Max’s Sermon on Psalm 8
This Summer, St. Lydia’s is welcoming guest preachers to share the Word with us. Reverend Maxwell Grant from Community Church of the Pelhams, UCC in Pelham, NY joined us last Sunday, June 26, and shared this sermon on Psalm 8.
Part of what I find so wonderful about Psalm 8 is its profound celebration of Creation. Many people make a connection between Psalm 8 and the opening of the Book of Genesis, and it has that same kind of cataloguing quality—that same evocation of divine balance and order in bringing forth Creation. And I can see that.
Actually, for me, it’s a little bit like the opening shot of the movie “Casablanca.” You may not remember the opening shot of “Casablanca.” Trust me, it’s just like this. “Casablanca” begins with the picture of a slowly turning globe, and then it zooms in to North Africa, and then onto the city of Casablanca, and then it goes closer and closer, further and further down, from the highest minaret until it finally comes to restonto the streets, where, if my memory serves, they are hard at work gathering up the usual suspects and watching for the take-off of the daily plane to Lisbon. Does anyone else remember that?
If you look closely, Psalm 8 has a kind of analogous structure. An older version reads: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou does care for him? Yet thou hast made him a little less than God [some versions say “gods”; some say “ a little lower than the angels”] and dost crown him with glory and honor.” You can kind of picture the spinning globe, there, can’t you? “Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet…” The camera is starting to zoom in, now, “all the sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea….”
And now the camera goes even further: “whatever passes along the paths of the sea…..” Warner Brothers couldn’t have done it any better.
What’s interesting about that particular shot in “Casablanca,” of course, is that it reminds us that the drama that will play out, mostly between three people, in a particular café in a a remote city, is somehow connected to the spinning of the globe itself. At one point in the movie, Rick says to Ilsa that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” And yet the opening shot has already signalled to us that this isn’t true. Somehow, maybe in ways they cannot entirely fathom, all Creation is somehow implicated in their problems. And so, by extension, all Creation is somehow implicated in their choices. Well, the Psalmist probably didn’t have the chance to check out “Casablanca.” But I think he would have shared some of that sensibility. He evokes the majesty of Creation so powerfully—looking at God’s handiwork and wondering who we can possibly be, given the grandeur of everything around us. But then there is that crucial word right in the heart of the Psalm — right at the hinge, if you will – where he says: “Yet.”
“Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.”
Read the rest of Reverend Max’s sermon…