June 15, 2025 Reflection

I’d like you if you’re comfortable to close your eyes and imagine a dark, dark sky above you. Relax, lean back, take a breath. It’s a clear night, no clouds, no mist or smoke from the fires. One of those nights when the contrast of inky darkness and brilliant pins of light take your breath away. When you want to slow your heart and silence your breathing so you can take it all in, so you can grasp the magnificence. And you wonder, not in curiosity but in awe, you wonder about the magnitude of this, God’s cosmos. About the incomprehensible enormity of it. About your place at its feet. Your neck starts to crick and maybe you’re getting cold, but you can’t draw your eyes away, you can’t get your soul back into your body. And in that moment, you are at one with the Psalmist David who wrote some 6000 years ago, “Oh. My. God. How majestic is your name in all the earth. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human being that you are mindful of them (of us), mortals that you care for them (for us)? (Psalm 8:3-4) And please open your eyes.

                Psalm 8 is a song of praise to God. A song of thank you, and wow, and help me all wrapped into one.

            The Psalmist continues: “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.” (Psalm 8: 2) Now that’s odd isn’t it. Out of the mouths of babes and infants comes protection again enemies. I wonder if the writer has shifted focus from the enormity of God’s creation to the most intimate tiny thing to show that even there, in that wee baby, there is still power – the power of vulnerability. Because who is not dis-armed by the face of a baby, by the little moue of those perfect lips? Who is not left helpless when that little face lights up to see you, when the whole body squirms in delight at your presence. I wonder if Christians can interpret the Psalmist to be saying God disarms us through the vulnerability of a baby, with the same vulnerability that Christ showed? And even more, can we understand that Christ’s vulnerability is dis-arming, that it turns away our enemies and ends the cycle of violence because the risen Christ did not seek revenge and retribution but instead offered his peace, his unconditional, dis-arming peace?

Is the power of God revealed in the vastness of the night sky and in the confines of a bassinet?

            “You have made us a little lower than God,and crowned us with glory and honor. You have given us dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under our feet.” (v.5-6)

                There’s affirmation and warning in there isn’t there. You have made us a little lower than God. We are not God, in spite of our hubris, our effort to muscle our way through life. In the progressive church we are sometimes tempted to a functional atheism, a sense that if anything good is going to happen around here, by God we’re going to have to be the ones to do it. But the Psalmist reminds us that we are made a little lower than God. We are not in charge of all things, we are not above all things.

            Many, many years ago I was an exchange student in Argentina. I pretty much figured I had the world by the tail. At that point in my 16-year-old deep wisdom I had decided that there was no God and along with Karl Marx I figured that religion was the opiate of the masses. I was living in the beautiful city of Mar del Plata, had lovely Argentinian friends and was staying with a family that treated me like a princess.

Near the end of my year there, friends and I travelled by train through the Patagonia to Bariloche, a town situated in the foothills of the Andes. We set out for a hike on a mountain called Cerro Lopez and along the way met 4 fellows from Buenos Aires who were very good company. That night we slept in a hut on the side of the mountain, and I was feeling on top of the world, literally and metaphorically, the mistress of my fate. I was woken by a vivid light shining in the window. Initially I thought it was a streetlight but then remembered where I was. On a mountainside. In the wilderness. Where there was no power. I went to the window and there, filling the sky was a comet. The bright head and the long, brilliant tail an enormous exclamation mark across the celestial sky. Even as I tell you this, I realize it’s hard to believe. But there it was, and it was stunning. And I heard the voice of God say: “Honey, anything you can do, I can do better.”

            We’re created just a little lower than God. And God help us when, as we do, we forget that and act outside of God’s parameters for goodness. We can see how we have abused our power of dominion over creation. Rather than responding in awe and gratitude:

“You have given us dominion over the works of your hands! We will steward your precious creation with infinite care,” we have sometimes heard “You have given us dominion over all the works of your hands, and we will exploit them as we want.” And in the ongoing collapse of our environment we see the cost of this hubris.

            “What are human being that you are mindful of them/us, mortals that you care for us?” The Psalmist isn’t expecting an answer from God but somehow lifting up both our human sense of insignificance when confronted with the created universe, and the utter miracle that God has chosen to have a special relationship of caring with us, with humanity. The psalmist holds together both ends of the continuum of the cosmos: the Creator of all, the One who set the sun and moon and stars in their places, is also deeply attentive to each one of us, each of us a “small wonder” in God’s eyes.

            We preachers often stress, and I hope you often hear, that God loves us: that God loves you, and loves me. But the psalmist explores one particular aspect of love, I think, in claiming that God is “mindful” of us.

Mindfulness implies careful attention, that is, attention that is full of care. As one writer puts it, “mindfulness is love that resists distraction. It is a staunch refusal to fall into absentmindedness. It is focused, sustained attention toward the beloved… Mindfulness is choosing to cherish and then choosing – again and again – never to back away from that initial decision.” (Mark Rolls, “Mindful,” in the Christian Century, May 15, 2007)

            And according to the psalmist, this is the relationship that God has with us. Despite our frequent inattentiveness to God; despite the fact that sometimes, “human beings aren’t very attractive”, the psalmist proclaims, with wonder and not a little surprise, that God’s attention never wavers from us.

So the psalmist calls us, not only to recognize and marvel at the fact that God is eternally mindful, attentive, care-full, of us. But also to practice that mindfulness with each other, and with God’s creation. 

Note for anyone reading this. The following is not exactly what I said. I spoke without notes from here on. But this gives you an idea of the point I was making.

Now what you might be wondering at this point, if you read the newsletter and were expecting a sermon about the Trinity, on this Trinity Sunday, what does this have to do with the Trinity? Not a lot really. I got so carried away with the beauty of the Psalm that I was distracted from a doctrine that can seem rather esoteric. The truth is I broke a cardinal rule of mine.

For 30 years I have resisted including sermon titles in newsletters or orders of service, or now Power Point because so many times, on Friday or late Saturday night, the Holy Spirit decides we should go in a direction I wasn’t expecting. And the sermon ends up having nothing to do with what was advertised. It’s all Julian’s fault really – I sent him a draft of the service and he wrote back saying, ‘But, isn’t it also Trinity Sunday?’ And I thought ‘OK, right, let’s make it about Trinity.’ But then the power of Psalm 8 carried me away.

But – there is a link. When we read something like that Psalm we might feel like God is so awesome there is no way we could have a connection, there is no way we could approach that entity. But the Bible offers ways to find this Creator more accessible, referring to God as Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. Referring not to people, but to relationships that we can imagine. If we’re fortunate, we can imagine a father and a mother as someone who has nurtured us, and who we could approach when we’re troubled. Or for me, my grandma was the incarnate image of God. She loved us to bits, all 25 of us. We could do no wrong in her eyes. She offered the love and the embrace that I can imagine as the love and grace of God. And unlimited fig newton cookies, like the abundance of Christ’s table.

Father – Son; Grandma – grandchild.

Part of the Trinity that makes up the awesome God. Jesus, the son, both divine and human, in a form that we can recognize, teaching in a way we can understand-sometimes. And the Holy Spirit – a movement, an energy that we sometimes recognize in our bodies or as a wisdom coming out of our mouth and we think, ‘where did that come from?’

Trinity is all of these energies – the power that creates the stars in the heavens; the vulnerability of the baby who lures us in with her smile, the wisdom that reaches us through the word of Scripture and conversation with each other.

The Trinity is a response to the truth that God can’t be fully named, God can never be fully grasped. God is an experience, an experience that causes us to throw back our heads and cry out: “Oh. My. God. How majestic is your name in all the earth!”

Thanks be to God. Amen