Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2 v5-9
Part of a series on the Psalms, Songs of Experience.
This week: Purpose: Nat Charles encourages us to look up, look back and look forwards to find our meaning and purpose as humanity.
Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday service currently meeting on Zoom. Due to a computer issue during the recording this video is audio-only.
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TRANSCRIPT
This afternoon we’re beginning a new sermon series in the book of Psalms. I wonder what your experience is with the Psalms?I grew up in a tradition where the Psalms formed an important part of the weekly worship of the gathered congregation. Every Sunday, at least one Psalm would be chanted as part of the worshipping life of the congregation. And depending on how well the congregation knew the Psalm, it could feel like a serene, reflective, almost ethereal moment in the weekly service.
Yet that often felt like a sharp contrast to the content of the Psalm that we were singing. There is an emotional depth and honesty to the Psalms, to the point that sometimes we struggle to know what to do them.
But the reason that the Psalms have formed a significant part of the worshipping life of the people of God over millenia is that they teach us how to bring, and direct our own emotional life before and too God. The Psalms are a gift to us, because they don’t only give us information about God, although they do that, they help us know how to respond to God and to life in his world. They help us to tune our hearts, shape our prayers, and give us a vocabulary for our own Christian life and experience.
So over the coming weeks, as we work through a selection of the Psalms we’re going to be thinking about life as it is for us so often. We’re going to exploring issues like joy, security, doubt, envy. And this afternoon, in Psalm 8, we’re going to think about our purpose, and how we ought to think of ourselves, as human beings.
Questioning the value and meaning of your life might not feel like an everyday concern. But we live in a historical where it’s a deeply important question. And there are two views of humanity that you would find at work in the world at the moment.
The first is deeply optimistic. I read a book at the start of this year, written by a journalist who explores why the concept of liberal democracy is under pressure and in retreat at the moment. He starts by telling the story of an overnight drive that he had with his friends from Oxford to Berlin in 1989, to be present when the Berlin wall fell. And he writes that at that moment, as the wall came down, it seemed as though there wasn’t any problem or obstacle to human progress that couldn’t be overcome by human spirit and technological ingenuity. Communism was in retreat. The nuclear threat was fading.
But thirty years on, things are much more complicated. In fact, the pendulum has swung. And now, people think of humanity in a much more pessimistic way. As we try to come to terms with our colonial past in this country, we’re confronted with uncomfortable questions about ourselves. And most troubling of all is the question of whether we are so compromised and complicit we just don’t know how to even begin addressing the conversations we should be having.
In the midst of all that, Psalm 8 speaks with piercing, ringing clarity. How do we find our meaning and purpose? The answer of the Psalm is that it’s in living before a majestic, creator God. Three things to notice. Look up, look back, look forwards.
LOOK UP
First, look up. The beginning and the end of the Psalm root everything in the reality of who God is. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.
The Psalm is profoundly God focussed, theo-centric. How majestic is your name. And the first verses tell us that we live in a world that is profoundly God focussed. You have set your glory in the heavens. Which means that the whole universe speaks to and witnesses to the presence and reality of God. God is the defining reality of the universe, humanity is not.
We may carve the likeness of an American President into the side of a mountain, but the whole universe speaks to the presence and reality and grandeur of God. We’re living in his place, not the other way around.
And that’s visible on the broadest scale, but also on the smallest. In Vs 2, David reflects on the power of praise. There’s an irony at play here – when someone that would have been considered weak or inconsequential praises God, a child or infant, it’s enough to silence the enemies of God and his people. Such is God’s glory and splendour that it completely transforms our notions of power and weakness.
If you want to know what our purpose is and where meaning is found for humanity, start by looking up.
That might sound like it belittles humanity. But I wonder whether that perspective is actually liberating. If we know that we live in a world that is charged with the grandeur of God, we’re freed from the impossible burden of believing that we have the responsibility of fixing everything, and making the world perfect once again.
Of course we find that a burden. We can’t do it. Which isn’t a reason to not get involved, but does give us perspective on what can be achieved by human effort alone.
LOOK BACK
Look up. But also, look back.
The tension in the Psalm is driven by the fact of God’s majesty. The heavens, so vast and enormous to us, are God’s handiwork. The moon and stars, beyond measure to us, God set in place as you or I might lay the table.
But knowing God’s majesty troubles David. He puzzles over why humans matter to a God like this. Vs 3, ‘what is humanity that you are mindful of them, human beings, that you care for them?’
And his answer to that question comes by looking back. He draws on the Scriptures, and the foundational narratives of Israel, the early chapters of the book of Genesis. In vs 5-6 David reflects on Genesis chapter 1, which pictures God as the immense and vast creator of all things, installing human beings in his creation to steward the world. To fill the earth and subdue it.
In other words, we matter because we are made by God, we are in his image. And we’re made to steward his creation. ‘You made them rulers over the works of your hands’ says David ‘You put everything under their feet’.
At times, a sentiment like that has been used by some within the Church as a charter for abuse, whether abuse of the environment, or abuse of other humans and an opportunity to exert power over them.
But rightly understood, David sees the role that humans play in God’s creation as a means of service. Humanity is steward God’s creation, in recognition that creation rightly belongs to God, and ruling is an act of service to him. So to rule in any other way, would be an abuse of trust and position.
So as he wrestles with the question of purpose and meaning, David holds two things together. Humanity is not central in the universe. We are not at the centre of the gravitational pull of the world. God is. We are in his orbit.
And yet, he has created humankind with a high calling in his world. To rule and reign for the good of the creation.
LOOK FORWARDS
Look up, look back. Also, look forwards.
Of course, we don’t see any of this in the world as it is at the moment. As you and I look at the world, it appears as though it is ruled by other things. By illness and disease. By structural and institutional injustice. By greed. Ultimately, by death.
We live in a world that looks as though it is ruled by other powers.
Which is why the Hebrews directs our gaze to Jesus. We don’t see humanity living out it’s God ordained purpose. But we do see one who is. Who through his death, and resurrection and ascension in to heaven is ruling over all things in his humanity. And because we are joined to him in his death and resurrection, where he has gone and what he is doing now is our future hope. Where he is we will be. What he is doing, we will also do. Not in degree, but in character.