A Fourth Church Sermon by Joyce Shin

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November 22, 2007 | Thanksgiving Day

Light and Water

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Genesis 1:1–2:4

I said to a squirrel, “What is that you are carrying?” and he said,

“It is my lucky rock; isn’t it pretty?”
I held it and said, “Indeed.”

I said to God, “What is this earth?”

And he said, “It’s my lucky rock;
isn’t it wondrous?”

Yes, indeed.

“My Lucky Rock”
Tukaram (1608–1649)

You may be familiar with Nathaniel Philbrick’s work. He won the National Book Award for his book In the Heart of the Sea. In another book he has written, Mayflower, he tells the story of the Pilgrims, their voyage on the Mayflower and their arrival in the New World. He describes the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in the New World. He writes:

It was probably in late September or early October, soon after the Pilgrims’ crop of corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas had been harvested. It was also a time during which Plymouth Harbor played host to a tremendous number of migrating birds, particularly ducks and geese. (p. 117)

Celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages—stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown—simmered invitingly. In addition to ducks and deer, there was a “good store of wild turkeys” in the fall of 1621. (pp. 117–18)

In addition to listing the food, Philbrick describes the fall foliage. Unlike the cloudy fall days in England to which the pilgrims had grown accustomed, autumn in New England would have been a startling experience for these new settlers. He writes, “In New England . . . the profusion of sunny fall days and cool but not freezing nights unleashes the colors latent within the tree leaves, with oaks turning red, brown, and russet; hickories golden brown; birches yellow; red maples scarlet; sugar maples orange; and black maples glowing yellow” (p. 118).

Nathaniel Philbrick writes that “it was a display that must have contributed to the enthusiasm with which the Pilgrims later wrote of the festivities that fall” (p. 118). Given the desire for religious freedom with which the Pilgrims sought a new land and the religious piety that pervaded their way of life, there is no doubt that the special celebration of the Pilgrims in 1621 was an event of profound religious devotion. Undoubtedly the abundance of game and harvest as well as the magnificent display of fall foliage must have inspired among the Pilgrims an extraordinary desire to give thanks.

Stories of the early pilgrims open up a world—a time and a place—so different from our own. As one who purchases a turkey once a year from the supermarket and has only once seen a living, free-range turkey; as one who does not tend a garden and has certainly never known the joy of harvest time, I cannot help but think that if I were more connected to the land, I would be more appreciative of, more thankful for, the food that I eat and for which I say grace at mealtimes.

Though I grew up in Kentucky, surrounded by farmland, rivers, and vegetation, I can’t say that I ever had much exposure to the daily practices that relate us closely to the land. Living now in the city, none of my daily activities are determined by the seasons, in relation to the earth, in relation to animals, in relation to the soil, in relation to seeds, in relation to the sun, in relation to rain.

So when author Wendell Berry visited this congregation last year and I read for the first time some of the poems and novels written by Berry, who is also a Kentuckian and who farms and writes from the perspective of someone whose life is intimately and thoroughly tied to the well-being of land, I was startled at how different my experience of growing up in rural Kentucky was from his. Many of his fictional characters have great love for the land, and some of his poems speak of farming as an art. In almost everything I have read that he has written, there is an appreciation of, a gratitude for, God’s creation that is so deep and full that I have found it attractive and have wondered from where it springs and what it empowers us to do.

I’m talking about a gratitude that goes beyond feeling thankful for the blessings in our lives. Each of us can enumerate things for which we are thankful. Counting our blessings, however, is not what I have in mind. The kind of gratitude to which I am referring could be inspired by seeing a magnificent display of leaves changing color, signaling the change of seasons. If the changes in season, the changes in precipitation, and the changes in temperature, however, were to affect our well-being in a fundamental way, wouldn’t we then be more deeply grateful for everything it produces? It is a thankfulness felt for something when you are aware of how it relates to many other things. Gratitude deepens, I think, when we see the interconnectedness of things.

In the first chapter of Genesis, we have an account of God creating the world and everything in it. According to this account, first God created the heavens and the earth. Then God created light separate from the dark so that there could be day and night. God then created the seas. Only then did God say, “Let the earth put forth vegetation,” which was followed by, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth.” Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind.” After all this, God said, “Let us make humankind in our image.”

