A sermon based upon Psalm 8, CSB
y Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
y Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
June 23rd, 2019
Steven Colbert has a spot on his Late Show. Perhaps you’ve seen it. He and a celebrity are lying down, supposedly looking up at the stars, wondering about some of the great (and not so great) mysteries of life. Something like that, in a more serious way, is going on in 8th Psalm, which is specifically labeled as a Psalm of David. Probably, after long hours as a Shepherd boy; keeping watch over his father Jessie’s ‘flock by night’, starring long and deep into the night sky and full of amazement, wonder, and contemplative worship, David could not help but express his thoughts, in what are some of the most beautiful lyrics ever written.
David did not write all the Psalms, but almost half of the 150 Psalms; 73 to be exact, have king David’s name of ownership on them. Some were written by him, others may have been collected by him, and there is no doubt that David himself wrote this one. It sounds like ‘a man after God’s own heart’, because it opens and concludes full of absolute praise and worship: “O Lord, our Lord, How Majestic is Your Name in all the earth’.
WHEN I LOOK UP….
Did you especially catch David’s ending, ‘in all’ or ‘throughout the earth’? To claim that his own Jewish God’s name fills the whole earth was a very big claim for a little shepherd boy.
As A great preacher once asked; How could David make such a claim,
when he had never seen flamingos flying over a lake,
had never watch a whale explode out of the deep blue sea;
had never seen the long neck of a giraffe,
had never seen an ugly ostrich stick his head in the sand,
had never saw melting snow rushing into Fjrods in Scandinavia.
had never look at the millions of organisms in an electron microscope,
or had never seen a rocket on TV headed toward the moon,
nor had a clue that there was a much, much more in that sky he couldn’t see?
David’s eyesight may have been very good, but still, even on the darkest desert night he could only have seen a few thousand stars, having no idea just how vast and how unlimited this universe, let alone, what may be beyond this universe, in the many multi-verses that science suggests may exist beyond our own?
The great preacher I just referred to, the Late Fred Craddock (who influenced this sermon greatly), gave us creative dialogue between an angel and Robert Williams, who had just died and had newly arrived at the pearly gates. When he approached the desk, the angel ask, “Name?”
He said, “Williams.”
“First name, please?”
“Robert, Everybody knows me.”
“Well, Robert, we have here 413 billion Robert Williams. Could you be more specific?
“But you know, in Gilmer County, they always call be Bob.’
“Bob? That helps. Now, were down to 193 billion.
“Bob? That helps. Now, were down to 193 billion.
“My close friends call me Buddy.”
“OK, Buddy, now we’re doing well, 97 billion. Could you help me a little more?
“Well, I lived out on the road going out….?
“No, No, which planet?”
“Well, it was the earth, it was the third planet from the Sun!”
“That’s good. What country!”
“The US of A!”
“Would you give me the state.”
“Georgia.”
“Would you give me the county again?”
“Gilmer.”
“Now, would you give me the address?”
“3800 Creekside Loop.”
“Ah, I see, you are that Robert Williams.”
Isn’t it easy to think small? Or isn’t it also easy to think you are a big fish, then only to realize later that this is very small pond, and you didn’t realize just how many other ponds there are out there, with even bigger fish, not including in the oceans?
And have you ever also considered just how big, this small little earth is? Go out and look at the moon and stars that try to imagine how many other people are doing the same thing, somewhere else in this world. It’s always dark, somewhere; and every minute there is some boy, girl, man or woman looking up at the same stars, wishing, wondering, hoping, praying. Teach your children that in the same way we might here, also “in Korea, Russia, Bosnia, Uganda, Brazil, some child is looking up and wondering about what is ‘out there’ and ‘what all this means’ and wishing the same kind of dreams? The world is put together to get us to wonder, and to think and dream big?
I know that life moves so fast, has so much for us to do, that fewer are taking time to smell the roses or think about ‘what’s it all about Alfie?’. But when you do, if you did, ----and you will be spiritually poorer if you don’t--- because when you do ‘contemplate’ what this life is, it’s hard not to be filled with the same kind of wonder, the same kind of reverence, the same kind of smallness, but also to come away with a certain grasp of the bigness of life right here, on little earth, there is life that happens nowhere else, as far as the eye can see.
