INTRODUCTION TO THEME

Hi everyone, today is our 2nd Sunday in the Season of Creation, and our theme is “Part of Creation”, following on from last week’s theme of “Called to Care”.

The focus last week was, as you might recall, on the great “Call to Stewardship” of Genesis 1:26-28, God’s call to all humans to steward, to care for and nurture, God’s creation – on God’s behalf, or, as the scripture actually says, in God’s image, likeness – like God, we too can love and care for creation. Last Sunday we saw that the Call to Stewardship is not a command, a burdensome obligation or responsibility that God puts on us. Rather, the call is an invitation, a gift, a grace, an amazing opportunity God offers us, to care for and love Creation – that we can take up, therefore, out of freedom, not out of a feeling of obligation.

This week we’ll reflect on the wonderful Psalm 104 – usually referred to as “A Hymn to the Creator”:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment.” [Verse 1-2a]

What we’ll focus on is the wonderful truth that we are intimately and integrally, part of creation, not separate from it, not special in anyway – except and only in the amazing opportunity of stewardship God offers us.

BIBLE READING: Psalm 104: 14-15, 27-28

14-15You cause the grass to grow for the cattle and plants for people to cultivate, to bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine and bread to strengthen the human heart.

27-28These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.

REFLECTION

“You cause the grass to grow for the cattle and plants for people to cultivate, to bring forth food from the earth, and wine … and oil ….. and bread ….. to gladden …. and strengthen the human heart.”

Yay! Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it! We are part of creation, everything is interconnected, and the abundant, loving God is behind it all. If this sounds a little bit human-centric – we’ll come back to that a bit later – then further on in the psalm the psalmist declares:

“There is the sea, great and wide; creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great…… These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.”

So, it’s not just about us! Yes, we are part of this great creation, intimately and integrally connected to all other creatures, and, indeed, to the natural, physical environment; and yes, behind it all, driving the whole process, powerfully and lovingly, is the great Creator and Provider, God on high.

It’s poetry, however, it’s not literally true! To be sure, it wasn’t just poetry back then, when it was written, in the 10th century BC. We can only assume that the psalmist – quite likely the great King David himself – actually believed what they said was literally true: that God does somehow cause grass to grow, and does make sure all living things have enough to eat.

Back then everybody believed in Creation, everyone had a Creationist worldview; the psalmists, all the Old Testament writers, all the New Testament writers; they all, without exception, wrote, 100%, from a Creation perspective. And the Creation narrative at the start of Genesis is basically common to all traditional religions world-wide, apart from local variations in detail – so, yes, everyone in the world at that time was a Creationist!

Including the writer of Psalm 104. The idea that God directly makes the grass grow and makes sure all animals, including humans, have enough to eat, comes out of that Creationist view of the world, which imagines an omnipotent God who creates the world in the beginning, then controls it and keeps it ticking along ever after. But we know now that the universe we live in is an evolved, not a created universe; and there is a world – a universe – of difference between the two world-views – ne’er the twain shall meet!

So, yes, the Psalm is poetry, it’s not literally true. Does this then invalidate the message – that we are an integral part of the world, intimately connected with all things? Well, as it turns out, no! What I want to try to explain to you now is that when we move from the old narrative of creation to the new evolution narrative, not only is the wonderful message of the Psalm not invalidated, it’s actually greatly enhanced.

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Remember, first, how the evolution narrative goes. The universe was not created all at once, complete, but born, about 13.6 billion years ago, from literally nothing – no space, no time, no matter yet – in a Big Bang – whoosh!! (well, because there was no space, time or matter at that point, it would actually have been completely and utterly silent 😊). “Born” – “the birth of the universe” – that’s how scientists actually describe it. And, right from the start, this new-born baby universe is a living thing, it has a life of its own, it’s like a sort of organism. It starts growing, expanding, evolving, it begins to develop organized structures, like atomic nuclei, atoms and molecules; then heavenly bodies with internal structure, like stars and planets; then planetary systems, solar systems, even galaxies with organized internal structures, and then there are galaxy clusters with distinctive internal structures. Yes, it’s alive! All this organization, at every level of the universe, from the very small to the very large, is the unmistakable hallmark of life. The universe is not a giant automated clockwork machine, as it used to be pictured before the emergence of modern geology, evolutionary biology and cosmology, but a growing, evolving, living thing.