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about this creation story. In it he understands the theologians of ancient Israel to be affirming first and foremost that God, as creator, has a purpose and will for creation. “Creation,” he writes, “is not a careless, casual, or accidental matter” (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching—Genesis, p. 17). The creation story asserts that there is an order to God’s creativity.

We’re never quite sure what that order is. We often say that God acts in mysterious ways, because we cannot fully discern how one thing relates to another thing, how one event affects another event, how one heart touches another heart, and yet we know that things do exist in relation to each other.

In fact, neuroscientists have shown that the human brain is actually wired to scan the world it observes, searching constantly for patterns. The brain subconsciously keeps the world under surveillance, both auditory and visual. They strive to understand and to explain what we know experientially.

Ecologists try to discover how the constituent parts of the living world interact with one another. They propose theories that can explain the patterns we observe and relationships that exist in nature.

The investigation into patterns and relationships has also been the subject of theologians and people of faith. The creation story would be misunderstood if we were to interpret the text as a scientific description of what happened. This is unfortunately the misunderstanding that has led the text to be caught in the battle of “modernism” between “literalists” and “rationalists.”

Last September Fourth Dimension, one of our fellowship groups here at the church, held a program entitled “God and Darwin: Creation and Evolution.” They invited a scientist from the Field Museum to speak on Darwin’s theory of evolution and how it underlies all modern biology. What I found fascinating about the research in which he and his colleagues are engaged is the working assumption that all living things interact with one another and their environment as they evolve and that these complicated interactions explain the rich diversity of living things.

Such investigations are not at odds with the theological quest to understand how all things relate. Treating the biblical creation story not as an account of what really happened, but rather as a statement of faith affirming the claim that God’s creative activity has a purpose, people of faith can seek the help of scientists to discover the complex relational patterns that exist in the world.

There is perhaps no theologian who more rigorously sought to discern such patterns as the American writer and preacher Jonathan Edwards, who lived in New England 100 years after the Pilgrims arrived. Edwards was not just a theologian; he was also a keen observer of nature. He kept notebooks over the course of many years in which he would record every kind of pattern he observed, whether it was in nature, in society, or in scripture. In these patterns he sought to discover the will of God, the purpose for which God created the world.

Furthermore, his journal entries express how beautiful he found these patterns to be. The more complex the connections, the more beautiful Edwards found them. Beauty was, he thought, the key to discerning God’s creative activity in the world. To see the beauty of creation is to experience God’s mysterious way of working in the world. No one, no matter how earnestly and intentionally she tries (no matter how many notebooks she fills), can see all the ways in which everything that exists is connected to everything else, because no one can see everything from every possible angle. Edwards was a serious student of the natural world. He had mastered Newtonian physics, the leading scientific theory of his day, and he had employed science in his quest to see God’s creative design. Nevertheless, in the end he came to the conclusion that we’ll never be able to see once and for all the world’s beauty. Even if we could, it wouldn’t matter, because at every moment the world keeps changing. God is active, always creating and recreating the world.

So how shall we respond to the beauty that we do perceive? In a poem entitled “Isn’t That Something,” the poet Jalaludin Rumi, part of the Islamic world during the thirteenth century, knows something about how people have always responded to beauty. In this case it’s not nature that reveals to him how all of creation is connected. Rather, it is the beauty of art, of music, that teaches him.

I
like when
the music happens like this:

Something in His eye grabs hold of a
tambourine in
me,

then I turn and lift a violin in someone else,
and they turn, and this turning
continues,

it has
reached you now. Isn’t that
something?

Rumi understands what can happen when we encounter beauty. Beauty draws out an appreciative response from us, moving us to participate, to become instruments ourselves, to extend the beauty for others to encounter. This is the kind of response that beauty makes possible. It is also what we find expressed in the poems and novels by Wendell Berry. His deep and full appreciation for the intimate connections between our daily practices and the well-being of the land, expressed in his writing, moves readers to become better stewards of creation.

It is good to worship God with you this Thanksgiving Day. It is good to hear the creation story read aloud and to remind ourselves that God creates with a purpose. I pray that you will be filled this day and every day with a deep appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation and that together, as a people of faith, we will be moved to increase its beauty.