“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

“Your splendor above the heavens is praised from the mouth of babes and infants. You have established power because of your foes, to quell enemy and avenger.” That’s how one Old Testament Scholar translates the difficult Hebrew text that forms the first verses of Psalm 8. “Your splendor above the heavens is praised from the mouth of babes and infants.”

The first infant I baptized is graduating from high school this week. It is an odd feeling to ponder. Most of you can understand when with time and by grace, God offers you such moments of reflection. One church member told me just the other day what a gift it has been to get to know his children as adults. Another told me of her father and her son who had always been so close, and this summer that relationship of grandfather and grandson will be sealed even stronger with a visit to the World War II memorial in Washington. I have never kept track of the number of children that I have baptized but in pondering Gerry’s high school graduation, it is as if time has collapsed and I have this image of font gathering after font gathering, family after family, babes in arms, older children kneeling, a few confirmands too, some adults who I baptized, one man baptized at the same time as his infant daughter. I see the pictures in my mind; infants sleeping, fussing, cooing, screaming, the congregation saying “we will” over and over and over again. The snapshots rush by in the powerpoint of my memory.

Indeed, infant baptism is an act of praise and adoration. Here’s to those baptismal huddles where my voice was not the only one to be heard. For as the psalmist reminds us, “your splendor above the heavens, O God, is praised from the mouth of babes and infants.” An infant choir, as all the years mush together, and the family of faith stands with baptismal water dripping down our necks and our eyes turned heavenward. And those of us now blessed with the kind of time and the taste of grace when God offers those moments of reflection. You and I, we stop again to listen as the children sing.

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

Just a few weeks ago on a Sunday morning, I was heading to church pretty early. The sun was just coming up over Lake Carnegie as I drove by. It had rained during the night. A bit of steam was coming off the water. The sun’s glow was just starting to rest on top of the trees. The beauty of the morning allowed me to smile and give thanks. As I came into down up Nassau Street from the east, I had to swerve to avoid a man who was walking right into the road in front of me. He had a camera with him. As I turned into the church driveway, I stopped and looked back to see what he was doing. Well, the sun was rising and had taken shape in all of its beauty, centered perfectly above Nassau Street, a huge orange circle, whose circumference bled into the trees, as if colored by a child who didn’t worry much about the lines. In fact, with the wet road reflecting the rays, it looked like the sun had been broken open and was being poured right up Nassau Street toward Palmer Square. That’s why the guy was wondering into the middle of the street with a camera well before seven in the morning. I think God must have been smiling, maybe looking for a little something for the effort. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established.”

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!”

The ageless, timeless choir full of infant voices. Creation’s beauty proclaimed at the dawn of yet another day. But the psalmist doesn’t stop there. The psalmist doesn’t allow the faithful to settle for a nostalgic listening as heart strings are tugged by the photo album of faith. The psalmist doesn’t stop just as the eyes absorb a sunrise, or a fertile valley, or a rainbow, or a flowing river, or a meteor shower in the night sky. No, the psalmist as inquisitive theologian isn’t willing to simply join those who long ago decided their relationship with God could be best fed by the view from the mountaintop, or there in the surf, or at a canyon’s edge. “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?”

Who are they? That you would remember them, that you would visit them? Who are these people? “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 seas, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” Who are we?

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

The psalmist hears the praise of God that comes out of the mouths of babes and the psalmist looks to God’s handiwork displayed in creation, and the psalmist turns, looks, and asks, “but what about these guys.” Humankind there at the center, framed by the universe. Humanity there at the top, resting comfortably above creation’s food chain. The psalmist points to you and to me and our place in God’s eyes. Of course, in the sinfulness of us all, we sit there just this side of things divine, basking in the glory and the honor, patting ourselves on the back and giving thanks for words like “dominion.”

