The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost - September 20, 2009

"The Mysteries of God's Creation"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

"Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature… There is thus only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the great block to insight." (God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism)

So wrote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century, over fifty years ago. He warned even then of the dangers of objectifying the universe. “The Greeks learned in order to comprehend [he asserted]. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use.” That contemporary shift in approach, Heschel instructed, leads the human race away from its real identity, away from its true purpose, away from its Creator, from whom all blessings flow. “Dazzled by the brilliant achievements of the intellect in science and technology [he wrote], we have not only become convinced that we are the masters of the earth; we have become convinced that our needs and interests are the ultimate standard of what is right and wrong.”

Over the next four weeks, we at the Chapel of the Cross want to restore some balance to that skewed approach to life. We want to focus again on God as the center and source of the wonders of the universe. We want to acknowledge that we are stewards, not masters, of the gift of the earth. We want to rediscover, in Heschel’s words, our wonder and radical amazement and sense of awe at our Creator. As the collect on the back of your bulletins asks of this almighty and everlasting God, “Grant that, as we probe the mysteries of your creation, we may come to know you more truly, and more surely fulfill our role in your eternal purpose.”

The portion of Psalm 104 that we recited together gives us a place to start. The Psalmist, in Heschel’s definition, is certainly a religious person, captivated by wonder and radical amazement. As David Frazelle told the 7:30 congregation this morning, “the psalmist finds God in every element of the created order – fire, water, air and earth; beasts of the field and birds of the air; wild animals and monsters of the sea; sun and moon, wind and thunder, bread and wine, and daily labor.” Yet despite this broad recitation of so many aspects of creation, as David noted, “its subject and object is God. In the 24 verses we read, God is mentioned 22 times. ‘You wrap yourself in light as with a cloak.’ ‘You send the springs into the valleys.” “You make grass grow for flocks and herds.’ ‘O Lord my God, how excellent is your greatness! You are clothed with majesty and splendor!’” The psalmist’s experience of the vibrancy and the complexity and the abundance of creation leads him into losing himself in awe and the praise of God. It prompts him, as we sang in our opening hymn, to “worship the King, all glorious above,” to “gratefully sing his power and his love!”

Living as we do, less close to nature, in the protective environments of our houses and our offices and our air-conditioned cars, we do not have as much chance as this long ago Israelite to encounter God so directly in the mysteries of creation. For the most part, we are unaffected by storms, unfamiliar with the forest and the jungle and the desert, untouched by the intricacies and patterns of ageless nature. But every once in a while we bump into the surprising majesty of the Creator: we are overwhelmed by a summer sunset; we marvel at unspeakably beautiful blossoms; we feel small in gazing at a starry night.

Betsy and I had just such a gift last month in spending a week at Emerald Isle and enjoying once again the ageless pounding of the ocean surf; the long, silent, graceful lines of pelicans, gliding overhead or just above the water’s surface; the smooth, rhythmic undulations of the dolphins swimming slowly together down the beach; and this time even a large manta ray somersaulting in the air to shake off barnacles and splashing loudly back down into the hidden depths. But the highlight of the week and the most overt epiphany of the divine presence was a vigil we kept each night at a loggerhead sea turtle’s nest. Sixteen nests had been discovered over the course of the early summer by the hundreds of volunteers who walk the beach each morning, not only picking up the litter, but watching for the telltale deep furrows of the 300 pound-plus mother turtle who has dragged herself well up onto the beach during the night to lay a laboriously prepared nest of a hundred or more ping pong ball-sized eggs. A few feet below the surface, the embryos develop over several months until the determined baby turtles break through the rubbery egg surface and finally one night erupt up through the sand in what is rightly called a boil of tiny, struggling baby turtles to eventually make their way down to the water’s edge to be swept out into the immense sea.

This was nest number eleven and was due to hatch just around the time Hurricane Bill was causing unusually high tides on the Carolina coast. Fearing that the nest would be inundated at its most vulnerable point and the fledgling turtles drowned before they ever got started, volunteers moved the nest higher up the beach, next to the first dune. In digging it up, they found some baby turtles all ready to go out on their own, and they released them to the sea. Some others had hatched, but were still covered with the yolk of the egg, which they needed to absorb into their bodies for a day or so, in order to provide their first several weeks of nourishment as they learned how to survive in the ocean. These the volunteers kept in a tub of sand, releasing them the next day. Other eggs were still unhatched, and it was these that were buried higher up the beach and became the object each night of a vigil of anywhere between ten and forty of us on a given night. Perhaps because the nest had been disturbed and the timing thrown off, no boil occurred; but each of four straight nights, one or two or a few more would finally poke up their heads through the sand. Sometimes immediately and sometimes after regaining their strength for an hour or two, they would follow the light provided by the volunteers and head down the long, smooth sand chute prepared for them to lose themselves in the vast ocean. The final night, the last eleven made the fifteen minute journey, stopping periodically to lift their little heads, as if listening for the surf from which their mother had come, and thrilling us with their determination and ultimate success.

We knew that some of them were probably eaten by crabs or other predators only minutes into their young lives, adding in their own way to the richness of ocean life. Others will survive for longer periods, but very few will make it to the age of twenty or thirty necessary to help generate future nests of eggs on the same beach where they were born. That is the reason for the large number of eggs and the extraordinary determination built into these turtles: to provide for the continuation of the species.

What an extraordinary experience that was to come so close to one small yet powerful manifestation of the dynamism of the earth and the life cycle! With our hearts we could look at the almost imperceptible movement of the sand indicating the mysterious bursting of life beneath it and think, “In that tiny microcosm is all that you need to know about the dynamic, life-giving, lavish God.” With our minds we could realize that this ageless process was far beyond human cause and control and simply stand in awe. But we also grasped that sometimes human cooperation is needed to assist the process; in this case many dedicated volunteers spent time and energy ensuring that this nest of sea turtles had every chance to continue the presence of loggerheads among God’s creation.

That is where our role as stewards of God’s creation comes in. We did not create life; we cannot control it. We are not the masters of the earth. But we are its stewards, and in grateful and awe-filled response to our Creator, we are to take care of it. Rabbi Heschel went on to say, “It is not a feeling for the mystery of living, or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear, which is the root of religion; but rather the question of what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with the awe, wonder, or fear… Wonder [he concludes] is the state of our being asked.”

Let us pray together on the back of your bulletins: "Almighty and everlasting God, you made the universe with all its marvelous order, its atoms, worlds, and galaxies, and the infinite complexity of living creatures: Grant that, as we probe the mysteries of your creation, we may come to know you more truly, and more surely fulfill our role in your eternal purpose; in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."   [Book of Common Prayer, p. 827]

Psalm 104:1-24