When we are young, most of us look at life, and considered everything good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, biblical or unbiblical. But when you look get older and wiser, you just might start seeing another category, like DAVID did, reducing everything that is down to one single category: big and small. “When I consider (look up) at the Moon and stars, O God, why do you even think about us?”
The moon and stars, keep going around so orderly. Whatever the century, whatever the country, whatever ever the moment. They are so precise that we can plan our lives, our calendars, and calibrate all our instruments on the fact that ‘they’ know exactly where they are going?
But where are you going? Where are we going?
Aren’t we humans getting more and more confused?
More and more people don’t know whether they supposed to live by the night, or the day, whether they are a boy or a girl, whether they should get married or stay single, whether they are religious or not? I’m not saying we shouldn’t love such ‘confused’ people, I’m just saying that there is so much more confusion today. Can’t you see it?
Once, God told Adam, whose name means ‘humankind’: “I’ll give you dominion over the land and sea, and all that is in the land or the sea; over all the beast of the field, over the fish in the sea.
“I’ll give you dominion…” God said. But today we don’t know what that means, do we? Does that mean that we control, take, kill and destroy whatever we like, or does that mean that we are too be stewards, caretakers, and care-givers to life that is a “gift’ to us, on this earth? Too many people believer we can rape the land because we own it. We can pollute the streams, because it’s ‘my’ land. They misunderstand that song: “This land is your land, This land is my land….” Some people think that means that you can trash it, darken, pollute it, forget about it. They also think, “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want with it….” They think “YOU SHALL HAVE DOMINION” means do whatever you want, become whatever you want, say whatever you want. Have you ever realized what’s not going on in the mind of a person who throws trash out the window of their car, or allows ‘trash’ to come our of their own mouths or life?
And of course, there are also those who think that ‘dominate’ means to accumulate. It’s yours, so take it, get it, hold it tight. Most of these people never understand that the more they ‘have’, the less somebody else can have. Most people never get the reality or the connection between ‘the haves’ and the ‘have nots’?
I recall in the Mission Learning Center, in Richmond, how we once had a meal where we ‘cast lots’ and one group got to eat beans, another rice only, and a too many got nothing, while there was one small little group who got to eat steak, and all the fixings, and not just one steak, but ‘all they could eat.’ That was our ‘actual’ meal for the 30 some missionaries that night, and those most of those barely got barely something, and some and had to go to bed still hungry, already started ‘’hate the few people who would not share with us. (They were instructed not to share, but we didn’t know). The next morning, when all came back together: “That’s how the world really is, our missionary teacher, tried to teach us. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s how we make it. That’s how a few have ‘dominion’ while many others have nothing. That’s the way the world works, or should I say doesn’t work. A few have, most have not. A few grab, hold, collect, or even hoard. After all, we do have ‘dominion’ don’t we?
Of course, a even worst ‘confusion’ these days, is not only the increasing idea that I can ‘do what I want’, but it’s also the idea that “I” am the center of my world; and that we are all on our own, without any need to ‘think’ about anything, anyone, or anybody, except ourselves. They look at the ‘big’ world out there, or the ‘infinite’ sky out there, and reason that there’s nothing more than that. “This is all there is,” so take, ‘grab all the gusto you can get’, for tomorrow you die, and that’s it. Life is just life, and nothing else.
Well, that’s what the former renowned atheist Anthony Flew thought, until he one day he thought again about the precise uniqueness of life on this one planet. He realized how life on this planet earth is a mathematical impossibility, unless some purposeful force manipulated the numbers. He thought, as he looked at the stars, that no matter how many times you might throw a deck of cards up in the air, you might, after enough time, get one or two of them to stick together, but you would never, ever, ever have a house of cards, unless there was mind to build it. Somebody had to be the first mind, the first cause, or, as the philosophers used to say, ‘the unmoved mover’.
