We could read today’s psalm as a portrayal of a distant God separate from creation and thus capricious and rapacious. We could read it as God thrashing and trashing the trees, ravishing the wilderness, setting forests on fire, and flooding lands maliciously. (Perhaps a god like ourselves, careless with creation.)

Yet this is a psalm, a song for worship, a text with a liturgical context. When reciting or singing it, we encounter the numinous in our experience of nature. Thunder, lightning, wind, and storm, Lebanon skipping like a calf, and even an earthquake speak with God’s voice. Without the natural world, we would have no images and no imagination with which to declare God’s glory and power. The forces and realities of nature are a book we must read to know the glory of God in the other book: the Bible.

Disorder and destruction are so named because of our miscalculation of powers and cycles we cannot fully measure or control. What if we expanded our understanding of baptism to include yielding to such power and glory? Jesus speaks of it when he tells Peter, “When you grow old . . . someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18).

How can we know the wonder and wildness of our baptism if we refuse to acknowledge that we are integral to the beauty and wildness of nature? How will we appreciate the force of the inbreathing Spirit if we have not stood in the gale and shuddered at thunder’s intrusion? In our living and dying, baptism immerses us in nature. Our God, our creator, present in creation’s order and wildness, comes to us, speaks to us, fills us with wind and fire, and evokes our declaration, “Glory!”