Psalm 8
June 7, 2020
Trinity Sunday
William G. Carter
O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the
earth!
You have set your glory above the
heavens.
Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the
avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your
fingers,
the moon and the stars that
you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of
them, mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of
your hands;
you have put all things under
their feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the
field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the
earth!
All of us have our favorite places. One of mine is a plot of land
in northern New Mexico. It is a large plot, about 21,000 acres, a ranch owned
by the Presbyterians. Ghost Ranch is an extraordinary place. The red rock
landscape looks like a Road Runner cartoon if you remember one of those. You
can hike up the mesa or lose yourself in a box canyon. I have seen birds and
animals there that I have never seen anywhere else.
Yet as marvelous as the scenery is, the real show comes after dark.
The first evening star pops up within minutes of the sunset. Within a short
time, the sky is illumined by thousands of stars. There are no streetlights
within fifty miles. No distractions on the horizon. If you lie down on the
field and gaze toward the heavens, it is astonishing how much you can see. And
you feel small.
Can you remember a time when you felt like that?
Some time back, I attended a lecture by Dr. Margaret Geller, an astronomer at
Harvard. Her name is revered in astrophysics. Whenever she has the itch to look
deeply at the heavens, she phones up a governmental observatory in the mountains
of Arizona, and they always take her call. Dr. Geller spends her time peering through
enormous telescopes. She describes her life’s work as mapping of the universe.
She asked the crowd, “Would you like to see some of what I see?”
Without waiting for an answer, she started clicking through some pictures. We
saw swirls of light in colors that I have never seen before. She mentioned
distances that my little brain cannot calculate. As a man in the next row ahead
gazed at the images, he wiped away a tear, stroking his chin, too dumbstruck to
move.
The poet who composes Psalm 8 is lying on his back beneath a
star-filled sky. The Milky Way spills across the black velvet expanse. Darkness
is punctured by a billion points of light. The moon smiles kindly. The poet
exhales awe – and suddenly feels ridiculously small. Speaking to a God he
cannot see, he says, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established . . .” who do I think I am?
Who do we think we are?
The answer is that we are human beings. We are not mules. We are
not angels. We are fashioned as human beings. That is our lot. The dictionary
says the Latin origin of the word “human” comes from “humus,” from the soil.
Just like the old story from Genesis: God scooped up some mud from the river
bank, shaped it to resemble the divine image, and blew holy breath into the
nostrils. The first human critter was called “Adam,” a Hebrew word that means
“dirt creature.” That is who we are. Ever since, whenever we move too far from
the soil, life gets bent out of shape.
There is a parenthesis around all of this. In Psalm 8, the poet exclaims
the same line at the beginning and the end: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic
is your name in all the earth!” He says it twice, for God has a really big name.
Even as we name God as the “Trinity,” we can only point to the One who is
behind everything we see and cannot see. God says, “I am – I will be – That is
my name.” God is the Source and Destination of everything. Everything! If such
immensity does not make us feel small, then we have not been paying attention.
Sometimes we recover a sense of God’s size when we go outdoors.
Modern life promises us machines to manage and reduce the universe. We are
tempted us to presume that we humans are in control. But if we stand outside as
a storm blows in, the sheer force can stun us into submission.
So claim my good friend, who reports on the recent tornados in his
city. The destruction stunned him. Trees yanked up from the soil, spilled like
toothpicks on the kitchen floor. Have you ever seen the pictures of a whole
town flattened? Anybody still want to hang onto the myth that human beings are
in control of anything?
True wisdom begins when we perceive our complete dependence on God.
We live and breathe flat-footed on the ground, thanks to a God who thought
gravity is a good idea. When John Calvin, the great theologian, wrote his most
famous book, he said, “Our wisdom consists almost entirely of two parts: the
knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Without knowledge of God there
is no knowledge of self.”
Now, there is somebody who knew the psalms. Psalm 8 directs to look
at the grand glory of the heavens, unmanageable and enormous. The poet invites
us to trust there is a God behind it all, in the thick of it all. And when
speech begins again in the human throat, the question arises, “Who do we think we
are?”
We know the limits of being human – we have only so many days and
time is short. Our bodies can only do so much. We cannot protect ourselves from
the force of tornados, only send in the ambulances and the bulldozers to handle
the wreckage. As we have feared for the past three months, illness might strike
at any time. We never know what will happen today, much less tomorrow. All the
while, we are prone to thinking too much about ourselves in a universe that remains
indifferent to our small concerns.
Anthony de Mello describes this paradox in his book One
Minute Wisdom. "Before I was 20," he says, "I never worried
about what other people thought of me. But after I was 20, I worried endlessly,
about all the impressions I made and how people were evaluating me. Only
sometime after turning 50 did I realize that they hardly ever thought about me
at all."[1] We
presume ourselves to be at the center of everyone’s attention, and end up performing
for an audience that is not there.