Flew finally came understand that the potential and probability of life needed conditions that were more than random, more than accidental, and more than chance. He came to a whole different conclusion about life on earth. He realized that just a few degrees difference in the angle of this globe, then life would not have happened. He also understood that not only did the earth have to be exactly the right distance from the sun, the sun and the earth too, had to be just the right size. He understood that in all that great universe, life did not happen, but it happens here, and it happened with some kind of purpose; some kind of evolutionary goal that stopped with humans as the final goal. Then, he also understood that even his own ability to contemplate this very thought, he was pointing directly toward the great ‘mind’ behind his own thoughts. The event of humanity, the grandeur of the universe and of the ability of the human mind, was on the side some great purpose and some very great mind.
WHAT IS A HUMAN?
And when you start realizing that we aren’t here, just for us, and that it’s not just about us,….you finally come, as David did, to the most puzzling, but most necessary question of all: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the deepest meaning of being human in this world? Who is this mortal that God has taken note of him?
When the King James Version of the Bible asks, who are we that God has ‘visited’ us (v. 4), it seems to imply that the complexity of human life proves that earth is the only planet God has ever ‘visited’. Of course, we don’t know whether this is true or not, but we can certainly know that life on this this earth is very special because even the idea of life elsewhere is still speculation. Astronomers get all excited when a radio wave, a blip on a screen, picks up a planet the same distance from a sun about the same size as ours, while at the same time, a far greater event is constantly taking place in ‘maternity wards’ around the world. Every second a new life, a human life, we we can see and touch comes to life, who is much more dream about. Who is this person? Who will this newly born ‘miracle’ turn out to be? The greatest miracle in our universe are happening right here, right now, right under our noses.
However, the way David ‘wonders’ in this Psalm, is not just about life itself, but he is wondering how the life of a person could ever really matter? How could, even this human ‘pixie-dust’ matter, unless the creator-God, the great mind of the heavens, knows and cares about him? Even as amazing and astounding as human life is, we still end up as dirt to feed the worms, becoming the biggest ‘joke’ of all, unless we are somehow connected to the eternity of God?
Some say it’s ridiculous to think that we should dare peer beyond life here on earth, and that any imagining of God or eternity is just ‘wishful thinking’ because we face the anxiety of our eventual demise and death. They suggest that life now, is ‘all there is’ and this should be enough to contemplate. To allow your mind to move beyond ‘here and now’ is delusional, if not psychotic.
So, where do you come down on the what philosopher Charles Taylor labels as the most important question of life? Who are you? Who are we, as human beings? Is this life all there is, or do do we live in an ‘enchanted’ world with the possibility of being much more? Or, are we all we’ve got, all we’ll ever be; and is what we have now, what we know now, all we’ll ever know or should hope for more?
A LITTLE LESS THAN GOD?
In David’s mind, this open question of ‘who are we’ leads to asking ‘why would God pay attention to us’. This deep thought is especially mature for a little Shepherd boy, who may have been pointing to himself when he said in verse 4: ‘praise’ comes ‘out of mouth of babes and sucklings’! As the youngest, and the ‘runt of Jessie’s litter, David may have wondered why would God pay attention to him?
I don’t know about you, but when I ‘consider the heavens’, wonder ‘what it all means’ or ask myself ‘why would God pay attention to me’, I also understand just how ‘temporary’ or ‘small’ my life is. The sun, moon, and stars are forever, but I’m just a ‘blip’ on the radar screen. There was a time I didn’t exist. There will soon come a time I don’t exist. I have only this time now, what am I supposed to do, or why would it matter? Life is so brief. It’s beginning to feel like ‘Happy New Year’ every month. Life comes and goes so fast. In the first quarter, I was kicking a football, then in the next quarter I was married and working my life away, in the third quarter I thought I was ahead of the game, and then comes the fourth quarter there are just seconds to go.
Why would God pay attention to me, to you, or to any of us?
David’s answer to his own question was so outrageous to the King James Bible translators, they decided it would be better to ‘duck’ it altogether. When they read in the Hebrew, the original language of David, that he wrote that we humans are created ‘a little lower that the Elohim’, they didn’t dare write that. How could King James, who they were all working for, and who understood that only himself, as a king, was next in line to God, ever allow the average person to be labeled this named way? The Bible the Pilgrims brought with them, the Geneva Bible, said we are ‘a little less than God’, but they knew King James wouldn’t stand for it. So, what those ‘secretaries’ of King James did, was to settle for placing us ‘a little lower than the angels’, rather than what David actually said. To substantiate this, they turned to the Greek text that had translated that way. This wording might have been good help them keep their heads, but today we need to look at what David really said so that we don’t loose ours.
