Creation
Summary
In week 3 of Beauty: See Again What God Calls Good, Matt Crummy turns to the created world as a living witness to God’s presence and love. Drawing especially from Psalm 104, this sermon reminds us that responding to creation with praise is not extra or peripheral, but a sign that we’re seeing a fuller picture of what’s real. We’re invited into a simple, transformative rhythm: direct our attention to the world already declaring God, learn to read what creation’s “speech” is revealing, and be reformed as this goodness reshapes our desires, pace, and way of life. The sermon closes with Augustine’s stirring invitation to “question” the beauty of earth, sea, sky, and stars—until creation’s confession leads us to the One who is beautiful and unchangeable.
Questions for reflection
When was the last time you felt genuinely awakened to wonder? What helped open your heart to it?
What do you think creation is “saying” about God’s life, love, and generosity—and how might you learn to discern that more clearly?
Where might God be inviting you to slow down or speed up so your pace better reflects what is true and good?
Psalm 104 portrays God as the One who opens his hand and satisfies his creatures with good things. What would it change if you lived from that picture of God’s provision?
Augustine says creation’s beauty is its confession. What part of the created world most readily draws you toward gratitude and praise?
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When was the last time you were awakened to wonder? I don't mean wondering. I wonder what I'm going to have for breakfast today, although that's important I say awakened because it seems that it's both sort of a state of being wonder and maybe an awareness of majesty and beauty all around us, and maybe it's sometimes something we don't acknowledge. You could say we're asleep to it and there are a million different wonders in this world. Billions perhaps, and I would say each person themselves is sort of a wonder, a world to themselves and each person brings their own quirks, their gifts, perspectives. But you start to kind of expand beyond humans and you start to think about hummingbirds or waterfalls or field mice kind of scurrying beneath the corn or dark matter, the laws of physics, the structure of cells, coral reefs, Saturn, Jupiter and things get incredibly complex and just start to get a sense of how amazing our universe is.
So when we confront what's true about all of this, when we confront what's real reality, it awakens wonder within us because we see that we are not its ultimate source. It's perhaps a little bit of why AI videos are less wondrous because you're sort of like, oh, that's ai. It's not real. Something about reality that brings a different type of reaction. We are reminded that we are an important part of something much, much, much bigger than each of us. Something good, something true, something interconnected and even sacred as Christians, we are people who are captivated by the love of God. We are a people who inherit and share in the reality that Jesus lived and died and rose again and sustains all things evoking wonder. Even today, he sustains this marvelous and complicated and confounding place we call home. And beyond that, we are convinced that love itself is the most powerful force in the universe, greater than our divisions, our sadness, our brokenness, our inequalities, our limitations greater than even death.
And that God in his grace sought us out and seeks us out still today, humanity, y'all, that he made us in his image to receive and experience his love in relationship with him and with each other forever. That he puts in this place us as sort of lowercase g gods of the earth, stewards and caretakers of this world which is teaming with life. So we have to wake up to these truths in some way each and every day. Otherwise we tend to forget perhaps what is most foundational to what is actually real and we begin to orient our lives, our days away from our first principles of love rather than toward it. The French Jewish philosopher in Mystic Simone Vay, who I would say was decidedly Christian, curious, I'll put it that way, wrote to her father in a letter in 1942, just a year before her death at the age of only 34.
She said this, and you can put there's a photo I think of they up there. There she's, she wrote this at 33. The children of God should not have any other country here below, but the universe itself with the totality of all the reasoning creatures that has ever contains or will ever contain that is the native city to which we owe our love. She's saying here now, this place less vast things than the universe among them, the church impose obligations which can be extremely far reaching. They do not, however include the obligation to love. That's a little side eye to the church at least that is what I believe. Our love should stretch is widely across all space and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it. As is the very light of the son Christ has forbidden us to attain to the perfection of the Heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestow of light.
Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality. Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God's creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below. Beautiful. I wasn't writing that at 33, I can tell you that. So this is part of what maturity looks like. You grow up and hopefully realize that the invitation from God is to join in the renewal of all things as friends or as they put it, to merge your love into his with regard to all things here below. Much of our lives spent doing this, practically cultivating this place we live in in various ways. Some it may literally be cultivating land, but in other ways we cultivate our faith, we cultivate community and so on. Professor Norman Wba at Duke Divinity, he frames this in sort of agricultural language.
