Between Sermons II
The Assembly
We tend to think of worship as something humans do.
We gather. We sing. We pray. We listen. The building holds us, the liturgy shapes us, and what happens in that hour on Sunday morning is, we assume, the point. The rest of the week is what we return from. The rest of creation is the backdrop.
The pond disagrees.
In March, before the ice was fully gone, I watched a swan working at the edge of the gray surface. It was pressing its long neck down through the last of the freeze, reaching for food beneath. It did not register the ice as an obstacle. It was eating breakfast. The conditions were what they were. The swan's vocation was what it was. The remaining ice was a minor logistical detail somewhere between the two.
I have been thinking about that swan ever since.
BlueGreen Theology calls this unselfconscious participation. The swan was not striving toward God. It was not choosing worship. The swan was pressing its neck through ice to eat. That is the whole of it. And in that, according to Scripture and according to the theology I have been trying to recover, something is happening before God that does not require our presence to be real.
Psalm 148 is the text I keep returning to. The psalmist summons the sun and moon, the sea creatures and ocean depths, the mountains and hills, the fruit trees and cedars, the wild animals and flying birds to praise God. Directly. Not as metaphor. Not on humanity's behalf. The psalm does not say these creatures remind us of God, or that they provide evidence of God's power. It says they praise. It addresses them as participants in a community of worship that exists whether or not any human is present to observe it.
The grammar is not figurative. The assembly is real.
The wood duck (Aix sponsa) nesting in the cattails at the northeast corner of the pond is in that assembly. The hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus) riding the open water in winter. The great blue heron (Ardea herodias) standing at the edge, present in whatever the pond is today, unbothered by ambiguity. Elodea nuttallii spreading across the summer shallows. The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) pressing against the dam from below, following an instinct older than the parish, older than the town, older than the European presence on this continent. The muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) motors through the summer surface trailing its triangular wake. Everyone thinks it is an otter. It is not. But it does not mind. The North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) we almost never see. It leaves evidence: a latrine at the water's edge, confirmed last December, which means it has been here all along, moving through the dark, signing its name in the mud.
All of it already alive before God. Already doing what the Psalms say it does.
This is not a lesser form of worship because it is not conscious. It is differently whole. The river flows in God's presence without the self-awareness that might generate doubt. The tree grows in divine sustenance without the capacity for self-examination that produces anxiety. Creation's unselfconscious praise is not inferior to what we manage on Sunday morning. In crucial ways it is more integrated with the divine presence than what human self-awareness achieves.
We are the newest members of this assembly. Genesis makes that plain. The light, the waters, the dry land, the plants, the creatures of sea and sky and earth: each declared good before any human observer exists to evaluate it. When humans finally appear, on the sixth day, they arrive into a world that is already good. They do not make it good by arriving. They are last. Not the culmination. The last.
The change this makes is not small.
If the pond is already alive before God, if the peepers are already praising, the wood duck already in its vocation, the heron already attending, then environmental destruction is not only the loss of beauty, or of ecosystem services, or even of species we might have needed. It is the silencing of voices in an assembly. It is a theological event. We sin not against passive matter but against creatures already living in God's presence, already doing what the Psalms say they do.
And our work here: the restoration work, the watershed work, the patient and unglamorous labor of improving water quality and removing invasive species and, God willing, installing a fish passage so the eel and the alewife and the river herring can reach the water they have been trying to reach for centuries. That work is not management. It is not stewardship, exactly, though stewardship is better than nothing. It is more like clearing a space in the assembly that we ourselves blocked. Making room for voices we silenced. The pond was praising before we arrived. Our work is to learn to recognize the congregation we are already part of, and to act like it.
The swan does not know any of this. It was eating breakfast.
That, too, is instruction.
This is the second in a series of four pieces.
