Higher Than Ants
Psalm 8 (NRSV)
1 O Lord, our
Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory
above the heavens.
2 Out of the
mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to
silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at
your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have
established;
4 what are human
beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
5 Yet you have
made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given
them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their
feet,
7 all sheep and
oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of
the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our
Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Every year around Valentine’s Day, I hear ads on the radio
for a company that will sell you a star so you can name it after your beloved. Have you ever heard any of those ads? I went to one of their websites
this week and found out that the starting price for a star naming kit is
something like 50 bucks.
Alas, I am sorry to
report that like many other beautiful things in life, you cannot buy a
star for love or money. The tracking and cataloging of stars is controlled by
the International Astronomical Union, the recognized authority in the scientific community for naming
things like stars and celestial bodies. And the International Astronomical
Union stopped naming stars back in 1922. Today, stars are not named, but catalogued by number according to
their positions in the sky. Even a little piece of the night sky cannot named
or sold. At least not yet.
One of the other
things we cannot buy is the kind of night sky that the writer of Psalm 8 saw
when he looked up. The starry sky described in Psalm 8 is
available only to people in rural parts of Africa and Asia – people who do not
have much in material things and infrastructure but have a much better view of
the night sky than you and I have from our perch in America. I know some of you
have seen extraordinary night skies in places like Malawi, but the rest of us have
to get out of populated areas or squint through a telescope to see even a tiny
percentage of the stars in the sky.
I remember spending New Year’s Eve on the beach a couple years ago and I can still recall my heart-pounding
awe as we sat on the sand, listening to the roar of the sea in the darkness, and
looking up at the night sky just crammed with stars. Even that sky was nothing compared to the heavenly display people in the
undeveloped world see every single night.
We may have comfortable well-lit homes and perfectly paved, well-lit
roads in our part of the world, but I think we have lost some of our connection to the wonder of God’s
creation.
People even in
the most remote corner of our planet only receive a tiny glimpse of the existing
universe. Thanks to images
provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists estimate that there are at
least 176 billion galaxies in the universe. And each one of those galaxies contains 200-400 billion
stars. So that’s at least 176
billion galaxies times 200 billion stars.
I’m not doing that math because the number of galaxies, the number of
stars – and these are only the ones we’ve been able to see so far – is beyond
awesome. Billions and billions of
stars. Why so many stars and
galaxies? Why couldn’t God stop at
a million? Two million? One billion even? Why this extravagance? It boggles the mind.
So we might indeed
share a little of the awe and wonder of the psalmist as he stares up into a night
sky and feels his smallness underneath the weight of God’s abundant
creativity. This ancient
poet, even without the benefit of a telescope and certainly without the knowledge
that there are a trillion or more stars up in the sky, can look up and be
reminded that one human being is pretty small potatoes compared to the vastness
of the universe:
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?
I heard a speaker in Nashville last week echo the question of this
psalm: “What are human beings?”
She said, “For the first time in human history, we do not have a real
definition of what it is to be a human being.”[1]
For many centuries, humanity distinguished itself as different from the rest of
creation by virtue of our ability to think. But in the 20th century, biological science
established that there are other animals who can also think – animals can
remember, anticipate, mourn, learn, problem-solve and even use complex language. And as we begin to understand more and
more about the human brain, we realize how much of our understanding of who we
are is controlled not by consciousness but by chemistry; our sense of self
resides in whatever chemical wash bathes our neurons and brain synapses.
I know this all sounds like pretty academic stuff, right? Billions of stars. Billions of brain synapses. Why waste our time pondering why there are so many stars beyond our view, or what it is that makes humans a little lower than angels but a little higher than a dolphin or a chimpanzee?
But I think that the poet who wrote Psalm 8 is engaging in exactly that
kind of cosmic questioning. He
looks up at a night sky and he is absolutely blown away by the idea that there
is so much he will never know beyond the simple truth that God is majestic and
glorious.
And in many ways, we do not know much more than the writer of this psalm. Even with all our scientific knowledge,
we cannot add much to this meditation on the inexplicable wonder of a creation
that goes infinitely on and on and on.
We cannot explain what makes us uniquely human any better than we can
explain God’s lavish creativity that continues, at this very moment, to empower
the multiplication of stars and galaxies beyond our comprehension and even our
imagination.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the only feast day in the Christian calendar
that does not celebrate a biblical event or person, but rather a “doctrine.” And doctrine is one of those unfortunate
words that sound kind of cold and distant and unapproachable. Which can make doctrine not only a
tricky thing to preach, but also a real stumbling block for anyone who is doing
their best to understand how it is that God can be one in three persons,
blessed Trinity.
But I think that the Doctrine of the Trinity is a terrific example of
how poets and philosophers and theologians approach unapproachable mysteries
like the vastness of the universe or the intricacies of a human soul. Science and philosophy and theology can
only take us so far until we find ourselves gaping in wonder at what we cannot
know.
And that is what happened in the early church when they hit a
theological wall in thinking through the biblical words – God, Father, Son,
Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the
Trinity came about because the early church needed, desperately, to stop fighting
with each other about Jesus, and begin to understand how God revealed God
through Jesus. What came out of
those negotiations was a humanly imperfect but faithful description of how God
can be experienced by human beings in relationship with God and with one
another, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the reality of the
resurrected Christ. It was, simply
put, the best that the early church could do.