He puts it this way and you can put him up there just to get, look at that goatee. He's ready to be a pastor in 2000. Hopefully he never listens to this on YouTube. Okay? An agrarian informed faith hinges on the assumption that this world and its life are sacred gifts of God that are meant to be cherished and celebrated. This sounds straightforward enough until one realizes how many spiritualities have been and continue to be premised on the exact opposite assumption. These spiritualities though sometimes waxing eloquent about the beauties of this world are fundamentally dualistic or gnostic. Here's what he means and he tries to explain it. What I mean is that they assume materiality or embodiment like the real stuff in our bodies to be deficient and thus a lower order of reality that must all to be left behind. That was a series if not destroyed altogether.
It's as if God made a mistake in creating creatures that are finite, fallible, marked by need. The focus of these spiritualities is this ethereal human soul. And the point of their prescribed spiritual practices is to liberate the soul from places and bodies that are variously described as fleeting, frustrating or foul. Okay? You can take his beautiful goatee down on things. So as he stated, this world and its life are sacred gifts of God that are meant to be cherished and even celebrated, cultivated maybe. And I believe we're tempted to miss these gifts drifting through life reactively pushed around by our appetites for lesser gods, or we look beyond this life to some sort of non embodied post earth bliss that will have us very bored given what we've constructed in our minds. A place disconnected from the way we are designed to thrive as humans.
Also like non embodied post earth bliss sounds like a fragrance line. So I'm just going to name that, maybe claim it for this holiday season Anyway. This life isn't all bliss is it? Right? None of us would claim that I don't think, in fact death and disappointment and abuse and abandonment and unmet needs, they tempt us to wanting these disembodied placeless futures. But in this, we miss the givenness of the here and now. It is simply impossible to live in the future. It is impossible to inhabit anywhere else than where you are right now. So when we are asleep to these kind of fundamental realities, life begins to make a lot less sense. We are drawn away from our finitude is the word. This finiteness our boundaries. That is our God-given limitations. So we're in a short series on beauty, which Dominic has been doing a great job with and it has been very helpful for me already and what it is and why it matters not only is ornamentation, but as a way that reality itself shines.
But do we measure beauty by some sort of ideal? Do we need to learn to see it in the particulars? Is beauty like a means to some other end or is it an end in itself that we're created to enjoy? So in particular today, we're going to explore beauty and the natural world, which is why again, I was talking about this is convincing people that dessert is good and you should eat more of it, the universe and everything in it. So let's pray and then we'll finish our sermon here today. God, we thank you just for this time. Thanks for this passage we're going to look at here briefly. God, we thank you just for the wonder of the natural world. Thank you just that you have created us in love and that you are here with us this morning. We pray these things in your name, amen.
Psalm 19 verse one says this, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the glory. I'm sorry, proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words, no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out into all the world, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens, God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bride groom coming out of his chamber like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the nothing is deprived of its warmth. So here we have a psalm written by the Jewish prophet and King David and recall that he grew up as a shepherd before he was thrust in the limelight as a kid who killed Goliath and became the chosen he of the throne of Israel.
And I can imagine that as a shepherd, he spent many nights of course studying the sky dwelling maybe on his place in all of it. And as the youngest in a Jewish family, I can also imagine he might've felt the sting of insignificance, perhaps wondering if his life would amount to much. But he grew up, some things happened and of course we have this song here from him still today the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaimed the work of his hands. This is an image of a master craftsman, an artist creating something utterly magnificent, breathtaking. In fact, it is so charged with meaning that creation itself as though it's speaking in these lyrics is revealing knowledge even without words. And I think we need to hear this in the information age. Do you know that things can be revealed to you apart from Wikipedia and chat GPT or even in advanced degrees and job training programs?
