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Psalm 8
Jesus knew the Psalms. Paul knew the Psalms.
In fact, the entire early Christian community was steeped in the same Psalms that have served as the central prayer and hymnbook for the church since its beginning-until now.
Reading, studying, and praying the Psalms is God’s means for teaching us what it means to be human: how to express our emotions and yearnings, how to reconcile our anger and our compassion, how to see our story in light of God’s sweeping narrative of salvation. Our intent this summer is to help provide the tools for understanding and incorporating these crucial verses into our own lives by exploring 10 hymns from the books of the Psalms.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know, my name is Devin and I'm one of the pastors here at Common Church. Over the last few weeks, we've been walking through the Psalms. And today, I am the fourth person who has contributed their voice to this series. And before the end of the series, we will hear from a fifth person.
Speaker 1:I think it's an incredible thing that this community has developed such a diverse group of voices that make up our teaching team. Each person with unique elements that they add to the teaching of this community. And I feel very honored to speak next to these individuals and to serve this community in this way. So thank you. Each new teacher in this series has given us a unique perspective on the Psalms.
Speaker 1:Not just theological perspective, but I think a personal perspective. And not really wanting to break with tradition, I think I'll do the same. When I read the psalms, I think the thing that stands out for me is that the psalms, we encounter the full breath of human emotion. Yeah. You can read about anger and hope, despair and peace, loss and joy, revenge and acceptance, shame and trust, and all the other emotions that seem to collide into a kaleidoscope of human expression.
Speaker 1:While at other times, they exist in desperate exclusivity. If I'm honest though, sometimes, I have a hard time connecting with all of these emotions. I mean, don't know what it's like to be so afraid that I'm running for my life Or so angry that I pray that God comes down and smashes my enemies children's heads on the rocks. But for most of us, these are the emotions that are easy to distance ourselves from. Right?
Speaker 1:I mean, I would think that most of you would feel better knowing that I don't think those things or I don't feel those things. The truth though is that sometimes I have a hard time saying I feel the ecstatic joy that is present in the Psalms. When I read Psalm a 126, our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues songs of praise. I don't know if I recognize this within myself all the time. I mean, I've giggled.
Speaker 1:I've tittered maybe and even possibly guffawed. But having a mouthful of laughter, I don't know if I feel this very often. And just between you and I, I would rather not admit this. But then, I'm reminded that the Psalms were not necessarily written so that someone like me could open it up and immediately identify with every emotion on every page. They were and are songs meant to be rehearsed in public side by side with neighbors and strangers alike.
Speaker 1:And as I think about this, I'm drawn outside of myself. I begin to think about those in the body of Christ who do laugh and do sing big. I think of my mother. I think of my nieces and nephews. I think of my wife Nicole, and I begin to think that these experiences are possible for me as well.
Speaker 1:See, for me, this is the special quality of the Psalms. They draw us out of ourselves and into community. Instead of focusing on the self and looking for something that gratifies my desire for custom tailored biblical experience. The Psalm asks me to consider others. To ask ourselves in the moments of joy, who around us is hurting?
Speaker 1:Or in the words of Paul in the letter to the Romans, rejoice with those who are rejoicing and weep with those who weep. The Psalms build empathy and community. So, as we make our way through the rest of this series, would you listen to these Psalms and pay attention not only to the psalms that you immediately identify with, but also with the foreign ones. Knowing that there is a person in this room that needs somebody to laugh with them, while still others who need somebody to weep with them. And I hope that the spirit draws you out of yourself and into the grace and peace of Jesus Christ found when we truly allow ourselves to be vulnerable with one another.
Speaker 1:Vulnerable having said all that, let's dive into what we're here to talk about today. Listen as I read Psalm eight. For the director of music according to the Gittith, a Psalm of David. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory in the heavens through the praise of children and infants.
Speaker 1:You have established a stronghold against your enemies to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them. You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands.
Speaker 1:You put everything under their feet, all flocks and herds and the animals of the wild. The birds in the sky and the fish and sea, all that swim in the paths of the sea. Lord, our lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Psalm eight. Now, before we get into the meat of this psalm, this is a fairly common question I come up with or I come against.
Speaker 1:But throughout the psalms, you'll notice words like, you know, usually at the beginning of the psalm or kinda right by the side of the psalm. And people ask me all the time, what do these words mean? Unfortunately, we don't really know. There there isn't a great, solid, 100% explanation of them, but most scholars believe that they're musical notations. One of the most common ones that you see is this word salah.
Speaker 1:And if you're familiar at all with sheet music, it's kind of the same sense that when you read normal sheet music, the sheet music we've been used to today, it'd be like staccato or legato. It would be how you would play the music. Or in this case, guitar, it might be referencing an instrument that was meant to accompany the song. Sound fair? Okay.
Speaker 1:So this psalm is the first of its kind in the psalter. It's generally considered a psalm of praise, but there is much more to this psalm than praise. There are elements from hymnic wisdom and the lament traditions frowned here. And even though not a technical genre, some commentators have suggested that this is really a psalm of creation. And the chimerical form of the psalm in itself is believed to be a poetic device meant to mimic the diverse and creative imagination of the divine.
