Recover The Glory

A sermon based upon Psalm 8

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Trinity Sunday, May 30^th, 2010

Sojourner Truth was a freed slave, who although she was set free, at one point decided to return to her former owner because her slave life had been easier than her free life.  She "looked back to Egypt" as she described it. Most of us would probably agree that freedom is usually harder than slavery. Responsibility is more demanding than dependency. But just as she was about to go back to her old life, she had a vision from God. In her vision she saw that God "was all over, and that there was no place that God was not."

"O God," she cried, "I did not know you were so big!" She felt overwhelmed and terrified. In her vision she thought she was in danger of annihilation by the all-consuming God, and she couldn’t even bring herself to speak. But just as quickly as she was swallowed up by the bigness of God she felt a mysterious presence between her and the Almighty. At first she didn’t recognize him because until now Jesus had been a just another famous person to her along the lines of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. She had not known Jesus as a personal presence. Suddenly she sensed someone with her who was there for her so she might bear the immensity of God’s nearness. She felt a sense of trust with Christ’s presence and later learned his name.  God was big, and even big enough to be small.  (From a sermon entitled "The Mindfulness of God" by Lisa Kenkeremath @ GoodPreacher.com).  

Our text today from the Psalm is about the bigness and greatness of God.   The Psalmist puts his word in a song, which we might call a biblical “praise” sandwich.   He gives us the meat of the message put between two identical words of praise.   “O Lord, our Lord!  How majestic is your name in all the earth!. 

But this psalm is most impressive, not just because of what it has to say about God, but what it also has to say to and about us.   For you see, how we see God in our minds, also says a lot about what we think about ourselves.   In other words, the bigger God is in our minds and hearts, the bigger and better people we can become, for we recover the glory of God as we also recover the glory and honor God has given us.

CONSIDER THE GREATNESS OF GOD

If you are going to consider the greatness of God, you will have to enlarge your mind and expand your horizon.   Our text says that God’s glory is “set…above the heavens”.  

I like to consider the greatness of God similar to the greatness, power and brightness of the sun.  None of us can look straight into the sun keep our eyesight.  The energy is too great and it will burn a hole in the back of our retina without our knowing it.  We should know that if God is truly great, we can’t know the greatness and power by looking directly into it, but we must consider what his light brings to the  world around us.  

I’ve recently finished a book from an MIT professor Gerald Schroeder, entitled “God According to God”.  Schroeder says that God reveals his greatness in the world around us, especially in the science of physics which is his expertise.   One reason he knows that there is a God is in question: Why is there something and not nothing?  For many years well known scientists came to the conclusion that life happened by chance and accident, suggesting that to be a good scientist, you had to leave God out of the equation.  With better technology and the introduction of quantum physics, everything needs to be recalculated, Schroeder suggests.  In other words, if you do the math, there has not been enough time since the beginning of universe for things life to have developed out of non-living chaos, unless there was a mind behind it.

 Schroeder gives an example of the changed mind of Harvard biology professor and Nobel laureate, George Wald.  Once Wald wrote in the Scientific American: “However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen….”   25 years after publication those words have been were retracted, saying, “Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times when Wald has been wrong, because “merely to create a single bacterium would require more time than the universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.” 

In other words, the world is still not old enough for living matter to be here, but it is.  Where did it come from?  Listen to what Wald has more recently written:  “It has occurred to me lately---I must confess with some shock to my scientific sensibilities---that both the question (the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non-living matter) might be brought into some degree of congruence.  This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality---the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff.  It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creates that know and create: science, art, and technology-making animals.  In them the universe begins to know itself.”  

               

To put this simply, “mind is the source of the mind” we have in ourselves to reflect upon and know about the universe, and mind can only come from mind.   There is no chance in time as we know it and can calculate it that anything but a mind can create a mind.   The world did not happen by accident.  Even the process of millions of years of development had to have a mind behind it and in it.   When I say “in it”, I also mean that.  Wald realized this by studying the eye.   The ability of the eye to see and interpret information as fast as it does, means that mind working the eye is not just in the brain, but part of the mind is also in the eye itself, which could not work as fast without both minds working at once.  This gives a new understanding of the phrase, that “Two minds are better than one.”  (From G. Schroeder, God According to God, pp.48-49).

