of the diversity of life and habitat. By listing various animal species, the psalmist offers a selective sample of the vast Encyclopedia of Life (see www.eol.org). As the species of life are varied and numerous, so also are their niches, from towering trees and flowing wadis to mountainous crags and the deep dark sea. In God’s cosmic mansion there are many dwelling places, each fit for each species. Humanity’s place in the varied order of creation is as legitimate as that of any other species, along with the coney and the onager. There is living room for all, according to the psalmist, even if the lions get control of the TV remote at night. And God loves them all, which I guess that makes God a biophile, a lover of all things biological!
The great evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what biology could say about God. He replied, “I’m really not sure except that the Creator, if he exists, must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.” There are in fact 400,000 species of beetles; they make up close to 25% of all known animal species. But whether beetles or Behemoths, God loves them all, God the biophile.
The Wicked
But for all of the psalm’s praise over nature’s goodness, its beauty and its bounty, the psalm ends on a rather sour note. Did you catch it? There is something wicked in the land of “lions and tigers and bears, AMEN.” At its conclusion, the psalm exhorts God to vanquish the wicked (v. 35a). The psalm’s cosmic scope, which includes even the monstrous Leviathan within the orbit of God’s providential care, has no room for the wicked. For many readers, such a grim ending ruins the psalm’s wide-eyed wonder about the world. But for the ancient listener, this imprecation against the wicked made perfect sense in a world that was otherwise perceived as harmoniously vibrant, notwithstanding the one distinctly human glitch. You see, by cursing the wicked, the psalmist has transferred the evil and chaos traditionally assigned to mythically monstrous figures like Leviathan and placed them squarely on human shoulders. Conflict, the psalmist claims, is most savage, most cruel, most wicked, among human beasts.
We don’t know whom the psalmist had in mind when he called God to consume the wicked. But whoever they were, they apparently had a nasty habit of fragmenting creation’s integrity in much the same way that the curse shatters the psalm’s picturesque poetry. Positively, this grim conclusion rescues the psalm from viewing the world through rose-colored spectacles, from romanticizing nature. The psalmist acknowledges both predator and prey. Here is an authentic assessment of creation as it stands, not as it once was in some pristine state or as it will be in some future fulfillment. Here is a world in which the purveyors of chaos are not mythically monstrous—monsters made in the image of animals—but rather are monstrously human.
Yes, the psalmist helps us to see the enemy, and it is us. No other species has changed the shape of the earth more than we have, and particularly within the last fifty years. The power that we wield exceeds anything else on earth. And what are we doing with that power? We are destroying precisely those things that the psalmist celebrates and commends to God’s enjoyment: habitats and their inhabitants.
The evidence is clear: with the accumulation of industrial greenhouse gases, we are making this planet increasingly inhospitable for all of God’s creatures, including ourselves. Even at the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (380 parts per million), numerous damaging impacts are already being felt: increasing acidity of the oceans, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, increasing weather severity, numerous extinctions, widespread mosquito-borne diseases, and the displacement of peoples due to drought and flooding. And these are only a few of the accumulative effects of industrial emissions. And I won’t mention the ominous tipping points, those environmental triggers that will kick global warming into irreversible overdrive. But the kicker is: we have lit the fuse, and time is running short.
Such are the data of danger, provided by the best that science has to offer. We can no longer deny or rest complacent about the chaos that we are wreaking upon the earth. Paul Ehrlich, the great paleo-anthropologist, likens earth to a spaceship that we are piloting, with all the other species on earth acting as the rivets that hold the spaceship together. Those rivets are popping at an alarming rate, and the more that come off, the more likely the spaceship is to fall apart. The IPCC has estimated that more than 40% of known plant and animal species could become extinct by 2100. As one of our hymns poignantly expresses, “How does the creature cry Woe; How does the creature cry Save?” (Hymn #272)
And so I ask, how do we cry, “Enough!”? As followers of Christ, how do we respond to the inarticulate cries of God’s creatures? How do we respond to the scientific data of despair? We do what Christians have done for nearly two millennia in the face of great crises: we too cry out with those who suffer, with those who have been displaced from home and shelter, with those who are hungry, those who are on the brink of extinction. We join our voices to the groanings of creation. And as we do so, we confess, we repent, we hope, and we act.
First, we acknowledge that this earth of ours is not really ours, and certainly not ours to destroy. The earth is the LORD’s. To call the earth “creation” is not to raise our fists against the Darwinian evolutionists; it is not to engage in a culture war over the Bible’s allegedly literal truths. The Bible can take care of itself. No, to call the earth “creation” is to acknowledge divine ownership of all that is. We are only the tenants, but we have acted more like negligent landlords. We have recast ourselves into the imago deletoris, the image of the destroyer, instead of preserving our God-given identity as the imago Dei, the image of the life-giving, life-sustaining God.
We must acknowledge the victims we have made through our consumptive lifestyles and resource-devouring policies. We must compensate the poor nations, which have suffered the brunt of global warming thus far, particularly the millions of environmental refugees who have had to flee their homelands because of drought, floods, famine, melting tundra, and rising sea levels.
We are turning God’s Joy to the World into God’s Despair of the World. God’s fanfare is failing because the orchestra is losing its members. The psalmist reminds us that we cannot take for granted creation’s gifts, nor can we take for granted God’s joy in giving them.
And so we must reorient ourselves to the world and to God. A turning around is called for, and that is what repentance is all about. To preserve habitats we must change our habits, namely, our habits of consumption. There is a way forward: the psalm claims divine biophilia, God’s love of all things biological, as a model for humanity’s role in the world. Delighting in creation has nothing to do with exploiting the world for the common greed. Rather it has all to do with receiving the world’s abundance for the common good. Natural habitats are to be preserved, not because of self-interest but because of God’s interest, because we know that God does not value the world for its uniformity but for its awe-inspiring diversity, from lions to Leviathans, from humans to hyenas.
We acknowledge nature’s divinely wrought and divinely enjoyed goodness. Ecology, the psalmist would remind us, is an exercise of joy. Delight celebrates the world’s sufficiency, a sufficiency to be shared rather than sold. The psalm places God’s joy squarely upon the shoulders of human responsibility. So Calvin may very well be right: “When God sees that the good things which he bestows are polluted by our corruptions, God ceases to take delight in bestowing them.” “The stability of the world,” Calvin states, “depends on this rejoicing of God in his works.” Harsh words from a not so austere churchman. But the psalmist would agree, wholeheartedly. The creator’s delight in creation requires reciprocal engagement on the part of the creature. It is incumbent upon God’s most powerful creatures to ensure that divine delight is sustained so that the world is sustained.
And so as wine serves to “cheer the human heart” (v. 15a), so God savors creation, not as its consumer but as its provider and sustainer. And so should we. As the drama of God’s providential care continues from creation to Christ, we find that God’s “joy to the world” can trump even sin and death. Indeed, it was for “the joy that was set before him” that Jesus endured the cross (Heb 12:2). That joy, the joy of resurrection, the joy of new creation, we receive from God in Christ, and it is with that joy that you and I go forth, go forth so that “the mountains and the hills . . . shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isa 55:12), so that all creatures of our God and King, of every species, can lift up their voice and sing: Alleluia!