These are all good things. They're tools, they're helpful. They require or involve information transfer, but we're actually designed for both types of knowledge input and we'll get into that here in a minute. We live inside what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the imminent frame. I've talked about this a little bit before. It's a way of seeing the world that treats reality as mostly just self-contained. You can explain everything from within it without needing anything beyond what you've got right here. And we all feel this pressure, the age we live in, it trains us to make sense of things down here in terms of what we can measure, manage, or control. And I get that. But beauty is one of the few things that actually breaks this frame open. Think of those moments when the world sort of catches you off guard like a super moon takes over the sky in the evening or the sudden freshness of a breath of cool air, maybe like a colorful bird in February or the dignity even in a person's face and you're just struck by it.
Beauty, it doesn't just inform us, it sort of addresses this like, Hey, I'm here. It feels like a voice calling from outside the room in our brains saying, look, there's more that you're not noticing here. And Taylor says, modern people like us we're often cross pressured. We're polled between a flattened world and also the sense that we're looking for transcendence and beauty is one of the places where longing returns and it suggests that the world is not a closed system. It is not empty. And it hints that reality is a gift, not an accident. It awakens like a hunger, maybe a gratitude, a sense of awe. And I would call this the ingredients or the beginnings of worship. Beauty wakes us up to what is real. So when David says the heavens declare the glory of God, it's not just like poetic exaggeration, it's forming and reforming us beauty.
It reopens our flattened worlds. It teaches us how to see again, how to attend to God, whose radiance fills this place. Alejandro Garcia Rivera, he helps us bring some structure to this thinking. He puts it this way. And here's a weird, this is like the only photo I could find of him just chilling. He looks like he's in like a nursing home here or something. I'm not sure. Maybe he is. He's no longer alive, but good guy. Jesuit. The role of grace in natural beauty suggests a revision of the definition of beauty. Although the classical definition of beauty, unity in variety is helpful, it still does not grasp beauty's spiritual dimension. Let me suggest then a theological definition. Beauty. Beauty is the sign of life abundant, known only by being enjoyed. To see beauty as a sign allows a crucial distinction between beauty and the beautiful, the experience of beauty.
Without this distinction, one would not be able to claim that there is beauty in the world. I'm sorry, beauty in what the world considers ugly. This is important to a theologian who would assert that beauty can be seen in the agonized face of the crucified Christ. Similarly, it allows the theologian to say that not all that the world considers beautiful is an experience of true beauty. In other words, beauty as a sign, it preserves its divine origins, but allows for human experience. Beauty as a sign that straddles heaven, it straddles heaven and earth. It's a sign that also means something meaningful aesthetically as possible. You've heard that word, right? Aesthetics, beauty. Beauty, like all signs must be interpreted. Okay, so what Alejandro, and you could put Alejandro down now. Thanks Alejandro Garcia Rivera makes a simple but important distinction. I think when he talks about beauty, he means something deeper than just prettiness or pleasing experiences.
She's not talking about like Travis Kelsey's chiseled jawline or mustache, right? Those are aesthetics, they're beautiful, but something else, right? Beauty for Garcia Rivera is God's life breaking through to the world, a glimpse of abundance, a sign of goodness and love that come from God himself. But our experience of the beautiful is more surface level. It's not bad, but it's whatever strikes us as lovely or impressive or moving or aesthetically pleasing. And those two things don't always line up. Something can look beautiful but be empty and something cannot look beautiful at all and yet still carries God life, God's life within it. So beauty is something real that comes from God and the beautiful you could say is our reaction to it. Our reactions are not always trustworthy. So this distinction, it helps explain why Christians can say there's beauty in places in the world where people might reject or overlook people. And the cross is maybe the clearest example of this. Nothing about the crucified Christ looks beautiful in a conventional sense. It was like a bloody awful event. It was brutal. It was public, it was shameful. And yet Christians for thousands of years now always have said that the cross is filled with the deepest beauty.
Love made visible is a thing of beauty. So we remember this a communion each week, and we'll do that here in a moment. In the same way, not everything that grabs our attention or stirs your emotions contains real beauty. Some things that look stunning on the surface don't lead to life or goodness or love. They pull us toward maybe envy or vanity or emptiness. So Garcia Rivera, he's inviting us to learn. Discernment is maybe the word to pay attention, not to just only the surface level of what's beautiful, but to pay attention to what's actually gives life real beauty. It calls us toward God. Like Simone Vay was grappling with in her letter to her dad, it deepens love. It awakens gratitude. It makes us more alive. That's the beauty. We're after God's life shining through the world, sometimes in bright places, sometimes in surprising ones.