It is not at all self-evident, is it? How the psalmist could look at the human and grant her a place there a little lower than God? Given the brokenness and the reality of the world, the terror and the inflicted pain so evident, the obvious potential for mass destruction, is it at all clear that the human has guaranteed his estimated spot there in God’s royal hierarchy, God’s crafted ecology, God’s economy of being? O Lord, our Lord, what about us? Is our place in this design so evidently secure? And so the history of interpretation when it comes to Psalm 8, takes a turn to Jesus right about now. “What is man that thou are mindful of him, the son of man that dost care for him?" (RSV) Taking a cue from the New Testament, the Book of Hebrews, the move is to the Christ, the Son of God, the Great High Priest. You just can’t look to the human being, but we can see this “Jesus, who for a little while was crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone. (Heb 2: 9).” Or as theologian Karl Barth argued, when the bible points, when the psalmist points to humanity and its place in the cosmos, it is a “prophetic and apostolic pointing”. A pointing that has meaning only in relation to God’s plan and in relation to God’s Son. It is a pointing to the future truth of humankind. A truth only revealed and made known in Jesus Christ. “If this Jesus is actually the man of Psalm 8,” Barth writes, “the estimate is true, which otherwise could only be described honestly as false.”, that humanity lingers somewhere just this side of divinity. Apart from Jesus the Christ, how could the psalmist possibly grant humanity a place there at God’s fingertip?

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth?”

Somewhere within the gates of heaven, now this side of incarnation and cross and resurrection, now this side of that Jesus the Son of God, the psalmist looks out to the world as you and I live it, and then tugs at a royal sleeve, stands somewhere near that divine finger tip and still raises the question that hangs heavy in the kingdom air, “so what about these guys?” “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them. Yet...” And with the constant march of time, that unending march of history that is as certain as the unrelenting nature of humanity’s sinfulness, it would seem the accent, the emphasis on the “yet” only seems to grow. “Yet you have made them a little lower than God.” Look around, and yet. Yet. Yet.

I guess I would have to work a bit harder to make the word “yet” sound like a promise. But for those of us who know that every now then, with time and by grace, God offers you such moments of reflection, Psalm 8 can be something more than a biblical witness to the centrality of Christ in the cosmos of God. Psalm 8 becomes an invitation and a promise for you and I to claim our spot in economy of God. Psalm 8 becomes a warrant and a mandate for you and I to claim our spot in the ecology of God. Psalm 8 becomes an affirmation, that indeed you and I can live into the future of God’s place for humanity, that you and I can yearn for that spot where God points. You and I, we can long for and see and lean toward that spot next to God’s fingertip!

At God’s fingertip, where a creating, and redeeming, and sustaining power takes a shape that can be touched, and seen, and held, where a word like “dominion” isn’t understood as “domination, or destruction”, but as “care and nurture”, where “glory and honor” is defined by a self-emptying love and an open-armed grace and a daring reach for the most in need, or the most unloved, that at the finger tip of God is where we yearn to be shaped once again by the grace in which we stand, as God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. At the fingertip of God, where lions and lambs are privileged to lie down together, where the proud are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up and the hungry are filled with good things, where the poor in spirit, and those who mourn and the meek and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, where the merciful and the pure in heart and peacemakers, where they are all blessed by the life-giving and life-sustaining eternally creative touch of God.

At God’s finger-tip, where you and I find the strength to love and the courage to forgive, where we can allow our bruised selves to be anointed by the mercy of God, where long standing hatreds can be shattered, and relationships long since broken find some healing, where greed can be transformed into a desire to share, where that deep-seated concern for self can be upended by a radical awareness of the other, where our deeply ingrained tendency to see “us and them” can be replaced by a holy vision that affirms that all people are created in the image of God. There at the fingertip of God, where the kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven, where God’s inbreaking into our lives can be felt, where the presence of God is palpable and sure, it is there where you shall know yourself for certain to be a child of God, where you shall forever be “convinced, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39).”

“What about these guys?” “Yet...you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth?”

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