May 30, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
By now, you know that I am a neat and clean freak. I have this tendency to look down and see dust balls, cigarette butts, paper debris, and even lint. At home, I vacuum regularly with my Dyson and sometimes even walk around in my bare feet to make sure I got every morsel of dirt. Joy would always complain that I don’t look up to see the cobwebs on the ceilings.
When I come to church and before I go up to my office, I would pull out the broom and dustpan to sweep the sidewalks around our church of all the city life that accumulated last week. I walk around the church and up and down the stairs picking up paper and leaves off the floors and the carpets. Sometimes, I think I am the one with a problem!
When we look down, we see not only cigarette butts and dust balls, but we see the cruel ways we treat each other. On our Holy Land Pilgrimage earlier this month, we visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. From the perspective of the Israelis, we witnessed on this human level, how human beings can look down at other people and justify atrocities done to others while the rest of the world looks the other way. The rest of the world may not have been the Nazi leaders who ordered the extermination of the Jews, but we are just as guilty for looking the other way thinking that it’s not our problem.
When we only look down, we end up with the catastrophic accident of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While we are told that safe guards and back-up systems should have gone on when the explosion happened, we are now left with an ecological disaster that is larger than the Exxon Valdez spill because some people may have been only looking down in their wallets and investment accounts from oil profits instead of looking up to see the potential environmental impact that deep off-shore drilling can have. “Drill, baby, drill,” has lost its luster.
When we only look down, we don’t look up to see how God created the world and made us human beings just a little lower than God.
The Cosmos and God
Psalm 8 is a bold affirmation about God’s majesty and glory in his creation. Picture the psalmist sitting on a Palestinian hillside. Black skies are pierced by stars in a way that most of us in electrically lit cities don’t even know how to imagine. He’s just stunned—stunned into worship and reflection.
If God’s glory has been set above the heavens (v. 1), then imagine God’s astonishing glory given how almost incomprehensively vast the universe is (v. 3). Did you know that:
*A beam of light takes eight minutes to cross the 93 million miles between Earth and the sun.
*Our solar system—sun and eight planets—is the relative size of a quarter, making our galaxy the size of North America.
*If you were to count the stars in our galaxy, one per second, it would take you 2,500 years to count them all.
*The Milky Way galaxy contains billions of stars, but our galaxy is only one of at least 200 billion galaxies.
But in contrast to how big God is, this vast universe is simply tiny. After all, God’s fingers (v. 3) push the stars into their places. God’s massive hands are billions of light years wide, holding the heavens in his palms (Isaiah 40:12). God numbers the billions of stars, speaking each of their names as he counts (Psalm 147:4).
The psalmist is looking up at the heavens and saying that God is more majestic than the starry host. But then he gets personal. “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
If God is that big, then what is God doing paying attention to something as small as “me?”
If Earth is that quarter-size somewhere in North America, then I am like that molecule of pocket lint on it. I am so small that I won’t even be able to vacuum it up with my Dyson vacuum cleaner. Trade in the telescopes for microscopes and we’re nowhere to be found.
Giving this comparative sizing, how heart-stopping is the realization that God is mindful of—caring toward—each one of us 300 billion lint atom on this quarter?
While God counts and names the trillions of stars, God goes much further with each of us, designing each of us in a unique way. God knows what makes us tick. God hears our prayers when we cry. God cares about each one of us.
We should feel awe. Honor. We should have this divinely inflated self-worth. All that beauty to look at in the heavens and God pays attention to us. The Psalmist declares, God made humans “a little lower that God crowned them with glory and honor and gave them dominion over God’s handiwork.”
Lower than God
What does it mean to be a little lower than God and be given dominion over God’s creation? The dangerous word in Psalm 8 and in Genesis 1, is “dominion,” which tends to evoke images of abusive power. Over the generations, humanity has used this word as justification for mistreatment of the environment, claiming that God gave it to us to use as we see fit.
When we take a closer look at the term, “dominion,” it reveals that the kind of “control” God grants to humans is of a totally different sort. The Hebrew word, mashal, is also used to describe the way that God rules over creation, which does not involve abuse. God’s role is one of caretaker, who does not use creation to God’s benefit but rather protects and sustains it. Likewise, humanity is entrusted with the great responsibility of tending the garden of creation. Our “dominion” should be modeled after God’s work, not the skewed vision of power that humans so often do in our daily lives.
We may be just a molecule lint so small that it’s not noticeable in the large creation that God created but God still made us for a purpose. Because God cares for humans, it is obvious that we are created for something. God cares for us like a parent cares for her child.
