Thought before
worship: “Let your mind roam through the whole creation, everywhere the
created world will cry out to you: ‘God made me.’ . . . Go round the heavens
again and back to the earth, leave out nothing; on all sides everything cries
out to you of its Author; nay the very forms of created things are as it were
the voices with which they praise their Creator.” ~ Augustine of Hippo
In our confirmation family night a few weeks ago, a thoughtful
parent asked an arresting question, “Why should we read the Old Testament? And
how should we do it? Isn’t it something that no longer applies?” I stumbled my
way through an answer that I hope had meaning – I’m not sure. And while today’s
sermon won’t directly answer that question per
se I hope that by engaging this passage from the OT we might gain some
insight as to why we need it. Psalm 8, of course, has much to teach us about
praise.
1.
Praise
is a wide-eyed orientation toward all that exists. It is to inhabit a universe
in which every inch bears God’s name.
We praise God, in other words, not simply when we address
him directly in worship but when we thankfully acknowledge the earth is a good
thing – a God thing, God’s creative power at work all around us. It’s when we realize
that to put our hand to the gravelly ground, tousle the hair of a giggling
child, or rub the back of an elderly friend, is to touch a spiritual thing.
Praising God isn’t only singing artful words but also can happen while eating a
fresh watermelon, skipping a smooth stone across placid water, gazing at an
enormous redwood, studying for a test, investigating the frenetic march of ant,
or sitting at the bedside of a sick and dying and friend, and saying
“majestic.” Praising God is to see all that exists as God’s and all that God
has intimately made as wonderful – he used his fingers, the Psalmist tells us.
That phrase “the work of your fingers” reveals God’s
“hands-on nature” in the act of creation. God did not merely utter orders and leave
someone else to do the work, but became personally involved in the most
delicate and intricate way. His own attention to detail is what truly gives it
its majestic character and we can see him in his handiwork. Jesus often used
creation to speak about God’s identity and activity – “Consider the lilies of
the field, he said . . . Look at the birds of the air.” The creator is
witnessed in the creation. We know this to be true - why else do we cover our
refrigerators with the art of children? Both Jesus and the Psalmist use the
present tense to speak of God’s relationship to creation. It’s a reminder that
God is always creating, God is the One who sustains creation, God is being
itself. Even now, Paul writes, God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence
the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).
Praising God is about recognizing “the earth is the
Lord’s and everything in it.” That “everything” refers to nature but also our
whole lives – spirituality, vocation, ideas, culture, etc. The spirituality of
the Bible over and over repeats an idea that I want you to pay close attention
to this morning. At the heart of biblical faith is the belief that our life
with God, our life with others, and our life in this world are one life. Me – I
tend to have 50 fragmented, frantic lives – my home life, prayer life, work
life, married life, parent life and the Psalmists breaks in and says, “No.”
There is only one life and it’s a life that is spiritually-earthy in praise to
the One who has made you. This means that living into your vocation - your job
- is spiritual task, a holy thing. Praise is who we are and what we do – a
vocation that manifests itself in a spirit of caring for all that God has made,
e.g. shamar – “to keep” (Gen 2:15) is
the mandate from God to us in the garden and God for us in Numbers 6:24.
Our stained glass with oak trees reminds us that what we
do here is to lead us out there. “in all the earth” means that proper praise
should always lead us outside these walls and that all that happens outside these
walls is in God’s sights.
2. Praising God is
the recognition that we are created “glorious”
To praise God is to reverse the funnel of your life.
Praising God shouldn’t lead you into more narrow, private, secret spaces of
intimacy but into wider, broader, more spacious ones. It will make us ask, like
the Psalmist, in the midst of such greatness, such expanse, who are we to God?
Amidst all this jubilance the question posed by praise sounds almost
despairing. How can we matter to God that’s that big, that majestic? Who are we
to that God?
This was more than an idle question for the Psalmist and
the world he lived in. More importantly, most of the world in which he lived
had a different story – not the story of Genesis but the Enuma Elish.
