July 12, 2026
Indianola Presbyterian Church
" God's First Cathedral"
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch
July 12, 2026 Based on Isaiah 55:10-13
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since I got to study abroad in college, but I can still remember the feeling of walking inside of St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome. Maybe You know the feeling. You walk in off a loud hot chaotic street, and the temperature drops and quiet descends. The ceiling pulls your eyes up and up. It’s massive like I’ve never seen. Marble everywhere. Gold leaf catching candlelight. And I remember standing there in all that beauty with one question running through my head.
Am I allowed to sit here?
A practical question more than a theological one.
Is this pew for tourists or for people who actually pray? Can I touch this column? Is this rope here for me? I lowered my voice without anyone asking me to. I walked slower. Something about the place demanded reverence, and my body knew it before my brain did.
I've been thinking about that feeling this week. Because look where we are.
No marble. No gold leaf.
The ceiling this morning is maple and oak and a lot of July sky.
And yet, I want to suggest that this is not any lesser a sanctuary than the ones in Europe. It might even be the first sanctuary.
At least that’s what John Muir, the writer and outdoorsmen, thought. Muir grew up under a father who preached a hard, strict faith, the kind with more rules than grace. He had most of the Bible memorized before he was grown, and not because he wanted to. So when Muir finally got free and wandered into the Sierra Nevada, he brought all that Scripture with him, and he started seeing it everywhere. He wrote about watching trees in a windstorm, bowing, and tossing their branches, and he said it looked like worship. Then he wrote this: "No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples."
God's first temples. Before anyone quarried a single stone, this was the sanctuary. The hills were the architecture. The trees were the choir.
Which brings us to Isaiah.
Isaiah 55 is a homecoming song. It's written to people in exile, people who have been far from home so long they've almost stopped hoping. And God makes them a promise. My word goes out like rain and snow. It waters the earth. It does not come back empty. And then the promise gets specific, and it gets loud.
You will go out with joy and be led back in peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you. All the trees of the field will clap their hands.
I love that in this text, creation is not the backdrop for the homecoming. Creation is the welcoming committee. The hills sing. The trees applaud. Listen for a second this morning. That birdsong is not an interruption to our worship. Those leaves moving overhead are not background noise. According to Isaiah, they're the congregation. They were here praising God before we arrived and they'll keep going after we pack up the chairs.
Here's the thing about this cathedral, though. It asks a different kind of reverence than the one in Rome.
In Rome, reverence meant restraint. Hush your voice. Don't touch. And honestly, some of that belongs here too. There is a way of treating creation like raw material, like it exists to be cleared and paved and used up, and Isaiah stands against it. Because listen to the last verse. In place of the thorn, the cypress will grow. In place of the brier, the myrtle. And it will be to the Lord for a memorial, an everlasting sign that will not be cut off.
A memorial. Think about what we usually mean by that word. Carved stone. A statue. A plaque with a name on it. Something built to last precisely because it's dead material, because it can't change.
God's memorial is a myrtle tree.
Not hewn. Grown. Not installed. Planted. The monument God chooses is alive, which means you can't build it. You can only make room for it and let it grow. And Isaiah says that living sign will never be cut off. Muir noticed the irony. He said the more we cut down the groves to build churches out of them, the dimmer God seems. We take the living memorial and turn it into a dead one, and then wonder where the presence went.
Now, I don't think the cathedral in Rome is the enemy here. I think it's the imitation. Those columns are stone trees. That vaulted ceiling is a canopy. The builders were homesick for the grove, whether they knew it or not. The stone cathedral is beautiful the way a photograph of someone you love is beautiful. Worth keeping. Not the same as the person.
So what does reverence look like in the original cathedral, in this one?
Some of it is the Rome kind. Care about what your hands do here. Leave the trail better than you found it. Ask, before we clear or build or pave, whether we're about to cut down a memorial to God.
But some of it is different. Because nobody in this sanctuary is whispering. The hills are singing. The trees are clapping. This cathedral doesn't ask you to hush. It asks you to join in. Reverence here might look like joy. Like noticing. Like letting yourself be welcomed by a creation that, according to Isaiah, has been waiting to celebrate your homecoming all along.
So in a few minutes we'll finish worship, and you'll walk back to your cars under these trees. Here's what I want you to know as you go.
You will go out with joy. You will be led back in peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you. And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
That's not poetry about some other place. That's a promise about this place that we always inhabit.
Amen.