In this psalm, God’s hope is that we share in his good stewardship of the world. Being reminded of God’s creation of the world, in which order was created from chaos, we are to work with God to maintain order. With dominion comes the responsibility to treat the world well. Life’s meaning is to be found in serving God, who in turn blesses human.
There’s been a variety of translations of this phrase, “Yet you have made them a little lower than God” (v. 5a). Some have read: the divine beings or angels, heavenly beings. If we are made in the image of God according to our likeness as in Genesis 1: 26-27, then we must examine first our image of God in order to discern how humanity should act with respect to all of God’s creation.
In other words, unless we look up, we won’t understand how to look down.
God is mindful of humanity and cares for us. God cares for us by giving what we need to live. God cares for us by protecting us from danger. Many of us emulate God’s model of care with our friends and loved ones. Parents who care for their children will give them what they need to grow and thrive and protect them from harm whenever possible. When we look up to see how God is mindful of us, we know how to be mindful with each other.
Recently, I was able to finally watch the movie, Pursuit of Happyness that I’ve wanted to see for some time. In the movie, the main character, Chris, became homeless and lived on the street of San Francisco with his young son. Living on the street was not the life he planned for himself or for his son. While on the street, however, Chris did everything he could to keep his son safe. When they slept in a homeless shelter, he often laid awake at night to make sure no one harmed his son. Though money was in short supply, Chris always made sure that his son had food to eat and clean water to drink. He walked his son to school every day and helped him with his homework every night. Though they were in an abnormal situation, he tried to maintain some level of normalcy. He corrected his son when he felt he was wrong or out of line but allowed his son to express his opinions and personality. Chris used his dominion or control he had over his son’s life to care for him rather than dominate or severely restrict him. God is like that.
God is mindful of who you are and cares for you. I know some of you are sitting here saying to yourselves, “I’m not that important. This all sounds wonderful and poetic but does God really know me and what I am going through right now?”
The psalmist might not be able to explain it but he is able to affirm the reality that in God’s sight, you matter. In verse 2, the psalmist says, “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark.” Miraculously, we find that God draws strength out of the most helpless and vulnerable among humanity—babes and infants. If God can find power in such apparent weakness, than how can we, in our most vulnerable moments, dare to claim that God can find no goodness or possibility within us? If you are feeling unable to cope, you are still loved and valued by God, not because of your weakness, but because of the strength that is still found, even in your frailty.
In the face of God, we are incredibly puny—insignificantly a lint of molecule. Yet, God finds strength in our very puny-ness. We may wonder “Why?” Why does God really care?
But God, through this psalmist, seems uninterested in explaining it. Rather, the message is to remind us of who we are, whose we are, and the responsibilities that grow from these facts—whether we understand them or not. After the Psalms, we know that God tells us again that we are mindful of him when his son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ comes into the world because of God’s love.
In the likeness of God, God created each one of us, we are responsible to create, cultivate, filling the earth and exercising dominion. The sun didn’t get this responsibility. Neither did the trees nor the fish.
Looking Up
With smart phones, I heard you can get this amazing app called Google Sky. When the phone is held out to the horizon, the screen shows the stars and constellations visible at that trajectory. It’s the digital equivalent of the stars that you would be able to see if we were with the psalmist when he saw the constellations on that dark night on a Palestinian hill.
Unless we first look up to see how God in the first place created the glory above the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars that God have established, we won’t understand our own place in God’s creation.
A number of years ago, a reporter carried out an interesting survey on the street. Pedestrians were stopped at random and asked, without looking up, to describe the sky as it was that day. Only a small percentage could give a description with reasonable accuracy. One way to join the psalmist in marveling at God is by looking up!
It is wonderful to consider that the same night sky, that filled our psalmist with wonder, is still there for each of us to look up and see.
When we look up and see God’s heavens, we will look down and see how mindful we must be to ensure that human atrocities against other humans like the holocaust must not happen again.
When we look up and see God’s heavens, we will look down and see how mindful we must be to prevent abusing our planet because we have been given dominion over the works of God’s hands, all things under our feet, all sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, he birds of the air, and the fish in the Gulf of Mexico.
When we look up and see God’s heavens, we will look down and see how mindful we must be to care for those who are made weak, vulnerable, and helpless because our society is punitive and hardened from compassion.
When we look up and see God’s heavens, we will then only be able to look down and see how God has been mindful of us, making us just a little lower than him and crowned with glory and honor to know that God will sustain and redeem us in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
Let us pray.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Remind us of our awesome responsibility of caring for the world and all of its inhabitants—the birds in the air, the fish in the sea, the animals that roam the land, and the human beings that you have been mindful of because you have created us just a little lower than you. Call us to action and faithfulness so that we may learn from your love and creativity. We pray that as we are crowned with glory and honor that we may be acceptable in your sight. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.