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May 6, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Praise and Creation

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 13:1–9
Galatians 5:22–23

Psalm 148
Isaiah 65:17–22
Revelation 21:1–6

“Praise the name of the Lord,
for he commanded and they were created.”

Psalm 148:5 (NRSV)

Enjoy the earth gently
Enjoy the earth gently
For if the earth is spoiled
It cannot be repaired
Enjoy the earth gently

Yoruba poem
(West Africa)

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There’s a new photo in my office. A photo that has sparked the interest of some of my colleagues and people who’ve passed through the office. I should be clearer: it’s not a new photo; in fact it’s a very old photograph but one that I received recently.

It is a photograph that was found by my eldest brother while he was doing some research into family archives back home in Scotland. It’s a grainy black-and-white photograph coming from the early years of the twentieth century, and it’s a photograph of a fishing boat under sail at sea. You can see quite clearly from the photograph the name of the fishing boat. It’s called Muirneag (pronounced Mower-nag), named after one of the mountains on the Isle of Lewis, where my family comes from.

The fishing boat belonged to my great-grandfather. His name was Alexander, and he was known universally as Sandy Muirneag because of his fame as a fisherman. The Muirneag was a significant boat not only because it was my great-grandfather’s fishing boat but because it was the last of its particular class of boat to fish for herring around the northern coast of the UK. It was called a Zulu class boat: the boat only went under wind power. It had—for the sailors among you—a lug sail, which meant to change direction you had to bring the sail down and change the direction; there was no boom. (For those of you who are not sailors, just forget that last sentence.)

In that boat with my great-grandfather worked all of his sons who survived the First World War. They all had times aboard that boat, following the shoals of herring around from the west coast of Scotland through to the North Sea and down to the northern parts of the east coast of England.

I remember a conversation with my great-uncle, my great-grandfather’s youngest son, the brother of my grandfather, one day when visiting him. He was speaking about his life as a fisherman who fished all his life. He spoke of the days on the Muirneag and how they would follow the shoals of herring around the coast and when they had a full catch they would put into the closest port and dump the catch there and then head back around following the shoals; this he described as being the time of the harvest. It’s a harvest of fish because after they had followed the herring around the coast for some months they would then return back to their homes in their villages on the island and till the soil, farm the land, keep some sheep and some cattle, and they would allow the stocks of fish to replenish until the next year at that season. They would then head out again and follow the shoals around.

I was talking with him sometime in the late 1970s, just after a ban had been imposed on herring fishing in Scotland, a blanket ban on fishing for herring, and the reason was that there were no stocks of fish left. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, industrial-style fishing happened in the herring fisheries: huge factory ships from Eastern and Western Europe came into the British waters, and they overfished with nets that did not allow the small fish to escape. Therefore fish that could not be sold were still scooped up by these huge trawler nets.

There are still connections with fishing and my life. I still have family who fish in the western isles. I myself enjoy going fishing with family up there. We keep some of the old traditions from the old times: If we have a good catch of fish, we will make some parcels up and deliver them to the older women, the widows in the village who don’t have someone to fish for them just as the old fisherman would do if someone was widowed and had no one to fish. We make sure that those people are provided for from the catch. And also the way of eating the fish—one of the things we’d find in those peasant kinds of communities is that nothing goes to waste. That’s famous, of course, in Scotland for the making of haggis, as many of you know. All of the leftovers from the carcass and offal are mixed up together and stuffed into the empty stomach of the sheep and boiled and eaten that way. (Lovely stuff for Sunday morning at 11:00 o’clock; I hope I’m not turning you off your brunch.)

We do the same thing with the fish. There is nothing that is not used from the fish. Even the bones are used for fertilizer One of our family favorites is when my father makes a dish, caleed (in the Gaelic, ceann cropaig). When a particularly large whitefish is caught, you take the liver of the fish and mash it up with your hands with oatmeal and salt and pepper and stuff it into the head of the fish and then boil that in water. You make a lovely fish stock, and then you scoop out the oatmeal and liver and eat that and drink the broth and eat the fish cheeks—very sweet. My dad’s favorite, of course, is to eat the eyes of the fish as well—always keeps the grandchildren happy, as you can imagine.

Eating like this continues a culture in which nothing was wasted and everything was used. My uncle Sandy, in that conversation, was reflecting on what we might call the symbiotic relationship between the fisherman and the sea (that word simply means a relationship that was mutually beneficial and sustainable). It was understood that the stocks needed to replenish so that the fishermen could continue on with this practice, which had happened for hundreds of years. Uncle Sandy was lamenting the passing of that. The advent of industrial-scale fishing had put that relationship out of joint. It had broken that to such an extent that people couldn’t go fishing any longer.

