By Rev. Chris Jorgensen
April 29, 2018
Scripture: Psalm 104: 1-2, 10-12, 16-18, 24
1 Bless the Lord, O my soul!
O Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
2 covering yourself with light as with a garment,
stretching out the heavens like a tent.
10 You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills;
11 they give drink to every beast of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
12 Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;
they sing among the branches.
16 The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
17 In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has her home in the fir trees.
18 The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.
24 O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom have you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Most pastors have topics that they love preaching on. There are particular characters or ideas or scriptures that they keep going back to. Maybe it’s something like an affinity for the Gospel of John, or the character of the flawed disciple Peter, or maybe they really love the story of the Prodigal Son. So they keep returning to it and exploring it from different angles, seeing what else there might be to say, or what new insights the Spirit might provide when they revisit the topic once again.
For me, it’s rock badgers. That’s right. Rock badgers. What? You haven’t had a pastor preach about rock badgers before? Well, I don’t know what these people have been doing.
In that case, let me tell you some things about them. They are fascinating little creatures. Rock badgers, also known as rock hyrax or coneys, live in the Middle East and Africa. Some of them live in the Holy Land, where our psalmist lived. They are ubiquitous there – they are all over the place, kind of like squirrels are here.
And as you can see, they are very cute…even though my husband Matt says they are terrifying because he doesn’t like rodents. (Yes, this is what we talk about at home.) But I told him, they are too cute because they are NOT rodents. Get this. Rock badgers are related not to rodents or squirrels or even badgers. Their closest living relatives are elephants and manatees. In fact, you can’t see them in the picture, but they have tiny little tusks, and their feet are just like little elephant feet. That’s how biologists know they belong to the elephant family and not the rodent one. So they are indisputably cute.
If you are in Omaha, you can see them at the Henry Doorly zoo if you go in the summer. I’ve tried to go see them in the winter, but they are never on display then. That’s because they are in the new Africa exhibit which is outdoors. See, rock badgers have poorly developed thermoregulation systems. In other words, they can’t regulate their own body temperature very well, so they have to stay inside during the Nebraska winter. Even in warm climate of the Middle East, the reason they lay around on the rocks or even in little piles of rock badgers all the time is to keep warm. They need other rock badgers and warm rocks to survive when it gets cool.
That’s why our psalmist says, “The rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.” When I was first learning about this psalm, I read a commentary by a man named Walter Harrelson, and it really struck me. It’s probably his fault I became so enamored with rock badgers.
I want to share what he wrote in spite of its slightly outdated 1975 language. Professor Harrelson writes:
“God made fir trees for the storks to nest in, and he made storks to nest in the fir trees. He made high, inaccessible mountains for the wild goats to run and jump upon, and he made wild goats to do the jumping and cavorting. He created the vast expanse of rock-covered earth in eastern Jordan for rock badgers to live and play in, and he created rock badgers for the rocks.”
… and then he writes:
“Storks and goats and badgers do not serve mankind. They do what is appropriate to them.”
In other words, God did not make rock badgers, or any animals described here, to serve humans. God creates things not for human use, but solely for God’s pleasure and for the thriving and well-being of those creatures. Interestingly, elsewhere in the Hebrew bible (Leviticus 11:5 to be exact), the people are told that rock badgers may not be eaten. They are not kosher. So there really is no human purpose for their existence. And yet God creates them and gives them life and gives them a home in the rocks.
Quite apart from any concern about humans, we can look at nature and notice that God is continuously creating and sustaining the earth and everything in it for its own sake. So we are called to honor the sacred in all of creation, not because of what it does for us. We are called to honor all of creation because as God’s creation, it is valuable in its own right. We are called to lovingly tend the earth as God’s garden, rather than exploit it for ourselves.
Humans, historically, have not been very good at this.
In my childhood, I learned about this thing called the “Dust Bowl.”
“Dust storms, at first considered freaks of nature, became commonplace. Static charges in the air shorted-out automobiles on the road; men avoided shaking hands for fear of shocks that could knock a person to the ground. Huge drifts of dirt buried pastures and barnyards, piled up in front of homesteaders’ doors, came in through window cracks and sifted down from ceilings.” (http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/)
As a kid, I thought this happened as a result of a random drought, something that humans were merely victims of. Well, I learned as an adult that the reason it was such an enormous disaster was because of something called the Great Plow-Up of the 1910s and 1920s. The Great Plow-Up “turned 5.2 million acres of thick native grassland into wheat fields.” (http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/) When the drought came, the barren fields where the wheat couldn’t grow anymore caused an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil to blow off the land in one year alone! And without topsoil, you can’t grow anything.
