Common Ground: MADE

Week 1: Common Ground: MADE (Sermon on May 1)

Psalm 8
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Notes on the text
Verse 5 is often translated ‘you have made him a little lower than heavenly beings’. A better translation would be ‘you have made him a little lower than God’.
See Genesis 1:25-31 as a source for this psalm. It speaks of our identity under God, but over all creation.
See Hebrews 2:5-9 – Jesus is seen as the perfect fulfillment of the human under God and over creation.

A helpful image or opening question:

• What divides people in Oakland? What unites us?
• In your experienced, are churches/religion helpful or harmful to that unity?
• Read C.S. Lewis quote below – do agree with the final statement in that quote?

Questions:

• What does this text say about God?
• What does this text say about people?
• If we deeply believed these things, what would change about us, about our city?
• Who can we share this text with?
• How can our neighborhood group live out what we learn from this discussion?

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory