A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

May 26, 2002 | Trinity Sunday

Every Blessed Thing

Calum I. MacLeod
Interim Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Genesis 1:1–10, 26–2:4
Matthew 6:25–29

Two stories about creation as an introduction to frame our reflections this morning:

In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, God spoke with the messenger Gabriel and said to Gabriel, “We’ve got the planet ready and we’ve got that big continent on the top part that’s called Europe. We’re going to put an island off it past the channel there, two big islands, and the top part of the main island, we’re going to call that Scotland.”

“Okay,” said Gabriel. “We’ll do that.”

God said, “And Scotland is going to have beautiful hills and mountains and lovely scenery. It’s going to be the most beautiful land that we’re fashioning: glens and lochs and the seas will be teeming with fish and salmon in the rivers.”

“Okay, we’ll do that,” said Gabriel. “We can sort that out.”

“And the people,” said God, “the people are going to be the finest, kindest, nicest, most friendly people in the world. They will be well educated and great inventors and travel the world and everyone will know of Scotland.”

“Done” said Gabriel.

“And,” said God, “we’re going to give them some special things. We’re going to give them a great game to play; we’ll give them golf. And they will enjoy themselves well; when they are relaxing, we’ll give them Scotch whisky as their drink.”

At this point Gabriel looked kind of quizzically at God and said, “Just tell me, why are you being so kind to these people? I mean this isn’t the children of Israel we’re talking about; this isn’t the chosen people.”

“Ahhh, just wait,” said God. “I’m going to give them the English as neighbors.”

I know—not a very nice joke, but you see I’m bitter because the soccer World Cup is starting this week and Scotland are not in the competition, but the English and the even the USA are!

A second story for you—more of an image to hold in your mind’s eye. It’s an image that I came across this week in the New York Times. I’m sure some of you have seen it, as well. It was a photograph beside a story. The photograph was of two chickens: a rooster with a big red crown and a hen beside it pecking away. These chickens had been genetically modified to be featherless. They were bald. And as I looked at this image, I thought at first that it was a hoax. I thought it may have been a leftover from April Fool’s Day. And then it struck me as being kind of a joke, these stupid looking featherless chickens pecking about.

Then I couldn’t get that image out of my head. As time went on this week, I started to develop a sense of violation about it, these bizarre, monstrous creatures. As I thought more about that reaction, I realized that part of it is personal. My grandmother and grandfather kept chickens beside their house on the Island of Lewis. We went to visit them every summer. They had a plot of land for some root vegetables to grow and a few sheep out in the pasture, the croft; and beside the house in the chicken run and pecking around the house were the chickens, which we would feed with the leftovers from dinner or the potato peelings. They would be clucking about during the day, and myself and my brothers and sister would be vying to be the one who would go to the hen house and reach in and get the warm, fresh eggs that had just been laid, hoping that the one that we got for breakfast would be a double yolk. If you’ve ever had a proper, real, free-range egg, the yolk is rich and creamy and the white is textured and beautiful. It’s not the kind of flaccid, smooth thing you get these days from battery hens.

I realize now that chickens have some meaning for me. They constitute an important memory for me—memory of childhood, of my grandparents, of family summers on Lewis—and that seemed to be violated by what this scientist had done.

And then that disturbed sense became bigger. It went on to a kind of cosmic scale. It felt to me like it was a violation of God’s whole creation. Now I know that this may be because I have been reflecting all this week on the text that we heard read this morning, so it is on my mind. Yet it seemed to me as if a beautiful painting had been scarred or vandalized; that violence had been done to something which in itself was whole and beautiful and perfect—a chicken.

I think this may be a helpful way to orient ourselves to the text this morning. That is, to see creation, God’s creation, as described in the first chapter of Genesis, as a kind of work of art; see the formless void as a blank canvas that the artist God transforms with vivid color and diversity and beauty. Or as a piece of paper onto which an intricate and beautiful poem, Creation, is inscribed.

So what I mean is that as we read the narrative of the seven days of creation, we’re not looking at a scientific paper. It is not a suggestion of the theory of the process by which the universe as we know it came into being. We are not looking at an attempt to encompass or combat the discoveries of the last century in areas like biology or physics or cosmology.

It is a statement of faith. A statement of faith, as the American commentator Walter Brueggemann puts it, “in the form of a poetic narrative.” It is a poem that we are hearing read. God, the character of God in this poem, is not a philosophical category or an abstract concept, The Prime Cause, the First Mover or “that which came before the Big Bang.” God is a poet.

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” we affirm when we stand and say the Apostles’ Creed together as we do each week in worship. “Maker of heaven and earth.” I love that phrase because in the Old Scots language from around the fourteenth century, the word maker means “poet,” someone who made images and metaphors with words and cadences and rhythm.

God speaks creation. God said, “Let there be,” and there was. You see it is only recently, say in the last few hundred years, that poets have been writers.

Before books and printing, poets weren’t writers, they were speakers: the Norse sagas, the Celtic bards in Wales and Scotland and Ireland; the poetic tradition we have in the Bible—all started as oral tradition. Poems made and passed down and remembered and retold and changed. God speaks. God creates. God is the “Maker,” the poet who, to paraphrase Paul in Romans chapter 4, “calls the world into being.”

