Psalm 8:1-9 August 23, 2009

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. 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, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

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I have a bit of personal history with this morning's psalm. From about as far back as I can remember, until I left home for the Coast Guard, I was involved in one or another of the choirs at my church in Southern California. You might say I grew up singing in church and I have many fond memories of those days. Of all the hymns, introits and anthems I've sung over the years though, there aren't too many that I can call to mind at will. I tend to recognize things when I hear them, but usually I don't have the titles, composers or lyrics of church music filed away in my brain like I do with Simon & Garfunkel. That is not the case, however, with an anthem by Dale Wood based on this morning's psalm. That one I do remember.

The reason I remember it is that right in the middle of the anthem there was a section that was meant to be dramatically spoken rather than sung, and whenever we did it, I always ended up feeling like an idiot. The choir director must have liked it though, because we sang it a lot. In rehearsal, the director was always very intent on having us speak the words clearly and distinctly in the same rhythm. He wanted us to build to this mighty crescendo together, all the while overdoing the diction. It sounded something like this.

Thou hast made man a little lower than the angels.

And hast crowned him with honor and with glory.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands.

Thou has put all things under his feet:

All sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field,

The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea.

Oh Lord. Our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth !!!

This is obviously the King James translation. Even if you don't recognize the psalm, all the "thees" and "thous" would give the translation away. As a kid, I never really had a problem with the old language. I always thought Shakespearian English had a beautiful music to it that modern English often lacks, and personally, I like all kinds of music. I've never been too fussy about what I've been asked to sing in my various choirs. But still, every time this particular piece came around, I found myself cringing in embarrassment.

Thinking back, I'm not sure the song is what started it, but it was during that same period of my life that I began feeling some real awkwardness with the church in general. It felt like someone had dropped a stone in the pool of my mind and the rings of doubt were fanning out in all directions. I began questioning whether or not I really believed the things about God and faith that we were singing about every Sunday. I wasn't at all sure I did. One weekend a group of people came to our church to "witness" to the salvation they'd found in faith. Heaven forbid, I thought, that I should ever be asked to witness to anyone myself. It is just a bit ironic that I ended up in ministry. I realize that. But I've never been content to simply swallow whole the teachings of the church. From about confirmation on, I began thinking for myself about what the church was asking us to believe, and I've often felt there was something decidedly odd about it all.

"Thou hast made man a little lower than the angels. And hast crowned him with honor and with glory." You know, this psalm, all by itself, is a densely packed theological statement. It presumes a worldview in which the universe was created by God, with a built in hierarchy and a built in patriarchy. There is a real heaven above, populated by angelic beings, and a real hell below, with real devils. In between, the earth, which is the battle ground between good and evil, has been placed under the dominion of man, who is the crowning achievement of all creation. All of nature has been placed at man's disposal to do with as he sees fit, so long as it ultimately serves the grand purpose of glorifying the majesty of God, who stands at the pinnacle of it all and deserves our worship and praise.

That's a lot to pack into one short poem isn't it. And please understand, I'm not mocking God, or the bible, or the church, or Christian theology. I'm simply pointing out that these are some of the images and beliefs that have been handed down to us through many generations of faithful people, who mostly accepted them without question, but that today, most of us do not accept them, at least not at face value. The old worldview of the bible is often grossly out of keeping with the worldview we run into as soon as we walk out the doors of the church. The great hierarchy of the universe, the rightful domination of men over women, our divine right to use or abuse nature as we see fit, the literalness of heaven and hell ... these are ideas the secular society has mostly come to view as absurd if not in fact dangerous.

And we know it. We are all perfectly well aware that there is a widening gap between what is taught inside and what is taught outside the church. The problem is, we are citizens of both worlds, which means that we are struggling - the church is struggling - with what psychology calls, "cognitive dissonance." We're trying to hold in our heads two very different explanations of the way things are that don't seem to fit together very well. And it's giving us all one colossal headache. A good many people have come to the conclusion that they have to choose sides. Since the two worldviews seem irreconcilable, one or the other must be wrong. Some have chosen to abandon the ancient worldview of the church, and even divinity itself, in favor of science and technology. Others think their calling is to hold fast to a literal-minded understanding of the scriptures, condemning all who don't share their views to a fiery demise of one kind or another. And here we are in the middle, trying to keep one foot in each camp and uncertain of the future.

My friends, lets be honest. I'm a big fan of honesty. It's true that the things we teach in the church, the stories we tell, have a decidedly odd side to them, but the thing is, what's taught out in the world can be pretty odd in its own right. The idea for my sermon today came from a Newsweek article from May of 2005 which was titled, "The Oddness of Everything." The writer, George Will, had been asked to address the graduating class of the University of Miami. In his speech, he used a number of facts pulled from Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." He was trying to make a case that the universe is a pretty odd place and we should be careful about what we think we know. He wrote:

We should by now be used to strange thoughts. It has been 100 years since June 1905, when Albert Einstein began publishing the scientific papers that taught us that gravity bends light, that space and time are warped, that matter and energy are interchangeable, that the mass of an object increases the faster it moves and that the experience of time is a function of speed.

The sun around which Earth orbits is one of perhaps 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is a piddling galaxy next door to nothing much. There are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the still-unfolding universe. If all the stars in the universe were only the size of the head of a pin, they still would fill Miami's Orange Bowl to overflowing more than 3 billion times.

After presenting these and other "strange facts" to the graduating class, Will makes this observation:

The more [we] appreciate the complexity and improbability of everyday things - including [ourselves] - the more [we] can understand the role that accidents, contingencies and luck have played in bringing the human story to its current chapter. And the more [we] understand the vast and mysterious indeterminacy of things, the more suited [we] will be to participate in writing the next chapter.

Will concludes by saying:

It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right. One way to immunize ourselves against misplaced certitude is to contemplate - even to savor - the unfathomable strangeness of everything, including ourselves.

The point, it seems to me, is that despite all the fabulous and wondrous things science has revealed to us, if anything, we are as far as we have ever been from truly understanding the universe and our place in it. We have a great deal more data than we used to, but we are still only scratching the surface, and we still can't say with any certainty what it all means. The ancient people of the Bible talked about the infinite using the best information and ideas that were available to them at the time. And though they didn't have the information we've come to take for granted, they did have a clear sense of the vastness of life. We may reject the notion that the cosmos is organized hierarchically, but all the psalmist was trying to say is that the universe has an order to it. It makes sense. It is not simply random and chaotic, but has been brought into existence somehow by a power that has an investment in how it evolves.

It is rather extraordinary when you think about it. The psalmist was writing some three thousand years ago, but all these years later, we are still considering the heavens, the moon and the stars, the wondrous works of nature. We are still wondering what it means to be mortal in relation to the infinite. And while it's true that we can easily become confused trying to sort out the sometimes very different ideas of the secular and sacred worldviews, ultimately what gives me confidence in the future of the church in society is that I believe we are using our different ideas and perspectives to reach for the same truth.

Amen.