who is seated on high,
who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes,
with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home,
making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the LORD!" (Psalm 113:5-9)
It's easy to look down on people.
We human beings have spent an awful lot of the last several thousand years inventing new ways to do it, too. We rank each other's worth based on how much shiny metal each person has--and then, when our currency turned to paper, we compared stacks of cash, and now we use the even more fictional inventions of crypto-currency, too, to do the same thing! We compare who has the larger house or the nicer car, as well as who has the more prestigious job or who lives in a fancier neighborhood. We judge one another based on whose family looks more like some fictional cookie-cutter pattern of the "ideal," and criticize those whose households don't measure up in our estimation. We invent classifications for people so that we can deem "outsiders" as inferior--whether it's based on where you come from, what language you speak, how much money you make, or whether you agree with my group's politics. We end up ranking people who are "like" us first, and then create a descending scale of value from neutral strangers to suspicious outsiders to downright worthless enemies. And of course, we invent religious notions that there are gold stars out there to be given by God as rewards for personal holiness, public piety, or respectable rule-following, all in order to make ourselves look better than "those people" (however you want to describe "those people").
We have been doing this sort of thing as a species for as long as we've been writing down records of our own history (bean-counting has a long and storied history with our kind), and all of it boils down to coming up with new ways to look down on someone else. Somehow, we tell ourselves, we are slightly better than the rest as long as there is someone beneath us on the list of rankings, so we keep coming up with new ways to play that same old game. So there is nothing really unique or special about being in a position to look "down" on other people. Whether you actually have a position of authority, responsibility, or leadership, or you have just come up with another stupid ranking on your own terms to belittle others, that sort of condescending posture is old hat. We've seen it done from the Pharaohs of Egypt, the kings of Babylon, and the Caesars of Rome to the follower-counts of social media and listings of the Fortune 500 still today. There is nothing new, different, or even interesting about finding yet another way to look down on someone.
That's why the Scriptures are so refreshing, honestly. We are given throughout the pages of the Bible a different picture of the living God--one that doesn't look down in arrogance or self-inflated pomposity, but that lifts up the ones who have been looked down on by everybody else. You can hear it all over the place in the Bible once you to know to look for it, but it's on full display here in this passage from the Psalms, which many would have heard or sung in worship this past Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary.
This section starts out picturing God high up, in a sense, looking "far down on the heavens and the earth." You might at first think we were going to get a sort of comparison between Israel's God, YHWH, and the other gods of the surrounding nations. You could imagine the temptation to have said, "You know how WE can tell that OUR god is better than yours? Well, OUR god has a throne that's even higher than yours!" You could imagine a rhetorical contest of deities, each one trying to outrank or out-perch the others by comparing their powers, their mythologies, or the status and wealth of their worshipers. You could imagine someone trying to puff up the reputation of their god by arguing, "Our god is the best because our god's followers have a higher GDP, or a bigger army, or larger territory, and that's how we know!" You could imagine a psalm saying, "Our god is worthy of praise because our god's worshippers are the movers and the shakers, but those other gods are only worshipped by nobodies, weaklings, and losers!" All of that would just be more of the same stupid, petty game-playing we've been doing to look down on each other since time immemorial.
But that's where the psalmist does something unexpected. This poet doesn't launch into a contest of "Which deity has a taller throne?" but rather says that the living God--despite being far beyond heaven and earth altogether--chooses to see the most lowly, the most at-risk, and the most marginalized, and to lift them all up to places of honor. The real difference is not a matter of looking down on someone else, but of lifting up the ones who have been stepped on, forgotten, and pushed aside. That is what makes God different--both from the idols and pantheons of the surrounding empires, and different from the typical human way of looking down on each other. God sees the folks who have been regarded as "less than," and instead of using that to puff up the ol' divine ego, God looks for ways to raise them up. God, the poet says, "lifts the poor from the dust, and the needy from the ash heap." God brings the lowly to sit at places of honor beside the nobles and royalty. And God finds the women who had been told they were "damaged goods" or "second-class" because they had no children and gives them a home. None of that smacks of arrogant condescension. It is all about God's care for the people most on the margins. And over against all the kings, emperors, gods, and goddesses of history, that really is different. The living God doesn't look at the world through the lens of some cosmic rankings with pious worshipers at the top being rewarded with perks, and then strangers, losers, and enemies all further down in less importance. God deliberately goes to the end of the line and puts the last first, lifts the lowly up high, and gathers the outcast back in. That kind of upside-down motion is what makes God different.
It will make us stand out in the world, too, if we are going to be associated with this table-turning, lowly-lifting God. I was in the gas station the other day and when I got up to the cashier inside, the attendant asked about my lapel button, which simply says, "the last first" on it. It looks like this:
When I simply replied, "Oh, my button says 'the last first' on it," she pressed me further: "What does that mean?" So I simply said, "Like when Jesus says, 'The last shall be first and the first shall be last,'" she just sort of shrugged me off and started making small talk with the other cashier, with a vary look on her face like I might actually be an alien or someone with three heads. Everybody was pleasant, and nobody was rude, but it was certainly a moment that reminded me how unusual it really is that we Christians dare to believe in a God who reprioritizes things that way. We do not believe in a god who merely rubber stamps the world's rankings of who matters and who doesn't. We do not believe in a god who endorses our habit of looking down on others as "less than." Rather, ours is the God who seeks out the empty-handed and fills them with good things. Ours is the God who seeks out the folks who have been pushed out to the edges and brings them to the table to be welcomed to places of honor. Ours is the God who just comes out and says, "The last will be first." Even if the world isn't always downright hostile to that sort of thinking (and it often is), the world will be surprised by that kind of messaging and that kind of God. We had better own it: the God of the Scriptures is perfectly willing to be counter-cultural that way. The God we meet in the Bible chooses to stand out, not by looking down on all of us with scorn and self-importance (even if God has the "right" to do so as Creator of all things), but by lifting up those who are down in the dumps and crushed into the dust. God's choice to seek the people who have been most stepped-on and to raise them up in honor and love is what makes God worthy of our worship, according to the psalmist.
Look, plenty of tyrants and bullies throughout history have puffed themselves up by looking down on the people they see as "less-than" or "major losers." Plenty of pompous blowhards have proudly bragged about how much they hate their adversaries and would only do good to those who would paid them back with favors or fawning praise. The God of the Scriptures is neither. The psalmist says God is worthy of praise for being different--the living God does good to the empty-handed, the excluded, and the enemy.
If that is the God whose way we seek to walk in, then we should be known for the same kind of care for those who are most looked-down on by everybody else. And we should be ready to get funny looks for trying to point to the surprising ways of this God in our everyday lives.
Lord Jesus, make us brave enough to be willing to stand out from the crowd in the ways that we honor other people.
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