Mindfull
Psalm 8

June 3, 2007


There is no doubting that this is the musical church. We sing lustily, revel in and reverberate to a phenomenal organ, our sanctuary overfloweth with choirs, and our Knox-Met Brass makes certain we hear the music.

Singing psalms is part of the joy and thrill of our worship. The problem with psalms, those ancient poetical Hebrew songs, is that we have lost the tunes. Most of the Psalms come with the title of a tune to which apparently it was originally sung, but no one, not even the rabbis remember them. In the synagogue there has long been what we might call a liturgical way to chant the psalms, but no pretension to what was originally sung. So, the way in which we sing the refrains in our responsive reading of the psalms does justice to the spirit in which they were first meant to be heard.

It is not just the music, but the words that still attract us. Yes, some of the psalms exhibit an orneriness and desire for vengeance that we wince at from our purified Christian perspectives. As if we never experience such feelings! Psalm 8 is not one of those.

The difficulty lies in which words we use. Psalm 8 was written in Hebrew which is a language that behaves differently from English. Anytime you translate from one language to another something is lost or not quite right, but there have been translations that have given us something more. There is the old saw that translation is the first act of interpretation, and sure enough we interpret this psalm differently.

The King James Version is most familiar to many of us: “For thou hast made [man] a little lower than the angels....” The Revised Standard Version declares, “Yet thou has made him little less than God....” Angels and God are pretty heady company for you and me. We did not know we were so good, such lofty creatures. Eugene Peterson in his The Message does a little bit more interpretation than the rest, and injects a little more fire as well in a very contemporary key.

GOD, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name.

Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.
I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?

Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden's dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lords of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.

GOD, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.

Eugene, you got it right. Just to remind you, this first Sunday after Pentecost is always called Trinity Sunday. Other special Sundays are based upon an event, you might say upon what God does, but only this Sunday is focusing on an idea and concept of who God is. And who God is determines who you are.

The Trinity, of course, is the unique Christian perception of God: God the Father and Creator, Christ the Son and Redeemer, the Spirit and Sustainer. God only is mentioned in this psalm, though the psalmist sings of how God has been working in this world through us human beings, God’s Spirit implicitly permeating every pore of created existence. Most people find the Trinity, God Who is Three in One, far too difficult to comprehend, which is quite all right, for that is the reason why people keep trying to explain the Trinity. It isn’t that we have an impossible God, but that God is impossible to describe. Any time you think you have all the right descriptions in place to describe God, then you have described something that is not God.

The psalmist proclaims about the creation of the world that God “made us lords of sheep and cattle...,” and remember, “asked you and me to give a name to every living thing, which gives us power over them and control, makes us lords. If you can describe God, then you’ve named God and you can control God, make sure God doesn’t do what you don’t want to do. That is an atheist’s world in which there is no God at all, for you have reduced our God to a thing, and you and I most certainly are not God.

But the song sings God a lot bigger, for our God is not too small. God is so big that there is not a creature that does not about God, a household name on the tips of everybody’s tongue. Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you! Even before they can speak a word an adult can understand, they know. The nursery songs of toddlers drown out the babble of atheists. There was no comprehension that an atheist could exist, Mr. Dawkins is deluded, for God is. The Biblical problem of God was not whether God existed, but what do you do with God, how do you respond to what God does?

I love how Peterson does his translation of the first big point of the psalm, totally un-biblical vocabulary. “I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, Moon and stars mounted in their settings.” And then “Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?” Macro-skies and micro-self - no wonder Bono of U-2 has written an endorsement of this translation on its jacket cover.

Lost, however, is that gentle adjective that says a lot about God and about human beings. Why are You mindful about us? This is the God Who is Three in One, the God whose mind is full of human beings who encourages you to have your mind so full of God that every thought that issues from you begins with God. I am not talking about all that super-pious language so many people are fond of glibly uttering at every breath to prove how Christian they are, but the deep seated realization that the real world operates according to the way God perceives her “handcrafted world.”

God is so full of us that in the act of creating this world “we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden's dawn light.” There is a fair share of people, unfortunately, who have missed the message that we have missed being gods; that our minds need to be full of God, not full of the idea that somehow you are a God.

But having your mind full of God is a humbling activity, for it is then you know what a huge gap there actually is in your narrow miss at deity. There comes a point for every determined language student that you know enough of the language to know that you don’t know that much. In the same way, when your mind is crammed full of God, you will comprehend that it is amazing we have any awareness of God, that we are able to listen and speak and hear God and that God is somehow mindful of us, takes us into account and loves you in particular. It does us so much good to know that we don’t know much.

There is an African-American spiritual that sings about Jesus in this way. “Mah God is so high, yuh can’t get over Him; He’s so low, yuh can’t git under Him; He’s so wide, yuh can’t get aroun’ Him.” You just can’t beat God, control God, completely understand God; surprise! because you ain’t God!

Now this is the Sunday we’ve spent a whole sermon just talking about God, and we don’t understand the Trinity any better, social and cultural issues - have we been wasting our time? No, I really don’t think so, for when you are talking about God, you are never talking about nothing. Talking about God has a habit of making you then talk about yourself and other people - all of those who narrowly missed being gods - and before long you can’t help noticing how some people have acted like they were gods over other people, punishing and oppressing them. You even notice how you have gotten carried away and treated others in an ungodly manner. It is at that point that you and I start working to undo the injustices, reconcile the conflicted, heal the sick, clothe the naked, give food to the hungry and water to the thirsty.

You start doing all this stuff, you keep doing all this stuff, you persevere in the endless battle of all this stuff, by crying out, your mind so full, “O God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world.”

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan