St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, April 24, 2005

Song of the Waters

God’s Dominion, Sea to Sea – Rev. David Mundy

Psalm 104:24-34 John 1:24-34

I am a landlubber by birth, growing up not far from here in a community that still had pride in its farms and orchards when I was young. I have been fortunate to spend two periods of time living in Atlantic Canada.The first was immediately after I was ordained. The United Church allowed us three choices for regions where we might serve and I put the province of Newfoundland as my first choice. I was told later that I might as well have written down Newfoundland, Newfoundland, and Newfoundland because as soon as they saw my willingness to go to The Rock they ordered my sou’wester and rubber boots.

We loved the rugged beauty of the outport community where we were settled and the manse looked out the harbour toward Fogo Island of “I’se the Bye” fame. We were mightily impressed that we could walk down to the stage head to buy freshly jigged cod for twenty-five cents a pound, or fifty cents if it was filleted. It tasted nothing like the smelly stuff my mother would buy in frozen bricks from the supermarket when I was a boy.

When folk realized that this young mainland couple actually enjoyed being out on the water they would invite us on excursions to outlying islands where we would see whales and seabirds such as puffins. And we were introduced to the annual phenomenon known as the caplin run. These tiny fish would wiggle their way onto the beaches to lay eggs. Caplin are one of the keystone species which are the source of sustenance for seals and birds and whales, as well as harvested for centuries by humans.

One outspoken parishioner who became a friend told me as often as he thought I would listen that it was all coming to an end. He noticed that the caplin were fewer each year. He had licenses for salmon and lobster but it seemed that he had to work harder every season to eke out a living. And he was convinced that the larger boats which the federal government had helped to finance were so efficient and destructive that there would soon be no fish left.

My friend was not liked by some of his neighbours because he was so outspoken but in the end he was a prophet. We all know that the seemingly inexhaustible supply of codfish collapsed and now serves as a cautionary tale of the depletion of an abundant species. The caplin runs are now a matter of memory rather than a yearly ritual.

A few years after I returned to Ontario to live, I went back to Newfoundland on church business and I visited this friend and his family. I sat on their dock one morning and savoured the salt air, and the natural beauty of the area. But it struck me that something was missing and I eventually realized that it was the sight and sound of the sixteen and eighteen foot boats moving about the bay to check lobster traps. Many of the lobster fishermen had sold their licenses back to the government and “retired” early. While there are still some prosperous fisheries such as crab, one has to wonder how long it will be before they too will disappear.

This morning is our last Sunday in our month-long exploration of our relationship with Creator and creation. This also happens to be Earth Sunday, with its theme of Sacred Oceans and Seas. Our United Church appreciates that living near and on the ocean has a sacred component. We have a service for the blessing of the fishery which includes this preamble:

From the ocean comes all life.

Fish and all creatures of the sea

remind us of God’s acts of salvation.

In the beginning, the Spirit of God swept over

the face of the waters, bringing light and life to all.

God parted the waters of the Red Sea,

graciously giving life to Miriam, Moses and all God’s people.

In the belly of a giant fish, Jonah found life and thus God.

Witnessing for Jesus Christ, Paul endured a storm-tossed sea before finding safety on shore.

Both of the passages we chose for this day are about water but it was the psalmist who took us to the shore and invited us to venture out into the great waters of the sea. What we heard was a marvellous description of the abundant life of marine waters “Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it. “ We aren’t certain just what this Leviathan is, but it could well be the whale who frolics in the waters. And there is a sense that humans in their ships and the diverse creatures of the sea can coexist, and that is the way God has planned it.

