Psalm 104:10-18, 24-30

¹⁰ You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
¹¹ giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
¹² By the streams^[a] the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
¹³ From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.

¹⁴ You cause the grass to grow for the cattle
and plants for people to cultivate,
to bring forth food from the earth
¹⁵ and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
¹⁶ The trees of the field^[b] are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
¹⁷ In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
¹⁸ The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
²⁵ There is the sea, great and wide;
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
²⁶ There go the ships
and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

²⁷ These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
²⁸ when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
²⁹ When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
³⁰ When you send forth your spirit,^[a] they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.

Water is life. When you take a drink in the summer heat, you feel the soothing flow in your mouth that sends coolness all the way to your stomach. Sitting on the beach, you can watch the waves crest and fall for hours and think timeless thoughts. Do you remember first learning to float, and you trusted the buoyant water to hold you weightlessly? Whether you sail or swim; fish or farm, or simply live on this earth, water makes it possible.

Water is the only substance that can exist as a solid, liquid or gas within the planet’s normal temperature range. Every drop of water is ancient. If it had a memory, it has had many lives and adventures. A drop might refresh a rose, join a rushing rapid, or be frozen as solid ice for centuries before recycling again. The same droplet might have landed on Jesus’ brow and later ruined your golf outing. Oceans contain 97% of all water, 2% belong to the polar ice caps (for now) and only 1% is the fresh drinkable water we all depend on.

Our wonder with water is prominent in many religious rituals. Baptists immerse people in water, symbolizing rebirth and cleansing. Other Christians are content that a few dribbles will do. In Judaism, a mikvah is a ritual immersion before certain life events or festivals. Wudu is the Islamic hand-washing ritual before prayer, sometimes done five times a day. Many religions bath in sacred rivers or make pilgrimage to sacred springs for healing or to ask for wisdom.

Psalm 104 is a poetic hymn to the life-giving wonder of water. It gives credit to God for causing springs to gush, and every living thing benefits. Springs were a wonder to ancient people. They didn’t know the underlying geology. Water perpetually came from an opening in the ground. It was a precious, replenishing source of fresh water in an arid landscape. The Spring of Gihon was Jerusalem’s only source of water, and it saved the city in times of siege. People thought of springs as a liminal space, where the underworld connects to the surface world. The source of a spring was thought to bring wisdom and healing as well as water. Many famous shrines from Delphi to Lourdes were built beside springs for this reason. Water from a spring was seen as living water, not only because it continually replenished its flow, but because ancient cosmology saw springs as coming from another realm.

The Psalmist proclaims goodness to a world where creatures have lives that do not revolve around us. Only cattle were domesticated. The springs sustain the life of wild donkeys, mountain goats, hyraxes (a kind of rock badger.) These are land animals that live free beyond the places where humans live. They aren’t hunted nor do they play any part in human economy. The birds of the air are free. Storks were known to be especially benevolent to their young. Their Hebrew name, Hasidah, comes from the root word hesed, meaning steadfast love, the most common descriptor of God in the Old Testament. The poet throws in sea monsters and Leviathan. These creatures humans feared or imagined as chaotic belong within God’s creation and God’s delight. The poet describes Leviathan whimsically playing in the sea, perhaps like a whale splashing their great tail before plunging down again. This list would be the ultimate National Geographic movie.

Our modern faith has, in some ways, lost touch with this regular, sacred contact with water. During the Protestant Reformation, theologians were deeply concerned about idolatry and superstition. They wanted to strip away the magical powers attributed to holy objects and places. The veneration of relics had become especially troubling. Every cathedral needed a splinter of the original cross, or the finger of St. Thomas that touched the wounded side of the Risen Christ. It was good for revenue. Attempting to drive superstition from the believers, the Scottish Parliament banned visits to sacred springs and created penalties for worshiping at “superstitious resorts.”

In bringing the modern and more rational world into being, important things were lost. By disenchanting nature as sacred, the natural world was reduced to a human warehouse for what we need. Once something is desacralized, it can be turned into a commodity without any regard for where a tree or a stream fit into the ecosystem and creates the web of life.

Seeing nature only as a resource has affected how we treat the earth, and how we imagine God. God has been pushed farther and farther away from the life of this earth, into a philosophical realm of ideas. I believe ideas matter. But I believe matter matters, too.

Christianity makes an astonishing claim: the Word became flesh and dwelled among us. God did not remain an idea. God entered the material world. So, if God can become flesh, might God’s Spirit also be present in the living world around us? Psalm 104 gives us reason to say yes. If true, then we may start another kind of reformation of how we understand God’s presence in the world and our relationship to the rest of creation.

Asking if nature is alive is not only a moral and spiritual question, it’s becoming a legal question. Christopher Stone, a young law professor at USC in 1971, saw his students losing interest in a grueling property law seminar. So, he asked,

“What would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like? A consciousness in which…nature had rights? Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals. How would such a posture in law affect the community’s view of itself.”

The students began an animated debate. “Rivers can’t have rights, its absurd. Who can file their complaint? It would be chaos.” Others argued back, “Corporations have rights, and they exist only on paper. Corporation are represented by human lawyers, and often have more rights than the people who work for them, so why can’t a river have rights?”

Stone eventually wrote a paper called Should Trees Have Standing? He observed that when something has no legal rights, we tend to see it as nothing more than a thing for our use. Stone wasn’t just asking for trees to get lawyers. He was asking whether changing the law might change how we see the world.

The first book I read this year by nature writer Robert Macfarlane was titled Is a River Alive? MacFarlane loved rivers and told his son he is thinking about writing a book to explore the answer. His, son laughs and says, “That will be a very short book! Of course, the river is alive!” Sometimes a child can see what adults have spent centuries learning not to see.

MacFarlane travels to Ecuador, a country that rewrote its constitution, and gave all its rivers constitutional rights. Ecuador has a significant percentage of indigenous people, and their world view was written into the law code. Western environmental law focuses on property rights and proving property damage or personal injury to sue. The Ecuadorian constitution recognizes that both nature and humanity must have rights for both thrive.

These laws have recently been tested in court. In 2024, an indigenous group sued the city government of Quito on behalf of the Machangara River. In a city of 2.6 million people, 98 percent of all sewage and industrial waste was entering the river untreated. Ecologists showed that the oxygen levels in the river were below the 2 percent threshold to sustain aquatic life and the river was functionally dead. The court ordered the government to create a plan for remediation and since 2025, three large wastewater treatment facilities are being built.

Now, I know this idea of rights in nature can quickly become a polarized political argument. But that isn’t where I want us to begin. I don’t know if a river is alive or conscious. But I do know this: A river is sacred. Sacred things aren’t ours to use up. They’re given, and we receive them with gratitude.

Psalm 104 invites us to see the world this way again. The spring does not exist to be bottled in plastic for our convenience. Its waters give drink to the wild donkey; birds make their homes beside it; the mountains shelter the goats; the sea teems with creatures beyond our counting. The whole living world participates in the generosity of God.

Perhaps this is what we have forgotten: we are not standing outside creation, looking at it, or using it. We belong to it. We live because creation gives itself to us. Water has been given to us all along.

In the water we drank this morning. In the rain that grew our blueberries.

In the waves at Ocean Point.nIn the water that washed our hands. All of it is gift.

The first spiritual step is to notice. Notice the wonder. Notice the gift. And give thanks. For water. For life. For the God whose steadfast love flows through it all. Every drop is a testament.