Speaker 1:So pigeonholing this psalm into form and structure gets to be pretty tough. But we still have a lot to talk about. Last time, Jeremy taught, he rehearsed a bit of the Babylonian creation myth, where the hero or duke killed Tiamat. This sort of creation through war mythos was very common in the ancient Near East. So when the psalmist says, you have established a stronghold against your enemies, we shouldn't be surprised to find war imagery here.
Speaker 1:I mean, after all, this is how story works. We have talked a lot about this in this community, especially in a series like we did when we talked about revelation. When we tell stories, we draw on common imagery and symbols to help our audience understand the point we are trying to make. And when we do this, we often tweak those images and those symbols in order to imbue them with a new meaning. So when we hear language of enemies and strongholds in the Psalms, which are militaristic images.
Speaker 1:We need to understand them as borrowed language that the writer is trying to imbue with a new meaning, a twist if you will. And the twist in the Psalms is this, Yahweh is not like other gods. It doesn't take long if you call or if you identify as a Christian to eventually find yourself in a conversation with somebody about creation. These conversations usually include questions that concern the mechanics of creation. Questions, that pit the biblical narratives of creation against our modern understandings of biology, geology, and astrophysics.
Speaker 1:And ultimately, it's a question about how did God do it versus how did the natural processes govern matter and life do it. But if you ask a Hebrew person from the ancient world what the creation stories in Genesis are about, their answer would be a who, not a how. The creation accounts in scripture point us to the who in the divine person, not the how of the creative act itself. We have to keep this in mind as we read this psalm. The writer is not concerned with creation itself.
Speaker 1:He is concerned with the person behind creation. He wants to tell us, his audience, that Yahweh is different. All the other gods are fighting and killing each other to establish themselves, But Yahweh is revealing himself not in war, but through the praise of children and infants. How are we supposed to understand this? Well, my suggestion is that we see these children and infants as metaphors for weakness, or at least an alternative to military aggression.
Speaker 1:And if this phrase about the praise of children and infants seems familiar to you, it could possibly be because Jesus quotes this Psalm in the Gospel of Matthew. Listen as I read that section. But when the chief priests and the teachers of law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, do you hear what these children are saying? They asked him. Yes, Jesus replied.
Speaker 1:Have you never read from the lips of children and infants, you, Lord, have called forth your praise? And what is more radically different than gods who engage in cosmic battles than a god who chooses to indwell the thing he created. Not to raise an army and fight, but to simply and profoundly die. Yahweh reveals himself unlike any other gods. His name is revealed on the lips of the powerless and those that have been silenced by religious power brokers.
Speaker 1:Now, commentator James Limberg calls this psalm, a psalm for stargazers. And I think most of us here will be able to relate to the feelings of the psalmist here. He walks out into the night sky, looks up and sees the vastness of space, and feels small. I've been struck by this same impression myself. A few years ago, I had the chance to go to Zambia to visit the community of Calendi that we support through Hands at Work.
Speaker 1:And one of the things I was most excited about, was seeing the nighttime sky of the Southern Hemisphere with different stars and different constellations. And not only was it going to be new, but in rural Africa, there isn't the same level of light pollution that there is here. So when I finally walked outside one evening and looked up, the sky felt bigger. It felt new. For you, maybe this feeling comes when you're driving towards the mountains, and as you drive closer to them, they get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you do a lot of flying, and when you come home, and you're on your approach into the airport, and you see just how small our city actually is. And a sense of awe or perhaps even humility creeps into you as you are reminded of how big everything out there is and how small you are. But I encourage you to slow down in these moments because for the writer of Psalm eight, it is not wonder that overtakes him in this moment. It's despair in the face of his own insignificance. We need to be honest about our objectively inconsequential nature.
Speaker 1:If I die, the stars keep shining and the world keeps spinning. And then the midst of this feeling, of this deep smallness and tininess comes the next question that the psalmist asks. What is mankind that you are mindful of them? What an uncomfortable question. Lately, I've seen advertisements for programs on television channels like History or Discovery or SciFi, all asking kind of the same question.
Speaker 1:What would the planet look like if everyone just disappeared right now? And invariably, the hosts talk over CGI renditions of real cities that we live in, overgrown by vines, where animals are free to walk in the city, streets, and do what they like. And the sense I get from these shows reminds me of this question. What is man that you are mindful of him? I think these programs are tapping into this awareness of insignificance.
Speaker 1:But let me suggest to you that there is another way, that this is another way in which Yahweh is distinguishing himself from other gods. In the ancient world, celestial bodies, stars, planets were deified or at least took on symbolic representation for the gods. Today, we name we may not believe that gods are planets, but they have kept their names from a time when they when people did think they were gods. Saturn is the Greek god of abundance. Mars and Jupiter are the Roman gods of war and thunder respectively, and Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld.
Speaker 1:I know Pluto's no longer a planet, but later on, he was replaced by Hades as the god of the underworld. So the guy just can't catch a break, so I thought I'd throw him a bone. The point is this, in the ancient world, people looked at nature and saw gods. But Yahweh's person is not bound to a planet or a star. In fact, he moves them with his fingers.
