Sermon: “Waves of Grace Command the Morning”

September 3, 2016: Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Season of Creation: Ocean Sunday

Texts:
Psalm 104:1-9, 24-26
Job 38:1-18

Job spends much of the book that bears his name asking God to explain. Why do I, Job, suffer? Why am I, Job, in pain? I did nothing wrong, says Job. Why, God, why?

In response, Job receives a flood of words, a wave of poetry, a tsunami of beauty. David R. Henson writes, “God doesn’t respond with beauty to cancel out or disregard Job’s suffering. I think that’s why God doesn’t exactly answer Job’s question about suffering. Because an answer – even one from God – is never satisfactory in the midst of our pain and grief. Nothing solves suffering. Nothing answers it. But neither is suffering or grief the whole story of our lives and of the world. There is beauty, and grace, and hope in the world, too, existing simultaneously, in paradox, side-by-side.”

God says to Job:

“Have you commanded the morning
since your days began?
Have you caused the dawn to know its place?”

As Rev. Nelson writes: “Just as Job is pleading with God to look at the world and bear witness to its suffering and pain, God is pleading with Job to look at the world and bear witness to its beauty and glory.”

This month we observe a Season of Creation, and in our island home, surrounded by the waters, I can think of nothing more appropriate than to begin with a Sunday for our Ocean. In it, we see both the glory and the suffering of Earth. The ocean’s power has toppled humanity’s grand designs, and human beings have, quite literally, trashed it. North of the Hawaiian Archipelago, within the currents that churn about the North Pacific, there’s a lot of human garbage in the sea. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the Great Pacific Trash Vortex.

It’s actually somewhat difficult to see if you’re moving through it on a ship. Wave action breaks things up, even our non-degrading plastic bottles, into smaller and smaller pieces, even microscopic. That makes it hard to measure – but twenty tons of plastic washes up on tiny Midway atoll every year, and biologists believe that nearly all of the island’s Laysan albatrosses have plastic in their systems.

But the ocean is also far, far too large for a sermon, which is supposed to be focused and specific. The oceans are vast and various. Coherent won’t cut it.

At the risk of offering you an incoherent sermon, I’m turning from the straightforwardness of prose to the possibilities of poetry, just as the author of Job did. I propose that before we take on the question of how we exercise our power over the flowing waves, we first pause and appreciate it. The questions are like the ocean itself: in constant motion, fluid and powerful, beautiful and terrible, deep with mystery, unpredictable as the arc of plume of spray.

Before we take those questions on, let us love the ocean first, love it like a mother who gave us birth, like a friend whose welfare we seek, like a spouse in whom we find our own well-being.

Take a look at what poet Michael Coffey, author of Mystery without Rhyme or Reason, said in this poem, “What Job Meant to Say had He Girded Up His Loins” on his Octillo Pub website.

“Who shut in the sea with door when it burst out of the womb?” asks God, in an image of the great ocean coming into the world like an infant being born.

“I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band” – imagine the newborn ocean in a baby’s blankets, wrapped in bands of cloth in the same way that Luke describes Jesus, snug and lying in the manger of Bethlehem.

“The Wonders of the Sea”

The wonders of the sea are grand
The flowing wave which flings its diamond spray
Into the air, the glistening schools of fish,
The massive dignity of whales serenely swimming.

The wonders of the sea are tiny
A garden blooms within each pearl of water
And the ripples barely dampening the rocks along the shore
Glint merrily when lightly kissed by sunbeams.

In Job we find:

“Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deeps?”

Humorist Dave Barry, in a more reflective mood, writes, “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean.”

Poet Nayyirah Waheed offers us this perspective on the seas, challenging us to be a little more like the ocean.

“If We Could Love the Ocean”

How can we love the ocean?
Its friendly waves deceive;
They rise to overturn and overthrow.
Its cooling depths will smother;
Its countless fathoms crush.
Its gentle surface warmth rises up
In thickening clouds
Which rage in rain and tempest.
So unlike us – or not so unalike?
If we could love each other,
Then we might love the ocean.
If we could love the ocean,
Perhaps we’d love ourselves.

[Pastor Eric then sang a song entitled, “Waves of Grace Command the Morning.” The lyrics follow:]

Water crashing on the shore
Great waves battering, and scattering,
And pulverizing rock into sand.
The ocean breezes blow
Zephyrs buffeting, and carrying,
And scattering ohi’a seeds below.

The tides they rise and fall
The currents stir the deeps
The soaring seabirds raise their call
And hidden in the shallows the hawksbill sleeps.

Water washing on the shore.
Ripples moistening, and glistening,
Evaporating into misty air.
Seaweeds wave their leafy crowns
Surges aerate, and circulate,
And pollinate their groves.

The tides they rise and fall
The currents stir the deeps
The soaring seabirds raise their call
And resting in the shallows the hawksbill sleeps.

Have you entered the springs of the sea?
Have you embraced the ocean like a child in your arms?
Have you entered the springs of the sea?
To find that waves of grace command the morning?
To find that waves of grace command the morning?

Water reshaping the shore.
Beaches fashioning, then terracing,
Then vanishing below.
Water flowing through the veins
Of the Oma’o, Makua,
Kamaha: Human beings ourselves.

We are children of the seas.
‘Ohana to the restless waves
Oceans embracing and conflicting
And suffering our callous disregard.

Have you entered the springs of the sea?
Have you embraced the ocean like a child in your arms?
Have you entered the springs of the sea?
To find that waves of grace command the morning?
To find that waves of grace command the morning?

You will find that waves of grace command the morning.

If we could love the ocean,
perhaps we’d love ourselves.

Amen.

Pastor’s note: I have included links to the selections by Michael Coffey and Nayyirah Waheed, and not included the full text, in order to properly acknowledge the authors and publishers.