Most of us here this morning are landlubbers and we spend our lives as terrestrial creatures for the most part. Maybe that’s why we say that we are “green” if we are environmentally conscious, rather than “blue.” But from space our planet is the “pale blue dot” which cosmologist Carl Sagan spoke about. Our nation does have as its motto, “from sea to sea” which is taken from Psalm 72 and the phrase "[God] shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth." Psalm 72:8

This is appropriate because Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world with more than two hundred thousand kilometres, or roughly five times the distance around the planet at the equator. Sadly we have often abused this access to our oceans, using them as garbage dumps and toilets, almost literally. It shocks people to hear that three of our major maritime cities, St. John’s, Halifax, and Victoria, continue to pour untreated sewage directly into their harbours. While we were living in Halifax a prominent doctor, a bacteriologist, announced that he wasn’t going to allow his children to sail in the Northwest Arm anymore, for fear they might fall in. He wasn’t concerned that they would drown. He didn’t want them to be immersed in the water!

Even though we need to be sending out a distress call, an SOS, for the quality of the water and for the many creatures in our seas whose numbers we have depleted, there are many more species in the ocean depths which we are only beginning to realize are there. You may have heard that there has been an international project called the Census of Marine Life which recently made a preliminary report, a couple of years into this ten-year project. Already they have discovered thousands of previously unknown species, including hundreds of “new” fish. Of course they are only new to us and these scientists are suggesting that we may never really know the diversity of the oceans and that the writer of Psalm 104 was correct when he claimed that the creatures of the oceans are “innumerable.” There was a time, not all that long ago, when we assumed that no matter what we put into our oceans, nor what we took out of them, our human activity really couldn’t have that much effect. There is a growing awareness that we must live responsibly and with humility.

How do we respond to this SOS as we come to the conclusion of this Season of Creation? You might be asking why we should bother to expend so much effort in worship on the environment. After all, there is a host of secular agencies which address these issues quite effectively.

We can, though, use the words of faith to speak of what happens when we allow ourselves to move beyond self-preservation and even scientific common sense. Those words include wonder and respect and justice and even obedience. The other word which comes to mind is love, both our love for God and love for the other. When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment he said that we should love God with everything in us and to make sure that we also love our neighbours as we love ourselves. We are beginning to understand that our neighbours include all creatures that bound and splash and wiggle and crawl on this planet. This is said so eloquently in a story by Loren Eiseley called The Star-Thrower. You may have heard this story along the way although it has been mangled and misused, so I hope I can do it some justice. Eiseley, who died in 1977, was a scientist and naturalist. He was also a poet and poetic writer who used religious imagery in his essays.

He tells of visiting a southern beach very early one morning before most tourists were out of bed. In the near-darkness he sees scores of local people working furtively to pick up the shells and starfish and other creatures which have been tossed ashore by the waves and tide. They will be offered for sale to the visitors who are still asleep and there is an urgency to their work. As the sun begins to rise Eiseley makes out one figure half a mile away, a man who is engaged in a very different activity. He bends and picks up an object and hurls it into the sea, and then he repeats his effort. When Eiseley gets closer he realizes that the stranger is hurling beached starfish, still living, out into deeper water. He doesn’t know what to say when the man looks up. As a scientist he knows that there is a natural order to things and that all that lives must die. So he mutters a few words and leaves.

Yet the brief encounter stays with him. He begins to think about good and evil and life and death. In his musing Eiseley comes to a new understanding of himself and who he wants to be in the world. He wants to choose life and with that choice to take the risk of love. Alone in a room he makes the affirmation “I do love the world, I love its small ones, the things beaten in the surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again.”

And so, on another morning, Eiseley goes back to the beach and there finds the star-thrower. He stands beside him and says “I understand” and begins throwing starfish out into the surf. “Somewhere” he says, “I felt, in a great surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew.”

When we care for the earth and sky and waters of this planet we aren’t just earnestly “doing the right thing.” We are participating in the love of God. God the Creator who sees the sparrow fall. God who delights in the breaching whale. God who loves the world so much that he sends his Son to live with us and die with us and whose rebirth gives us hope and meaning.

And we are affirming that the God who has dominion from sea to sea is the God of love.