Where does this life – the life of the universe itself and everything in it – come from? Science itself has no idea – it is completely agnostic in relation to the cause of the Big Bang – it just doesn’t know, and some scientists even reject the notion that we ever could know.

But the psalmist knows, the writers of Genesis know, we know: the life of the universe and everything in it comes from … God! Far more than just being the creator of the universe, God is therefore the Divine Parent who gives birth to it. The universe is the literal offspring of God, who gives it a life and freedom of its own.

Divine Parent? That’s exactly how Jesus always referred to God, isn’t it? – “Father”, “my Father in heaven”. And Jesus was “the Son”, the literal offspring, of God. Yes, Jesus, very definitely has something to do with all this; but first let’s continue and finish the evolution story, then we’ll come back to Jesus.

Eventually, maybe about 4 billion years ago, organic life itself emerges on Planet Earth. Do you know that every organism, every species that has ever lived, plant, animal or whatever, is descended from one original organism, the LUCA, or Last Universal Common Ancestor. Not Adam and Eve, LUCA – the theoretical first organism with a cellular structure to be able to successfully survive and reproduce. It’s an amazing story. What it means is that we are all, every single organism ever, related – the life in all of us comes, ultimately, from the same source. And if you back track through the LUCA to the Big Bang and the birth of the universe 9.6 billion years before that, this same source is, ultimately, the great God on high, the Divine Parent. So, yes, no longer in a human-centric way, we are part of creation, all life on earth and in the universe is one, and God is truly behind it all, as a parent is to their offspring!

Can you see, therefore, that the evolutionary narrative is actually a great improvement on the creation narrative in emphasizing the interconnectedness of all life? More than just being the creator of everything, God is our ultimate parent – “Father”, or “Mother”, or “Mother/Father” – whichever way you want to put it!

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But what exactly does Jesus have to do with all this? Well, the clue to it lies in the human-centredness of the psalmist’s viewpoint that we noted earlier. The psalms are wonderful – beautiful prayers, poems, songs; heartfelt, profound – but they are, generally, you’d have to say, very human-centred – very, dare I say it, ME-centred. One minute the psalmist is crying out saying “why have you abandoned … ME … O God?!”; the next minute they are extolling the virtues of and expressing gratitude to the same God for their wonderful provision for and salvation of, yes, ME – us, humans, the chosen people, the special ones.

Jesus came to change all that – all that human-centredness, ME-centredness, self-centredness. All of Jesus’ teaching was about taking your eyes off yourself – off ME – for a change, and looking out for others. Changing from self-centredness to selflessness: the Metanoia, or conversion that we’re always talking about, this new way of living focussed not on self but on caring for and serving others and the world – including, of course, stewardship of the environment, of nature, which is our focus in this Season of Creation.

When you let go of your self-focus, your whole way of seeing the world changes, you start seeing the world more objectively, you start seeing yourself more objectively. It disrupts all your old ways of thinking – and yes, in time in human history, this disruption gradually impacts our scientific vision of the world, and the old human-centred, earth-centred cosmology and creation narrative gradually give way to the completely objective, evidence-based approach of modern science, which allows us to, so to speak, zoom out and, for the first time, actually see this amazing living, evolving universe, of which we are but a part, intimately and integrally connected to all things.

Yes, Jesus, the Metanoia, is responsible for all that. On the other hand, however, the psalmist, the old religious narrative of creation, are actually right: we are special! But not because of what we are, rather because of what we can, uniquely, do for the world, for nature. We humans have a choice. We can choose to keep on exploiting it and wrecking it, and maybe one day end up wrecking it completely – no other living creature is more powerful and more destructive than us. Or we can choose to do the opposite – be the ones who intentionally care for and nurture the natural world – no other living creature is remotely capable of doing that. Yes, we have a choice, we are special, we are in imago dei, in God’s likeness, uniquely, in having the capability, the potential, to love the world in the amazing way that God does.

Through faith, belief, trust in Jesus, therefore, let us whole-heartedly, joyfully embrace this wonderful thing God calls us to, this gift, this opportunity they offer us, to be the stewards, to love, care for and nurture God’s beautiful creation!

“May the glory of the Lord endure forever [these are the final verses of Psalm 104] ….  who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to them, for I rejoice in the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord! Amen.”