Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Lenten Evening Prayer

PSALM 8: A PRAYER OF PRAISE

Beloved people of God, grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.  AMEN.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  So asserts the first verse of the Bible.  God is affirmed as the Creator of all things, the Creator of the universe.  Within the Christian community we may have differences on how long it took God to create and on how God did it, but at least we agree that God is the Creator.

And we are not just talking about any god.  We believe that the Creator of all that exists is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, the God who revealed himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  We tend not to realize how bold it is to claim that our God is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, of everything that exists, of the whole universe.

Psalm 8, the first Psalm of praise in the Psalter, is a beautiful prayer of praise to the Creator.  Praise is indeed a keynote in the Psalms, and it is a starting point for prayer.  One well-known prayer formula    is called the ACTS of prayer.  “A” stands for “adoration.”  “C” for “confession.”  “T” for “thanks.”  And “S” for “supplication.”  To express adoration is an act of praise in prayer.

Such prayer in praise of the Creator is not limited to human beings.  I was struck by the passage from Tertullian that Dan read: “Every creature prays.  Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee.  As they come from their barns and caves they look up to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirits in their own fashion.  The birds, too, rise and lift themselves up to heaven: They open their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.”  The last verse of the Psalter, Psalm 150:6, affirms: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!  Praise the Lord!”  The very breath of every creature is a prayer of praise to the Creator.

Psalm 8 begins with praise of the name of the Creator:  “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”  The people of Israel had all sorts of names for the Lord.  But they so hallowed the Lord’s personal name “Yahweh” that they would not utter it aloud.  “Yahweh” has been translated as “I am who I am.”  No other name compared with the majesty of this name.  No other name was as powerful.  Psalm 148:13 exhorts the whole creation to “praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven.”  Taking a cue from Jesus we tend to speak with God in a more familiar way.  Yet even in the Lord’s Prayer we pray to God the Father, the Creator of all things: “Hallowed be your name.”

Psalm 8 also praises the wonder of creation.  Today we have the benefit of high-powered telescopes.  We are well aware of the vastness and complexity of the universe.  We have learned that light travels at 186,000 miles per second.  The sun is 8 light minutes away from the earth.  Alpha Centauri, the nearest star in our Milky Way galaxy, is 4 light years away.  It is 80,000 light years across our galaxy.  Our galaxy is just one of many.

Without the benefit of a high-powered telescope, the Psalmist perceives the vastness of the heavens and the smallness of human beings.  He marvels: “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?”  Surely we can share in the Psalmist’s wonder.  The insights of modern science ought to strengthen our sense of awe and wonder.

It is truly amazing that the Creator of this vast universe cares for human beings.  The Creator hears us when we sing praises to God and call upon God’s name.  The Creator loves each one of us individually.  The Psalmist goes on to affirm that the Creator has crowned human beings with glory and honor and given us dominion over the creation.

“Dominion” does not mean “domination”.  We are given a special responsibility to care for the creation.  This special responsibility does not make us better than other creatures.  Genesis 1 affirms that God saw everything God had created as good.  Yes, we have a unique responsibility—in that sense we are a little lower than God.  That unique responsibility entitles us to care for creation.  God invites us to participate in God’s ongoing creation.  God wants us to enjoy creation, but to do so in a way that values all creation, attests to its goodness, and allows it to continue to lift up prayers of praise to the Creator.

As I mentioned earlier, the second step in the ACTS of prayer is confession.  In our world today, where ecological sin has risen to the fore, prayers of praise to the Creator lead to prayers of confession for what we have done to the creation.  O God, wake us up to the way we have squandered the blessing of creation.  Open our eyes to look at your creation and see its goodness rather than looking at it and seeing how it can simply be made good for us.  We praise you for creating and caring for us.  Grant that we may care for your creation.

O God, you are the Creator of all things, and indeed that is very good.

AMEN.