“Let All That Have Breath Praise God”

A sermon delivered by Rev. W. Benjamin Boswell at Myers Park Baptist Church on April 24, 2016 The Fifth Sunday of Easter/Earth Sunday from Psalm 148

There once was a woman who loved her dog so dearly that she wanted to make sure she would be with her forever for eternity. So she went to the local Baptist church, called on the pastor there, and asked him if he would give her dog a blessing. The Baptist pastor said, “Well Ma’am, I’m sorry to say we just don’t do that kind of thing here at the Baptist church. You should go to the Episcopalian church. I hear they do animal blessings over there.” “Thank you,” the woman said. “I appreciate your help. Can you give me some advice? How much should I pay the priest—$5 or $10,000 dollars?” “Wait a second ma’am,” the pastor said, “I didn’t know your dog was a Baptist. What kind of blessing do you want?”

Today is Earth Sunday and every year the NCC Creation Justice Ministries suggests a theme for congregations to explore in their observance of Earth Day. This year’s theme, which you may have already noticed from the hymns we sang this morning, is “Care for God’s Creatures.” I have to admit that I was a little concerned about this theme because the last time I preached about God’s creatures, a member of a previous congregation got very upset with me. In a sermon on the , I said, “What if human beings are not the center of the universe? What if creation wasn’t made for us? What if humanity is really only one small part of the great wonder and mystery of God’s creation? That’s basically what God said to Job from the whirlwind. God gave Job a glimpse of how God sees the world and Job quickly learned that creation does not exist solely for human beings. We are a part of a great mystery God has created; but we are no more important than any other creature and we depend on all the other parts of creation for our health, wholeness, and vitality. Like Job, we need God to remind us of our proper place in the family of things.”

The next day a woman came to my office and said, “I heard your sermon on Job yesterday and I don’t agree with you. Do you really think that I am no more important to God than a bird?” You know, it’s amazing what people get out of a sermon. How do you answer that question? That’s one of those times you realize that the Bible is not very helpful when it comes to pastoral care. I wasn’t sure what to say so I just replied, “You must not know how strongly I feel about birds.”

Earth Sunday is a relatively new concept and is not an officially recognized Sunday in the church calendar yet; so the lectionary texts for this Sunday usually have nothing to do with creation. But this year is different. It just so happens that the Psalm for the fifth Sunday of Easter is perfect for Earth Sunday. Psalm 148 is nothing less than a great symphony of praise featuring the entire universe in chorus. The Hebrew word for praise, , appears thirteen times in fourteen verses and every part of creation is summoned to praise God—heavens, angels, hosts, sun, moon, stars, waters, sea creatures, oceans, fire, hail, snow, winds, mountains, hills, fruit trees, cedars, wild animals, cattle, creeping things, flying birds, and people of all kinds—rulers, leaders, judges, princes and commoners, men and women alike, young and old together. A remarkably diverse choir made up of the entire universe is called to praise God in power, unity, and fidelity.

The great universal symphony of praise in Psalm 148 is a reflection of God’s vision for the world. It echoes back to the very beginning in Genesis 1 where God created the waters, the earth, the vegetation, the trees, the light, swarms of living things, birds above, sea creatures below, cattle, creeping things, and wild animals of every kind including human beings—and God saw that it was good. But Psalm 148 is not just a vision that echoes back to creation. It is also a vision that looks forward to the future in the hope of what the kingdom of God will be like—a place like the vision in Isaiah 11 where all creatures live in harmony and

© where “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together… they will not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God.”

It is impossible for me to speak about Psalm 148 and not give proper respect to its greatest interpreter—St. Francis of Assisi, whose beautiful hymn “All Creatures of Our God and King” is likely the most famous reflection on this Psalm. And while his prayerful, poetic, paraphrase is a beautiful encapsulation of the Psalm’s meaning, the life of St. Francis was an even more stunning witness. Francis was known to talk to larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, bees, waterfowl, the famous wolf of Gubbio, pigs, and fish. Francis could see that the entire material world had sacred, sacramental meaning. He believed that all creatures’ bear the image and likeness of God, and creation itself became his primary place of worship. What St. Francis of Assisi understood, more clearly than most people in history, was his proper place in the order of creation.

