BackstageThe Sermon I Heard Before the Coffee
I walked outside one morning and the sunrise had already started preaching. A ridge of cumulus across the kitchen window. Light coming up peach over the hill. And before I had poured a single cup of coffee, I had heard a sermon that used no words.
That is not poetry. It is Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. There is no speech, nor are there words, yet their voice goes out through all the earth. The sky has been talking since the fourth day of Genesis, and it has never once stopped. I built a whole album on the strange, glorious fact that creation is a choir that has been singing far longer than any of us have been alive.
But that is not the part that undid me. The part that undid me is what I realized about myself standing in the middle of it.
Everything Is Singing, But Almost Nothing Can Hear
The deeper I got into the record, the more staggering the choir became. Psalm 104 says God plants the cedars; Isaiah says the trees of the field clap their hands. The mountains rise at His command and wear His name across their granite. Out in the deep, the humpback sings at a frequency below what a human ear can even register, a praise going up that I will never hear, but the Father hears every low note of it.
The chorus states the strange arithmetic of it: "Mountains sing but cannot hear; cedars clap but cannot say."
And there it is. The mountain sings, but the mountain cannot hear the cedar next to it. The whale rumbles its praise, but it cannot hear the storm answering back. Every piece of creation is pouring out worship, and almost none of it can perceive the rest of the song. It is the most magnificent choir in the universe, and its members are, in a sense, deaf to one another.
Except one.
The Difference Was Breath
Genesis 2 tells us something happened to one handful of the ground that did not happen to the rest of it. The LORD God formed the man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. The mountains were spoken. The cedars were spoken. But this dust, Yahuah leaned down and breathed into it Himself.
The dust was different. Father blew the breath that learns to pray.
That is the whole revelation the album is built to arrive at, and I called the peak of the record after it: I am made of listening dust. I am not more valuable than the mountain because I am louder. I am not the lead singer of creation because my voice is better. I am dust, the same stuff as the ridge and the riverbed. But I am dust that was given breath, and breath is what learned to hear. I am the one part of creation that can stand in the middle of the choir and actually take it in. The stones sing without knowing it. I get to sing while knowing exactly Whom I am singing to.
The Evening I Heard Him in a Field
There is one song on this record where the wordless sermon of creation becomes a spoken word, because sometimes the God who preaches through the sky decides to preach through it to you specifically. It is a testimony about a person at twenty-seven whose company had failed in the spring, who walked out into a hayfield in September just to think, and sat down in the cut grass with the orange light going long across the hill.
And in that field a voice came that did not sound like their own kind of thinking, clearer than my mind and kinder than my drinking, and it said: this is not the ending. This is the ground of the next thing.
The voice in the song speaks it directly: "This is not your story's ending, this is your ground for the next thing; you are still on it, look at the orange light."
I love that the pulpit was a field and the sermon came with the smell of cut hay and a grasshopper on the knee. Creation is not only a choir singing generally to everyone. Sometimes it is the room Yahuah chooses to meet one grieving person in particular. The skies declare His glory to all the earth, and every so often, standing in the middle of that declaration, you hear your own name in it.
Not the Soloist, a Row in the Choir
Here is where it got humbling, and I needed it to. I have spent years as a worship leader with a microphone and a face pointed at a crowd. And somewhere in making this record, the Father gently rearranged my seat.
I am not the soloist, the mountain has been. I am not the conductor, that's the Father at the rim. I am not the audience. There's no audience to win.
The mountains have been holding the alto part longer than I have been alive. The forest ran its dawn chorus every morning before I learned the words. I am not the star of this thing. I am not even the conductor. I am one row in a choir that started long before me and will keep singing long after, and my job is not to be impressive. My job is to join. To take the breath I was given and add my voice to a song creation was already singing, and to be the member of the choir that gets the unspeakable privilege of hearing it.
The Song That Will Not Stop
I ended the album where the choir never ends. Because Paul writes in Romans 1 that God's invisible attributes have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, in the things that were made, the sky has been a witness with no excuse for anyone to miss. It was singing before Scripture was written, and it will still be singing past the last page of Revelation.
The closer chants it out past the horizon: "Past the end of every age, skies won't stop; past the last of every page, skies speak out."
So the next time you step outside and the morning is doing something wordless and enormous over the hills, do not just admire it. Recognize what you are standing in. You are inside a choir older than the human race, and you, dust with breath in it, are the one voice in it that can hear the rest and answer back on purpose. That is not a small thing. That is the reason Yahuah breathed into the dirt in the first place. Add your row to the song. Everything else already has.
