Hilton Head Island, SC – July 24, 2022
Gen. 1:26-31; Psalm 8
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. – Psalm 8:5 (RSV)
The Book of Psalms is the Bible’s hymnal. Originally all of the Psalms were sung. They still are sung every day in every monastery and convent around the world.
I chose Psalm 8 for today’s sermon theme specifically because it is a paean of praise to the human race. Presumably it was David who wrote it, or at least that’s what the superscription at the beginning says. In any case, this is the quintessential hymn to biblical humanism.
David starts the Psalm by noting what every ancient human understood, namely, the immensity of space. However, they couldn’t know how vast it was, nor can we, really. “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?” (8:3-4) Standing in a desert at night, with no artificial light to obliterate the brilliance of the night sky, David was able to grasp intuitively that it was a colossal expanse out there. So what difference would human beings make to the God who created the entire expanding universe? (David didn’t know it was expanding. Neither do we, really. We are left trusting that Einstein and his astonishing cohorts are right about that.)
However, the glorious creation and the magnificently interconnectedness of nature is not the whole story, David concluded. “Yet Thou hast made (human beings) little less than gods themselves, and Thou hast crowned our race with glory and honor.” Who has dominion over nature? We do, says David. Who has power over all the animals and plants, over birds and fish? We do. Who are the masters of the Earth? We are. God, said David, has placed Homo sapiens at the apex of earthly creation.
I know what you’re thinking. “That’s a highly debatable point,” you’re saying. “A fine mess we’ve made of things,” you’re saying. We’re killing off hundreds or thousands of species every year, and only this week we heard that we may driving monarch butterflies into extinction. We’re using up definitely limited natural resources like there’s no tomorrow, we may well be rendering the planet uninhabitable because of climate change - - - and we’re the brightest and best on Planet Earth? Yeah, right!”
The creation story in Genesis 1 and 2 clearly proclaims that God intended humans to be His primary caretaker species on this particular planet. It was believed by the biblical Israelites that God intentionally gave us the intelligence to rule the earth. We were to do it well and wisely, but we were definitely meant by our Creator to do it.
Allan Effa is a professor of intercultural studies at Taylor Seminary in Edmonton, Alberta. Referring to the notion of creation, Prof. Effa said this: “All Christian traditions call for a shift from an anthropocentric to a theocentric concept of creation. A Copernican revolution must take place in our theology of creation; instead of existing primarily for human benefit, creation is to be understood as God’s creative masterpiece, an object of his pleasure and a witness to his presence and power. Humans are God’s image bearers, but they are only part of the divine expression. Other elements of creation declare the glory of God in ways that humans cannot duplicate.”
That is an important insight, and all of us need to incorporate it into our thinking about our place in the world. The communication of whales is little known, but enough is known for us to realize that other species have intelligent conversations with one another. Forty years ago our family saw a mass of white and purple and blue lupen flowers blowing in the fields of Prince Edward Island. They looked like waves on the wind-blown turbulent sea in one of nature’s innumerable hymns of praise to its Creator. It was a memorably amazing sight. If I live to be a hundred and twenty, I will never forget the total eclipse of the sun in 2017. (At least I say that now; in five or ten years I may not recall it at all.) The eclipse was inexpressibly magnificent. Nature provides numerous oratorios to God without human involvement at all.
Nonetheless, the Bible in both the Hebrew and the Greek versions proclaims that human beings were meant by God to be the highest and most dominant species on our planet. It is certainly debatable whether that is actually true, and many Darwinian evolutionists would dispute it, but it isn’t debatable that the Bible makes the claim. Both Testaments have much to say about sinful behavior among all of us, but curiously, it is the New Testament much more than the Old Testament which devotes much of its vigor to an exposition of the wages of sin.
There certainly are numerous instances of abhorrent actions by our species. A ruthless dictator kills thousands of Ukrainians, despite the fact that he preversely insists that Ukrainians are actually Russians. Young men with automatic weapons regularly kill innocent victims all across America. A 27-year-old man rapes and impregnates a 10-year-old girl, and the doctor who performed an abortion on her behalf may be arrested for having done so. Interminable hearings are held further to prove that our former president was the primary person who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. What will become of these hearings only God knows.
Who are the people whom God created as little less than angels (as the KJV says), or little less than God Himself (as the RSV says)? White people? Western people, deriving from European ancestry? Americans? Who?
There are many definitions of humanism. Many of them are positive, but some are very negative. The American Religious Right, for example, has used the epithet “secular humanism” in a very pejorative manner and as a rallying cry to political battle. But throughout history there have been numerous Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist humanists. They sought to elevate our species, not by attempting to pat us on the back, but to say that we have the capability to make moral and ethical decisions which no other species on Earth can match. A coyote has no moral qualms about catching and eating a very young or very old rabbit. Without even thinking about it, he says to himself as he takes off at a rapid gallop, “A coyote’s gotta do what a coyote’s gotta do.” Poison ivy and pythons and brown recluse spiders never hesitate to do what to them comes naturally. We are confronted, as Tennyson said, by “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
But humans have, or at least should have, a moral compass. We have the intellectual ability to reflect on should and must and ought, or on should not or must not or ought not. Animals cannot do that. God has created humans with free will. It is both an awesome and an awful gift. It is a great blessing and a great complication. Sadly, we do not always use our free will wisely. All of us use it badly from time to time. But we use it, and only we, of all earthly species, have it to use. Free will is an enormous burden, an incomparable gift, and an immense responsibility.