And it didn’t help matters much that Jesus himself didn’t give a whole
lot of thought to the problem of the triune God. At no point in the gospels did Jesus stop to explain the
intricate dance between Father, Son and Spirit. It would have been easier if Jesus had done that, but
instead, Jesus said, as we heard in the gospel reading this morning: “I still have many things to say to
you, but you cannot bear them now” (Jn 16:12).
So what was it that Jesus followers weren’t ready to hear? What is God holding back from us? Why can’t we hear the rest of the
story?
Barbara Brown Taylor used a phrase in a recent lecture – “We need to
allow God a certain amount of privacy.”
Which is a very good way of saying that God is more transcendent and
more mysterious than we can possibly imagine or our doctrines can possibly
contain. But even as we dwell in
the mystery of God’s sheer otherness, we cannot toss out our doctrines, as imperfect
as they are, because they invite us into God’s creative, transforming
work. The Trinity affirms that God
is, indeed, mindful of human beings.
The triune God cares for us, and longs to be intimately involved in the
life of all humans who are made a little lower than God out of not much more
than star dust. And as if the
sheer gift of life isn’t quite enough to fill you and me and the whole family
of humanity with unending awe and gratitude, we and all of our fellow mud
creatures are crowned with glory and honor.
We don’t know everything and we never will. And together with our never-ending curiosity about what everything means,
we have an equally strong impulse to keep God at a distance. We do want to allow God some privacy, maybe because we hope
God will give us exactly the same thing.
Maybe we want to give God some space, because we really cannot bear to
hear the whole truth about God. Or
the whole truth about ourselves.
Maybe the ancient Hebrews really were onto something. You can discern this tension between the eminence and intimacy of God throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Listen to what ancient person had to say
about being in the eye line of YHWH:
“What are human
beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them
every moment? Will you not look
away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you
watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?
Why have I become
a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my
transgression
and take away my iniquity?
For now I shall lie in the earth;
you
will seek me, but I shall not be” (Job 17:17-21).
Job had grown weary of God’s obsessive attention for humanity and wanted nothing more than escape from God’s steady, ceaseless gaze.
And who could blame him? The
ancients knew full well the otherness of God because they remembered what happened
when Moses encounters the Divine Spark burning in the desert
wilderness. Moses said: “If I come
to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to
you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
God replies: “I am who I am.
…Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”…‘The
Lord,the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title
for all generations.
“I am who I am.”
That is who God
says God is. “Ehyeh
aser ehyeh” in the Hebrew. Which literally means: “I will be what I will
be.” “I am who I am.”
When we have lost our ability to
be in awe of “I am who I am,” we have Psalm 8 to remind us that the creator
of billions of stars and billions of people is still coming close to us, while
still remaining the wholly other and holy one of Israel. Our doctrinal habit of nailing down the
“whys” and the “hows” and the “whats” of the divine will never come close to disclosing
the fullness of God. So while we
do not discard the doctrines, neither do we allow them to hold our imaginations
hostage.
I thought about all of this
last week as Tom and I spent a sunny hour or so hanging out on George Jackson’s
back porch. We were delighted to
find him enjoying a tall glass of iced coffee and gazing out at his garden that
used to be the domain of his wife, Ollie.
Now, I do not know very much
about gardening. Ok, that’s not really
true. I know nothing about
gardening. But I inherited a very
nice garden when we bought our house and there are two flowers in my front yard
that have absolutely thrived despite my benign neglect. The lilies of the valley are still
going great guns. And the other
flower that is doing really, really well are the peonies. They are crazy beautiful and I love
them because I do not have to do a thing for them. They just grow.
George also has peonies in his
garden. And as we were chatting, I
observed that they seemed just on the verge of blooming and he said, yes that
is true. The ants are doing a
really good job and the flowers should be appearing any day now.
Ants?? I was intrigued and looked a little
more closely at the peony buds.
Yes, there did appear to be a quite a few big fat black ants having a
lovely time on the still-closed buds. George told me that there is sweet nectar
on the flower buds that the ants are crazy about. Once the ants have done their thing in eating all that good
stuff, the peonies open up and bloom.
I was absolutely delighted by
this information. Because I am an
ignoramus about flowers, I had no idea that peonies depended upon the hearty
appetite of ants in order to burst open in the late spring. Ask Tom – I was giddy about this simple
yet profound interaction between ant and flower. I even took pictures.
When I got back to my office, I
committed the fatal human error of not leaving mystery alone. I sat down
to my computer and typed into the Google:
“Peonies and ants.”
You can guess the rest. Turns out that George and I were both deceived by a common old wives tale.
While it’s true that there is a substance on peony buds that attracts
ants, the peonies will bloom whether the ants show up or not. So while the ants are fed by the
peonies, the peonies do not need the ants in order to bloom and, in fact, if you’re not careful
when you bring cut peonies into your house, you can probably count on an indoor
ant infestation.
I didn’t want to know
that truth. I was happier when I was in
George’s backyard, in awe of the interdependence between ant and flower, and
marveling at God’s creative hand in putting bug and bud together. I could not bear the cold, hard fact.
We may have dominion over the
works of God’s hands on earth, but we do not have control of God or how God will
choose to reveal God’s self. We
cannot buy a star or fathom the universe or even really understand the mystery
of the triune God. But Jesus said
the Spirit of truth will come, in its own time, in its own way, and in a billion different ways, and declare to us what it means to be human– a little
lower than angels, a little higher than an ant, and wrapped in the mystery and
jaw-dropping awe of God’s care and mindfulness. And in this season of Pentecost, in this small moment,
that’s all I need to know.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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