Two Rocks in the Pocket
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Psalm 8
I thought this morning I would get back to some basics. What a way to start the New Year!
It is a simple question, that's all! It is not particularly deep or long, and it is simply this: What does God think of us? Now this isn't usually the question that theologians ponder. We spend a disproportionate amount of our time asking the other question: What do we think about God? This time, we turn the tide. We ask almost an unanswerable question, for who are we to say what God actually thinks of us? Yet, throughout the Scriptures, throughout the years, there have been clues, and these clues help us point our way in a New Year, for if we have a sense of what we think God thinks of us, then maybe our lives will be conformed to precisely that wish and that thought.
I base this on something that I read some time ago by a very famous Rabbi. His name was Rabbi Simcha Bunim. He was from Poland and was a writer in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century. He was part of what we now know as the Hassidic movement, the Hassidim, those who from the Jewish tradition who often appear quite different from the others, with their long bangs and their boxes and their hats and their beards. They stand out.
The Hassidim have a deep and rich history, and Rabbi Bunim is one of them. He was once asked for some advice: What should believers do to help them live a life that is true to God? His answer was that in each of one's pockets there should be two pieces of paper. On one of these pieces of paper it should say, “I am but ashes and dust.” In the other pocket, it should say, “For my sake the world was created.” He said in these two great statements lies the way that God sees us, and subsequently, followers of his would put two stones in their pocket: one to the remind them they are but dust, and the other that for their sake the world was created.
What Bunim is pointing to is one of the great paradoxes of human existence. The paradox is that we are at the same time both, extremely important, elevated, magnificent and yet on the other hand, we are frail and vulnerable and relatively unimportant. Benin based this whole notion on the Book of Genesis that we return as “dust to dust” when we die, that we are mortal, but on the other hand, we are made in the “image of God,” again, this juxtaposition between these two poles of both mortality and eternity and both our insignificance and our value.
You can see this coming out clearly in our passage from The Book of Psalms. The Book of Psalms, and particularly Psalm 8, elevate us as human beings into this high plane and into this glorious place. At the same time, it wonders who we really are, and what we are about.
What is magnificent about Psalm 8 is that there is no ambivalence about it: we are either wonders of creation, a little less than God, or we are something that shouldn't even be given thought to by the Lord, our maker. So often though, we are ambivalent. When we look at the world and we see people living and dying, when we see people elevated to the greatest heights and then being brought down to the greatest lows, we are ambivalent.
I must admit I felt that so much with one character this past year, and that was Jack Layton: to suddenly become the Leader of the Opposition, something that he had wished for and hoped for and worked for, for years and then, in the same calendar year, to meet his demise. It shows us how ambivalent we can be about the nature of our human life.
The great philosopher Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, once put it this way, and this describes what a lot of us think about life and ourselves:
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster! What a chaos! What a contradiction! What a prodigy! Judge of all things! Feeble earthworm! Depository of truth! Sink of uncertainty and error! The glory and the shame of the universe!
Pascal captured what we think about ourselves. We are at the same time elevated, glorious and magnificent, but at other times, the shame of the universe. Over the last year we have seen both manifest themselves in human life. We have seen bravery, we have seen the highest ideals of thought, the greatest desire for peace, and then we have seen the painful journey of the gun and hatred. We are sinful, shameful, and wonderful, all at the same time.
What should we then think of this as we carry these two stones in our pockets into the New Year? Metaphorically, I think we should be doing that if we want to know what God thinks of us. Let's have those two stones come out, and let's be honest about them. The first stone in our pockets is what I call “The Stone of Uncertainty.” When we are uncertain about ourselves, when we are not completely clear about what we are like, the psalmist said, “What is man, what is humanity that you are mindful of him?”
Why care? Why bother? Is the psalmist, in saying this, suggesting then that we are of little or no value or little or no worth? “What are we that you would think of us?” the psalmist sang. Well clearly, what he is not saying is what David often said in his psalms: it is not a mea culpa. It is not a statement that we have done something wrong. It is not a statement about our sinfulness.
David often in the Psalms talked about himself as being unworthy of God's grace, primarily because of what he had done with Bathsheba and the story that followed. He was full of contrition. But, this is not a story of contrition. This is not a story of a mea culpa, that we have done something wrong, therefore why is God mindful of us?
This is not even a statement about our own vulnerability or our own weakness. This is not like Martin Luther when he wrote that incredible statement about himself: “How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, reach the point where the children of God call themselves by my ungodly name?” Luther had a pretty low opinion of himself at the time. “A stinking bag of maggots” is not a nice image of oneself! But there was a man who felt a sense the guilt of his own existence. That is not what the psalmist is getting at here.
The psalmist is also not getting at the fact that we do not have self-esteem, and self-esteem has of course become the new philosophy of our time. To achieve it is the greatest height; to not have it is the greatest right. Self-esteem: “What is man that you are mindful of us?” It is not about that at all. What the psalmist is saying here is that humanity, never mind our existential situation, never mind what we've done or not done, before the might and power of creation it is but a miniscule speck! “What is man that you are mindful of him?” is always in reference to the magnificence of creation and the glory that is around us.
In many ways it echoes the great Book of Job, and the more I read Psalm 8, the more I thought about Job, because Job had this similar sense of his own weakness before the might of God. God said this to Job near the end of the Book of Job in Chapter 38:
Job, He said out of the storm, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man and I will question you and you will answer me, where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand? Who marked off its dimensions? Oh, surely you know! Who stretched the measuring line across it? On what were its footings set? Or, who lay its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the wound, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed the limits in it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ”˜This far you may come and no further. Here is where your proud ways halt.' Tell me Job, where were you when I did these things?
Job, at the end of his book answers, and he does so in a way that sounds like our psalmist:
I know that you can do all things. No plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ”˜Who is this who obscures my counsel without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things, Oh Lord, I do not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said, ”˜Listen now, and I will speak. I will question you, and you shall answer me.' Lord, my ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you, therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Sounds like Rabbi Bunim, doesn't it? Job understood what the psalmist understood: that before the enormity of creation, before the magnificence of the world, and the Lord who is the Maker, we are insignificant that the Lord should think of us and care for us.
When you really look at 2011, you can see that very same fragility and uncertainty of the stone in our pocket is being revealed. The people in New Zealand faced it with that most crushing earthquake. The people of Australia faced it with floods. The people in Joplin experienced it with tornadoes. The people in Manitoba experienced it with floods. And, the people of Japan, worst of all, faced it with a tsunami. “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Who are we before the greatness and the powers of God?
There is a danger though of only taking that one stone out of our pockets. The danger is that we then devalue ourselves and feel that we are not of importance, and we are. The danger of having only that stone taken out of our pocket and held up is that we devalue others. “What are you then that God would be mindful of you?” Therefore, we treat people with disdain. We treat life as if it is cheap. We treat grace as if it has no place in this universe where we mean so little. To have only that one stone in our pocket can be dangerous for we can miss the truth of how God sees us.
This means we need the second stone in the second pocket. That is the stone of value. Look at the language that the psalmist uses to talk about us, to talk about humanity. He says that we are only a little lower than the “heavenly bodies” we have been “crowned” we have had “the animal and the beasts of the earth placed before our feet.” We have this immense power that we have been given and it is true we have.
In the nineteenth, and even before it in the eighteenth, and definitely in the twentieth century, humanity got caught up in this positivism, got caught up in humanity's ability to control the universe, and to even be able to subdue nature at times. The modernist agenda was borne out of a post-Enlightenment belief that glory to man, to humanity in the highest, for we can do so many things. So many of the great philosophers that arose in that time, such as Hegel and others believed tremendously in the power of the human being, and what human beings can do.
In the earliest part of the twentieth century, the great ideologies that tried to create Utopias on this earth were predicated on exactly the same idea: that humanity is a glorious thing, that the earth could be subdued, and that in fact humanity could rule. That was the idealistic thinking behind Communism. It was the idealistic thinking behind forms of nationalism that a nation would arise and become in a sense a God-like character to subdue all that is wrong or evil or dirty within the world.
This agenda came crashing down. It bore terrible fruit in the end. It glorified humanity, but in so doing, sometimes destroyed it, put it in little boxes, confined it, and conflict arose. There is a problem when we have this stone in our pocket that elevates us and we think that we are the most important thing.
