Temple to Creation

Psalm 65:1-13 (NRSV) 1 Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion, and to you shall vows be performed, 2 O you who answer prayer! To you all flesh shall come. 3 When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions. 4 Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple. 5 By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. 6 By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might. 7 You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples. 8 Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs; you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy. 9 You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. 10 You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. 11 You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness. 12 The pastures of the wilderness overflow; the hills gird themselves with joy; 13 the meadows clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys deck themselves with grain; they shout and sing together for joy. Picture The lectionary this week divides Psalm 65 in half, instructing us to read either verses 1-8 or 9-13. How I initially read the psalm was subsequently influenced by that parameter. “Okay,” I told myself, “I will meditate on the second half, where creation is present, where we hear about the ‘river of God.’” However, we thwart the depth of this psalm if we cut and paste what we assume to be most relevant. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us about the tendency to clip the wings of Scripture as we contemporize texts. It became obvious to me how, with the lectionary’s aid, I was doing so as my supervisor and the co-director of Creation Justice Ministries, Avery Davis Lamb, asked, “Is forgiveness in verse 3 not also an act of creation?” ​ When reading Psalm 65 in full, there is a shattering of paradoxes. The movements from silence to praise and from cult to creation, which initially seem separate, are all connected by the God enthroned in Zion. Zion theology is a fascinating part of Israel’s imagination and political ideology. “Zion” is the name associated with the religious significance of the temple King Solomon built in Jerusalem. Dr. Ellen Davis in her book Opening Israel’s Scriptures, explains how in Zion theology the temple is the garden of God, the new Eden. The entire building was styled as a sacred garden/forest, lined with fragrant woods, carved with designs, adorned with flowers. A pilgrimage to the temple would be styled as a return to Eden, meaning a return to the place where humanity was in the closet company of God, where God’s presence was most fully experienced. Part of Zion theology was thus the understanding that God had an abiding commitment to Zion. When the Babylonians attacked and the unthinkable happened as Jerusalem was forced into exile, Israel’s theology had to be reimagined (work we see mediated by the prophets). Yet, the most radical transformation of Zion theology happens in Christianity, when Zion and Jerusalem become states of beings rather than geographical locations. Jesus is himself the “meeting place” of heaven and earth, greater than the temple, where God and humanity are completely joined. Dr. Ellen Davis says, “the theology of Zion becomes the theology of the incarnation.” Picture Picture While it is sound exegetical practice to read the Psalm in its own historical context, written in a pre-exilic Israel under a bountiful and orderly socio-political institution, as Christians, we have the liberty to read with a trinitarian lens. Where one part of the Godhead is, so are the other two. I find Dr. Ellen Davis’s work illuminating because it helps bridge gaps we see in the psalm and which the lectionary underpins. The first is that our places of worship and intimacy with God were never intended to be isolated from creation. In fact, the opposite was true: in the temple nature was honored and nurtured as a place of restoration which helped cultivate an imagination for harmonious relations with the world outside the temple. It makes me wonder what it means for us to worship in minimalist buildings, isolated from the Earth we came from. It would be a foreign concept to our faith ancestors, and it is tragically ironic that those very worship sites are often run with unsustainable energy systems, only contributing to the further destruction of our ecosystems. Second, just as Dr. Ellen Davis highlights the union between heaven and earth in the temple, and then in the person of Jesus, we also see in the structure of the psalm that temple and creation belong together. Creation sings and shouts in praise with us as kin, participating in a relationship with the divine. The smallest of acts are formative for our faith, and the Psalmist helps us properly name and narrate the world so we can understand how to better live in it. Yahweh is God of everyone and everything, “the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.” God’s love is operating within the places we design as sacred and, more shockingly, from the margins and throughout creation. God’s relationships and workings are pluriform and interconnected. As Dr. Norman Wirzba has noted, the world is not a value free, amoral mechanism to do whatever we want with. God is the divine gardener, softening the Earth with showers as the Psalmist says. We have forgotten how central creation ought to be to our worship, and perhaps, need to unify them, seeing creation as the place we actually learn how to worship and enter into intimacy with the Creator. ​ Our places of worship and intimacy with God were never intended to be isolated from creation. In fact, the opposite was true: in the temple nature was honored and nurtured as a place of restoration which helped cultivate an imagination for harmonious relations with the world outside the temple. The Church Forests of Ethiopia are one example of what this might look like in the Anthropocene. Over the past century, Ethiopia’s native forests have been eaten up as a result of agriculture and growing populations, becoming a dry hinterland. Less than three percent of the primary forest remains today. Yet, Ethiopian churches scattered throughout the highlands have created porous walls to secure and expand forests, allowing for regeneration of plant and animal life. These churches have become a place of coolness and rest, where the woods and spirituality are all bound up in one, manifesting Psalm 65. Fred Bahnson, who wrote about these projects, reflected that the scriptural metaphor of “City on the Hill” was properly adapted for our climate crisis: “less militant fortress than mystical refuge: the Forest on the Hill.” He ultimately witnessed, “the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.” Hope remains for us; we can look to the Psalmist and join in with the Spirit at work in the Ethiopian churches to once again gather as people satisfied and filled with the goodness of God’s house. ​ Resources ​Books: Davis, Ellen F. Opening Israel's Scriptures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Web Article: https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia/