“A who done it”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, June 5, 2022
Psalm 104:24-34,35b (Forward, p. 38) CEV p. 619
One of my favourite TV genres is the murder mystery. Years ago, I was glued to the television set for Angela Lansbury and ‘Murder She Wrote’, and then, for a while, ‘the Murdock Mysteries.’ Of late, it has been Father Brown, Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Tommy & Tuppence, and ‘Death in Paradise’. Sad to say, I’m always left guessing until the very end, as to who ‘done it’ and how.
When it comes to the world in which we made I have no such guessing games. I know, for myself at least, who ‘done it.’ It has all been put together, designed and created by a loving God, our Creator. There are many in our world today who would dismiss Him altogether, saying that it all happened entirely by chance, entirely by a series of random events and circumstances. But for me, noting the fine-tuning of our earth and its place in the solar system and the precision of life itself, I cannot but exclaim that there a Mind, a designer behind it all. And, even allowing for the possibility of evolution, I would here postulate a ‘theistic evolution’ where a Someone directed all of these thousands of infinitesimal and incremental changes, rather than some accidental, random, directionless process.
It is this idea of a loving Creator that our psalmist waxes eloquent about in today’s psalm. He speaks particularly of the amazing diversity of life in the sea and of how God not only created it but also nourishes it. (From my reading, it would seem that marine scientists are continually discovering more hitherto unknown sea creatures and an even greater diversity of their habitats and complexities). And not only that, but, as our psalmist also notes, the intricacies of the volcanic and tectonic processes that ‘power’ our earth and its climate and entire system of ‘working’. No wonder the psalmist is moved to praise God. And, I would have to say the same: to sit at the seashore or at a mountain vista, or to observe wildlife whether in a zoo or unfettered in the wild, certainly evokes my wonder—and my praise. And, to think that this same wonderfully creative, wonderfully inventive God, also made us, and loves us so much that He intervened in what had been a hopelessly sad fate—by sending His Son: what a marvel and a wonder that is. Praise be to Him forever and ever. Amen.
Forward note: “Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living things too many to number, creatures both small and great. There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it” (verses 25-26).
“On the feast of Pentecost, the church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit, the ineffable third person of the Trinity. On the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit enabled believers of many different languages to hear the singular truth of God’s mighty acts.
“The psalmist gives praise to the great giver of life for the manifold works of creation, from hills and mountains to the vastness of the deep, noting an unexpected motivation for breathing life into the world—that God made the Leviathan ‘for the sport of it.’ Playfulness and pleasure aren’t often qualities we attribute to God.
“Jesus’s command in the Gospel of Matthew to ‘be perfect…even as your heavenly Father is perfect,’ is daunting and impossible under our own power. It is encouraging to know that divine perfection includes taking pleasure in creation, which, through the work of the Holy Spirit, pulses with life.”
Moving Forward: “What creatures exhibit God's playfulness?”