Mindful God

Text: Psalm 8
Other texts: Proverbs 8:22-31

It is partly a question of scale.

In the scheme of the universe, from the very largest, oldest thing we know, to the very smallest, most ephemeral thing we know, we are somewhat closer to the smallest than the largest. Yet the range and quantities above and below us are incomprehensible. There are sextillion stars in the universe. And there are a thousand times as many atoms in a human body—that’s one octillion—than that.

So we wonder with the writer of the psalm: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what are humans that you should be mindful of them?” How can God even know about tiny us?

But mindful is more than being aware of. How can a God who created all things—galaxies and stars and atoms and quarks—understand our thoughts? The taste of coffee, a comfortable chair, fear of thunder, remembering the smell of the soil where we grew up, knowing that a friend is safe, picking tomatoes in the summer. Plus grief at bombings, tornadoes, factories in Bangladesh, warehouses in Texas, and fears of war and poverty.

We know so much more now than when the eighth psalm was written about how big the universe is and how small its parts. Even if God can comprehend it, we cannot. And even if God can comprehend our worries and pleasures, how can we be more than one piece of data in a huge store of it?

Yet we understand that God can, and does. We understand even more—that God is near us, with us. Even more—that God comprehends us because God exists in Jesus, a human being on this earth. And that God inhabits us in the Spirit, breathed into us, breathing life into us, and praying our secret prayers.

The Trinity is often considered to be a way to characterize God. God is three-in-one, God is triune, God is inherently relational, and so forth. When we start doing that, we get into arguments about proper ways of thinking—and talking, and praying—and generally get tangled up at some point. But we should always be suspicious of statements that begin “God is …” God is such and such. Even when it is we who are saying them. It is hard to know whether we ever have enough information to make “God is” statements.

But we can say what God is for us. Especially for us individually, but also things we might agree with others about (which sometimes thus becomes dogma). In this way, the Trinity is not about the nature of God, but about how God seems to us. And about how the universe that God made seems to be. We can speak then with authority. And we can use all the sources we have that reveal God to us, including scripture and Jesus and the Spirit felt within us.

And we can also use ourselves as sources. The delight we take in things, our appreciation of beauty, our love for others. This is all useful information. So is our urge for justice and peace. We can see these things as our nature—in God’s image—or as gifts from the creator, or the presence of the Spirit within us, or fortified by our trust in Jesus.

It seems like there are a few portraits—three, what a coincidence!—that people paint of the world in which we live.

First, the world is created. You do not have to imagine God’s fingers actually forming the world out of clay piece by piece to see it as organized, beautiful, and awesome. There seems to be order in things, rules that we are learning about. Amazing structures seem to emerge from first principles. It is majestic. At the same time, it is incredibly complicated—maybe even beyond our knowing (how smart can we be, after all?)—and very mysterious. It is an object of and occasion for wonder.

Second, the world is intimate. Or maybe personal would be another word for it. Though we seem to ourselves to be independent entities, we also know that we are fundamentally interconnected. That is, we cannot exist physically or spiritually without the amazingly elaborate network of things—maybe even the network of all things—of which we are a part. So in one sense we are just one of many. But in another sense—in our own sensations—it is all about us. Individual humans matter. The universe creates more than humans in general. The universe creates me. God is not vague. God comes in a particular person unlike any other but connected, as all are, with others.

And third, the world is lively. Everything moves. Matter is waves. We are not all one blob of universal stuff, because objects zoom around suns and particles zoom around (or wave around) nuclei. Locally, all this motion seems inevitably to produce life. Things love to grow all over the place. Bacteria and plants in the sidewalk and tubes at the bottom of the sea. Nothing is static. No Platonic inanimate perfection.

God is not, as one person said, a “nondescript sustainer.” The world is spirited. Life-bringing. Full of wind and fire, moving us this way and that, we not knowing where to next. But forward, it seems to us. Not progress, necessarily; not purposeful, necessarily; but in a direction. God is not timeless, meaning only that the God we know lives in time, too. God to us is a story that has unfolded over time and that we are convinced continues to unfold. God is a god of memory and of hope.

We can say that the lively, intimate, creator God is different faces of God, or manifestations, or elements, or appearances, or persons. But we cannot—we do not—say that they are three separately-wrapped gods. The God we see exposed in the universe, from tiny to tremendous, from impossibly far away to intimately within is, is a continuous person, with a continuing memory of creation, and a willingness to be affected by things and therefore open to surprises.

The God we know—and we can say nothing about the God we do not know—the God we know is a kind of ongoing tale which we read about in the Bible and which we experience in our lives in the world.

What we mostly know from this tale is that God really likes us. As it says in the first reading from Proverbs: God rejoices in his inhabited world and delights in the human race. The creation of the world—which is described in that reading and also in the psalm—is closely connected with that delight. Proverbs seems to say that the nature of the world is a result of God’s joy in it and, amazingly, in us. God is mindful of us.

The Trinity is therefore primarily an expression of grace, praise, and gratitude resulting from our observation of what God is. For us. It represents thanksgiving for our existence, for wonder and awe; thanksgiving for being intimately connected to each other and to God through Christ; and thanksgiving for the vitality of a universe in motion. And an acknowledgement that all this is so because of the love of God.