Crowned with Glory and Honor

This Trinity Sunday, we suggest that you start with the Psalm. Psalm 8 is a hymn of praise that reminds us of the majesty of God. We’ll also look in on Romans 5 and the reminder that we share in the glory of God in some powerful ways. And then we also invite a glance at Proverbs 8 as a way to flesh out the Triune God in our understanding.

Full confession, however, I haven’t always been a big fan of Trinity Sunday. One reason is that it causes us to change colors from the dramatic red of Pentecost back to the white of majesty. White is used at Christmas and Easter and the seasons that follow and on Trinity Sunday. It is about authority, about purity, about Lordship. It’s a powerful color, appropriate for these occasions. But we have just gone from a white season – Eastertide— and are teased with red for one Sunday and then it is back to white again. Technically, the tradition is that after Trinity Sunday, we switch to green for the whole summer - or Ordinary Time, as the old calendars had it. We call this time “Sundays after Pentecost” in our tradition today.

Trinity Sunday bumps the red off the chancel, and I’ve never liked that. (I did sneak some red back in for the early part of Ordinary Time, just to keep the excitement up. Yeah, I’m easily amused.) So, I would usually give Trinity Sunday a passing reference, but not much attention. But Trinity Sunday deserves our attention. And Psalm 8 is an appropriate way to launch into the experience of Trinity.

O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8:9 NRSV).

“How majestic is your name.” That’s the line that stands out, maybe because the psalm begins and ends with those same words. “How majestic is your name.” That sounds wonderful. You can’t read those words without hearing the Michael W. Smith song in your head, “O Lord, Our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” It is one of those 7/11 songs that people complain about: “Seven words you repeat eleven times.” You’ve heard that, I’m sure. Yet sometimes, it works. Sometimes it is the repetition that carries the meaning. It is only in saying it over and over and over that it makes any sense at all. Like the seraphs flying around the temple in Isaiah 6, and they kept singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.” Over and over, they sang those words. And it was in the singing and in the repetition that it began to make sense.

Or did it? What was that sense? What do these words mean? “How majestic is your name.” Does it mean that God’s name is kind of cool? Well, sort of. But in an Old Testament sense, not in a modern day, “Hey I like that name!” kind of sense.

In the Old Testament, knowing a name was a way of having power. That is why it is so incredible that God would give away the divine name. That’s why that burning bush is such a singular moment. And the people of God knew that, so they were reluctant to say the name of God. The letters YHWH form the name of God in the Hebrew text. We would pronounce it Yahweh because our understanding is different. Words are just words; names are just names. So, you’ve heard the name “Yahweh” in some circles. And perhaps rightly so, since God gave us this name to use.

But the early followers didn’t want to abuse the gift, so whenever the text would have those letters, YHWH, then the reader of the text would substitute the word “Adonai” for the name. Adonai means Lord; it is a title instead of a name. Adonai was used for human beings at times to acknowledge a superior. It was an honorific.

So, now when translators heard the word “Adonai” inserted where they saw the letters “YHWH,” they substituted the vowels from the first into the consonants for the latter and came up with a new word, “Yahovah.” Since they were German translators, where the “Y” letter is pronounced like a “J,” the word was Jehovah. We now use that word as a substitute for both the name and title of God, but it doesn’t appear in the original text of the Bible anywhere.

OK, fascinating, but what does it have to do with Trinity Sunday or the psalm for that matter? Well, I’m not sure. Except that it is a bit of a mystery. This name thing, I mean. And how can a name be majestic in all the earth? And does constant repetition of praise bring glory to God’s name? And what aspect or dimension of God are we praising anyway.

The psalm is about the Creator God, whom we usually understand to be the father. (Oh, right, Happy Father’s Day, dad. And all other dad-like creatures out there.) So, how is this a Trinity Sunday passage? Where are the other dimensions? Or aspects? Or persons? Or whatever you call thems?

“When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers...” I’m amazed, I’m astounded, I feel small. Not a bad feeling to have every now and then: that in the vastness of this created universe, we are but a tiny speck. And yet this isn’t a humbling psalm. It isn’t about our speckness; it is a psalm of amazement that we are anything but speckish! We are a “little lower than God, crowned with glory and honor.” We share in God’s glory, by God’s choice. We are significant because God made us so.

That is the aspect of God we know as Jesus or the Son. The Redeemer aspect of God is what lifts us beyond where we might be, could be, and perhaps should be. Elsewhere, we are told this was done because of love. Because God so loved us, we might know eternity, we might stand in glory.

So, how else could we respond but by saying, “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” Like babes, we coo and gurgle to the one who cares for us, or so says the psalmist. And those coos and gurgles silence those who say there is no God. And those coos and gurgles are what brings majesty to the name of God. It is us, our words, our lives, our power that gives majesty to God’s name. We are bearers of that name, a name that is beyond us, bigger than us, more than we can carry, unless we are strengthened by the God whose majesty we proclaim with our words and deeds and being. Unless the Spirit, the consolation, the comforter and guide is with us.

It is that Spirit that pours God’s love into our hearts that enables us to stand and grow and become the disciples that we are seeking to be. “That’s our boast,” says Paul in Romans 5. We boast that we can share in the glory of God. Wait, what? The glory? The same glory that we were singing about in Psalm 8? Well, yes. But not so that we can supplant God, but that we might stand in grace before God. The amazing thing is that grace is available even when it seems like everything is going wrong. “We rejoice,” Paul says, in our sufferings—not because we like to suffer, but because we can know grace and we can know glory, even in the midst of suffering. And we know that in the midst of this, we are loved and we are being made more like the Christ we follow. Our love is being shaped by God’s love that is poured into us.

We are God’s act of creation. That’s a part of the message of Trinity Sunday. The Creator works within us, choosing us to be a sign of God’s presence in the world. And the tool that God uses, according to Proverbs 8, is wisdom. Wisdom is God’s first creation, we’re told, and then wisdom becomes the means by which everything is made. Is this the Word that John 1 speaks of? Is this the Spirit that pours love into our hearts? Maybe. Could be. Who knows for sure? But it all works together in the mix that we have come to call the Trinity, a concept that is both wholly other and an intricate and intimate part of us, the community of faith and the making of disciples. We bow to the one whose name is majestic, and we are also crowned with glory because we stand in the presence of that one. The only way we can bring sense to this beyond-sense understanding is to live it out, to live out the glory in ourselves and in any and all who seek to stand in that presence, any and all who want to claim a birthright, a grace, a hope. We are the sign that God is God whenever we reflect the promise of creation and the hope of redemption and the wisdom of encouragement and growth.