The Inconvenient Truth of the Bible

Good morning, friends,

I want to preach on the psalm this morning. It may seem like an odd choice, given the edgy matter of divorce that comes up in today’s Gospel. I would point out that I preached on Mark 10 from this pulpit the last time it came up in our lectionary cycle. But I would also point out that Psalm 8, in its own prescient way, touches on the subject of divorce. Not the kind of divorce that occurs between humans, but the slow-rolling divorce now taking place between humankind and the earth that God has entrusted to our stewardship. This is what I want to preach about this morning—our divorce from the land, a land that shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but our relationship to it. When we turn a blind eye or abuse our dominion over the natural world, the consequences are staggering and deadly.

I saw this firsthand when I was in Asheville, N.C. last weekend. By some miracle on Saturday, I was able to navigate an obstacle course of downed trees on Highway 26 and make my way southeast to Charlotte, where I caught a flight home to Washington. I saw firsthand the devastation of the flooding on Friday afternoon when I tried to drive north on I-26 to Johnson City, Tennessee only to have to turn around because a house had just floated across four lanes of highway. You’ve seen the images. You’ve read the horrific stories about people and pets and livestock being carried away to their deaths. There was no power, no cell coverage, no internet, no water, but by the grace of God I had three-quarters of a tank of gas. Most folks had no fuel and couldn’t escape like I could. They waited helplessly at gas stations in hopes the power would miraculously flicker on. What Hurricane Helene left in its wake is nothing short of apocalyptic. When a storm of this magnitude unleashes itself, it renders us humans helpless; it literally puts us in our place.

There can be no more denying that the earth is warming due to our reliance on and burning of fossil fuels. Escalating carbon emissions are responsible for scorching temperatures, relentless wildfires, massive floods, storms, rising sea levels. Scientists believe climate change created a 50% increase in rainfall in Georgia and North Carolina during Hurricane Helene. The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described Helene’s rainfall as “astronomical,” telling the Associated Press the amount of rainfall, 40 trillion gallons, was enough to fill Lake Tahoe – with its depth of 1,645ft and surface area of 191 sq miles – or the Dallas Cowboys’ 80,000-seat stadium 51,000 times over.¹ Now try to wrap your mind around that!

Please bear with me. I will connect the dots to our scripture this morning. First, I want to recite the 8^th Psalm as interpreted by the contemporary translation of the Message Bible. You may read along in your bulletin—that translation is from our Book of Common Prayer.

1 God, brilliant Lord,
yours is a household name.
2 Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.
3-4 I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
5-8 Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden’s dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us stewards of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.
9 God, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.

A stunning amount of theology is packed into those nine verses. At its essence it celebrates the Creator’s magnificence and the God-given dignity of every human being. The glory of God is manifest in the night sky and in the songs of babes. What is so startling is that God has gifted us a share of God’s own dignity by conferring on us dominion over the rest of creation; this we heard in our passage from Genesis this morning.

There is a sense in which Psalm 8 comes down to just one question asked of God by the psalmist: How in the world are you even able to know us at all? Job asked this very question: “What are human beings that you make so much of them, that you set your mind them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?” (7: 1-18). Dwarfed and mystified by the expanse of a starry sky on a cloudless night, the psalmist feels like a speck of dust. That God’s eyes could even pick him out much less care for him and perhaps even love him addles his imagination. God created us a little lower than the angels and still adorns us with glory and honor. It’s almost too much to bear. So the psalmist throws up his arms and exclaims, “God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world” (vs. 9).

Last Sunday Bishop Baxter preached that if we build our lives, our faith and our Cathedral church on the rock, it shall stand. What is the rock, he asked? He quoted the King James translation of John 3:16 in response: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” His point was that the state of our nation’s soul—marred with its hate and bitterness; uncertainty and hopelessness—is causing us to perish. Our spirits are perishing. Our communities are perishing. Our politics are perishing. Our religions are perishing.”²  This is what the world looks like without Christ Jesus the rock. I will go a step further and say that our planet is perishing.

My own theology has evolved about this scripture verse thanks to Dr. Norman Wirzba, a Professor of Theology and Director of Research for the Office of Climate and Sustainability at Duke University.  As a matter of fact, he was here last month speaking on a panel co-sponsored by our Creation Care Ministry.

Dr. Wirzba teaches that the advent of Christ was made possible by God’s love for the world — not only God’s love for humans and for the heavens, but for the world, the terra firma. What God also loves is the dirt, the soil, the dust—the landscape under our feet from which we came and to which we shall return. I was blown away when I first heard him teach this theology because I realized that for my entire Bible-reading life, I had substituted “people” for “world” without even thinking about it—something which shortchanges how expansive God’s love truly is.

Wirzba teaches that the sabbath, not humankind, is the pinnacle of God’s creative work. He says, “As Christians, we would often rather look up to heaven than be brought face to face with the carnage of the environment around us.”  His argument is this: How can we say we worship a God who loves the world but not give our love to the world at the same time? You see, according to his theology, it doesn’t make sense to talk about human flourishing if everything we need, in the form of water, and air, and food, doesn’t flourish at the same time. It is not an either/or proposition.

Quite simply, one cannot fully worship the Creator and at the same time destroy their creation. It is important to understand that this rock of ours, this canopy of sacred life of which we have dominion, not domination, is a multi-layered sculpture that reaches from the unfathomable ocean depths to the moss on the forest floor to the snow-capped summit of Mount Everest. And to every living being and every which way in between!

Environmental scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her extraordinary book, Braiding Sweetgrass, asks, “How in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?”  She argues that early in our nation’s history, a social construct was invented by European settlers who believed that land was property, real estate, capital—“a commodity to be bought and sold” and that we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.³ Case in point: the New York Times reported on Thursday that over the last 15 years the North Carolina state legislature “has rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes.” The home building industry in the state has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher and more expensive standards.⁴

As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Dr. Kimmerer understands land not as property, but a gift. She describes “Land as sustainer of life. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as a connection to our ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self.”⁵

This now brings me back to the Psalm and the two seemingly contradictory truths it reveals.  Human beings are laughably insignificant. We are specks in the big picture of God’s grandeur.  But we are at the same time glorious because God considers us partners and co-creators, caretakers and stewards of all that God has made. It is fitting that the Episcopal Church’s “Season of Creation” will culminate this afternoon with the celebration of the Feast of St. Francis and the blessing of the animals.

Psalm 8 is a wakeup call, the Inconvenient Truth of the Bible. We religious folk too easily forget that we are dependent on God in Christ even as we exercise the dominion God gave us over the earth.

Well then…what do we do? First, we must not despair. Despair begets paralysis, and paralysis robs us of agency. Second, we must see clearly what we have wrought: and make amends by pursing restoration. We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we start doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen.⁶ The psalm teaches us that the relationship between the self and the world is reciprocal; as we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.  As Christians we must believe that our redemption is tied to the redemption of all of creation.  How do we know this? Because God so loves the world.

¹ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/01/hurricane-helene-rainfall
² The Rt. Rev. Nathan Baxter, Sermon preached 9.29.24 at Washington National Cathedral
³ Kimmerer Wall, Robin, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013, p. 17.
⁴ How the North Carolina Legislature Left Homes Vulnerable to Helene, by Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times, October 3, 2024.
⁵ Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 338.
⁶ Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 328.