Besides considering the greatness of the “mind” both in and behind the great universe we are only part of,  use your own mind to contemplate just how big beyond comprehension our universe is?   A beam of light traveling 186,000 miles a second takes 8 minutes to cross 93 million miles from the sun to earth.  If our solar system were the size of quarter, our galaxy would be the size of North America.  If we were to count the known stars in our galaxy, one per second, it would 2,500 years to count them all.  The Milky Way galaxy contains billions of stars, but our galaxy is only one of 200 billion galaxies. 

If you have trouble figuring just how big the universe is, only consider by contrast how big the Psalmist says God is.   The Psalmist says that God put the universe together using only his “fingers”. (8:3).  In other words, the universe, as great as it is, is still small compared to the bigness of God.

What is most important to grasp here is not just the facts.  Charles Dickens wrote a lesser known book called, “Hard Times”, during the days of the British industrial revolution, but that book could  just as well have been written for the contemporary technological revolution. In the opening lines of the book, Thomas Gradgrind is instructing his children's new teacher in his duties:
"Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. Nothing else will ever be of service to them. Stick to the facts, sir."   In chapter 8, however, his own daughter Louisa begins to move in what he considers a dangerous direction. Dickens writes:  “When she was half-a-dozen years young, Louisa had been heard to begin a conversation with her brother, saying, "Tom, I wonder-," upon which Mr. Gradgrind stepped forth and said, "Louisa, never wonder! By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder."

In our day, we can clearly see that, even though good science is invaluable for humanity, life based solely on science, rationality and reason still fails to grasp all needs to be realized so that life discover its fullest glory and honor.  Even the physicists and researchers are creating space for wonder, imagination, spirit, soul, mystery and majesty.  In high school biology class, we dissected a frog, says pastor John Harnish.  You can remember cutting up all the muscles and organs, drawing sketches, taking notes, can’t you?   We learned all the facts, and by the time we were finished, I guess we knew about all you could know about a frog.  But when we were done, there was nothing left of what you might call a real frog.   There was nothing but formaldehyde and pieces-parts.  

If you want to know a frog, you don’t study “just the facts”, but you go out by a farm pond on an early summer night-to listen to the "hu-rump" of the bullfrog, the "ribbit" of the tree frog, the chirp of the spring peepers and you listen hear the chorus frogs and crickets under the wonder of the night stars with the song of the wind in the trees.  Truth is not studied, it is sung with majesty, wonder, magic, and awe.   This is why the Bible must never be reduced to a book of science.  Don’t allow science to be your Bible and don’t ever allow the Bible to be science.  The facts we learn in science only a part of God’s truth, but beyond the facts are the words of mystery, wonder and majesty which can only be sung from the heart, not just the head.    "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth."     

               

BE MINDFUL OF GOD’S GOODNESS TO US

But even as great as it is to have the knowledge of God’s greatness in our hearts, this greatness matters little if God we are not also mindful of God’s goodness to us.   This is the next direction this Psalm takes us to help us recover our sense of wonder and glory, when he asks:  “What are human beings that you are mindful of them…mortals that you care for (have visited, KJV) them?” (vs. 4).

See how the answer is already in the question the Psalmist asks!  When he asks why so great a God mindful of us, he already gives away the answer saying, God is mindful of us and God does care for us.   But the answer continues when he says God made us almost in his image, which is described here as, “just a little lower than the angels” so that he “crowned them with glory and honor.” (vs. 5). 

How do we grasp that the most important wonder is not what we can do, but who we are?   C. K. Chesterton used to say that the problem with us “moderns” is not that we’ve not just lost our way, but we’ve lost our address.  We don’t even know where our home is.  And when you don’t know where home is, you easily forget who you really are and what is most important.      

