Date:
May 30, 2010, Holy Trinity
Author: The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel
GLORY TO THE FATHER AND TO THE SON AND TO THE HOLY SPIRIT, AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW AND WILL BE FOREVER. AMEN.
“The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas Hobbes.
“What good comes of man? He eats and drinks only the best bread, meat, wine, beer and precious spices too. He excretes nothing but corruption, snot, sputum, matter, sweat, sores, pox, scruff, slough, discharge, pus, dung and urine. He clothes himself in satin and gold, spreads lice, nits, fleas and vermin.” Martin Luther.
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not—nor woman neither.” Hamlet. William Shakespeare.
One of you sent me a forward this week entitled Clay Balls:
A man was exploring caves by the seashore. In one of the caves he found a canvas bag with a bunch of hardened clay balls. It was like someone had rolled clay balls and left them in the sun to bake. They didn’t look like much, but they intrigued the man, so he took the bag out of the cave with him. As he strolled along the beach, he would throw the clay balls one at a time out into the ocean as far as he could. He thought about it until he dropped one of the clay balls and it cracked open on a rock. Inside was a beautiful, precious stone.
Excited, the man started breaking open the remaining clay balls. Each contained a similar treasure. He found thousands of dollars worth of jewels in the twenty or so clay balls he had left. Then it struck him. He had been on the beach a long time. He had thrown maybe fifty or sixty of the clay balls with their hidden treasure into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have taken home tens of thousands, but he had just thrown it away. It is like that with people. We look at someone, maybe even ourselves, and we see the external clay vessel. It does not look like much from the outside. It is not always beautiful or sparkling, so we discount it...There is treasure in each and every one of us. If we ask God to show us that person the way God sees them, then the clay begins to peel away and the brilliant gem begins to shine forth.
St Paul said “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, in clay jars.” We are people who struggle in so many ways. We recognize that we are not all we can be and never will be. We see the clay. We acknowledge the failures. It is easy to forget that we are God’s creation, made in God’s very image. We forget that we are people for whom the Son of God came and died and rose again that we might be just what we were intended from the beginning to be—people in fellowship with God, the crown of creation, made a little lower than the divine. Beneath the clay, there is a gem waiting to be seen.
This morning I would like to look at Psalm 8, a hymn of praise. The first and last verses in our English version praise the greatness of God: “Yahweh, our Lord, how mighty is your name in all the earth.” “Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” The God who created the heavens and the earth is a personal God—the Psalmist uses ADONAINU: our Lord, our sovereign. The psalmist addresses this song of praise to God. The poet tells God what God already knows— majesty and might and power belong to God, but in giving honor and glory to God, the psalmist proclaims God’s rule over the whole creation. God set his glory above the heavens; God make a bulwark out of the mouths of babes and infants.
“Babes and infants”—what does this mean? Here the psalmist contrasts the simple faith of children with the sophisticated skeptics who look at the world and see no God. We can jade ourselves so that we overlook the wonder of creation; we can inure ourselves so we see only that which is rather than the meaning and purpose of what is. We can look at the material and forget the spiritual; we see only the clay balls but not the gems. Children do not--and it is that simple praise of little children, the young people singing their Bible camp songs, the enthusiasm of the unsophisticated that form the mighty fortress of our God to silence the enemy and avenger. Little children singing “Jesus Loves Me This I Know,” saying their simple prayers, “God bless Mommy, Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa,” the voices of babes and infants, the weak and meek and lowly, are powerful enough to combat the forces of evil and protect against the enemy.
I remember when I was ten and went to summer camp for the first time. We had an evening where we all went out to the soccer field and lay down on our blankets to look at the night sky. We were pretty far removed from the city, so there was llittle interference from ambient light blocking our view of the stars. One of the leaders pointed out different constellations—I think I recognized the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and Orion’s belt and that is about all. But looking at the stars on such a clear night must have been what the psalmist did out in the Near Eastern desert. The myriad and myriad of stars too many to name brought forth a sense of wonder and faith in the psalmist. In Psalm 147 we read, “God determines the number of the stars. God gives to all of them their names.” The Germans have a hymn, “Weisst du, wieviel Sternlein stehen?” We do not know how many stars there are, as Carl Sagan used to say, “Billions and billions.” In the eyes of the psalmist, in the eyes of faith, the billions and billions point beyond themselves to God. God made the sun, the moon and the stars. The distant galaxies testify to the power of God but they also testify to the grandeur of human beings. The far reaches of the skies do not diminish people but cause the psalmist to exult in the human.
The same God who made the lights of heaven made people. The God who commanded the light to shine, who separated the waters and brought forth living beings, made humans in the divine image. God spoke a word and the worlds were created but then God stooped down and formed the man of the mud and breathed into him the breath of life. Adam—mud-man. The animals were created as helpmeets and named but the woman was the right help-meet. God put Adam and Eve in the Garden, made them perfect even with a will free to disobey. God made them little lower than God. We are made from the clay but we have God’s breath in us. We are made a little lower than heavenly beings—ELOHIM here can mean, God, gods, heavenly beings—in the Greek translation we get the word ANGELLOI, angels. God has made human beings a little lower than the angels, just a little lower than God. God has crowned us with glory and honor, given dominion over the works of God’s hands, put all things under our feet. The psalmist asks, “What is a human being that you are mindful of them, mortal that you care for them. The Hebrew is interesting. The word for human is ANOSH, not the everyday ISH for man. But what is translated mortal is important too—BEN ADAM, Son of Man, Son of Adam. The Church saw a reference to the heavenly Son of Man in Daniel and to Jesus Christ, but the words BEN ADAM really go back to the mud-man. This clay ball is really a gem. The human is as close to the divine as can be. The real connection with Jesus the Christ is that when we seek for God we find the Human One. We confess that if we would see the Father we must look at the Son who makes the fullness of God known. The psalmist says if we would see God we look to the human. Perhaps Michelangelo was not so far wrong when he anthropomorphized God in his Creation of Adam painting in the Sistine Chapel; how else to signify that we human beings are created so near the likeness God’s very being.
I saw on the television news this week a clip of Queen Elizabeth’s yearly address to Parliament. She wore the state crown and the royal regalia and read her message from the throne. She has been queen since 1952 and I realize that I have spent my life looking at pictures of her, young monarch, middle-aged, now in her eighties an old woman but still regal and splendid. The words the psalmist uses for human beings—crowned with glory and honor, given dominion over all things, put all things under the feet. God’s words are used for human beings. How like Queen Elizabeth we all are—humans with our human frailties but robed in splendor. Young and old, rich and poor, athletic or clumsy, highly abled or with limited abilities, we are kings and queens, near to the angels, given power and glory like God. The God who created billions of stars and put them in the heavens made each one of us to be very like God.
And yes, the tasks we have are like God’s too—to take care of the creation. The psalmist names sheep and oxen and the wild animals, bird of the air and fish of the sea, even those that pass along the pathways of the sea. We are charged to be mindful of them, care for them and each other. This is fulfilling God’s charge to those so like himself.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Praise to you for creating us and crowning us, making us so like yourself. Amen
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