Possibly my favorite psalm is psalm 8. Although the NRSV version is familiar and beautiful, my favorite version of the psalms comes from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrased version of the Bible, The Message:
God, brilliant Lord,
yours is a household name.
Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.
I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden’s dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lords of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.
God, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.
For one thing, it manages to include gurgling infants and singing whales, which, after reading this psalm for the first time, I realized are probably two of my favorite things. I also love that it is a psalm addressed “to the director of music”—it conjures images of a person conducting choruses of animals and symphonies of mountains and sky as all of creation sings praises to God. Above all, I love this psalm because it marvels at the wonder and majesty of creation, a sentiment that is especially apt this week in light of Earth Day.
In many ways, we have failed our Genesis-charge as we’ve polluted and killed and trampled and destroyed. When I think about climate change and everything that comes along with it—droughts in California, floods and hurricanes, the rapidly melting glacier a half a day’s walk from my home in Central Washington—I feel overwhelmed and discouraged. I look at my micro-self and wonder, how can I possibly do anything that can roll back the tide of incessant consumption? When I look at what we have done to this handcrafted world and remember that for some incomprehensible reasons God still loves us, I too ask, “why do you bother with us?” As much as I would rather believe in a God of love and forgiveness and grace, there are quite a few instances where Jonah’s God of brimstone and punishment makes a lot more sense.
But on days like Earth Day, I have a little bit of hope. Sometimes I tend to think of Earth Day with a little bit of skepticism. I think it’s great, but I also think it can be like only going to church on Easter—it’s a yearly obligation that you acknowledge and then the next day you step right back into your old routines and nothing has changed. But this week, in researching for this post, I read something on earthday.org that shifted my view. In its FAQ section, one of the questions was ‘Why do we need Earth Day?’ The response was as follows: “Because it works! Earth Day broadens the base of support for environmental programs, rekindles public commitment and builds community activism around the world through a broad range of events and activities. Earth Day is the largest civic event in the world, celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities. More than a billion people participate in our campaigns every year.”
Earth Day is something that is so much bigger than one person and can have such a massive impact. Getting one billion people to do anything in a coordinated way is a major accomplishment in and of itself and getting them to do something so positive is even more impressive. The individual actions might seem insignificant—picking up a few pieces of trash, posting an article about sustainability on facebook, or only eating locally grown foods for a day—but when those actions are repeated a billion times, they start to add up to something incredible. Earth Day joins together people from different religions, countries, and cultures to create a unified movement. Like the gurgling infants and singing whales in the psalm, each person brings their own voice and unique presence to the table and all those voices combine to create one unified song of joy and care for creation. I love Earth Day because it gives me hope that we can change, that we can take care of creation, that we can join our voices together with choruses of animals and symphonies of mountains instead of gradually silencing them, that we might be worthy of our Genesis-charge. Even if we’ve totally sucked at taking care of the world so far, at least we’re trying to make it better.