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"You Noticed!"

Listen to this reading of Psalm 8:

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. 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? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

My maternal grandmother once showed me how, if I held a Bible on its spine and allowed it to drop open in equal halves, I would be looking down at the Book of Psalms. I liked this trick. It gave me something of an edge in Sunday school drills where the goal was to find Bible verses and find them fast. Of course, my grandmother had something else in mind when she was demonstrating this easy way to locate the Psalms. She sent me to this spot midway between the dawn of Genesis and the “Amen” of Revelation to discover something that she dearly loved, a portion of the Bible that she thought I should read, too.

Evidently, my grandmother’s nudge in that direction worked, for today I regularly recommend that other people read the Psalms. If you are depressed and wonder whether other people of faith doubt the existence of a loving God, read the Psalms. If you are giddy over some news and want to do a “happy dance,” and fling yourself down in the grass, and thank God for life, and love, and luck, read the Psalms. If you are angry and feel betrayed by close friends and family members, read the Psalms. If you feel abandoned, alone, or lost, read the Psalms.

The Psalms cover the gamut of human feeling and this makes them incredibly relevant. Take today’s text, Psalm 8. At its core this prayer poses an ancient, yet still-pressing question, “What is a human being?” To get at this question, the psalmist paints an evocative scene. The Psalm begins, “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established…” Can you picture it? The psalmist is lying on her back, arms behind her head, gazing up at the night sky—the winking stars, the amber moon, the deep black of space. Now, I don’t know exactly what was going through her head when she looked up at the dome of darkness and light. I don’t know what she thought moon was. I am pretty sure she didn’t imagine that stars were balls of burning gas billions and billions of miles away. Still, I bet that she felt the same way that I did in looking at recent photos from the Hubble Space Telescope: small, insignificant, a microbe in the vast universe. In this posture of humility and awe, she asks, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?”

What are human beings? It’s a great question—a classic question; one posed by psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, artists and priests for as long as our species has tried to organize its thoughts.

Psalm 8 articulates one of the earliest-recorded responses to this question. To be a human, writes the psalmist, is to dwell on a continuum somewhere between God and the animals. Our place in this universe looks like this: God is sovereign. God made all that is—the world and all its creatures. Yet, in ordering creation, God gave human beings a special role. God said, “I care for you mortals, and, in turn, I want you to exercise this same loving care for the planet and all its creatures.”

In terms of theology, this is pretty basic stuff for a religious person to assert. Yet, it stops the psalmist in her tracks. “Who are we that God cares for us?” She’s got a point! This is a wild assertion. Imagine looking up at the night sky, feeling tiny under its vast umbrella, the most outlandish claim that you might make at such a moment is not that God exists, but that God cares. It is difficult, if not impossible, to prove or disprove God. Yet, to observe the universe, whether you are on your back staring up at the stars, or in a chair watching images of people dig for their loved one’s in the tangled aftermath of an earthquake, is to be assaulted with evidence that makes a person feel insignificant and anything but “cared for” by some unseen, benevolent power. And yet, despite the evidence against us, this is precisely the hope that we, the inheritors of the Psalms, continue to offer to the world.

A couple of years ago I had a chance to travel to Italy. As part of the trip, we went to Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, the 12th century monk who worked tirelessly with the poor and the sick. At one edge of Assisi is the massive Basilica of St. Francis. Adorned with vivid frescoes and precious altarpieces, it is a beautiful place.

Inside the sanctuary, we descended two floors to the tomb of St. Francis. The tomb is a medium-sized chapel. In the center, the saint’s bones lay in a marble casket that is perched atop a massive rock. Incense wafted through the air. Piped-in music set the tone with Latin chant. The mood was solemn. Although, peering behind one of the columns, I noted that the monks use Bose speakers. Ah, I thought skeptically, the monks are playing us! It’s a tasteful production, but a production nonetheless.

Moving forward, I approached the casket resting on the large boulder. People were lighting candles there. On the other three sides, the boulder was encased in a metal cage. The bars of the cage were set far enough apart so that a person could reach through, and on the inside, on the surface of the boulder, I could see splashes of color.

Peering closer, it became clear that people had placed pictures, hundreds of small pictures of their loved ones in the nooks of this stone. There were old, lined faces and young faces. There, thin faces and fat faces. There, baby pictures and wedding photos. They were beloved faces, the faces that appear in our minds when we pause at work and that rattle around in our hearts when we bow our heads in prayer. They were the faces that we want to hold up in front of God. And skeptical Protestant that I am, I was overwhelmed. Tears streaming down my face, I sat down, and prayed. Doggone it, I thought, the monks got me!

But then I thought a bit more. What was tugging at my heart in that holy space was not mere sentimentality coaxed to the surface by Bose speakers and cedar perfume. What was happening in the tomb of Saint Francis was a glimpse of God’s word for the world.

I have no doubt that people will always struggle with what it means to be human. Great thinkers and not-so-great thinkers will persist in asking the question, “Who are we?” And they will continue to come up with good, bad and indifferent ways to answer. That’s as it should be. We should attend to these debates. For that too is human! But as people of faith, we do this immersed in the wisdom of the Psalms—bathed in the belief that if we want to talk about who we are, we must first talk about who God is.

