Sunday Morning Meds--Outrageous

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! 

You have set your glory above the heavens. 

From the lips of children and infants 

you have ordained praise 

because of your enemies, 

to silence the foe and the avenger. Psalm 8:1-2 

Something—don’t we wish we knew what?—inspires David the poet so deeply about God’s love that, in the words in Psalm 8, he literally reaches for the sky, farther than he can go. But then, honestly and truly, no words will reach where the height he wants to achieve--and he knows that too.

But in his reverie, he goes for whatever he can pull out of his humanly-limited imagination, and what he comes up with isn’t bad, really: first, majestic or excellent, and then this outrageous cosmic comparison. “You who have created nothing less than the heavens,” he says, “have also created magnificence in the humblest of humans—little babies. And thus, are your enemies forever stilled by the sheer power of your almighty hand.” 

Like a thousand poets before and after, David goes for the impossible; he's in love, this is a love poem, and like all love poets, he just can’t reach high enough to describe the joy that fills his soul at the thought of his love, his Lord.

One image that catches at least some of the intent here may well be the picture of that single Chinese protester looking up the barrel of a tank during the Tienanmen Square uprising of 1989. If you’ve ever seen that image, you’ve likely never forgotten the little man poised against tons of massive war machine. Fragility stymied all that power.

That protester was not a child, but an emblem of what David is after here, the idea that God Almighty, creator and sustainer of the universe, shows his powers in the most outrageously tiny things and thereby, impossible at it seems, shuts up the avenger—the Devil.

And there’s this, too, of course. There’s Bethlehem. A manger. Straw for bedding. Cows for a hospital staff. A No Vacancy light flashes through the only window in the barn. Meekness in majesty--there’s that divine, unforgettable picture too.

What David is saying is simply what cannot be humanly understood or communicated. Not by him, nor by any poet, nor by the long list of commentators who’ve tried to explicate—not me, not Matthew Henry or Charles Spurgeon or John Calvin.

No matter. We all keep on trying to fine tune our understanding and pipe our love songs. Me too. Because there’s so much joy that we can’t not sing, I guess. Even when we don’t rise to the occasion, we sing because, I suppose, that’s what we’re created to do.

Outrageous, isn’t it?