Wesleyans, Nazarenes, and Southern Baptists were among those who gathered Sunday for the "Oil Spill Day of Prayer." 

The biblical information encourages both human action and Godly action in bringing about substantial healing in a broken world. Both the creature and the Creator are respected.

Unlike atheistic materialism, the Biblical data avoid smashing man on the altar of the machine (be it cosmic or governmental). Human beings are respected and described for what we know ourselves to be: Significant. First causes. Choosing beings able to affect the course of history. The wonder of being created in the image of God. Yes, even the "sinner" is a level of being higher than that of complex, organic space junk coughed up by an impersonal universe, as materialism would seem to require. 

And yet humanity is not God. And therefore we are saved from having to destroy ourselves by giving into that old temptation to deify humanity and set ourselves on high -- as if we were the Creator. Because we then would destroy ourselves, having reached for what we cannot ever be in our finitude and createdness, stretching beyond ourselves to escape the wonder and goodness of who we truly are, in exhange for a false hope, a false promise, and a pie-in-the-sky secularism of an anthroprocentric  heaven on earth. Which no socialistic paradise that I have ever heard of has come close to fulfilling.

Will God act supernaturally to stop the flow or oil? Or will man act supernaturally as a first cause into the cosmic machine to restore balance in the sea and on the land? Whatever the particulars of this moment in history, the theme is everlasting: God and man, significant in work and community, co-working as Creator and creature together for goodness and justice unto the ends of the earth and in the depths of the sea.