How did we lose this sense of our proper place in the order creation? Perhaps it began during the Enlightenment when many thinkers promoted a strong distinction between rational human beings and non-rational animals. This idea was given extreme expression by the philosopher Descartes who viewed animals as automatons incapable of conscious states, including a sense of pain, and did not think they were worthy of moral consideration. Immanuel Kant also argued “all animals exist only as means to an end, and not for their own sakes, in that they have no self-consciousness.” The belief that non-rational creatures do not merit moral consideration became widespread after the Enlightenment. This elevation of human rationality not only devalued animals and creation by considering them merely something to be “used for human means,” it also treated any human beings that were considered by those in power to be “less rational” as if they were “animals”—such as women, children, the disabled, the poor, non-Western peoples, native cultures, and those from different ethnicities.

The Biblical witness of Genesis and Psalm 148 makes a mockery of the Enlightenment’s claims. In Genesis, humans don’t come first in the order of creation—we come last. Everything else was created first; the waters, the sky, the light, the darkness, the trees, the vegetation, the birds, the bugs, the sea monsters, the wild animals, the cattle, and every other creature was created before human beings. We were the last things to be created. Psalm 148 bears the same witness. In Psalm 148, human beings are the last things that are called to praise God. Everything else is called to praise God first—sun, moon, stars, fire, wind, snow, hail, creatures, fruit trees, cattle, animals, birds—they are all summoned to praise before we are. In fact, it takes eleven verses before there is a single mention of human beings. Human beings were simply not the priority of the Psalmists invocation. In our arrogance, we humans tend to believe that God “saved the best for last,” but the reality is that if there is a hierarchy in the order of creation, we were created to be on the bottom—not the top.

Human beings were created last, at the very end of the sixth day, and we were given a specific purpose to be stewards, custodians, and caretakers of all that was created before us. But through our desire for power and dominion over all the creatures of the earth, we have turned the world upside down. Now we human beings are on the top and all of creation is on the bottom. When Jesus proclaimed the upside down kingdom of God where last are first and the meek get to inherit the earth, he was not proclaiming something totally new but simply the restoration of the created order—a return to the harmony of Garden of Eden before the fall—a repairing of the world back to the way was originally intended to be. We have reversed the order of creation and lost our place in it and in so doing we have failed to fulfill our purpose as the caretakers of Creation. Imagine how preposterous it would be for a caretaker to say, “I am more important than this thing that I am supposed to be caring for. I shouldn’t serve them. They should serve me.” It is completely antithetical to the very nature of caregiving, and yet that is exactly what humanity has said to the created world.

© This is why we need the powerful and transformative act of praise that the Psalmist implores us to practice. Praising God the Creator can be a healthy antidote to our narcissism as created human beings. When we practice the holy activity of praise, we experience a change in orientation. Praise is an activity that first disorients us away from our natural self-orientation. It immediately takes the focus off of ourselves as human beings and it reorients our focus on God—where it belongs. Over the years I’ve heard people ask, “Why does God want us to offer praise all the time?—Is God like the grand ultimate narcissist in the sky?” Every time I hear that question, I think of that English Boarding School Chapel scene in Monty Python’s movie The Meaning of Life, where the chaplain gets up to pray and says: “Let us praise God…Oh, Lord, Ooooo Lord, you are so big…So absolutely huge…Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you…” Suffice it to say, that is not what God wants from us when we offer praise.

As Ellen Davis says, “Praise is more than something we do for God. The truth is that praise does more for us than it does for God and it is time for Christians to get over the adolescent idea that the main reason we go to church is so that God won’t be disappointed. That is not why we offer praise. Praise is for those who aspire not to view the world through the disorienting lens of their own fantastic desires. Praising God is not concocted flattery, but the most earnest business we can undertake. Ultimately, it is for the sake of the world: we praise God in order to see the world as God does. And how does God see the world—with loving kindness.” Praise is not for God—it is for us! It takes the focus off ourselves and places us in the right relationship with God and the rest of creation.

When you start thinking about praise like Ellen Davis, you begin to see the political implications in the practice of praise. Once you summon the whole creation to praise its maker, suddenly you begin to identify quite clearly where the fault lines lie within the world of human power. People in positions of power who imagine that they deserve praise, honor, and glory don’t often respond very well when those below them offer their praise in a different direction.