Okay, so I guess the question becomes this. How do we live in this way? I don't think we're going to be walking around one day with a checklist, beauty versus beautiful, right? That's not what we're looking for here. Maybe the question is how do we become the kind of people who notice beauty, who discern it and let it shape our lives? Psalm 19 doesn't just describe like creation's beauty, it trains us in how to receive it. It gives us sort of an apprenticeship in beauty, a way of moving through the world where we are awakened to what it's saying. First, we learn to direct our attention to receive the world that is already declaring the glory of God. Next, we learned to read to discern what creation speech is saying and how it reveals the life of God. And finally, we learned to be reformed, to let this beauty reshape our desires, our pace, and the way we live in this world that God loves.
This is the movement of Psalm 19, and I think it's the movement of a life shaped by beauty. First to review, we learn to direct our attention toward beauty. Psalm 19 verse one says, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words, no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens, God has pitched a tent for the son. So here's what I don't mean. I don't mean that we sort of seek out beauty as an efficiency hack to godliness. Okay? We're not trying to god's a bridge to something else for us, right? Beauty either. It's important to know that any good thing can be of course, misused or misunderstood or transformed into a tool again for consumption or self-centeredness.
No, we regularly direct our attention toward the beauty of the natural world on purpose in order to listen to what it says, to enjoy it, to be inspired, to receive it as a sign to both encounter the divine other and perhaps even to re-encounter ourselves. On Christmas Eve in 1964, the Palo eight mission was doing some reconnaissance for a future moon landing. When astronaut Bill Anders, he watched the earth rise as they were coming from around the dark side of the moon, which is just mind blowing. They were witnessing something that had never been seen before in human history, and he ended up snapping what would become one of the most famous photos in history is an image of this on the moon surface. You can even put this up, Allison, the moon surface with the earth kind of looking like this blue and white marble in the distance and reflecting on the journey.
Anders, he later said, we came all this way to explore the moon. And the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth Bill Anders. He had the presence of mind to stop and think. He understood that the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night, they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words. No sound is heard from them yet, yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world, even the moon. Okay, you can put that up. Thanks. The other night I was kind of surprised I was taken off guard by the stunning display of the Northern Lights. Maybe some of you got to see that too. We walked over to Beaverdale Park near our house to sort of get a better view and a darker place, and my mind was blown and I grew up in North Dakota, so I saw some things there because it's close to the North Pole.
You can put up those photos from Beaverdale Park is the first one, just like radiant sky with different colors. You can do that next one too. Yeah, I think what stuck with me the most was seeing random neighbors out in the park at dark, just watching the sky together. There was a couple laying down in the grass taking selfies and with the sky randos pulling up in cars, there was a group of three bros just hanging out, watching not in a normal occurrence. Late at night, people were drawn to it to see it themselves, to see something real, to see it in person. And of course there were thousands of photos like the ones I shared here on social media where people, they were excited to share the experience and suddenly just for a brief moment, we weren't focused on red and blue, we were focused on the purple, bright green, pink, something different and beauty drew people out of this frame. The flattened world we tend to live in. Okay, thanks.
So beauty matters. To repurpose the astronaut's words, we came to witness the Northern lights and the most important thing we discovered was our neighbor encounters with beauty, wildness of creation. They remind us that not everything can be or should be bought and sold. So we learn to direct our attention toward beauty. Next, we learn to interpret, to discern what creation speech is saying and how it reveals the life of God. Psalm 1 0 4, verse 27 28 says this, all creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. So when we learn to see in this way, we reorient, reorient our lives around deeper truths. This is key to like a richer, fuller experience of walking with God and growing as a person.