Today you can’t open a newspaper or read a magazine or turn on the television without being faced with what we collect under the rubric of “green issues.” Issues around sustainability, around climate change, around use of energy and renewable resources. It’s become popular to engage in this. We might say it’s become cool. We are doing our bit at Fourth Church. Today we are marking Earth Day. Those of you in the know will realize that Earth Day was a couple of weeks ago. but we’re Calvinists and we keep our own calendar here at Fourth Church.

We’re doing Earth Day today. We have a special Coffee Hour, as you heard from Diane earlier in this service, and we hope you will join us there and find some really interesting ways in which you personally might make a difference. I know that some of you may already be involved deeply in this. You may be engaging politically and speaking to people who are in power so that the green agenda becomes a part of the legislative life of this country.

Some of you may be involved directly in industries and finding ways in which industry can be more careful of our use of resources. Some of you may already have made changes of your own, cycling to work, using public transport—all these good and faithful responses to the issue. These are all important. I want this morning just for a moment to go a little deeper and to think a little more deeply about this, about the way in which our relationship with God is reflected in, is mediated through our encounter with God’s grace and creation and the creatures around us.

Let’s start with our scriptures today. We have scriptures about visions, in our Isaiah passage, and a reading from Revelation that contains prophetic dreams about a future that is promised in Christ in which we will enter into a new harmonious relationship with God the creator. You see that the Isaiah passage describes how people who build their houses will live in them and those who plant the vineyards will eat of the fruit as opposed to an exploitative way of living and being; then in the vision of John the Divine in Revelation, that parallel passage using Isaiah’s language—a new heaven and a new earth—and that vision of oneness, of Christ as the beginning and the end and who we are and in whom we live. These are visions of shalom, that Hebrew word that means God’s peace—not just peace as the absence of war but peace as the fullness of life that God offers us as we live together in harmony with God and with creation.

And then looking at Psalm 148 we might say that this is about the present reality of creation’s interconnectedness, about the giving of praise by all that is created by God. Old Testament scholar James Lindberg writes this about Psalm 148: “‘All God’s children got a place in the choir’ goes an old song. The boundaries of Psalm 148 push even further to include places not only for all of God’s children but for all of creation.”

I think Psalm 148 sings of an underlying harmony in the created order. The great Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann wrote this about Psalm 148: “It is praise which binds humans with all other creatures.” Isn’t that an interesting concept? That our boundedness with creation, with other creatures, lives in our praise of the Creator. It recognizes our reliance on God as the creator and how we respond to our creator in praise. I’ve been fascinated recently reading some reflections by the contemporary poet Scott Cairns. Cairns took a sabbatical and went to live in a monastery, a Greek Orthodox monastery in Greece, where he talks about learning about community and about prayer. He learned much, he says, about the desert fathers, the founders of the monastic life, and he came across many whom I’ve never heard of and reflects on some of their sayings.

One from St. Isaac of Syria: St. Isaac asks, “What is a compassionate heart?” and he responds “It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation. On fire for all of humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for all that exists.”

I had the great opportunity recently to attend an art exhibition of contemporary Canadian Inuit art from the Arctic Circle. Extraordinary tunics and clothes, all made from natural products, obviously. Beautiful images as well—paintings and lithographs—that reflected the mythology of the Inuit people about the close boundedness of humanity and creation, creation stories of how humans could become animals and animals humans, and these beautiful images of interlocking and parallel lines with images of geese and bears and humans and loons and commentaries along with that. One Inuit shaman wrote, “Among us all is bound up with the earth we live on and our life here.” And this reflection on life and sustainability from one of the Inuit elders, Hubert Amarualik (I think this could have been my Uncle Sandy): “A land” he says “could only be occupied for three years. That was the way they lived. Always moving to another place. Never occupying one land beyond three winters. We will leave the land for another place so that they’ll give the animals in the surrounding area a chance to return without any disturbance.”

Isn’t that a beautiful image of harmony between humanity and creation? The great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins understood this, I believe. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who lived and worked in the darkest and worst Victorian slums of Britain in Liverpool and in Glasgow. And yet he wrote beautiful nature poetry giving thanks and praise to God for creation. He spoke about the “this-ness” of each created thing, what he described as its “inscape.” In one of his greatest poems he writes:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . .
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins’ understanding of opening our eyes to see the createdness is, I think, paralleled in the modern poet Richard Wilbur. Here’s a lovely poem in which he is sitting watching a hatch of mayflies as they come up and rise and then float down in lines. He describes it as if they were dancing to the caller of the dance. And his last stanza is astonishing. He writes:

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they—
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller of are.

Wilbur here, I think, gets to something very profound and deep about this relationship. He moves from being a watcher or even, we might say, a steward who is separate from creation to being in total and deep harmony with God in God’s creation through the encounter with these simple creatures.

I think that to encounter that deep harmony with God in creation is to glimpse heaven right here on earth.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church