Songs of Summer : Psalm 104 | Darci Morris | Part 9 of 9

Thank you so much for coming and welcome if you're watching online.

It's just so fun to be up here again.

Um, for the past several weeks, we've been going through the psalms, and along the way, we've discovered that the psalms are many different things.

They're songs of worship, prayers for every season of life, laments, words of wisdom, and even sometimes insurrection and shaking our fist at the wind.

We see the psalmists often expressing great emotion because the psalms are vivid and they're descriptive.

And I'm telling you guys, the psalms that we're reading today, it's just pure unabashed poetry.

It's so rich in metaphor and so rich in beauty and natural imagery that I think it's gonna kind of blow your minds.

And we're not gonna cut anything out of it, we're gonna go full on into this Psalms.

Um, my name is Darcy Morris, as Scott said, and some of you know that I have a background in therapy and more specifically ecotherapy.

So, what I do is I try to use the outdoors in nature in therapeutic ways.

And I discovered this on my own.

Years ago, when I was going through a really hard time, I realized that hiking and being out in nature was something that was incredibly healing.

So, about 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to really learn about this.

And I signed up for a class in Marin County called Introduction to Somatic Ecotherapy, and it was for anybody.

It was like six weeks, and I would drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and I would go to this class.

I was only one of three students in this class.

One was this very older man who was a healer, and I'm not saying that he was a doctor.

He would lay his hands on you and say, You didn't know it, but you have a gallbladder problem, and I just healed it, so you're good to go.

That was his healing.

The other guy was super young, and he was really cool.

And he he showed up stoned most of the time.

He was a 20-some-year-old kayaker who led kayak trips.

And he's like, I just want to find more meaning and help my kayakers find more meaning in kayaking.

So that was cool.

And then there was Dave who became my mentor eventually, and he's kind of a pioneer in somatic ecotherapy, and he's a therapist.

Um, and the first class, I drive out into this hillside, and there are these odd guys, and me, the budding therapist, and Dave decides he wants us to be a tree, and so he says, I want you to ground your feet like your roots, close your eyes, and everyone pretend you're a tree.

Well, this is kind of weird for me.

So my eyes were closed, and I was like a little tree.

And then he said, Now I want you to blow in the wind, keep rooted, and just let the wind blow you.

I was like, ugh.

So I'm kind of blowing in the wind.

And I opened my eye and I peek, and here's the healer and the kayak guide spinning just into the wind.

And I just thought, oh my goodness, this is a little too groovy for the therapist from San Jose.

And I was really intimidated, but I stuck through it because I really believed that nature heals.

And eventually I would sign up for a year certification program for therapists with Dave and become certified.

But I've become, it's kind of become my mission in ecotherapy to make it mainstream because I believe in the healing power so much of the outdoors.

We know that nature heals.

There are so many studies that show that just being out in the outdoors lessens depression, it lessens anxiety.

Sometimes it has the same effect as an antidepressant, although in no way am I against antidepressants.

They've even done studies that show if you're in a hospital room and there's a picture of the outdoors, people heal quicker, just being exposed to the outdoors that way.

And sometimes, you know, as I learned about ecotherapy, I really thought, why do we always start with all the man-made interventions?

Why don't we start with the God-made interventions?

Because God gave me my sight and my touch and the and feeling and my ears as mechanisms to heal and experience his creation.

And I'm not saying that we should have surgery in the woods or that we shouldn't look to doctors, but again, what I'm saying is maybe some of what ails us, the cure, is right outside of our door, especially in Santa Cruz, guys.

We have so much here.

Um, we talk a lot about the artist, and sometimes we fail to immerse ourselves in his art.

We talk about finding God in church buildings and Bible studies and in books and in classes, and all these things are important, but sometimes I am concerned that we've taken the beauty and majesty out of our faith.

And so we're gonna dive into Psalm 104, and I want you to notice the recklessness.

We don't know exactly who wrote Psalm 104, but it sometimes is attributed to David.

And we know that David also was one to lament and scream and complain, but often what he'd do is he would redirect from his problems into the grandeur of nature, and maybe that's something we can learn too.

So the psalm is long, and I just encourage you as we go through it to connect to the specifics of where you might have experienced these things.

And the psalm begins: Praise the Lord, my soul, Lord my God, you are very great.

You are clothed with splendor and majesty.

The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment, he stretches out the heavens like a tent, and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters, he makes the clouds like a chariot, and he rides on the wings of the wind.

