The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost - September 27, 2009

"My help comes from the Lord -- the Maker of Heaven and Earth"

The Rev. David Frazelle

"I lift up my eyes to the hills;
from where is my help to come?

My help comes from the Lord,
the maker of heaven and earth." (Psalm 121)

In the summer I turned 13 years old, I found myself on a boulder at the top of Mt. Hardy in the Middle Prong Wilderness section of the Pisgah National Forest. The rest of my backpacking group was in a nearby stand of evergreens, and I was enjoying a few minutes alone to watch the sunset. In those few minutes, in front of a fiery orange, yellow, pink and purple sky, with the evening coolness descending and the sweet organic smell of the mountain bald in my nostrils, I was changed. I knew that I was in the presence of a transcendent but personal being. I knew that something immature and unhelpful in me had just died, and that something sacred and strengthening in me had come to life. And I knew that I would not go back home the same person I had been when I walked out onto the side of Mt. Hardy.

It would be 9 years before I stumbled into the Episcopal Church and learned that the presence I knew and that knew me on that mountain was God the Father; that the dynamic of death and new life that I had tasted was a participation in the death and risen life of Jesus Christ; and that the connection between my story and the story of Christ on that mountain was the action of the Holy Spirit of the Living God. It would be 9 years before I heard for the first time today’s psalm, “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

The author of today’s psalm speaks from the midst of a very different context. The psalmist is in danger and distress. He lifts up his eyes from the battlefield to the hills above as he wonders who or what can save him. And somehow, in that meeting-place between heaven and earth where the mountains touch the sky, God communicates an answer to the psalmist, who then says, “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

The Scriptures are full of stories of God revealing himself to people through mountains and other features of his creation. The psalms of David are, as we heard last week, as rich in nature’s imagery as any piece of literature. In the book of Exodus, God reveals to Moses his name and identity at a burning bush, and his Law on Mt. Sinai. Ezekiel knows God in the sheer silence of his mountain cave. Jesus withdraws to the wilderness to be tested, and he constantly retreats to mountains and gardens to pray, to be transfigured, to know and be known by God. All of these people lift up their eyes to the hills and find God’s salvation in places where heaven and earth are joined.

The God that we meet in the natural world is the God of the Old and New Testaments. Every Sunday, we express this in the Creed by saying that God created all things through Christ. In the language of sacramental theology, the whole universe is sacramental, meaning that the whole creation is an outward and visible sign of God’s grace. Jesus Christ is the primordial sacrament – the perfect, eternal expression of God. Baptism and Eucharist are God’s primary sacraments – the most hallowed and transparent means of knowing and being known by Christ, in whose image and likeness we are designed and whose glory we and all creation are designed to manifest.

Regardless of whether you are, like me, moved by this language of sacramental theology, the bottom line is this: the God we meet in creation is the same God we meet in Church, and we are missing a key means of God’s grace unless we respond to his invitation to meet him in both places. In the bread and in the wine, in the mountains and in the wilderness, heaven and earth are joined. In the waters of a baptismal font and in the waters of oceans and streams, God speaks a saving Word. Whether we contemplate the cross on Calvary or the sunset on Mt Hardy, the prayer of the psalmist is ours to pray: “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”