So our text this morning is a poem. A poem about the Great Poet, the Maker of that which is, made out of love for us.

I would have loved to have had the time this morning to hear that whole chapter read so that in worship you would get the cadences and the flow and the rhythm. Why not do it yourself. This afternoon, if you have a moment, or this week, take out your Bible and take ten minutes and read Genesis chapter 1, the seven days of creation. Follow the structure and orderliness of each day of creation:

There was evening and morning.
God said, “Let there be.”
And it was so.
God saw that it was good.
There was evening and morning.

And so the rhythm continues.

Walter Brueggemann again: “That time pattern comments about the good order of creation,” which for me describes something of a work of art. Not order as the eighteenth-century Deists understood order, in the sense of God being like a watchmaker, working intricately with a timepiece and designing and creating it and then standing back after it’s wound up to let it flow of its own accord. Not order like that; rather order as in a painting or a work of art or a poem. The maker steps back. Steps back during the process of creation to review, or survey, the work that’s been done. “And God saw that it was good. . . . God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”

“Good” not as a moral statement, not good as opposed to evil, but good meaning lovely, beautiful. The Anchor Bible renders it, “It was pleasing in God’s sight.” Creation was pleasing. Well, of course it was: the variety, the rhythms, the color, the diversity, the beauty, the seasons—all reflecting the great goodness of God.

In the old Scottish tradition of religious Gaelic poetry, which was collected in the 1900s in a collection called the Carmina Gadelica: The Songs of the Gaels, was this poem or prayer or hymn of creation:

Each plant in its growing,
each shape in the strand
are filled with God’s blessing,
are stirred by God’s hand.

“Filled with God’s blessing . . . stirred by God’s hand.” We encounter God’s presence in the created order around us. The poets realized this. Robert Burns, the Scottish poet who on turning up a mouse with his plow sees in that a message about the human condition and our relationship to God. Or Gerard Manley Hopkins, perhaps the greatest of the nature poets, who, when he saw a falcon hovering overhead, recognized in that the very movement and being, the presence of Christ, so much so, that he wrote the poem “The Windhover,” subtitling it “To Christ, Our Lord.” And here, in a piece of prose about the creation from Neil Gunn, the fine Scottish novelist, “The Ancient Landscape”:

The wind blew steadily and, though the sky was overcast, it fanned the face with a fresh warmth. Very soft it felt, like a petal between fingertips. Reflective fingertips touched her cheeks. Eyes steadied on the far sea, glimmered; North-west to north, to the Arctic. A grey haze for horizon, for the illimitable; Space vast and quiet and strong. The breasts of the hills about her with the sea strip yonder like a shining doorstep to the uttermost. Magnificent the sweep of the spirit from the grey Arctic to the still, dark mountains, to the far cones hazed in purple, south-west to west. Hazed sky, too, high overhead; and passing from peak to sea through corrie and heather and myrtle, the wind, the soft warm August wind. Yet for all its breadth and sentinel grandeur, this land was in some curious way intimate and known of the spirit that swept and bathed.

I bet you‘ve been somewhere like that. Somewhere where grandeur becomes intimate, where God’s presence is felt. And there, the intimations of the Trinity, the presence of God’s Spirit, God’s breath, God’s wind that moved over the water in creation. God in relationship to us, God’s grace in the gifts of creation, of forgiveness, of the presence of the Spirit; creation suffused with that grace.

George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community in Scotland and a beautiful writer of prayers in praise of creation, in his prayer entitled “The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory” has this line: “If you turn but a stone, an angel moves.’’

God present, as MacLeod put it, “in every blessed thing.”

This is why Jesus could lift up the birds of the air and the lilies of the field as examples of God’s providence and our need to trust God.

“Every blessed thing” infused with the spirit of the maker God, united, as the writer of Ephesians has it, in Christ.

Every blessed thing, every blessed thing—even chickens!

What have we done? Are featherless chickens pleasing to God, or to us; are they “good”? And that, I think, is only one bizarre example of humanity’s ability to destroy and do violence to the gift of creation.

This is Memorial Day weekend when, rightly, we take time to remember and give thanks for the sacrifice of those who gave their all. But let us also remember that in war and violence the earth suffers too and knows sacrifice. The green fields of France mown down in the First World War; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, London blitzed, Dresden carpet bombed. You name the conflict and you will know violence to the earth. And the litany goes on: destruction of forests, raping wildernesses for oil, scarring the landscape with open cast mines.

From “The Brief Statement of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (USA)”: “We threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”

People in New York City, who because of an act of violence now know only a scar where there was once something of beauty and awe We threaten death to the planet.

And then, as I was reading this week, a moment of grace from an unlikely source. In an essay by a novelist called Bret Lott, this quotation, which comes from the last scene of Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator. This is the monologue at the end the film:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity, more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.

I am not anti-science. I am not a “Luddite.” I don’t think we should go back to prescientific days. But God grant that we might find some balance and learn—to be subtle, to know kindness, to find partnership with the Maker in creation. These are words of Shirley Erena Murray, a very fine modern hymnwriter from New Zealand:

Touch the earth lightly, use the earth gently,
nourish the life of the world in our care:
gift of great wonder, ours to surrender,
trust for the children, tomorrow will bear.

Amen.