Sermon - Let All Creation Praise

May only God's words be spoken and only God's words heard. Amen.

Okay, so math is not my strong suit, but as far as I can tell,

if I'm calculating this correctly, it's probably been 102 years since the last

time Psalm 148 was appointed to be read on the same Sunday that the cicadas

were singing in Asheville.

102 is, I think, the smallest number that's divisible both by 17,

the life cycle of the cicadas, and 3, the years of the lectionary.

I've been listening to the cicadas this week Their mating call like an unceasing

alarm Calling me to choose life while I can, whenever I can And to make a racket about it.

And I've also been listening to that secondary sound Of their little bodies

batting against the leaves Tricking

me into thinking I'm hearing the first drops of rain pattering down,

tricking me into lifting my eyes to see what's there,

tricking me into looking at the world around me instead of at my phone screen,

they're thick in the branches above my head when I get out of the car red eyes

and golden wings their carapaces lay crunchy on the ground beneath my feet,

at my computer I read about them about the way their babies will burrow into

the ground, latch onto tree roots, and suck the sap for 17 years.

By the time they reemerge, there are so many of them that they can be food for

a host of predators and still have enough of the brood left over to breed and burrow again.

Their shells? They provide rich nutrients for the soil,

so much so that when you cut down a tree you can tell by looking at the rings

which years were cicada years the rings are thicker because the trees were so well fed that year.

Psalm 148 is one of the Hallel Psalms. Hallel, short for hallelujah.

These are the five final psalms in our songbook.

They're all songs of praise, and they're a conclusion of sorts.

Psalm 148 is the middle of these five psalms, and in Hebrew poetry,

the most important line is often the middle one, the heart of the thing.

So Psalm 148 is the heart of the conclusion, of the book of Psalms.

And when we pray Psalm 148, we're calling on all creation to join us in praising God.

All creation in the heavens, all creation on the earth,

because God is the one who has created us, and because God has established laws

that will never end, and because God has raised up strength for God's people.

That word strength is literally horn in Hebrew.

God has raised up a horn the way an animal who's been victorious in a fight raises up his horns.

Sometimes in scripture, this is called a horn of praise.

Sometimes in scripture, as when Hannah praises God for answering her prayers

for a son and says God has raised up a horn for her.

God raising a horn for God's people means God raising up a child to become a leader.

All creation is called to praise God because God is raising up a horn of salvation

who will be for all creation.

As Christians, we see a messianic promise here.

And so all week I've been thankful for the cicadas, who are among those creeping

and winged things of earth which are fulfilling one of the purposes for which

they were made. They are praising God.

They are doing so loudly.

And their praise has encouraged me. It's encouraged me to lift my eyes,

to listen more attentively.

It's encouraged me that I'm not alone and feeling like an alarm should be sounding right now.

I'm grateful that we get to live in a moment when we can hear the cicadas praising God.

I read recently about Sam Lee, a folk singer in England who plays traditional

English music, music that shares a lineage, of course, with our Appalachian folk music.

In the spring, Sam sleeps in the forest, and he's learned to recognize the songs

of many of the birds he shares the spring forest with.

One of those birds, shy, heard but rarely seen, is the nightingale,

who sings for just about five weeks each spring during their mating season.

Sam has been listening for the nightingales since 2009.

In the last century, though, with the growth of industrialization and urbanization

in England, the population of nightingales has declined by 96%.

Sometimes in the spring, Sam sings his songs in the forest, and he works with

and harmonizes with the songs of the nightingales.

He says sometimes they've sung back, dropping into key with the song that he's

singing, and adding their own jumps and vibrations in time with his music, too.

Sam and the nightingales, they're fulfilling the call of Psalm 148.

And, Sam says, it's conceivable that in our lifetime we will hear the last nightingale's song.

Are we prepared to lose that?

What will be lost in creation's hymn of praise when it loses this voice?

And if we praying this psalm are calling on all creation to praise God,

shouldn't we care that species continue to exist continue to have the chance

to fulfill their creator's purpose for them continue to be able to join us in this chorus of praise,

humans were charged in the very beginning with the role of exercising loving

care and leadership over all the creatures of the earth.

Instead, so many of us have forgotten to even listen for their songs.

When Christian missionaries arrived in the rainforests of Ecuador,

they insisted that the natives who became Christians give up their quite minimal

style of dress for a more western set of clothing.

As David George Haskell writes in the Songs of Trees, an unintended consequence

of this was to reorient ears to the self and away from the forest,

partly closing the door to an acoustic relationship with plants and animals.

When rain hits a rain jacket, it makes a different and a louder sound than when rain hits skin.

Haskell writes that when he sits without his rain jacket under a sabo tree in the rainforest.

He can tell which other plants are part of the sabo's understory just by listening,

because rain sounds different hitting moss or an arum leaf or the leaf of an avocado plant.

We have forgotten that kind of listening, and we have made some songs extinct.

But the cicadas are here this week with Psalm 148, inviting us to ask creation to sing.

Inviting us to look for ways that we can fulfill our human vocation as caretakers

of creation and make it possible for all our created siblings to sing their songs of praise.

The cicadas are reminding us, by their insistent thrum of life,

to listen, even after they're gone.

Thanks for listening to 60 Church Street, a podcast of Trinity Episcopal Church

in Asheville, North Carolina.

Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.