A week and a half ago I attended what probably will be the last high school reunion of the Class of 1957 of West High School of Madison, Wisconsin. The classmate who has organized these every-five-year events has threatened before that he won’t do it anymore, and this time I think he really means it. Sixty-five years after our graduation none of our fellow geezers has stepped up to continue the tradition, and maybe it is too tenuous for enough people to get there from now on anyway.
But what a magnificent conglomeration of octogenarian oldsters it was! Many are survivors of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other physical assaults against aging flesh and blood. A few came with canes, two with walkers, and everyone else was far less nimble than they were 65 years ago. Everyone had stories to tell, and not nearly enough time to tell them. No one there (or anywhere else) was perfect, but all were excellent examples of the human race in all its weakness, strength, frailty, and God-given abilities.
That is the kind of humanism of which Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 speak. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26). In Psalm 8 David asked of God, “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that Thou dost care for him?” (Psalm 8:4) Speaking to God about humanity, David said, “Yet Thou hast made (them) little less than God, and dost crown (them) with glory and honor” (8:5).
To occupy my mind while driving 2500 miles, I checked out three long compact disk books from the Hilton Head Library. The first one I listened to was Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen, a British journalist and historian. Russia is the largest nation in the world in geographical area. For centuries it was surrounded by smaller nations on its southern and western borders, and it conscripted fourteen of them into the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. The author’s main theme was that in 1989 quite suddenly and unexpectedly the USSR fell apart. Sebestyen’s book tells how each of the attached cogs to the Russian wheel cast themselves off from their much more numerous and stronger masters. The intricacies of each of those mini-revolutions was a fascinating and unique story.
Collectively, human beings can cause unimaginable hardships for other people, but collectively they can also do great things, or rise against their oppressors and restore ethnic freedom to themselves in great heroic bursts of patriotic pride. In a different way from any of the revolutions of 1989, the Ukrainians are once again staging an admirable defense of themselves against the Russian bear thirty-three years after they liberated themselves during the collapse of the Soviet empire.
“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!” (Shakespeare) No species, other than Homo sapiens, Wise Human or Human of Wisdom, can imagine what can be out of what is not. What minds we have! What a blessing it is to be able to imagine and then give birth to a novel like Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, or a composition like Verdi’s Requiem, or a sculpture like Rodin’s Thinker, or an idea like Einstein’s theories of relativity or thermodynamics, or a movie like Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
What is humanity, that God pays any attention to us? Who is God, if not the progenitor of the best that humanism can produce? For all of our faults, of which there are multitudes, there also are legions of lasting masterpieces, human creations which shall undergird and inspire and uphold as long as there are any humans still alive to draw breath, human behaviors which shall elevate our race to its zenith as long as our race endures.
Ancient Britons transported huge blocks of stone from Wales to the Salisbury Plain in England, where they constructed Stonehenge, one of the most amazing wonders of the ancient world. (You can read about it in the August issue of National Geographic.) The Temple of Karnak was the largest religious building ever constructed in human history. It was begun about five thousand years ago and was completed four thousand years ago. Machu Picchu and Nazca and Chichen Itza were built hundreds of years before the Spanish came to the Americas in the early sixteenth century.
The play Driving Miss Daisy, by Alfred Uhry, premiered on Broadway in 1987. It had just two characters, Daisy Werthan, a patrician Jewish Atlantan, and her chauffeur-handyman-jack-of-all-trades, Hoke Coleburn. For the whole play, they were in Miss Daisy’s car, with Hoke driving and Miss Daisy in the back seat. The play went over so well that Uhry wrote a screenplay for one of the best movies of all time, with several more characters, and with a more complex plot line. Both the play and the movie are humorous, heart-rending, moving, and deep, displaying some of the finest, most-fetching, and most complex portrayals of Genesis 1 and Psalm 8.
The Hebrews had a word nephesh and the Greeks had a word pneuma and the Romans had two words, spiritus and animus, and the English had a word spirit. They all refer to that unseen inner reality in every individual which identifies that person. It is also used about animals, as when there is a very spirited or animated horse or dog or lion. Our spirits connect us to God, who is both an unseen inner and outer reality, the reality of all realities. Only we, of all species, know we have a spirit. Only we can know we are related to God. We are created as little less than angels, because it is what God wanted for us.
For the past hundred thousand years, the hominid species Homo sapiens has waged indescribable havoc against ourselves. Individually and collectively, we engage in unspeakable horrors and enact terrible deeds against one another. On the other hand, no other animal species is capable of producing the spiritual, intellectual, philosophical, technological, scientific, and artistic advances that have been made by the human race.
At our worst, we are far worse than the most savage of beasts. At our best, we are little less than angels, and in spiritual communion with God, the One who created us and everything else that exists. God works within us to do the best we can do. That’s the best any human can do. Doing our best is the defining characteristic of biblical humanism. May you and I always strive to be what God intended us to be.