I love the humility that came from Apollo 11. I am not sure if you are aware of this, but one of the things the Vatican did was to place biblical texts on board when Apollo 11 to be left in space. The passage that the Vatican chose as its primary text to leave in space was Psalm 8: “What is humanity that Thou art mindful of us?” They understood that even in this great success, some would even say the greatest technological success that humanity had, and even then there was the need for humility.
While we are wonderful and splendid and can do amazing things, we need to be careful. You see the danger in this pocket alone in our belief in ourselves, is that our sense of dominion, our sense of power can become a cue for domination. Is that not one of the great issues of the environmental struggle and the big question we have?
While we know that many of the things that take place on the earth and in the earth are based on natural science and natural changes that are taking place within the world, and which are sometimes not given sufficient credit, at the same time, as human beings we often crush things that are on this earth as if they are under our feet and placed there by God for the propagation of our own species at the expense of others. This is not the dominion that the Bible speaks of. That is the dominion of only one stone in our pocket. It is not the one that understands that we are accountable to the God who made us.
There is also the danger that we place and have too optimistic a view of our own reason and our own motives. That is why I always say when as a society, as we will probably be doing in the next year, talking about issues of euthanasia and life, we must always be humble and careful, very, very careful, for not all our motives are pure, and not all our reasoning is correct.
This life that we have been given must be handled delicately and cherished carefully. That applies to everything we do. It applies to our personal relationships, the way we treat family and friends, the way we treat others within the church. While we have been given and crowned with this incredible power as human beings, we must be very careful as to how we use it.
I like what Walter Brueggemann said, “Our sovereignty as human beings is always derivative.” It is not something we can claim for ourselves; it is something we have simply been given by the grace of God, but it can also be profoundly positive. There is a sense in which the powers that we have as human beings are incredible powers. God the Son,(sometimes called the Son of Man) would not have come to this earth had it not been for this belief that there is something about us that is made in the image of God and that we are truly valuable and we are truly precious in God's eyes.
I was reading just this last week about the discovery of insulin, and it was ninety years ago when in fact here, in this very country, insulin was developed in the way that it was. What a lot of you don't know is that one of the scientists who was involved in that discovery actually lived on Dunvegan Road right opposite where our church is on the corner. Not a well known fact, but true that one of the great minds that helped create insulin was right there across the road from us.
It is amazing what humans can do in the realm of health, in the realm of law, in the realm of governance and in the realm of science and technology. It is amazing what we are able to discover! It is one of the reasons that a lot of people have mourned the loss of Steve Jobs this year. It is simply the brilliance of a mind to be able to conceive of something different. It is incredible what we can do!
But there is one word in this Psalm that is really the key to it. It is the word that brings the two stones together, the insignificance and uncertainty and the value and the glory, and it is this, “What is humanity that Thou art mindful of us?” What is it about us that you should “care” for us? The psalmist understood that in both our elevation and our degradation, God still cares for us.
There is a wonderful story told about a mother who went to a psychiatrist after her husband had died. She was bringing up three children, and she didn't know how to cope with them. The psychiatrist and she had a long conversation during which he asked her which of the three children she loved the most?
She said, “Well, I love all of them. I don't love one more that the other.”
He said, “Come on now, you must love one more than you love the other.”
And the mother said, “No, no, no, I love all three of my children equally.”
He said, “Nobody loves everybody equally! No matter how wonderful your family is, you always love somebody more than you love somebody else.”
She said, “You know, you are right! The more I think of it, it is true. I love the one that is crying in pain more than I love the others. I love the one who is lonely and in need of a hug more than the other. I love the one who has failed in their project more than the other. It doesn't matter who they are, but it does matter whether they need me, and at that moment I love them more.”
I think what God is saying to us is exactly that.
God does not love us any more or less than anyone else, but in our times of need, in our times of dependence, in our times of our recognition, he brings the two stones together, and says, “I understand right now that you might feel insignificant.” Or, he might say, “I understand that you feel mighty and great, but forget not one thing: I made you, and I care for you.” And that is how God sees us! Amen.