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!

 

Well, in case you are wondering, “Chuckle Therapy,” my highly advertised program on laughter and health was a big hit. It is nice to know that if I wipe out as a minister I will have something to fall back on as I may be in demand on the comedy circuit.  I got a call this last week from a person at St. James Methodist Church who wants me to come do a little Chuckle Therapy for one of their groups there at a luncheon.  There is nothing like a Baptist to give the Methodists something to laugh about.  So who knows, maybe I will be famous like Grady Nutt or Jerry Clower, or some other Hee Haw luminary.  And why not, while I would rather be known for something deep and profound, the somber truth is that we all need to laugh more. If I can get adults to do just that, well, that may be a great gift.

            My presentation was a hit not because I was all that funny, but because I showed some funny clips from YouTube and other internet sources.  After all, I have been a Baptist preacher a long time so I know funny when I see it.  I also know that I am not all that funny because my wife tells me that I am not as funny as I think I am.  And unfortunately, that last comment wasn’t as funny as it needed to be to keep me out of trouble!  But what I lacked in jocularity I made up for in that I had a four minute clip of slapstick from America’s Funniest Home Videos, and another four minute one, the classic pie fight scene from the 3 stooges.  Now slapping someone in the face with a pie might not sound that funny, but before it was over everyone was laughing their heads off.  The longer that clip goes on the funnier it gets–sort of like my preaching.  But if you decide to hit me in the face with a pie after this sermon, would you please, please make it sugar free?  And the funniest home videos thing —isn’t it funny how tickled we get when people hurt themselves doing stupid things?  Nothing like running into a parked car on a bicycle to break up a room.  And there are many funny wedding clips on that show, but Emily and Evan won’t be material for the show next weekend, right guys?

            But the show stopper, what put the chuckles in chuckle therapy, had to be funny clips from an off the wall weatherman by the name of Mark Mathis, formerly of Fox TV in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Mathis was over the top, and eventually got fired for his insane antics from his weatherman job. Of course maybe his drunkenness and his meth addiction also came into play as well, but it’s just a guess.  He once did the weather dressed as a snowflake and jumped up and down to simulate snowfall, and once played the drums as he sang the forecasts. He danced, sang, and even did a rap or two while doing the weather.  He was very bizarre at times, and often borderline inappropriate, or maybe just plain Borderline.  This was especially so during severe storms, where he often made fun of towns in the path of the storms.   He was nothing like the weather people around here.  Heck, he made somewhat funny weather guys like Willard Scott and Al Roper seem like burial plot salesmen.  He once dressed up in a rain suit and hat and acted like he was being blown away as a crashing wall of water from a major hurricane was rolling in the background.  I am guessing the hurricane was not in North Carolina, which would not have been too funny to very many people.

            The trouble is as Mr. Mathis found out, the weather is really not all that funny and that fact eventually did in Mathis’ brand of chuckle therapy.  But hey, I am safe as religion will always be funny.  However, the weather can be anything but funny.  We certainly have seen our share of bad weather this year, with five major outbreaks of tornadoes in Arkansas with 20 people dead and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.  If that is not enough, there were major floods all over Arkansas that will affect farming and tourism all summer and beyond.  And to add to the weirdness, we had a heavy and freakish snow storm in March.  What is in store for us next?

            It has been a disastrous recently on terra firma with the devastating cyclone in Myanmar with now 78,000 believed dead, and the catastrophic earthquake in China with up to 50,000 dead.  Both catastrophes literally will impact hundreds of thousands and do so for years to come.  Officials in both countries are concerned with pandemic outbreaks in the aftermath of these disasters as well, and many other long range crises.  Throw in the tornadoes that also occurred in Stuggart, and in Missouri and Georgia recently, and it has been one bad week or so. So much so, that people are wondering what is going on. 

People like respected NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams who this past week gave credibility to the environmental theory that the Earth is reacting to humanity’s mistreatment by spawning a rash of tornadoes. Williams reported how “this has been one of the most active, deadly tornado seasons in a long time” with more tornadoes so far this year than through August last year. He then forwarded to NBC Weather Plus meteorologist Bill Karins the kind of reasoning he hears during his daily routine: I talked to three people, casual conversation today, all of them smart, saying “I don’t know, we must be doing something to our Earth.”

