Pentecost 22, Year A, October 16, 2005
Psalm 96

I spent time last week on a kind of personal retreat on a mountaintop in Pennsylvania. At nearly 2300 feet above sea level, Ganoga Lake is one of the highest natural lakes east of the Rocky Mountains. Bordered by State Parks and Game Lands, it is a secluded and quiet place - for me, a holy place. And being a holy place, there is a ritual that I do whenever I go there. On the far side of the lake, there is a trailhead leading off into the hemlock forest. After hiking for half an hour or so, I come to an opening at the top of a high cliff.

There, at the very edge of the cliff, a large promontory rock juts out into space,. I climb down a few irregular rock steps to stand on the flat surface, and feel in my body that this rock is tilted downward and that, if I’m not careful, I might be pulled right over the edge. After a time, I lie down on my belly and inch forward. I look over the edge and see once again that there is nothing below me for hundreds of feet. Again, I fight the sensation that I am being drawn forward. I carefully push myself back to my hands and knees and crawl backwards, away from the edge.

As the late afternoon sun warms my face, I sit, crosslegged, and look out over a vast bowl, filled with nothing but trees, the end of a long valley. A series of ridges descend down the western slope of Red Rock Mountain, like interlocking fingers, and recede to the lowlands far in the hazy distance. Running between them, hidden beneath the forest canopy, are small mountain streams, flowing down from the beginning of the world, carrying the spring water with the strange iron taste that gives this mountain its name.

I quiet myself. The sound of the wind moves through the trees in the woods behind me, on the nearby ridges, and in the valley below. I hear the calls of crows in the trees and, in time, the cry of a hawk, riding the thermal currents rising up from below. I feel the blood pulsing through my body, the flow of the breath. 

In ecstasy, the Psalmist rejoices, “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the whole earth. Sing to the Lord and bless God’s Name; proclaim the good news of God’s salvation from day to day. Declare God’s glory among the nations and God’s wonders among all peoples. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised."

To the west, the sun swells as the horizon rises to welcome it home. The treetops glow golden red, the ridges stand in sharp relief of light and shadow. The eastern sky behind shades to a deeper blue, unveiling the first faint glimmer of impossibly distant stars. 

It is the Lord who made the heavens, declares the Psalmist. As for all the gods of the nations, they are but idols.

Before I came to this mountain, down in the flatlands, the gods of the nations demand their sacrifice. The princes of church and state come in solemn procession into their courts, offering their dark litany, their antiphonal strife in the halls of power, their liturgy of war, their hymns of ideology, their unholy meal of the haves and the have nots.

Up here, I hear the Psalmist cry, Oh, the majesty and magnificence of Gods presence! Oh, the splendor of God’s sanctuary! Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!

Here, on this mountain, far above the clamor and the smoke, the beauty of holiness enfolds me and I am drawn into worship…worth-ship…the declaration that this beauty of holiness is worthy of my heart. Up here, there is nothing I must do, nothing I must say, nothing I must prove. I must only be in this presence.

And in this presence, as my restlessness ebbs away, stillness descends. In the stillness, I feel the rock beneath my thighs, my spine, connected to the cliff face, to the mountain, to the tectonic plate that vibrates with the life of the planet.

Let the whole earth tremble before God.

I know what the Psalmist means; let the whole earth and all creatures that dwell therein feel in their bones the deep singing vibration of the Original Word that spoke all of it into being…that Word that has never ceased to sound across the vast expanse of everything that is.

Sometimes the creation trembles like a lover at first touch…sometimes, like a child at first fear of the new or the strange. And sometimes, as we have seen, it heaves and quakes like the end of the world has come, and we stand bewildered in the wreckage, reminded of how truly small we are. This is no sign of God’s wrath, as some (trying to make sense of it) would say, but of God’s power to make and to break, to establish and to change. These are hard lessons and our minds revolt. Through tremors and tornados, tempests and torrents, we rage against our impotence, blaming the Creator for our suffering, speaking ill of our Mother Earth as a cruel and heartless monster repaying us for our sins against her.

This afternoon, we will gather outside this building, in the autumn sunshine, in belated tribute to Francis of Assisi, who sang of brother sun and sister moon, who preached God’s love to the wolf and kissed the fearsome leper. He learned, through his devotion, not to fear what God had made, but to enter into the mystery of Creation.

We will bless the creatures of this world, especially our furry and feathered companions, in the fullest sense of that word; to bless is not only to invoke the presence and protection of the Creator, but to praise the Creator for the creature. For a moment, we will know the ecstasy of the Psalmist as he sang this hymn of praise:

Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea thunder and all that is in it; let the field be joyful and all that is therein. Then shall all the trees of the wood shout for joy when God comes judge the earth. God will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his truth. Even this fearsome word “to judge”, if we are trusting and still, need not shake us. For while it is true that we are accountable before God for our sojourn on this earth, and our stewardship of it, the ancient word simply means “to govern” or “to rule”.

How can the Creation not rejoice in the knowledge that the One who spoke it into being has not abandoned us, that the hand of the Creator is still at work in the world about us?

AMEN