The poet Mary Oliver believed that paying attention was a form of prayer. The writer of Psalm 8 would have agreed. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. The psalm begins and ends in wonder — but in between, the poet looks up at the moon and stars and asks something that sounds almost like despair: What are human beings, that you are mindful of them? It is the question of someone genuinely astonished by the scale of things, unsure where they fit.
In this service, Pastor Julie preaches the recovery of a posture from Psalm 8. Head back. Eyes open. Breath caught. The accompanying texts set the frame: Genesis, where God steps back again and again to call creation good; and Matthew, where the risen Jesus sends his followers into the world in the name of the one who is somehow Father, Son, and Spirit at once.
We live in an age of more information and less awe than almost any before us. Something has gone numb. Wonder, it turns out, is less about what we know than how we attend — and together we'll ask what it might take to get it back. The accompanying scriptures are Genesis 1:1–2:4 and Matthew 28:16–20.