Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 8, 2023

What's Good under the Sun?

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor

Ecclesiastes 1:1–9
Psalm 19:1–10

I’m a fan of Internet memes and was tickled by this one: a couple pleasantly smiling in an embrace on a couch, with the caption “Arguing with your partner is like trying to read the ‘Terms of Use’ on the Internet. Eventually you just give up and say I agree.” It could be a partner in our household, a parent or sibling or cherished friend — this meme gets at our angst for arguing. We’d all rather avoid debate for the sake of unity or our own personal peace.

However, it is difficult to look to scripture to justify that desire for conciliation. Among the many voices that emerge from the Bible, there are many arguments. And sometimes, like our scripture passages this morning from Ecclesiastes and Psalms, they are downright interminable, more like equations for which we are eternally seeking balance than conflicts that simply end.

So who in this case are our disputants?

Well, in one corner we have Ecclesiates’ Qoholeth, a Hebrew word for teacher. This teacher is sometimes considered a stand-in for King Solomon in his elder years, but in its final form, scholars believe this text was composed in the fourth century BCE, in post-exilic, cosmopolitan, and Persian-influenced Jerusalem. And in that cosmopolitan hotbed of a city, Ecclesiastes emerges as a disillusioned, hard-nosed, and cynical voice. It’s the kind of text that can feel at home in the grittiness of our own metropolis. As scripture’s chief cynic, there is no pundit, no Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street fame, no hardened friend or family member you know, who can likely match the inner curmudgeon than someone who begins their phrases with “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”— or in the New International Version translation, “Everything is meaningless.”

The psalmist, in the other corner, speaks to a world chock full of meaning. Composing in that same post-exilic environment, the psalmist trades indifference for the full range of human emotions toward the divine: joy, anger, lament, and hope. In such hands, Psalms becomes the Bible’s book of prayer and poetry, always striving for praise of God and God’s creation. Even in lament, the psalms offer us praise in a minor key.

And in this debate between the cynic and praiseful, the early verses of Psalm 19 present us with the question of the moment: Are the heavens truly telling us of the glory of God? Does nature’s voice reveal to us, as the psalm insists, that God is worth glorifying? That God is both grand and ultimately good?

To answer a question posed in poetry, sometimes it takes a poet. Some time ago a young student at Oxford University in England gave up a promising academic career to live as a humble Jesuit priest. He was by all accounts an odd and ornery personality, prone to bouts of sickness, but also a feverish writer of poetry. His name was Gerald Manley Hopkins, and even after he swore off the poetry for ascetic vows, he kept up the craft. In 1877 he penned these words:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.

(Gerald Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”)

He was riffing, as jazz artists say, on Psalm 19. In place of God’s glory Hopkins wrote of God’s grandeur. But like the psalmist, he was trying to describe an almost indescribable divine presence he felt coursing through the natural world. To believe the world is charged is to know that nature itself has a voice to exclaim that reality. Those who knew Hopkins, as a recent biography tells us, noticed that Hopkins was in dogged pursuit of nature’s voice. Friends noted his penchant for “stooping down to study wet sand or blades of grass or little blue flowers.” In fact, he playfully told his younger brothers to follow suit “by eating flowers so that they would truly understand them” (Margaret R. Ellsberg, ed., The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 8–9). It’s the kind of boundless curiosity and hunger to unlock nature’s secrets, hear its voice and communion with its heart, that you’ll find from children playing with a couple square inches of mud and rock — discovering how much life is charged in one speck of earth.

That same desire to commune with nature’s voice wound its way into me after I made a pilgrimage last year to the South Carolina coast as part of an African American heritage trip. Since then, any time I dip into a pool, lake, or the ocean, I take a moment to repeat a little liturgy, a few short words that remind me of my historic connection to this vital element of life. I draw my hands into water, lift it up, and let the droplets run back, saying, “I am a child of the waters. My ancestors sojourned through the waters of the Atlantic, my father swam the waters of Lake Michigan, I married upon the shores of the Pacific. I am a child of the waters.”

Little liturgies like this one are ways of extending an embrace to the natural world, so that we might, like a child playing in the mud or eating flowers, get within shouting distance of nature’s voice.

