SUNDAY 22 MAY 2005 ?± Trinity Sunday
Reflection on Psalm 8 during a Taiz?à-style prayer service
Having had most of the people working around me this past week sniffing and sneezing, blowing their nose and coughing, I have no need to be reminded of how feeble humans are. Having seen in the media the devastation brought about by the heavy rains in the Bay of Plenty, I have no need to be reminded of how vulnerable we human beings can be. Remembering in a conversation this past week the simple fact that something like two-thirds of our physical composition is water, I have no need to be reminded of our human impermanence. Reading a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a sermon at a holocaust commemoration service, I have no need to be reminded of the depths to which we human beings can sink.
As feeble, vulnerable, impermanent, and guilty of great evil as human beings may be, when the lectionary compilers came to choose a psalm for Trinity Sunday ?± the day when the church proclaims the complex mystery and glory of God ?± Psalm 8 is chosen for two of the three Trinity Sundays in the three-year cycle of readings.
The psalm begins and ends with a sweeping doxology in praise of God ?± "O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" The Psalmist strongly declares God??s glory and the wonder.
But these profound statements of praise almost seem to serve as brackets around another wondering, astonished affirmation ?± this time of the glorious dignity of humankind:
"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
(other translations say "than yourself" or "than the angels")
And crowned them with glory and honour."
Who among us has not at some point or other in their life looked into a star-studded night sky and at the awesome hugeness of the universe, or looked out across the vastness of some natural scenery ?± the Australian Outback perhaps, or the Grand Canyon, or the Southern Alps or over a tossing sea, and realised their own puny nature? The human person ?± feeble, vulnerable, impermanent, guilty ?± is unimpressive when compared with the sun, moon, and stars, or with the vastness and glory of the natural world. And yet ?± this ancient poet claims ?± the human person is elevated by God above all creatures and stands next to and close to God.
Like the first of the two creation mythologies in Genesis, the psalmist places humankind at the pinnacle of the whole created order: "You have given them dominion over the works of your hands, you have put all things under their feet?ñ" Or as the ancient wisdom of Genesis put it, "Then God said, ?´Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.?? So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ?ñ God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good."
Our exalted status is both our glory and our shame. The God-likeness that is ours is expressed in selfless deeds of caring and compassion, and through visions of a nobler life that is striven for by some human beings for all human beings. It is found in human creativity expressed in art and architecture, the beauty of music and the beauty of words. It is expressed in the most sublime forms of human religion, in the depths of contemplation and the heights of praise and in outpourings of love. It is our God-likeness that compels us to reach out for that which is even more beautiful and pure, more good and more holy.
But our exalted status has also time and again led us human beings to abuse divinely given dominion over the creatures of the earth. Our human arrogance, thinking that we are the pinnacle of all that is results in the extinction of species, the destruction of life-giving forests, fertile lands turned into arid wastes, the depletion of the earth??s food and fuel resources, and ceaseless waging of war upon one another for greed and gain. It is seen in the abuse of religion when it becomes manipulative and oppressive, narrow-minded and cruel-hearted. What we see time and again in individual human beings abusing power, is writ large in humankind??s collective abuse of the created order and of each other.
Some have argued that the originators of the Genesis creation myth and the poet who penned Psalm 8 were wrong in their assessment of humankind, and that human beings are not the pinnacle of creation. Or if they ever were, it is time they were knocked off their pedestal. After all, are not both Genesis and the Psalms just the work of human hands and minds, the creations of human beings for their own glory? Or even if the writers of Genesis and the psalm were witnessing to a real deep and profound insight about the divine-human partnership, it is humans who have got it wrong, and decided that as the pinnacle of creation they need no other reference point, such as God, sovereign over all. Perhaps the greatest sin of humankind is making the supreme mistake of believing our own publicity.
Or might it be that those ancient writers, inspired each in their own way in much less complex times than our own, have indeed caught a kernel of truth, an understanding of the mysterious relationship between human beings and the Holy One? And might it be that in the Christian understanding of this mysterious relationship there is a kernel of truth in the conviction that ultimately God was disclosed not in the wonders and majesty of creation, in the awesomeness that is all around us, but rather in the feeble, vulnerable, impermanent and potentially flawed form of a human being? Might it be that when we are invited to see God all about us, we are not invited to look "at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars" but rather to look at each other?
Might it be that when we celebrate the wondrous "otherness" of God as expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity, we are invited to do so mindful that the ultimate disclosure of God, for we Christians anyway, occurred in the person of a human being ?± Jesus of Nazareth who was flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, blood of our blood?
Might it not be that when we seek the face of God, all we need do is turn our head and see the head that is on the pillow beside ours, or the face of the driver in the other car at an intersection, or the checkout operator in the supermarket, or the faces of displaced persons in the Sudan or the starving person in Zimbabwe or the still-grieving survivor of the December tsunami on our television screen, or at the Auckland street kid, or our own kid ?± or even to look straight ahead into the mirror and see our own face.
The wonder, the otherness, the complexity of God ?± three in one, one in three; Father, Son and Spirit; life-giver, pain-bearer love maker ?± the wonder, the otherness, the complexity of God seen in the wonder, the ?´here and nowness??, the complexity of each member of the human family.
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