He makes the wind his messenger, flames of fire his servants, he set the earth on its foundations, and it can never be moved.

You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment, the water stood above the mountains, but at your rebuke the waters fled.

At the sound of your thunder they took to flight.

They flowed over mountains, they went down into the valleys to the place that you assigned them.

You set a boundary they cannot cross, never again will they cover the earth.

He makes springs pour water into the ravines, it flows between the mountains.

They give water to all the beasts of the field, the wild donkeys quench their thirst, the birds of the sky nest by the waters, they sing among the branches.

He waters the mountains from his upper chambers, the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

He makes the grass to grow for cattle, and plants for people to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth, wine that gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.

The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted, there the birds make their nests, the stork has its home in the junipers.

The high mountains belong to the wild goats, the crags are a refuge for the hierks.

He made the moon to mark the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.

You bring darkness and it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.

The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.

The sun rises and they steal away.

They return and lie down in their dens.

Then people go to their work, to their labor until evening.

How many are your works, Lord?

In wisdom you made them all.

The earth is full of your creatures.

There is sea vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small.

There are ships to go to and fro and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

All creatures look to you and give them food in the proper time.

When you give it to them, they gather it up.

When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.

When you hide your face, they are terrified.

When you take away their breath, they die and they return to dust.

When you send your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.

May the glory of the Lord endure forever.

May the Lord rejoice in his works.

He who looks at the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke, I will sing to the Lord all my life.

I will sing praises to God as long as I live.

May my meditation be pleasing to him as I rejoice in the Lord.

But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.

Praise the Lord, my soul, praise the Lord.

Whew!

Isn't that good?

That is just unabashed awe.

Now, one thing I think is really interesting is if this is David, I love how he's so so amazed, but he just can't help but put in there, may the sinners vanquish from the earth and the wicked be more no more.

He just can't help it, right?

And I kind of think that we're like that too, right?

We all know that things are beautiful, but sometimes we feel like it's a little too Pollyanna, a touchy-feely.

But what I want to argue is this redirection that the psalmist has.

We know that this psalmist life is probably not going so well if there are sinners that want to be vanquished in the wicked to be no more.

But he's turning his direction away to creation, even for a moment.

And you know, this passage is not only beautiful and so concretely what a lot of us experience, the creatures of the earth and the whales, but it's so rich in metaphor, right?

What metaphor is and what art is, is it helps us to give words to things that we just find hard to express in our limited language, right?

So any art, whether it's a movie or whether it's a pottery, piece of pottery, we're trying to find ourselves in it because we're so limited.

Sometimes we don't even know what we feel.

And I find that when I'm working with clients in coaching or therapy, that so often it's not that people aren't telling the truth.

They just totally don't know what's going on inside.

They have no idea what they feel.

So when we can connect them with nature and metaphor, sometimes we can give them a little boost, a little power charge to helping them understand.

And Jesus said this as well.

He said, look at the lilies of the field.

Look at how the lilies of the field grow.

Are you not more important than the lilies of the field?

If God takes care of the lilies, how much more will He take care of us?

Right?

So we might go out into the world and say, I'm not so convinced that God cares, but we hear this poetry, and I hope that we find ourselves in that.

And so in my training as an ecotherapist, we're really big on metaphor.

Almost to the point I think a lot of my clients think I'm a little corny because I'll go, Oh, that just reminds me of a flower.

And they kind of, oh, okay, here she goes.

She's going off into her metaphor.

I once worked with a man who was kind of typical in that he knew he needed some help and guidance.

He didn't really know why.

And we were sitting at the banks of the San Lorenzo River in Henry Cowell, and I said, Is there anything here that you can find to help you describe what you're experiencing?

And as we were watching, there were kids kind of going down on little inner tubes down the river.

And he said, You know, everybody's going down the river and they seem to be doing so fine and having so much fun.

But I feel like I'm a swimming against the current and I can hardly keep my head above the water.

I feel like I'm gonna drown.

That's poetry.

He didn't know what he felt, but the river told him what he felt.

I had another family that came in to my an office setting, and there were two sons that were just that were struggling with drug addiction.

The mom was dealing with severe depression.

The dad had a very high profile, powerful job, and he said, I feel like I'm standing against a cliff and I'm holding a huge granite boulder, and I'm trying to protect us all from getting crushed, but my knees are starting to buckle, and I don't think I can hold it anymore.

Wow.