This is certainly an astounding thought, but what does it mean? What does it matter to be almost God? Isn’t that just as dangerous to think now, as it would have been in David’s time, or in the time of King James? Where does such a ‘high opinion’ of ourselves lead? I’ll tell you where! It leads right back to Genesis where it says, humans are created in God’s likeness and image. It also leads us to the New Testament where Jesus says ‘You must be born again!’, where it also says, ‘Now, we are God’s children’ and where it says there is no difference between what is common or what is holy. It tears down the curtain to the holy of holies and takes us straight into God’s presence where any of us could be called a saint or a priest. It brings us right to Jesus who tells those who are with him, ‘You are my friends!’
Don’t ever say those most profane words, ‘I’m only human!’ Why do we say that when we make a mistake? Why can’t we start saying when we do something beautiful or good that ‘I did that because I’m human.’ Why can’t we not only say that ‘to err is human, but also say that to forgive is human too, because we are like God?
Now, I know that making humans comes with risks, and even God had regrets a few times about how a lot lower than God we can go, but still when we get it and when we live like it, being human on this earth will forever be the most beautiful thing.
Recently, Teresa and I watched the Independent, Norwegian Film, ‘The 12th Man’. It told the true story about 12 men who were commissioned to Sabotage Nazi naval efforts in Norwegian waters. After much success, the German located their boat and captured 11 of them, but the 12th man was able to escape. He was injured, and in subfreezing weather he would never had escaped over the mountains to the safety of neutral Sweden, had it not been for the aid and help of local farmers and fellow Norwegians, who put their own lives at risk, to keep their injured ‘hero’ from being captured. At the end of the story, it was shown in text, that Jan considered those who helped him, the real heroes, so that when he died in 1984, he was buried, not in his hometown, but in the town at the foot of the mountain where the people had helped him escape. Even in a time when the dark side of humanity was on display, was also the time when the best of what it means to be human came shinning through.
Isn’t that how it often turns out? You are going through a hard time, and think you are all alone, then someone shows up and offers you a helping hand and a kind word. Or you read or hear that someone has left another baby in a trash can, but then next you hear how a community came together to help a handicapped child, or reached out to a disabled veteran, or offered to help a struggling family or person get through a very difficult spot. At the same time it was the worst of times, it can be the best of times. When the human person is seen at their lowest, you turn around and you see another who amazes you with their ‘god-like’ goodness and generosity.
In The Education of Little Tree, a marvelous story is told about a Cherokee Indian boy in western North Carolina, who was raised by his grandparents, and was very, very poor. He knew his grandparents had nothing to get him for Christmas; they had no money. But he wanted to give his grandmother something so he got some leather hide and sewed a little pouch, a purse for coins. He didn’t want to give it to her and hurt her feelings because she would have to say, “Well, Little Tree, I don’t have anything for you.”
So you know what he did? He pushed that little purse he made way down in a bin of dried beans. They ate dried beans all winter. He pushed it down in the bin about ‘Christmas deep’. His grandmother would start reaching into the bin every day, October, November, and then December. About the middle of December, she say, “Little Tree, look what I found. Look what I found! And he ran over and looked, “What is that?’ She said, “It’s a Christmas present. I didn’t know who….” And Little Tree interrupted and said, “Wow! That’s Beautiful!”
Didn’t David say that on our best day, we can clearly see that we are indeed made ‘a little less than God’. Of course, sometimes we act like ‘trash’, but have you ever watched how when the snow fall comes, even a trashing, cold, broken up ground can ‘mound’ up in white to the glory of God (Fred Craddock). How did Paul say the same thing David said? To the Ephesians he wrote: “For we are God's masterpiece…(re)created anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. (Eph. 2:10 NLT).
Do you hear? It’s still something to sing about: We are God’s masterpiece. He made us just ‘a little less’ than God. Amen.
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