So the Dust Bowl just got worse and worse, nearly turning the Great Plains into a desert. Here’s the kicker: if the native grasses had been there rather than the wheat crops, the topsoil would have stayed in place. Native grasses could have withstood the drought. The human activity of indiscriminately clearing all this land for just this one crop caused the Dust Bowl. This supposedly random ecological disaster was actually a human disaster.
We know this is true of our current ecological crises as well: climate change, pollution of air and land and water, deforestation, mountain top removal mining…there are so many ways we are not tending God’s garden well. But we can choose differently. And for that, the Dust Bowl is a great example. Contemporary farmers are beginning to tend the earth differently. They are practicing no-till farming and using cover crops to preserve the topsoil. These practices could actually prevent another Dust Bowl…which is of course good for humans and animals alike. The Dust Bowl helped us see that humanity’s well-being is intimately tied up in how well we care for the land.
But our Psalm actually challenges us to stretch our perspective even more. It doesn’t say, “care for the land so that humans can thrive.” It invites us to care for the land out of respect for God’s creation that has nothing to do with us. Not because it’s good for farming or good for business. But so that the storks can have trees to live in. So that the rock badgers can warm themselves on the rocks.
I know it’s difficult. It’s difficult to stop seeing ourselves as the center of the story. It’s easy to imagine that everything God does is for humans, or even particularly for me. It takes a radical de-centering of ourselves to think about the well-being of other creatures before our own well-being.
But that is exactly the call of the Christian life. This is not some pagan earth worship. This honoring of the created world is exactly what we read in the Psalms. And this de-centering of ourselves as the most important creatures in the universe – well, it’s a wider view of the same, liberating, self-giving life that we are called to as disciples of Christ.
As Christians, our salvation always lies in remembering that we are not the center of the universe. Our salvation always lies in remembering that our personal comfort is not the most important thing, but that like Christ, we are called to pour ourselves out in love for each other and for God’s project of redeeming all of creation.
Like I said, this is difficult. But I think the first step is opening ourselves up in love and delight to God’s non-human creation. Some of us have experienced true love of creation as pet owners. We’ve experienced the delight of welcoming some strange creature into our home, and we’ve experienced the joy and the responsibility of caring for a cat or a dog or a bird or a fish or a ferret – come what may. And many of us have experienced the grief of losing a beloved pet that sometimes stings and heavies our hearts almost as much as losing a human companion. I don’t think this is something we have to apologize for. If indeed God has created the rocks just for the rock badgers, God surely loves the dogs and cats and birds and fish and ferrets, too. Perhaps when we grieve their loss, we experience something of God’s love for them.
Others of us are swept up in the majesty of nature. We have stood at the edge of the ocean and watched the pelicans skim just barely over the top of the waves. We have watched the dolphins crest and jump. We have delighted in the diversity of the shells that are homes for all kinds of mollusks. We have caught our breath observing a beautiful landscape – whether it is a high mountain or green valley, a rolling sandhill or the stark beauty of the desert. We have heard the music of the birds – a different soundtrack for each scene. We have looked up and around us in wonder, and for a moment, we have forgotten our human cares. Perhaps when we appreciate the majesty of creation, we experience something of God’s delight in it.
And when we see through God’s eyes, we are able to remember that Christ is the center of all things, and not us. We are more willing to give of ourselves, to choose to recycle or drive less or eat differently or vote differently because we choose to de-center ourselves and to love – sacrificially – our neighbor-animals and -earth.
So may we open our hearts. May we open our hearts to the rock badgers. May we love our cats and our dogs and the birds in the tree. May we stand at the foot of a mountain and know our insignificance. May we look up at the night sky and rejoice that there is so much more than us.
And may we tend this earth beautifully for our good and the good of all creation.
May it be so.
Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
- Have you ever had a pet that you truly loved? How did that pet’s presence make you feel? How did you feel when s/he was suffering or died?
- Have you ever had an experience where something in nature took your breath away or made you feel more aware of the expanse of creation? When and where was that experience?
- What is one thing that you have done for the good of creation in the past or one thing you plan to do in the future?