Wow.

If I had just asked him when he came in, hey Tom, how are you today?

He'd probably say, Fine, right?

We find meaning through God's creation.

In my training, we had to take turns being the therapist and the patient.

And when I was the patient, my therapist colleague said, What can you find meaning in?

We were up in Marin at a state park, and it was just beautiful, these rolling green hills.

And right in front of us, there was this huge oak tree, and it was gnarled and it had this big stump.

And I said, Well, I guess I'm that oak tree because it's I'm solid, I'm dependable, the kids can climb on my branches.

It was kind of an uninspired, like, I whatever, I know what you're trying to do.

You're trying to get me to find a metaphor.

Um, and as I was connecting, trying to connect with this oak tree, I saw this hawk in the distance flying across the sky.

And we just stopped to watch it.

And my colleague, friend, said, I think there's a nest in that tree.

And I think that this hawk is flying into the nest, and then it's flying this huge loop and it's going back.

And I said, You know, I don't want to be that stupid oak tree anymore.

I don't want to be the oak tree.

I want to be the hawk.

And I want to tend to my kids and tend to my family, but I want to fly.

I want to soar.

And that was a really life-changing moment for me.

And I still think about it.

When I started my hiking programs and I started to travel and take groups out.

Um metaphor builds a bridge between the invisible and the visible.

Suddenly, a sprig coming out of a tree is hope, and a storm isn't just weather, it's grief.

And isn't that just how Jesus taught?

He rarely began with abstract theology.

He began with birds and fields and vineyards and sheep and fishing nets and wildflowers, not unlike the psalm.

The Bible encourages us to find wisdom through our connection in nature.

And sometimes when I do a grief group outside, I take people to a really beautiful place and we start labeling the things that we see that are beautiful: trees or a creek, clovers or flowers.

And then I'll say, but you know what else I see?

I see broken branches.

I see leaves that are crumbling and decaying.

I see a tree that's fallen and it looks like moss is growing over and it's rotten.

Did you notice that not everything here is beautiful?

And what we'll do is we'll talk to these people who are grieving losses about how beauty and devastation and loss coexist side by side.

I don't often know why bad things happen, but I know from the woods that nothing in creation is ever, ever wasted.

And nothing in my life is ever, ever wasted, or nothing in your life is ever, ever wasted.

I know that beauty can steal my focus from all that is wrong in the world, just like it did with the psalmist.

It redirects us.

And did you notice in this psalm, the writer?

I think this was really interesting because when I put the psalm up, I know I kind of wanted to proofread it because the psalm kind of goes like this You are very great, O Lord.

He stretches the heaven like a tent.

You created the river, O Lord.

He sails with the wind in majesty.

And I thought, shouldn't this be the right tense?

I learned in English, you should keep the right tenses.

And I wanted to change it.

And then I researched it and I found out that the writer of the psalm is using a very intentional device to draw us into a state of awe.

Right?

And so what awe does is the psalm doesn't say thank you for the trees, thank you for the river, thank you for the wind, thank you for the oceans and the wild creatures.

It says, You, God created that, and then it's saying to us, hey, look at what he did.

Right?

We do that too.

I mean, I look at my little grandbaby, I have a little grand two little grandbabies, and she's they're so cute.

And I just think that nobody's cuter and nobody's more smart, nobody's more brilliant.

And then I take out my phone and I go, I did it this morning.

And I say, Look at my grandbaby, isn't she so cute?

Like, isn't she the best?

You are so great.

Isn't she so great?

This would have been a great time to put a picture of her up there.

I should have kind of I kind of missed, I missed my opportunity.

Uh so the psalmist is saying that awe will draw us into community because we invite other people into seeing creation.

And Albert Einstein focused on this too, one of our greatest minds, right?

He said the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.

His eyes are closed.

Whoa.

Whoa.

The Psalm 104 is saying, Open your eyes, people.

Come on, look at this.

Don't be so hard-hearted.

Even Einstein says that.

One of my favorite quotes in a very old book that Donald Miller wrote called Blue Like Jazz is, isn't there something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what he's doing?

And what I've learned about Ah is that it invites all feelings.

And sometimes when I'm in doubt or I'm confused, I just need to know that there's a God that's steadying everything and he knows what he's doing, even when it might not seem like it to me, right?

We live in a really gratitude-oriented society.

And being in the mental health field, I know that gratitude journals are really helpful.

I believe.

I believe in them.