We remember that God provides for us and all of creation and our perspective, it widens and we see how intertwined we are with the Earth. Even as I've pointed out before, even the concept of mother Earth is closely tied to how God formed Adam out of the dust in the imagery of Genesis. God is our Father in the earth is our mother. While of course acknowledging this is poetic language used to sort of get our heads around the fact that Adam didn't have human parents, right? But the point remains, we are kept alive by other life today, like right now today, plants, animals, so on and so the positioning of our lives to learn from creation, it prevents us from drifting toward a type of immature magical thinking that imagines food just arriving at your table. That's what little kids think toward a maybe nonsensical individualism.
As the passage says, when you give it to them, they gather it up. God invites us into labor, and when we receive what he provides, we are able to do so with dignity and satisfaction. We find our lives in the life of God. Life in life. It's another thing of beauty Again, here's what Norman Wbu says. He says, created beings and places are not simply the focus or object of God's love and attention. They are also and in a way we do not fully understand the material means and embodied expressions of God's love. In scripture, God is often named Emmanuel God with us. Now, we can appreciate why God is forever wanting to be with creatures because they are the embodied sites through which God's love is already at work in the world. So gist, as your very existence declares the glory of God, so does the night sky at Beaverdale park at my house or near my house.
So now imagine how these two things are connecting. I love the posture described in verse 28. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. It's a picture of God sharing with us of provision of what's good. Maybe that's a picture you need today of a good creative God who invites you into his work together and opens his hands to share good things with you. Lastly, we learn to be reformed, to let beauty reshape our desires and be our pace. We slow down or maybe we speed up, I guess, and let the way we live in this world reflect what's true and beautiful a thing of beauty. Are you able to see beyond kind of the surface level aesthetics and discern that there is a deeper beauty in a created world that is all sustained and loved by God? How could regular meditation an encounter around this truth change you?
I mean that. How could that change you? Like your work, your attitude, your relationships? What it preach to your anxiety? Would it speak to your identity? Which as Dominic has pointed out, this is a lot of what the series is ultimately about. Is identity, would it transform your habits? Would it modify your day dreams? Would it reorder your loves? Where is God inviting you to be reformed by beauty? Psalm 1 0 4, verse 33 and 34 says, I will sing to the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. May my meditation be pleasing to him as I rejoice in the Lord. Beauty is not extra or like peripheral. It's not just a bonus. In this world, responding to God in praise is a good response to the beauty of creation. In fact, it's a sign that we're really understanding a full picture of what's real.
We're awake to God's presence and power in and through the created order. We don't just see the beautiful, we sense that it is all a gift of love. And so we respond in kind with love like God. We express our gratitude and allow beauty to cleanse us and in a sense and in a way that is very godlike. We bless him back. So a question that we started with, when was the last time you were awakened to wonder, how can we live lives transformed by beauty in some way? First, we learn to direct our attention to receive the world that is already declaring God. Then we learn to read, to discern what creation's speech is saying and how it reveals the life of God. And finally, we learn to be reformed, to let this beauty reshape our desires, maybe our pace, the way we live in and through the life of God.
In closing, we're going to hear a few words here from St. Augustine in a sermon he delivered back on Easter in the year four 11, which is just wild to wrap my mind around. Very relevant today. Here's what he says. Question the beauty of the earth. Question the beauty of the sea. Question. The beauty of the air. Amply spread around everywhere. Question the beauty of the sky. Question, the sired ranks of the stars question. The sun making the day glorious with its bright beams. Question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry light, dry land that fly in the air, their souls hidden, their body's evident. The visible bodies needing to be controlled. The invisible souls controlling them question all these things. They all answer you. Here we are.
Look, we are beautiful. Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful, changeable things, if not one who is beautiful and unchangeable? Let's close with prayer. God, we thank you that you are a God of beauty, incredible mind blowing beauty. God, you do make things beautiful and we are so grateful to live in a place that is marked by beauty. We acknowledge God that sometimes the world doesn't look that way. We pray that you would help us to see more clearly what is true and real, that even in love, marred by death, that we can see beauty, truth, kindness, grace, pray. Just that you would help beauty in the coming weeks and months and years, invade the flattened worlds we've created in our minds that we would see as you see something deeper, something truer, something more mature. Pray all of these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