There are three heroes in the book of who learned that lesson the hard way—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were there Babylonian names. The book of Daniel contains the stories of revolutionary Jews who remained faithful to God and resisted the pagan idolatry of the Empire during the Babylonian exile. Though, unless you went to Sunday School a lot as a child, you’ve probably never heard the story of these three Jewish friends. A decree was made in Babylon that required all people living in the Empire to worship a golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had created. But, being loyal Jews who were committed to worshiping only the creator God, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow down to the golden idol. So, Nebuchadnezzar had them thrown into a fiery furnace; but the three men were protected by angel of the Lord and walked out of the fire unscathed. The event was so incredible it caused king Nebuchadnezzar himself to give praise to the God of Israel.

The book of Daniel doesn’t explain what really happened in the fiery furnace that day, but there’s an addition to the book of Daniel in the Apocrypha called the “Song of the Three.” The legend claims that when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the fire, they started singing a song of praise to God that is so similar to Psalm 148, many scholars think it is the same song. They sang, “Praise the Lord, all creation. Praise the Lord, all heavens, skies, waters, sun, moon, stars, wind, fire, heat, dews, snows, nights, days, ice, cold, frost, lightning, and clouds. Praise the Lord, all mountains, hills, lakes, rivers, sea creatures, birds, cattle, and wild animals. Praise the Lord, all people of the earth, Israel, priests, faithful, humble, and holy—even we three here in the fiery furnace—Praise the Lord!” Just like the story in Genesis and the symphony of praise in Psalm 148, it took a long time before the faithful Jews in the furnace said anything about human beings. Even with fire raging all around them, they called the entire universe to praise for thirty verses before they spoke of any human person. Only at the very end did they sing for themselves.

The mistake, that King Nebuchadnezzar and many like him made, was worshipping the creation instead of the Creator. That is the definition of pagan idolatry, and it has been a practice that has been at the heart of all Empires in history from the beginning of time. It doesn’t matter if it is Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar,

© Constantine, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Stalin, or Hitler or any of the golden calves that they call us to worship—it is always idolatry. Worshipping anything that God has created, or that we have created for ourselves, instead of the Creator has always had disastrous consequences for Creation. That’s why I love that when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were delivered from the fire, King Nebuchadnezzar started singing praise to the God of Israel. It was the perfect fulfillment of Psalm 148 where it says, “Praise the Lord, rulers of the earth and all peoples, princes and all leaders of the earth! Young men and women alike, old and young together! Let them praise the name of the Lord, for God’s name alone is exalted; God’s majesty is above heaven and earth.”

The reason we have so many ecological disasters like endangered species, deforestation, global warming, climate change, ozone layer depletion, air pollution, water pollution, the great pacific garbage patch, and environmental racism is not just because human beings have lost our place in the order of things. The deepest reason the earth, and the creatures who live on it, are in such distress today is because we human beings continue to worship creation instead of the Creator. We still worship the “the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar,” the great god of Mammon. We worship gold, money, wealth, prosperity, and all that comes with it. What the most ardent environmentalists and creation justice advocates don’t often acknowledge is that we can’t talk seriously about climate change without talking about capitalism and our addiction to consumption.

In her book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein says, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. More accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.” Klein goes on to say, “I keep coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is preventing us from putting out the fire threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things necessary to change course because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. Underneath all this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change is a civilizational wake-up call…telling us that we need an entirely new economic model, we need a new way of sharing this planet, we need a new imagination of what constitutes a ‘good’ life. It is a powerful message telling us that we need to evolve.”

Can we evolve? Not if we can’t find our proper place in the order of creation and not if we keep worshipping the creation instead of the Creator. But we can if we adopt a posture of praise. We can if we join hands with all the creatures of the earth in the universal symphony of praise to the Creator we find in Psalm 148. We can if we join the protest of praise for creation that was sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fire. These songs of praise have the power to reorient our lives away from our selves— away from our narcissism, our greed, our idolatry—away from own creations and toward the Creator. We cannot praise the Creator and continue to destroy God’s creation. Creation wasn’t made for us. We were not created first, but last. We were created to be the stewards and caretakers of God’s creation. Yes it is a humble calling, a meek occupation, and a lowly vocation. But it is the only way for us to rediscover our proper place in the order of things, it is the only way for us to turn the world right side up, it is the only way for us to find ourselves in the kingdom of God, and it is the only way for us to truly say “let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” .

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