The kind of thing that only God can tell us about ourselves is perfectly illustrated in story about a young girl who was trying to teach her grandmother about the amazing power and capability of the internet.         “Grandmother, all you have to do is go to “ASK.COM” and you can put in any question you like and it will give you an answer.  

                “Wow!”  The grandmothers responded. 

                “What kind of question would you like me to type in for you grandma?”

                The grandmother answered:  “Ask it how Aunt Helen is doing!”  

                With a puzzled look, the granddaughter came back.  “But grandma, the computer can’t tell you how Aunt Helen is doing!”  

                Well, then she said, “I don’t see much good in it for me.”  (Story from Homiletics Online.com).

It is so important that we know where home is and to keep our perspective on life and about who we are.  This is something all the technology in the world cannot answer for us.   Nothing can tell you who you are, what your life is worth and what really matters, except God.  God is the one who put mind and life in the universe and only God knows your true address.  

How can so great a God care for you or me?   This is exactly what brings the Psalmist to word of praise, when he says in verse 2, “Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. (Psa 8:2 TNIV)”   The very strength and power of God against all that is negative in this world is realized through God’s concern for the weakest in the creation---babes and infants.   As God hears the cries of the smallest, his great power is shaped toward the needs of the “least of these”.   One pastor visualized God’s care and mindfulness this way.  In the popular T.V. commercial that asks “What’s in your wallet?” the recommendation is made that if you want to keep all the bad credit away, put this credit card in your wallet?   The pastor suggests that if you want to know what God carries in his wallet?  He doesn’t a carry credit card, but God’s carries pictures of us…our families… our children and all of us when we are at our weakest and even our worse, not when we are at our best and strongest.  God is mindful of us when we need him most” as the great hymn suggests.  This is how our great God is “good” for us.

BE RESPONSIBLE WITH GOD’S CREATION

There is one final picture of God’s “glory” we need to grasp in order to be rightly and spiritually nourished by this “sandwich” of praise.   If we want to get the glory back into our lives, we not only need to get lost in the wonder of God, and reaffirm God’s loving mindfulness of us, but we also need to own up to our personal responsibility to care for this world.  

Notice how this praise ends.  The world God has created is now placed into the care and stewardship of the people whom God cares for.   The Psalmist says “You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet….beasts of the field, birds of the air, and fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” (8: 6-8).

When I consider these words, I can’t help but wonder how this text would be read and heard in pulpits in and around the coast of Louisiana?   Take a look at the Gulf coast and consider whether or not we humans are doing all that we need to be doing to take care of the “glory” of creation that has been put in our hands and under our feet?    When we humans shirk and evade the physical part of our spiritual responsibility, we tarnish the glory and honor that God has given to us in flesh as well as spirit. 

John Claypool has tells a powerful story about a farmer who spent a lot of time, money and effort to fix up a house for his hired help.  When they came into the house it looked almost brand new.  Then they brought more family members in.  Those brought more also.  And then there were some others until the house was filled with multiply families living under one roof.  But that’s not all.  They did not take care of the house and it wasn’t long until the house was in shambles. 

When one day the farmer came to visit, he took a look inside and the house and was in shock.  He looked his hired hand in the eyes and told him.  “This house could have adequate for your live-time and for many years to come, but you have ruined it in just a short while.  

To understand “how” we can recover the glory in our world, we cannot forget the direct connection between physical and what is spiritual.   We won’t care much for the earth under our feet until we care about what is in our own heart and souls.  In a teachable moment for me as a child, one day I was about to throw a piece of gum paper out the window and my mother looked at me and said, “Joey, we’re not like that.”  Do you hear what I heard?  It was not as much about throwing trash out the window and it was about what kind of person I was going to be.  

I’d think that God looks at our care of the earth the same way.  It’s not just about keeping the earth, but caring for our fragile earth points to our great need to take care of our own souls, which is just as “breakable” and “vulnerable” to corruption.   But the psalmist points us to a way to recover the glory.

When we reflect upon the greatness of God and realize God sets his “mind” in and for us,  and when we become caring, responsible people  for the world around us, glory and honor can be inscribed on everything we touch and everything we are.   Amen.

© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.