Matthew B. Ciske
Pastoral Team Member
West Richmond Friends Meeting
May 24, 2026
Scripture: Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Good morning, Friends,
Many denominations mark the Feast of Pentecost today. The Lectionary offers several scripture texts for this year’s services — far too many to read today. A few weeks ago, our Friend Dinora preached on Acts Chapter 2, a Pentecost account.
Pentecost is the closing of Eastertide, the fifty days after Easter. Easter, Eastertide, and Pentecost tell a single story: the resurrection, the continued presence of the risen Christ, and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that sends the new church out into the world.
Creation is a deep thread woven through this arc. It isn’t a background theme; it is the theological scaffolding that gives the arc its cosmic scale. The resurrection is framed in the New Testament not just as the reanimation of a body, but as the start of a new creation. The empty tomb is a Genesis moment.
The timing of Eastertide, which falls in the spring here in the northern hemisphere, is not liturgically incidental. There is a renewal of the natural world as days stay light longer, animals emerge from hibernation, and plants push through the soil. These all have an echo of the resurrection.
There is numerological significance to Eastertide; it echoes the jubilee structure of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is itself rooted in the seven days of creation. The season could be viewed as a great Jubilee. The fifty days are a participation in the Holy Spirit’s ongoing creative presence. The risen Christ is present throughout, much as the Spirit is present throughout creation in our reading today.
In this arc, creation imagery reaches its pinnacle at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit that descends on the disciples in the locked room is the same Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis Chapter 1 as the creative breath of God. The rushing wind and fire of Acts Chapter 2 deliberately evoke primordial creative power. The church is, then, a new-creation community animated by the same breath that brought the first creation into being. Creation’s social fabric is repaired.
Taken together, Easter, Eastertide, and Pentecost tell of creation, fall, and new creation. Easter is the point where the old creation’s guaranteed death is broken. Eastertide can be thought of as an overlap period in which new creation begins, but old creation still exists. This is why the risen Christ appears in transformed and mysterious ways. Pentecost is the moment of new creation, powered by the same creative Spirit that started everything, and it starts to spread through the world by way of the church.
Psalm 104 is a sweeping hymn about God’s sustaining of God’s creation in the present tense. It opens with God wrapped in light as a garment and is structured around the movement from darkness to blazing light that characterizes the arc from Easter through Eastertide to Pentecost. The psalm presents a theology of continuous creation: the world doesn’t merely exist; it is actively held in existence by a God who waters, feeds, breathes life into, and constantly renews it.
The whole Psalm opens with an individual meditation-“Bless the Lord, O my soul”-and ends with the same phrase repeated, followed by a shift to the plural imperative: “Praise the Lord.”[1] The psalmist first celebrates the diversity of creation at a majestic, cosmic scale. They then shift to the Holy Spirit as the source of all life, ongoing sustenance, and renewal. All creatures depend entirely on God’s breath being sent out. Things are created when God sends forth the Spirit; they perish and return to dust when God’s breath is withdrawn.
A core Quaker belief is that of God in every person, and this text widens the aperture to capture at least every living thing. It calls us to consider who and what is encompassed in our blessed community.
The psalmist then prays, with hopeful expectation, that God will continually send forth that Spirit and rejoice in what God has made.
Pentecost is the dramatic and personal fulfillment of what the psalmist celebrated cosmically. The word translated “sending forth your Spirit” in Psalm 104 is the same theological motion in Acts Chapter 2: God actively sends the Spirit into the world. The Holy Spirit who renews the face of the earth is the same Spirit that fell on the gathered disciples.
Psalm 104 frames the Holy Spirit as the continuous creative power holding all things in existence, the revelation of something always true of God’s relationship to creation.
The section of the Psalm we heard today contains a thread of change. This change is not a guarantee of security, though it is a promise that God is alive. The sheer diversity of God’s works, an earth full of creatures shaped by wisdom, implies ongoing creative activity and not a static, finished world.