“God,” sings the psalmist, “you are the sovereign one who notices us mortals, the lofty king who cares.” This conviction will always seem naive to some, and on certain days it will appear foolish even to us—something silly and old, like candles and incense. And yet, as crazy as it sounds, looking at the tomb of St. Francis, I suddenly felt that the wisdom of the psalmist may be the most important thing that people of faith have to contribute to the world. It is the gospel: the seldom-substantiated conviction that God Almighty looks upon the faces of humanity, all the faces, the snapshots poked between metals bars and the digital thumbnails posted on our websites, your face, my face, all the faces, with compassion and love, and then patiently waits for us to respond to each other in kind.

Conversation with Scott Black Johnston

Daniel Pawlus: Scott, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing that inspirational message with us. I thought we might begin with just talking a little bit more about the power of the Psalms. I know many people have discovered the secret inspiration that they hold and it seems to be your main prayer prescription. I want you to speak a little bit more about how they resonated in your life and how you’ve seen them make a real change in people that you’ve told to go to the Psalms.

Scott Black Johnston: Recently there was a woman in my office going through a pretty tough time, was in the middle of a divorce. And she wondered whether she could keep her faith in the midst of the difficulty that she was going through. I pulled out the Psalms and I turned it open and I handed it to her. There it was. She sat, she read it for a few minutes and she looked up at me and she said, “I didn’t know the Bible said that!” And what it was saying was, how long, O Lord, will I have to go through this very, very difficult time? So I find in the Psalms an incredible amount of human honesty. People just lay it out there to God: this is what I’m feeling and they put it in front of the Almighty as an offering and assume that God will respond.

Lydia Talbot: And the poetry of the Psalms. We have to appreciate the poetry, the sheer poetry of the imagery in the Psalms. I must ask you, Scott, I’m sure we were all moved as you were by that epiphanous, revelatory moment at Assisi when what it means to be human was conveyed to you in the form of little photos, of pictures of all humanity there and reminded you, how you beautifully closed your message about how God cares for each one of us with love and compassion and patiently waits for us to respond to others in kind. But I have to ask you, how did you learn to trust that you, Scott, are on God’s radar screen?

Johnston: Well, there’s no one moment when I would say that happened. It’s the accrual of a lot of moments over time. I’ll tell you one story. About a year ago in New York City it had been a tough year. It was a tough year everywhere economically. But about a year ago the phrase that was being used again and again in my church was, “I wonder if there’s going to be another shoe to drop,” because the economy was in such a downward spiral. And we were having difficult times making ends meet and I found myself praying to God: Please God, let there be no more shoes to drop! Let’s start on an upward path. It literally was an hour after I prayed that prayer, the director of homeless ministries at the church came in to me and he said, “You’ve got to come downstairs and see this!” So I went downstairs and there were a bunch of off-duty New York City cops hauling in bags of counterfeit work boots that they’d confiscated from a counterfeit factory and they were bringing them in for us to distribute to the homeless. And I thought, okay, I get it, God! Another shoe has dropped but this time you dropped it on us. And it was a revelatory moment for me. I felt, yes, that kind of trust. You don’t always get what you’re looking for, though! You don’t always get a winning lottery ticket. Sometimes you just get some counterfeit shoes, but it’s enough.

Talbot: But discipleship like that gets us past that question of how do we know God cares. I mean, isn’t that the next phase from asking the question how do we know God cares?

Pawlus: I would also pick up on that. I think what’s interesting is that in some of the most challenging times, God offers us this opportunity to go deeper and to really think about how we’re being called to react to each other, as you intimated. There’s a beautiful message of us being more present in what we have and what we’re there to offer each other in faith, don’t you think?

Johnston: I do think that. In fact, a lot of times whenever anything bad happens, the first thing—and television reporters love to do this—they love to find somebody who is asking about “Does God exist?” because this bad thing happened. The resource that we have for responding to that really is Scripture because the Bible is mostly about people going through hard times and God being in the midst of it. It’s not the Bible with everybody skipping down the yellow brick road, we’re happy on our way to see the wizard! It’s tough times. It’s invading armies. It’s famine. It’s disease. It’s widows and orphans. The resources of the traditions that you evoke on this show usually arise out of the crucible of some pretty difficult moments.
Talbot: In the midst of those moments of isolation, despair and death, the realization that although God does not prevent those kinds of disasters and tragedies, God is there. God is not absent from them. God weeps, too, with us.

Johnston: Absolutely.

Talbot: You have two beautiful children, Isabella and Ollie.

Johnston: That’s correct.

Talbot: Eleven and six. How do you talk about God to your children?

Johnston: Well, once I heard a child psychologist talking about how to talk to children in general about big topics. The key is to listen to the question that they’re really asking. My problem on a show like this, but also with my own children, is I want to answer a whole lot more! I want to answer what’s going on in the back of my head. And the key, I find, is to answer to what Ollie or Isabella is actually asking me and that usually gets me a long way. Answer a little bit, then wait for them to ask a follow-up question if they want to. Most of the time their attention has already bounced on to something else and they’ve got me thinking about the problem of evil or something like that!

Pawlus: We wish we had so much more time with you! You’ll have to come back and visit us again, Scott. Thank you for being here to day.

Johnston: It’s been a delight.

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