It was the dominant story of the fertile crescent for at
least a thousand years that spoke of creation as a battle between gods (parents
vs. children) in which the universe was created by the winner Marduk out of the
remains of his mother Tiamat. Afterwards Marduk decided to create human beings,
“He shall be charged with the service of the gods that they might be at ease!”
To that story the Psalmist gives a resounding “no.”
That’s not the way it is, that’s not who we are, that’s not how the world works,
that’s not this God. The Christian farmer theologian Wendell Berry writes,
“Stories create our world. The significance – and ultimately the quality – of
the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are
taking part.”
In response the Psalmist gives a startling confession: verses
3-8: 1. Humankind is marked by God for glory and honor; 2. Humankind is
authorized by God to have dominion over all other creatures. Both of these things,
of course, are assigned to God. Humankind is not unlike God, the Psalmist
declares. Who are you to God? Why you are “glory and honor!” You are more like
him than you realize.
I’ve spent all week arguing with God about this one. This
can’t be true. Does God know me? I’m too sinful. Does God truly know you? And
God’s Word has hounded me – I made you.
In vs. 2 the Psalmist tells us that crying “babies and
infants” silence the enemy and avenger. Now, I don’t know who that enemy and
avenger are, the Psalmists doesn’t tell us, but it means that God’s bulwark is
simply doing what babies were created to do – that by being themselves they
engage in an act of defensive praise. It’s a reminder that to be a praiser of
God one need not slough off one’s humanity but more fully embrace it. It means
that praising God and being a follower of God are not somehow leaving yourself
behind or finding some perfection but being your created self. Being godly is
you being you unfettered – that’s hard, it’s hard to be your true self. And the
first step is maybe not to look at your sinfulness as if it created you but to
remember that God did. We often start our
story at Genesis 3, God starts our story at Genesis 1.
Rabbi Zusya was
a Chasidic master who lived in the 1700s. One day he said, “When I get to the
heavenly court, God will not ask me Why weren’t you Moses? Rather he will ask
me, Why were you not Zusya?” Friends, why do we need to read the Old
Testament? Why should Christians bother investigating the Psalms? Why does a
theology of creation matter? We read it in this instance to understand a
startling truth - that Jesus didn’t die on the cross to make you glorious. He
died to restore you to your true created self, which the Psalmist tells us
already was glorious!
This truth can be quite revolutionary. God has made us a
little lower than himself. He has crowned us, the Psalmist declares, with
glory. Yet, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, “All have sinned and fallen
short of the glory of God.” Before I had always understood that text to mean
that I had failed some external standard, fallen short of some divine exam, I
believed that I wasn’t simply broken but fundamentally evil. But, while sin is
devastating to us and terrible – maybe its worst work is that it keeps us from
seeing and believing the glory of who we were created to be. Maybe it is that
reality which keeps us from being ourselves. In Romans 7 Paul suggests just
that reality by speaking of the war of sin as a war with himself “I do not
understand my own actions,” he laments (7:15). “For I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do” (7:19). It means that to
follow Jesus does not make me someone else – it certainly doesn’t make me Jesus
– but makes me myself. God’s gospel is
not fundamentally about sin management but wholeness and restoration.
How do I know that humanity is more than an alternate
word for sin? Heb. 2:6-8 referring to Jesus quotes Psalm 8 to express God’s
solidarity with us. God is not content to be over and above but also remains
with and among. What can be more honoring than that?
Thomas Merton’s epiphany at Fourth
and Walnut: In which he realized deeply what it meant that God created
human beings and became one himself: He writes, “Thank God, thank God that I am
like other men, that I am only a man among others. . . It is a glorious destiny
to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many
absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God
Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human
race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like
news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” That’s what the Psalmist is trying to say.”
I’d like to send us out in praise with benediction and
then have us go out into God’s world as the church singing his praise. Go as a
member of the human race, crowned with glory and honor, to care for the earth
and all that is in it. Go – shining like the sun!
Benediction:
The way is long
let us go together.
The way is difficult
let us help each other.
The way is joyful
let us share it.
The way is Christ’s, for Christ is the way.
let us follow.
The way is open before us
let us go.
The love of God, the grace of Christ,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Amen. Sing the Doxology
No comments:
Post a Comment