            Indeed, is there something going on?  While we must be careful to not blame catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina on perceived moral failures of a few select groups such as some loudmouth fundamentalists did (and you know who they are), we must instead acknowledge that we have sinned against our planet. One cannot ignore that what we have done with our own carbon footprint and squandering our natural resources to some degree has affected or will affect the earth.  Unless of course you are James Dobson, who denies the existence of Global Warming or any kind of environmental impact by humans on the planet, but instead preaches of a left wing political conspiracy aimed at distracting Christians from “our mission.”  Jim Wallis, who was in town this past week thanks to the Clinton School and our friends at First Methodist, speaks of Dobson and cohorts in a column written about a year ago:

Once again, the hard-core Religious Right has gone on the attack, orchestrating a new campaign to advance their Far Right political views. In a letter to the chairman of the National Evangelical Association Board, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and their cohorts claim that “The existence of global warming and its implications for mankind is a subject of heated controversy throughout the world.” And even more bizarre, there was another report this morning that in his sermon last Sunday, Jerry Falwell claimed the debate over global warming is a tool of Satan being used to distract churches from their primary focus of preaching the gospel. Falwell, Dobson, and their friends are wrong, and this time their attack shows just how far outside the evangelical mainstream the Religious Right’s views have become.

            Well, certainly those guys know a lot about the politics of distraction themselves, but there are many others with religious blinders on, they are not alone. There is Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Ethics Daily Reported a while back that On Land’s radio broadcast he said: “A lot of this stuff that is being talked about with hysterical tones with global warming is quackery. When I see Al Gore and I hear him talk, in the distant background I hear ‘quack, quack, quack.’ Not because a duck is drowning because there’s no ice for him to sit on, but because this is pure quackery.”  His comments were intended to suggest that there is nothing to worry about environmentally.

            And that is not all friends, popular and best selling preacher John MacArther said this:

The earth we inhabit is not a permanent planet. It is, frankly, a disposable planet — it is going to have a very short life. It’s been around six thousand years or so — that’s all — and it may last a few thousand more. And then the Lord is going to destroy it. I’ve told environmentalists that if they think humanity is wrecking the planet, wait until they see what Jesus does to it. …This earth was never ever intended to be a permanent planet — it is not eternal. We do not have to worry about it being around tens of thousands, or millions, of years from now because God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth.

I could go on, there are many fundamentalists Baptists and others who believe that Global Warming is a hoax, and it is a topic that has been politicized to distract voters from the real issues of protecting the sanctity of marriage and abortion. I even read a reference to some Southern Baptists who said that left-wing Christians who bought into the global warming thing were committing the sin of making the theological political.  Now, the religious right has never done that one, have they now? 

So where do these folks get the nerve to challenge the best scientific thinkers in our world today who think otherwise?  Where does their arrogance come from?  This sense of our inalienable right to rape the earth often comes from passages like our lectionary text today. I have departed from my gospel expositions this week and selected the lectionary Psalm today, specifically Psalm 8, and a favorite of amateur astronomers like myself everywhere.  This Psalm starts out with a beautiful picture of creation and the majesty of God.  The Psalmist declares how unfathomable are God’s handiworks, creating the sun, the moon and even hanging the stars in the sky over our heads.  What a big deal that is! The Psalmists then asks who are we, small and insignificant as we are that God should care about us?  In other words, we are no biggie compared to creating the sun, the moon and the Milky Way.  Our own galaxy has 30 billion stars the size of our own sun, and the Milky Way is only one galaxy out of 30 billion just like it.  Our next closest neighbor star is 25 trillion miles away; it takes light 4 years to get here form there traveling at 186,000 miles per second.   Our world is a big place, and we are certainly a small part of it, but in spite of that reality God cares about us, the psalmist declares.  And how great is that?

But the problem for many comes in verse 6, where the psalmist echoes an Old Testament theme that seemingly begins on the first pages of Genesis.  It is a theme that has often been interpreted about “getting dominion,” or about subduing the earth:

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

            And as the ruler of all heaven and earth we are to as Dobson says, subdue it, it is here for us and is only here for us.  We are to rule over it, and I guess we are to use it even if it means using it up.  Dobson, Land and others have argued that there is no evidence that our carbon footprint is significant at all, that it is all political, and that if we don’t utilize the earth’s resources to the fullest then the poor will suffer.  For example, the rainforest can be turned into farm land or industrialized areas to benefit the poor and hungry, and that is a good point I suppose.  However, the truth is that there is evidence that only governments and big business prosper by deforestation of the rainforests, and that the poor suffer as it does as they depend upon its resources for survival.  The poor are not benefiting to the degree of sacrifice that occurs by the destruction of the rainforests. And while this is a complicated issue, these rainforest are disappearing at an alarming rate, an area about the size of Portugal every single year and greatly contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions.  In fact, as much as 20% of the greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere each year are from rainforest deforestation. The facts of global warming are not “junk science” as Dobson and others claim.

