June 15, 2025

Trinity Sunday
Outdoor Service

A Song of Praise to the Maker

Psalm 8

It’s our Outdoor Service this week – an opportunity to move outside the walls of our Sanctuary and reflect on the world we live in. And Psalm 8 is a perfect text for the day – a celebration of God the Creator, and our human role within the length and breadth of all that is made.

In midst of our enormous human-built city we often lose sight of the fact that even megalithic Toronto is tiny in comparison to the vastness of Creation. Light pollution blots out the stars at night, so we seldom experience the immensity of the cosmos. Forests are tamed and road covered with pavement, so we seldom experience the wildness that once dominated these lands. Much of what’s growing around us has been planted by humans, pruned and curated to look tidy and feel safe. We get annoyed when the wildness of creation interferes with the artificial haven we’ve created for ourselves: when coyotes hunt in our yards or raccoons ransack our garbage.

I wonder what we lose when it feels like we are masters of our own universe? I wonder what we lose when it feels like Nature is simply an annoyance?

This Psalm is a celebration of all that is cosmic, majestic, and immeasurable. It’s a celebration of beauty that we didn’t create and cannot destroy. It’s a celebration of the power beyond us, the things can never control, the ways in which we are beneficiaries of grace, rather than rulers of our own destiny. Experiencing the vastness of Creation is humbling. I wonder if many of humanity’s problems these days are because that kind of humility is in such short supply?

And yet humans are powerful. The things we create are remarkable. The control we exercise over our whole planet is breath-taking – for good and for ill. In a BBC documentary Linda and I watched other night, David Attenborough said that 94% of the mammals on the planet today are either our livestock, our pets, or ourselves. All of the mammals that live in what’s left of the wild places of the world and its oceans only make up the remaining 6%. I find that staggering!

“With great power comes great responsibility.” That line from the Spiderman movies is true, for all that it comes out of Hollywood. What does it mean in light of that statistic about the scarcity of wild mammals? What does it mean for the way we humans do, or ought to, exercise our intelligence, our energy, our creativity, our control? How do we take our place in Creation seriously – exercising our God-given strengths in ways that are consistent with God’s ends?

This Sunday when we gather on the lawns of the church, take time to ponder what was here before the church was built. Take time to ponder the Indigenous peoples who tended the land before our ancestors settled. Take time to ponder the other parts of the natural world that have always been on this land, and how many of them continue to cohabit with us. Take time to ponder how we humans are called to be caretakers – stewards – of the land and its creatures, and what we need in order to fulfill that destiny.

Join us on Sunday, on the lawns of the church, for our annual Outdoor Service. And then stay after worship ends for our potluck bbq.