I was camping with my family a few years ago in the Wallawa Mountains, in Eastern Oregon. This is an area of broad valleys between snow-capped peaks ,the ancestral lands of the Niimipuu people. We were camping along a bend in a clear mountain creek called Hurricane Creek. This is a spectacularly beautiful area we’d visited and explored several times, which had grown dear to us, a few hour’s drive from our home at the time in Eastern Washington.

This time we went to get away from the smoke. This was during one of the many recent seasons of terrible wildfires around the Pacific Northwest  – fires that in some places burned horizon to horizon, ripping through forests and towns, sending up unimaginable masses of smoke that would blow all through the region, and into the valley where we lived. The smoke would pile up and sit for weeks, thick and dark, choking out all colors from the sun except a dim smoldering red, bringing tears to the eyes if you were outside for very long.

We looked at the maps of the fires and the smoke and figured we could get some relief if we took a couple days off and drove two mountain ranges away to camp in our spot in the Wallawas which, for the time being at least, had not ignited into flame and had been spared getting blanked by smoke.

 When we arrived, it felt like such a mercy to be able to breath clean air, and to smell the piney tang and the rich humus of the forest, rather than toxic smoke, and to actually see the colors of things, crisp and vivid, the greens and browns and blues and whites dappling through the trees and stones and streams and peaks and sky.

During those couple of days, revived in the bright redolence of the living world, the words flowed through me for a little creative project I had been stuck on. Someone from the church I served at the time had expressed to me the hope for some fresh words to the doxology we sing every Sunday at church. The doxology was a song she loved to sing as a prayer while working outside on her farm. But the traditional words, with its “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” had long failed to express for her the open holiness beyond any limited human characteristics that she experienced with seed and soil and stone fruit and birthing goats and the sacred cycles of life and death and regrowth that one lives and prays through on a farm.

Could there be some fresh words to sing out our doxologies, our praises for the glory of God bursting from the world of Creation?

  There beside the mountain stream, enjoying the clearing of head and heart from those endless days of smoke and dread, some new words for the doxology did finally rise to my hears, words that sang out the prayer that I was feeling then, and have felt often before and since:

Praise the One from whom all blessings flow

Praise Holy Beauty above and below

Rain, sun, and wind; seed, soil, and stone

Praise the Creator of our earthly home

Amen

It is remarkable how many passages of poetry in the Bible express the things of the natural world as being more than mere things, but animate beings speaking and singing of the glory and wisdom of God, the Creator. 

When the God of Creation spoke to Job from the whirlwind, this is the message Job received:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

The birds in the sky, and they will tell you;

Or speak with the earth, and it will teach you,

And the fish of the sea will declare to you.

Who among all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this?

We find in the Psalms and the Hebrew Prophets songs in which each and every created thing, every element and living being declares the glory of God, praising our common Holy Creator through their very being (eg., Psalm 19 & 96)

Many of us can relate. So many people experience a sense of the sacred in nature. I’m sure many of you have stories you could share share about holy moments while out in the wild, feelings of awe and reverence and worship before the glory of God as manifest through the sanctuaries that form of their own accord from the very earth itself.

We need to honor this. We need to honor the ways we express and hear songs of glory to the Creator from the more-than-human world, we need to ask the birds and speak with the earth and listen to what all it reveals about the glory of the Creator.

There is an ancient, long-enduring understanding within Christianity that the natural world is a revelation of God’s nature that we should honor and study along with the revelations in the Bible, spoken through human voices. It’s called the “two books” approach. Augustine wrote about alongside the Bible, there is the “the great book” of “the very appearance of created things.” The 3rd century Christian monk Anthony of Egypt wrote, “My book is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, they are at my hand.” (from “Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You: A Field Guide to the Bible,” by Daniel Cooperrider, pg 5)

We have forgotten this, denied and dismissed the second book of nature at great peril. And when we do not live wisely, when do not head the word of God, in the ways it is revealed to us, there are consequences. This is true when we do not live wisely with other humans, this is true when we do not live wisely with God, this is true when we do not live wisely with the more-than-human world of God’s Creation. There can be catastrophe.

When I was there beside Hurricane Creek in the Wallowa mountains, feeling this praise and glory and finding new words to the ancient melody of praise to Holy One, in the clean, bright, redolent air, I could not afford to be naïve. We had to be vigilant to the very real threat of fire erupting in the forest around us. My words of glory were song by a creature who was also very much unsettled, uneasy, a fragile animal near to the frightful potential of deadly conflagration.

And does the fire not also sing of the glory of God? And the smoke?

God spoke to Job from the whirlwind, and challenged Job to hear what all of creation has to say about the nature of the Creator, in all of its more-than-human scope.

When we listen, what do we hear?

Are we willing to listen even when what we hear is strange or unsettling or convicting? What when the trees of the wood are not singing for joy, but crying out in agony?  

What is all of this in the Mind of God, how does the Holy One hold all these voices in God’s loving awareness?

The word “sublime” names both the awe and terror, the beauty and brutality, that comes when we behold even a glimpse of the fuller scope of the Holy, and of the great laws that undergird the God’s Creation. As we grow in spiritual maturity, we can become humbler and more open to the expanses of the Divine on the move through more-than-human world. We can grow to trust God to dissolve our sense of self out into the web of interconnections that knit together existence. We can grow in the grace of it all, and grow to be more responsive and responsible to our place within the universe.

Let me end with a prayer by the great Baptist leader, Walter Rauschenbusch, which he shared in 1910:

O God, we thank Thee for this universe, our great home; for its vastness and its riches, and for the manifoldness of the life which teems upon it and of which we are part. We praise Thee for the arching sky and the blessed winds, for the driving clouds and the constellations on high. We praise Thee for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills, for the trees and for the grass under our feet. We thank Thee for our senses by which we can see the splendor of the morning, and hear the jubilant songs of love, and smell the breath of the springtime. Grant us, we pray Thee, a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty, and save our souls from being so steeped in care or so darkened by passion that we pass heedless and unseeing when even the thorn-bush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.

Enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all the living things, our little brothers, to whom Thou hast given this earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty, so that the voice of the Earth, which should have gone up to Thee in song, has been a groan of travail. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee, and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve Thee in their place better than we in ours.

When our use of this world is over and we make room for others, may we not leave anything ravished by our greed or spoiled by our ignorance, but may we hand on our common heritage fairer and sweeter through our use of it, undiminished in fertility and joy, that so our bodies may return in peace to the great mother who nourished them and our spirits may round the circle of a perfect life in Thee. Amen.

Delivered May 7, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

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