The passage reflects the fifth day of the creation story, with a sea teeming with fantastic creatures. Water is inherently a place in flux, with waves, movement, and life cycling through it. The sea might be where the most unpredictable forces of nature are part of a dynamic, but ordered, system.
We, human creatures, are not explicitly mentioned at all in today’s reading, though I will come back to an omitted verse in which humankind features prominently.
All creatures wait on God for their food, “…in due season,” which introduces the idea of time and cycle. Provision is an ongoing, rhythmic act, a continuous loop of giving, gathering, filling, and satisfying. These verses are strikingly intimate: God opens God’s hand, and creatures are filled in response to the needs of those creatures.
Perhaps the most explicit and radical treatment of change comes in a profound cycle of dissolution and re-creation, a pattern governed by divine will. When God hides God’s face, creatures are troubled; when God takes away God’s breath, creatures die and return to dust; when God sends forth God’s Spirit, creatures and the earth are renewed. This means that existence itself depends on God’s engaged attention.
What is not cyclical is God’s glory; it endures forever, and God’s rejoicing in God’s works is eternal. Even here, though, change is implied by divine attention: the earth trembles when God looks at it, and mountains smoke when God touches them.
The earth is not indifferent to God; it responds to God’s gaze and touch, implying an ongoing, dynamic relationship.
Has anyone lived through an earthquake or a volcanic eruption?
The Israelites certainly experienced quakes: there is a major fault line along the Jordan valley. Volcanic activity is less common in that region, though the diaspora in Syria, Turkey, and the Aegean may have had to deal with eruptions.
Psalm 104 makes a sustained and vivid case for God’s ongoing engagement with the creation, as an active, present sustainer. God’s actions in the Psalm are described in the present tense. The verbs are active and continuous; these are not descriptions of past-completed projects.
The Lectionary guidance for the end of this Scripture passage drops the first half of the final verse. The missing phrase, “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more,” offers us an opportunity to wrestle with the text in the manner of our tradition’s continuing revelation, as a question put to us by the Light within. It might be read as a lament of human violence destroying the divinely designed harmony of creature and creation. It could be an opening to think about our own complicities in ecological and social ills. There is real pastoral and theological work to be done in this space.
What does the first half of the verse bring up in you?
The psalm itself, though, ends on praise, not on dust. The psalmist chooses to end the verse and the hymn with their inward soul blessing God and encouraging others, in outward community with one another, to do the same; how Quakerly this is! We might ask ourselves how we are a people who praise with a vocabulary of delight in God’s eternal presence.
In today’s Scripture, awe at God’s diverse creation, the dependence of all creatures on a divine sustaining source, and the psalmist’s commitment to sing to the Lord as long as I live[2] hold the testimonies by which we, as progressive Friends, seek to live.
John Keats wrote of “the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth’s human shores” — a line Quaker Earthcare Witness, a network of North American Quakers, has lifted.[3] Our stewardship testimony necessarily includes Spirit-led action toward ecological sustainability and environmental justice.
It may be difficult to see the world in its current ecological state or to acknowledge humankind’s role in bringing it to this condition.
The earth remains God’s creation, and the psalmist points to God’s eternal presence in it. God has not withdrawn God’s breath; we, creatures and creation, are still here. The earth has not returned to its dust. This, Friends, is our Good News today.
Pentecost is a present condition for Friends. The breath is still in the room, and we must be willing to be breathed on by the Holy Spirit as we, ministers all, go in peace into the world to continue the work of the original disciples.
As we center into expectant waiting, I pray that our almighty God will speak to us in the language of our hearts, that we may hear God’s Word with understanding, and that we may answer God’s call with confidence.[4]
May it be so.
[1] Psalm 104:35
[2] Psalm 104:33
[3] Ode to Water: Source of All Things, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Tom Small
[4] Prayer for Illumination, Feasting on the Word: Liturgies for Year A, Vol. 1, p. 173
Matthew Ciske 