The astonishing thing is that God takes notice. The God who created
quasars and moonbeams is the God who knit together our DNA and says to the
baptized child, “You are mine, all mine.” The Holy One who tosses the comets
across our sky and twirls the wind like cotton candy is the same God who weeps
when people don’t use their noggins, or take rational health precautions, or love
strangers as neighbors, or keep their hands off other people’s stuff. The
mystery of the Holy Trinity is that the Infinite Eternal God pays specific
attention to us.
That is what gives dignity to each person. God regards us. We are
not mistakes. We are not accidents. Certainly, we have bad hair days, burn the
barbeque chicken, and crash our cars into trees. Yet God regards us, setting us
a “little lower” than the angels of heaven. Granting us this stature, God gives
us responsibility for one another and for all the critters. And if that were
not enough, God has such high regard for human beings that God became a human
being. This is the greatest affirmation of our species.
And yet it is possible to fall short of the dignity, isn’t it? One
of worst expressions is when some people think they possess more dignity than
they will grant to others. They do not see how we demean ourselves when we demean
somebody else. We have lived through ten days of national brutality. That has
been hard. And I believe it is the latest chapter of a 400-year story of treating
people poorly because of the color or their skin.
Last Wednesday, I had the honor of conversing on the phone with a
man that I have respected for many years. He retired from the faculty at Yale
to return to his farm in the pine woods of Alabama. At the peak of his career, Willie
Ruff played his French horn for the queen of England. He was the first jazz
musician to perform in Russia, the first jazz musician to perform in China.
When he taught at Yale, he began a musical outreach program that reached
180,000 kids in the New Haven schools.
And yet, he said, “For most of my life as an African American, I
have been treated as three-fifths of a human being.” His childhood schools were
segregated. When he enlisted in the air force, he was sent to a segregated air
base. He was one of the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed squadron that served so
valiantly in World War 2. He claimed his God-given dignity even when the
systems of white privilege did whatever they could to rob him of it.
So what is a protest for justice? It is a demand for human
dignity. When voices long silenced speak up, they must be heard. This is not a
license to smash store windows or steal televisions; that sort of destruction
is another denial of human dignity. But to speak up when you have been put down
so long? This what happens when people declare they are children of God, just
like everybody else. There is a dignity to claim.
I think of Sarah Moore Grimke, the 19th century abolitionist,
attorney, and judge. She was a leader in the movement for women’s right to
vote. In a letter, she wrote, “I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our
claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet
from off our necks, and permit us to stand on that ground which God designed us
to occupy.”[1]
“I
look to the stars, and perceive the immensity of a holy God,” says the psalmist,
“and I wonder: who are we, that God should make us equally? That God should love
us equally? That God should endow us with great ability and deep
responsibility?” We are the children of God. All of us.
Three
weeks before George Floyd was murdered, back when the covid-19 pandemic was the
main topic on the national mind, former president George W. Bush pointed the way
forward for us all. He wrote:
Empathy and simple kindness
are essential, powerful tools of national recovery. Even at an appropriate
social distance, we can find ways to be present in the lives of others — to
ease their anxiety and share their burdens. Our differences are small in the
face of this shared threat. In the final analysis, we are equally vulnerable
and equally wonderful in the sight of God . . . We rise or fall together.[2]
Can
we hear the importance of human dignity? I think we do. And I am reminded of a
well-polished story that Mister Rogers loved to tell. Years ago, the Special
Olympics was held in Seattle. It was time for the 100-yard dash, and nine
contestants assembled at the starting line. At the starter’s pistol, they took
off.
But
a few yards into the race, one boy fell, hurt his knee, and began to cry. The
other children heard him. They slowed down, some turned around, and a couple
ran back to him. One girl bent down, kissed the boy, and said, “This will make it
better.” They helped him to his feet, locked arms, and walked together to the
finish line. When they did, everyone in the stadium leaped to their feet,
clapped, whistled, and cheered. People are still telling that story, even enlarging
on it, and you know why.
In
case we missed it, Fred Rogers tells the moral of the story: “Deep down, we know that what matters in
this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping
others win, too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and
then.”[3]
The God who made the heavens has entrusted us
with dignity. All of us.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Sarah Grimke, letter of July 17,
1837.
[2] President George W. Bush, “We rise
or fall together, and we are determined to rise.” https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/america-at-its-best/george-w-bush-rise-or-fall-together.html
[3] Fred Rogers, 2002 Commencement
Address at Dartmouth University, https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2018/03/revisiting-fred-rogers-2002-commencement-address
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