            So what about the command to subdue the earth? What about getting dominion over all creation?  Some say that everything has simply been put there for our benefit.  That we are to rule it and use it because we are in effect the linchpins of creation.  Nothing else would exist unless we needed it, in effect.  We have this very anthropocentric view that everything that exists does so to serve us as human beings and has no intrinsic worth apart from its place at our feet.

            This type of exegesis has led us to getting dominion over everything around us as our “manifest destiny.”  You have heard of the largely American Colonial philosophy that it is our God given right to take what we need, to prosper.  Of course, that included the belief that we were doing Christianity a favor by whipping all the Native Americans that we could who got in our way as we claimed the land.  We sometimes believe that we have a Carte Blanche to plunder and pillage all of creation, and that it is here for the sole purpose of serving us.  I will never forget a few summers back traveling to California and walking through the Great Sequoia National Park, where trees get to be 30 or more feet in diameter.  These are giants that are hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of years old. They grow only in one place in California, and they are truly majestic.  I also remember hearing the stories from Park Rangers and seeing evidence that when the early pioneers looked at these giants they only salivated over the millions of board feet of lumber that could be obtained from just one tree. The only reason that these folk did not cut every single one of the Sequoia’s down is that they were simply not able to. The trees were too big, too tough, so the men eventually gave up.  Manifest Destiny, indeed.

            Historian Lynn White has described this type of Christianity as:

“The most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,” bears a “huge burden of guilt” for fostering attitudes toward nature that form the roots of our ecologic crisis. Moreover, he claims, “We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

            Surely this approach of getting dominion, of subduing the earth has led to some attitudes toward nature that have led to ecological devastations, and have fostered inhumane and exploitative attitudes towards nonhuman nature.  Certainly Christianity is replete with examples of such exploitations. It seems to me that there is no end to our egocentricity.  And we have such a view of entitlement as a species. The term “sense of entitlement” is often used to describe the outrageous attitude of those who believe that the world “owes” them and they want to collect NOW. People with this type of attitude always want more. Whatever you do is never good enough for them, and they also generally show no gratitude or express any thanks–even when someone goes out of their way for them. These folk merely expect that they should be the center of your world at all times.

I see this kind of thinking all the time at the hospital. When someone dies who has a little money, every heir wants his fair share. If someone took care of granny 12 hours a day for five years, she expects more, and that son from California who hasn’t spoke to granny in 15 years wants the same fair share. There is a strong sense of deservedness, of entitlement for all concerned. And much of the time it can be traced to plain old greed, envy and pride, and a few other assorted sins. We believe that we deserve a certain treatment, a certain collection of things that we are entitled to, just because we are a son or daughter, an American, an employee or a club or church member. 

There is a strong sense of entitlement in our society today. And all of our increasing wealth and prosperity does not cure this sense of entitlement, but rather fuels the fire for more. It is the law of diminishing returns in action. If my rich kid has 130 dollar Air Jordan Nikes, then every kid has the right to expect the same thing. Psychologists tell us that this sense of entitlement has its roots in our childhood and is an attitude normally seen in toddlers, who want what they want and they want it now. Every parent or adult has had to deal with this kind of whining. And yet many adults hold on to that childish thinking. Many adults whimper at the slightest inconvenience, delay, or restriction. Why? Because, like toddlers, they are convinced they deserve what they want when they want it. They are “entitled” to it. Maybe these folk feel like they are entitled to better pay because they have put in more years on the job and their loyalty to the company should be rewarded, not their performance. Or maybe it is seen in those who feel like since daddy or momma gave their brothers or sisters something, they should be given an equal share. It’s like Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, in the classic “Charlie Brown Christmas Special.” You may recall that at one point Sally is writing a letter to Santa Claus and in the process generates an enormous list of toys she wants. Then at the conclusion of her North Pole-bound missive she writes, “But if that is too much to carry, just send cash.” When Charlie Brown sees this and despairs over his own sister’s greed, Sally indignantly responds, “All I want is my fair share. All I want is what I have coming to me.” We all want just what is coming to us.