Um and we ask people in the hardest of times, well, just be grateful for what you have left.

Be grateful, be thankful.

And I'm not saying that that's wrong per se, but has anyone ever asked you just to be grateful when your whole life is burning down?

You kind of get a little resentful, right?

It's like, yeah, okay, great.

Uh-huh.

Right?

And that's why ah is like magic.

That's why if we could move from being thankful and grateful to ah, it could just change everything and how we perceive the world.

Because I can look at my friend who's struggling with a terrible illness and who's in pain.

And I give my permission to not feel grateful for anything about that.

But I can be in awe of her perseverance.

I can be in awe of the fact that she can just get up in the morning and start another day.

When the fires swept through our area, we don't want to tell them.

We'll just be thankful for what's left when they look at their whole lives decimated.

But I've heard stories from people who just say, Oh my gosh, I'm in awe of the first responders.

I'm in awe of the community that came around me.

And the great thing is, I can be in awe and I can still be angry and I can still be confused, and I can still wonder where God is.

Because awe isn't drawing me.

To myself and my needs.

It's drawing me outward to another person, to God, and to community, because then I invite you in and I say, look at this.

We've all experienced awe-inspiring moments, right?

I remember years ago going up to Oregon and watching the eclipse, first total eclipse.

And I had heard that people get addicted to this and they chase the eclipse.

And it was just astounding.

It was like the entire community, everybody stopped at the exact same time, and this orb appeared before us.

And it was like, wow.

And we just could hear people gasping from all over the neighborhood.

Once I was driving down to Southern California, as I would often do, to visit my mom down there, and there was the most stunning sunset.

And I grew up by the ocean, and this was like an 11 of a sunset.

And people were getting off in the rest stops and at the exits just to pull over and watch the sun.

And it just struck me like, isn't this cool?

We're all different.

We're all different ages and economics and backgrounds.

And we're all just standing here in wonder at God's creation.

And I look at my friend Tracy down there.

And we were in Peru, and I was in a tent.

It was the first morning, and I was really grouchy, and I was really feeling so, so sick from the altitude.

And I hear the voice that wakes me up: Darcy Morris, get out of your tent and come and watch the sun rise.

It's so beautiful.

What are your moments of awe?

We all have them.

And the thing about these awe-inspiring moments is they make us feel kind of small, right?

We stand in front of a redwood tree and we feel wonderfully tiny.

A.W.

Tozer writes, to be right with God, we must understand our smallness and his greatness.

Now, feeling small gives us perspective.

It doesn't say that we're invisible or that we're not important or that we don't matter.

Right?

Our world likes to tell us like we need to be bigger.

You see a bear, be big.

We need to be stronger.

We need to be more successful.

We need to be really visible.

And a lot of therapy says, how do we make you more visible?

How do we improve your self-esteem so that you understand that you matter?

And definitely there's not anything wrong with that.

But the psalmist here is giving us a gift of something really, really different.

He's giving us a healthy dose of smallness.

When I look at a redwood tree and I stand at the ocean watching the waves, I'm kind of reminded that the world doesn't revolve around me.

Right?

God has put into effect systems and seasons and systems of life and death and rebirth.

And we're a part of all of that creation.

And we're an important part, even as we're a small part.

Sometimes when I do workshops, if you've ever done a workshop, you've probably done this with me.

We always want to start out, we want to be really centered on what's around us.

And so I'll say to people, just point out one thing that's really cool to you or that's really beautiful.

And sometimes people will say it's the sky.

And somebody might say it's the fog on my face.

There's always someone that is really good at looking at little tiny things, and they'll say, I noticed that little flower or banana slug.

And the thin I'll say, you know, if we were on a satellite picture and we were looking down at us, we would be indetectable.

Right?

We're basically on top of each other.

There's no difference.

We're all at the exact same place.

We're like a little pin drop on the earth right now.

And the amazing thing is, while we're small in that, we're all experiencing this place in extremely different ways.

In this place, we're all experiencing this time in extremely different ways.

So smallness reminds me that my experience is not necessarily your experience.

Smallness reminds me that my experience can enrich you.

Because if I notice the banana slug, maybe you didn't notice.

And now your life is enriched because now you see two things that are really beautiful.

And my world is enriched by your story because I may not have noticed the things that you've noticed.

And so when I look to creation, God says, Well, I'm small, he says, I created you too, Darcy Morris.

We are all in this room, God's workmanship.

We are part of creation.