Speaker 1:And to an ancient person, this claim would have been ludicrous. There was nothing bigger than planets. There was nothing bigger than stars. To them, the notion of Yahweh being bigger than the planets represented insanity, which makes you have you have to hold on to this moment of insignificance because then this next line comes. You have met you have made man little less than God.
Speaker 1:Our place in the created order doesn't come from a substantive difference from any other thing that God created. It comes from God. Some people would understand this as the image of God that is imprinted onto us by God himself, And this is spoken about in Genesis. In the creation stories, God chooses man and creates him in his own image. And once he is created, he is given dominion.
Speaker 1:To really understand this, we have to understand the original Hebrew. In the Hebrew, this high position would be understood as an estate, or think of it as an inheritance, maybe even a birthright that has been given to us. But if we stop there, we can get ourselves into trouble. If we believe our place in creation to practice dominion is a static title that we just always have to do with what we wish, we will be prone to lapses of entitlement. Or in other words, we forget that with great power comes great responsibility.
Speaker 1:If we believe our place in creation, sorry. Listen to verse six again. But you have made him little less than God and you will crown him with glory and honor. That's verse six. There's a shift in tenses in this verse.
Speaker 1:You have made him, which is a past tense and speaks about our static place that we have been given in God's creation. Well, the phrase, you will crown him is a future tense and speaks about the dynamic responsibility we have to care for the created world. See for me, I think Christianity's fixation on dominion over creation that has led to entitlement comes from a miss misunderstanding, a systemic problem that we have when we think about God's love. If I asked you what the focus of God's love is, what would you say? Just before maybe you answer that, let me read to you from the Gospel of John.
Speaker 1:For God so loved the entire world, he gave his one and only son. That's a pretty famous verse. As far as the bible goes, that may as well be a radio hit single. And I heard it a lot when I was young. And if you were like me, you always assumed that the world meant the people.
Speaker 1:God obviously loves people. I think that's plain. But what this verse says when it says world is a translation of the Greek word, cosmos. Cosmos did not mean planet Earth. It did not mean the people living on planet Earth.
Speaker 1:It meant everything. All the rivers, all the people, all the cows, the elephants, all the mountains, all the air, all the everything, all the everywhere. God created these things and said, it is good. He loves his creation. And many of us including myself, have grown up with an aggressively anthropocentric view of God's love.
Speaker 1:We have put ourselves at the center of God's love, and we have hijacked God's expansive shalom that was meant to repair all of his cosmos. And in doing so, we have asked the rest of creation to pay an incredible price. Now look, I understand where we live. I understand that many of us either work in or have loved ones who work in industries like oil and gas. I also understand that we need to get around by cars.
Speaker 1:It's a big city, and we need to heat our homes because winter. And that in a perfect world, hopefully, we would all have solar power, panels on our roofs, and electric cars in the garages, but that's not always feasible for us. So please don't hear that I'm out to vilify oil and gas or any industry like that. But I don't think that's what this Psalm is saying either. There is a but.
Speaker 1:I do think that this Psalm reveals Yahweh as a God that is different than the other gods. That God actually loves this thing he created, and that our place in the world is to love it too. And we see this in the incarnation of Jesus Christ who came into his creation in order to restore animals, matter, and people to his best imagination for this place. Secondly, this Psalm asks us to consider our responsibility as dominion holders, as we seek to care for all flocks and herds, animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. So today, maybe you can leave here thinking, about what this looks like in your life.
Speaker 1:And just like when we try to love one another, we are not going to love everyone perfectly all the time, and this isn't even the goal. And so you're not gonna love creation perfectly all the time. The goal is simply this, that little by little, we see how God loves, not just people, but creation as well, and that we do the same. And that we may likely mean that we need to start to ask the spirit to help us develop imagination of love, not just for people, but also for his cosmos like he has himself. Just before we pray, I want to leave you with the words of, one of my favorite early twentieth century naturalist.
Speaker 1:And yes, for anybody who's wondering, I have a list like that. His name is John Moore. It is a blessed thing to go freely in the light of this beautiful world, to see God playing upon everything as on an instrument. His fingers upon lightning and torrent, on every wave of sea and sky, and every living thing, making all together sing and shine in sweet accord to one love harmony of the universe. Would you pray with me?
Speaker 1:Father, as we come to Psalm eight and what it means to understand who you are as a creator, as you reveal yourself, please teach us what that means for us today. Help us to understand that that does not mean that we reach for perfection, but that we reach for progression. That we reach for something better than we have today. Help us to recognize the ways in which you are active in loving this world, this cosmos, not just us as people, but animals, forests, oceans. Help us to be active as a church in being part of those discussions, being part of those issues, and being part of the way that your Shalom is shaping not just us, but this place.
Speaker 1:So as we go from this place, spirit, I ask that you just shape our thinking and our imagination around a spiritual ecology. And as we go from this place, be gentle with us, and we love you God, and we ask these things, and we thank you for the way that you've created this beautiful place for us. Amen.