But often nature’s voice gets drowned out by another: the voice of the Teacher of Ecclesiastes telling us that all is not right and joyful in the world. Under that sun, which runs its course like an athlete, is a lot of toil, strife, and suffering.

Hopkins knew this too. In his poem on God’s grandeur, he grieves:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

It is, in other words, the human voice that drowns out nature’s praise, because the world under the sun is loud and grating with human struggles with nature, the human desire to exploit nature, or human grief when it seems as though nature takes away what people hold dear.

And in the face of such tragedies, we wonder where exactly is God’s glory in all this? Is God’s glory still found when a family loses all they have in wildfire? Is God’s glory there when farms fail due to drought and a whole economy withers away? Is God’s glory in the unjust and poisonous weapons that humans unleash to other human communities? The Teacher of Ecclesiastes says it’s the same old story of pain and contradiction, whether in post-exilic Jerusalem or today. Today Israelis and Palestinians wake up to horrific violence that has them and many around the globe watching events unfold, crying out like the Teacher that there is frustratingly nothing new under the sun. Violence and cruelty have become all too familiar and wearisome. We seem as helpless to rebuff them as the earth, moon, and stars embarking on their courses. The streams run into the sea, but they are never filled, says the teacher. Before such realities, ancient and modern, natural and human, we cannot be naïve optimists. If we are to sit with those in pain, we must call in pain.

Now the story and the poetry could end here. We might affirm the stoic cynicism of Ecclesiastes full stop. But the psalm invites us to lift our thoughts a little higher.

The last stanzas of Hopkin’s poem swing back in the direction of hope. He says,

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

“Nature is never spent.”

While Hopkins lived in the early decades of the modern industrial economy, given the impending impact of climate change, I am loathe to utter those words cavalierly. Channeling my inner Qoholeth, I wonder if fear of nature’s demise, rather than its resiliency, would give us ample motivation to keep the worst from happening. Nevertheless, Hopkins, like the psalmist, wants us to know that, in the face of lament, nature’s last word is still praise.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is another kind of poet laureate. She is a trained botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation, which traces its origins to these very shores of Lake Michigan we gather upon today. And she has her own way of getting up close to listen to the voice of nature through the instruments of Indigenous and Western science. She encourages us to learn from nature’s enduring praise. She invites us to see plants as our sage teachers. Take moss, for example. These green fuzzy little plants that have the look and feel of carpet have a 350-million-year start on us in praising God. Moss began emerging from the oceans, living on rocks and basking in the sun and water. Breaking down nutrients in rocks and sending them cascading into the ocean unleashed a series of events that led to a change in climate that cooled the CO2-saturated earth and enabled life as we know it. We’ve got a lot of reasons to thank this small humble form of plant life.

Kimmerer tells us that mosses take the long view and remember this is not the first time anything has happened — yes, nothing new under the sun – with many eons of reflecting the Sun’s rays by day and the celestial patterns by night as they sit upon their rocks and crevices. But those same mosses, as Kimmerer tells us, reflect goodness beyond their humble size. They serve as a healing force, softly blanketing every kind of surface. They find livable footholds in abandoned buildings and return life to radioactive Chernobyl. Following the laws of nature and divine guidance, they have found a sustainable place in the family of creation, not seeking to dominate but to flourish — just one tiny plant, one voice, in the vast chorus of resilient praise that is nature, amplifying the glory and goodness of God.

So how might we respond to that voice. In 1989, Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitros of the Orthodox Christian tradition called for a day of prayer for creation. That spawned a move by the World Council of Churches to designate the period from September 1 to October 4 — ending on the saint day of Francis of Assisi, patron saint in the Catholic church for animals — as the Season of Creation. It’s fitting then that we ponder this question of response to nature’s praise and warnings as this global church Season of Creation comes to a close.

Care for nature certainly must raise political, economic, and cultural questions and demand changes in policy and law and examination of our collective and individual responsibilities. But not all of us are policy analysts or botanists. Like the psalmist, most of us are casual observers seeking wisdom where we can find it. And so maybe like the psalmist our first task is to learn to listen. Simply listen. And I think that gift of listening is what we might model for the next generation, to Cassidy, Shea, and Charles who we baptized today. To let nature talk to us and talk back to it, just as we do with scripture. Heavens are telling of the glory of God. Can we listen?

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church