We are just as majestic as that whale breaching out of the ocean.

The translation of that verse is often used as masterpiece.

We are God's masterpiece.

Now, how does that work that we're a masterpiece, but we're small?

We're just one wonderful painting in God's vast gallery of beautiful works of art.

But it's not all about us.

We're not the only one.

And here's the thing that I believe so deeply in the work that I do and just kind of living life, you know, is feeling small is only life-giving when we know that we're loved, right?

When I know that I'm loved and that God says, you're just one painting, but man, I love that painting.

That's everything.

If I feel small in a world that is cruel, that's despair.

If I think the world is cruel, then I'm gonna fall into despair.

If I feel small before a God who I think does terrible things and is causing all the problems in my life and others, that's a life based on fear.

But if I feel small before a creator who knows my name and delights in me and calls me beloved and calls me his masterpiece, that is true love.

And that is what it's about.

And that is why God created all of this.

He created us and all of this out of love.

You know, um, I got involved in ecotherapy years ago, but way before that, my first experience really to the outdoors in a grand way.

I was raised in San Diego, and I always really liked the ocean, but I signed up for a backpacking trip to Colorado.

And I was like 16.

It was with Young Life, if anybody knows that organization.

And it was going to be a through trip, a week backpacking, and they told us to train and to break in our boots, and I did not do either of those things.

And the boots back then were really different.

They were clump, clompity, clump things, you know, with the red laces, and they were really hard, and sometimes it took like a year to break them in.

So we're walking at about the third day.

My heels are really hurting, the pain is getting worse.

Didn't want to, you know, stop the line, didn't want to draw attention to it because I knew I didn't break in my boots, didn't want to call attention to that either.

And I was getting blisters the size of quarters.

And the more I hiked the back of my heels, they were just getting raw and raw and raw.

And so for a time, all I was doing is backpacking like this.

All I remember, I still remember this: these big clompity clump hiking boots, a muddy trail in excruciating pain, actually fantasizing if they could actually get a helicopter to fly me out because I was in so much pain.

And for some reason, I don't even know why, we're in this little train line, right?

It stops, and we're all waiting for something.

I don't remember what.

And I'm standing here like this, and I look up, and oh my gosh, here's the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

They look like a painting, and there's a meadow with wildflowers as far as I could see.

I get goosebumps just talking about it, and the clouds were perfect.

And I remember just thinking, I've been walking through a painting all this time, and I didn't notice it.

It was the first time in my life at 16, I really remember being just moved to tears by something that was so beautiful.

And the beauty was there all along, right?

I just hadn't been looking.

I was so distracted by my own grumblings and complainings, and I just kind of wanted to be rescued.

But like the psalmist, I was redirected.

I was redirected from my pain and my grumbling into this.

And God is like, look at this.

Look up, pick up your chin, look up.

I wonder how many revelations that we've all missed in this room because our eyes were fixed on something else.

Maybe our worries or our complaints or endless lists or insecurities.

And I think it's a tragedy that more and more in our culture we'll being asked to focus on the man-made.

Look at your phone, look at AI, watch this on a movie, right?

We're becoming so disconnected from creation.

We're leaving the creator behind.

Is it any wonder why people are losing their faith if we're telling them to find God on their phones?

Is it any wonder?

We're missing the masterpiece as we leave the artist behind.

And the psalmist is saying, Hey man, jump right in.

Just jump in.

This is just amazing.

Psalm 104 invites us.

Lift up your chins, everybody.

Look up, lift your eyes, let creation speak.

His world is not just scenery, it's a testimony to his goodness, his creation, and his care.

Because we worship a God who is so creative.

He creates the grand, he creates the small, and he creates us.

And we can be in awe of all of it, including the person sitting next to you.

The earth is still clearing, declaring the glory of God, you guys.

All you have to do is walk out this door, and we have the ocean and we have redwood trees.

We can drive down one of the most spectacular coasts, probably in the world.

Nothing has changed today from when the psalmist wrote this poem.

The earth is still declaring the glory of God.

The question is, are we going to stop long enough to see it?

Lift up your eyes.

Let us pray.

Lord, you set the earth on its foundations and it can never be moved.

In your creation, we see beauty and loss existing side by side.

May we in this room live lives of awe, acknowledging your presence in both the beauty and the brokenness.

May we be good stewards of your creation, and may we look to creation for meaning and wisdom and clarity.

And may the meditations of our heart be pleasing to you.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.