People have such a sense of entitlement today. I will never forget the story I heard out of one of the shelters here in Little Rock that were set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2004, that there were some evacuees complaining about the free food graciously brought in and cooked by an all volunteer force religiously three meals a day. They wanted something different, and asked how come they couldn’t have Mexican and Pizza. They didn’t want anymore home cooking. And while most every evacuee was grateful, there are still those with a strong sense of entitlement.

          It is no wonder that we think everything in creation is about us and is for us, that it exists for us to use as we please.  And as such we manipulate it to the point that all creation is surely moaning and awaiting redemption. But I am sorry; I don’t see that in this Psalm today. Creation is not for us.  In fact, I see the opposite.  This passage is not just about dominion, but to the contrary, the Psalmist sees it as a world that is a very big world, a very majestic world, one run by God.  The Psalmist is in absolute awe over creation.  In fact he is not feeling like a lord over creation, but feels insignificant in the eyes of God compared to the Sun, Moon, and stars.  He didn’t have to understand the General Theory of Relativity or the fabric of the space-time continuum to appreciate the fact that the universe was beyond comprehension, he only had to look up into the night sky. It was this backdrop that he asks the question, “who on earth that are we that God should care anything about us?”  Our place is insignificant compared to most of the created order and certainly compared to the creator.

This Psalm was not intending to denigrate nonhuman creation to a lesser role—I believe instead that he meant to elevate our own sense of worth and to declare that we are indeed valuable to the almighty.  That God cares for us, all of us.  That the world is not too big for God to care about, but more importantly that we are not too small for God to care about.  That God watches over us like the rest of the created order, that he loves us and cares about our cares.

And who are we to think that he has time to care for us?  We are the ones that God loves — that’s who.  Our religion all too often devalues us by telling us that we are in fact worthless, that we are wretched, that we are insignificant.  Indeed, the Psalmist today says that we are valuable, that we are worth something, to God and that God has time for us.  He would declare on another occasion, in the 139th Psalm that there is nowhere that we can go and flee from the presence of God.  There is no place that we can escape from God’s presence; there is no place that God cannot find us.  If we are in a hospital room at one of our cities’ hospitals laying there on a ventilator, or if we are sleeping out on the street, it doesn’t matter, God is there.  If we are dealing with drug addiction or relationships that are breaking our hearts, it does not matter, God is there.  If we are near the ones we love or far away, or if we have lost our way, God is there.  If we have wandered far away from our spiritual home, God is there as well. God cares about us, from the least, the last and the lost.  It doesn’t matter who we are, what we have done or where we have been.  That is the message of the Psalmist.  That our great big God care for, yes loves little bitty us.  How amazing is that?

One of my favorite hymns says it well (in spite of the exclusive pronouns for God):

This is my Father’s world,

And to my listening ears

 All nature sings and round me rings

The music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world,

I rest me in the thought

Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas,

His hand the wonders wrought.

 

This is my Father’s world

The birds their carols raise.

The morning light, the lily white,

Declare their Maker’s praise.

This is my Father’s world

He shines in all that’s fair;

In the rustling grass, I hear Him pass,

He speaks to me everywhere.

 

This is my Father’s world,

O let me ne’er forget:

That thought the wrong seems oft’ so strong,

God is the ruler yet.

This is my Father’s world,

The battle is not done

Jesus who died shall be satisfied,

And the earth and heaven be one.

When we come to grips with the Psalmist’s perspective, our perspectives changes. It becomes a perspective that can inform our moral lives by engendering certain habits or dispositions that theologian James Tubbs calls “virtues”: the virtue of gratitude in answer to God’s gift of human dominion; the virtue of responsiveness to God’s will for creation which is our reasonable stewardship; and, last but not least, the virtue of humility in the face of a measure of value infinitely greater than our own aims, needs, or desires.  Friends, the planet is bigger than us. How about an attitude of gratitude over the beauty of the earth?  And maybe throw in a little humility as we are a speck in the wrinkle of time in the created order of worlds without end.  To do so means more than saving the planet. I believe that it also means saving what is worth saving about ourselves.  And that we cannot escape the fact that God is waiting to redeem us along with creation.  It is the message of the Psalmist this day, and it is also something else—it is the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God. Amen!