Stealer’s Wheel was a one-hit wonder pop group in the ’70s that produced the barely memorable song—“Stuck in the Middle with You.” Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight,/ I got the feeling that something ain’t right./ I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,/ And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs./ Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,/ Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Well, I think we all have the feeling that something ain’t right, but we also have that feeling because there’s something in us that is right and that tells us when things ain’t right. Our poet in Psalm 8 understands that right well. But it’s “not clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right”—it’s angels overhead of me, animals under foot, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Human beings are caught between heavenly beings and earthly creatures, between God and gophers, don’t you know?! This is where we fall in the order of things. And we are stuck there with each other.

The poem is beautifully symmetrical. The first and the last verses sing the praises of God in exactly the same words. Oh Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth. The praise of God is the frame around the painting that is this poem. Whatever is said about human rights and responsibilities, whatever is claimed about heaven or earth is qualified and authorized by the praise of God. God stands outside of creation to keep it from falling into chaos, and God dwells inside of creation to keep it from falling into confusion. God orders our lives and God gives them meaning.

It’s an odd way of saying things, but whatever the something is that is in between verses 1 and 9 of this psalm, it is something only because of the nothing that God is. God is no thing. God is not a thing that we can name or claim. We are things, made by the one who is no thing. God makes the world out of God’s own being, and God’s own being is … love.

Today is the Sunday after Pentecost, the day we call in the church Trinity Sunday. When Christians talk about God we aren’t talking about a rugged individualist, a lonely rich man that keeps office hours “somewhere over the rainbow.” To say that God is love is to say that God’s very being, the being out of which we and everything else is made is nothing you can grasp or control. God is love, and love is what is at the bottom of and the top of and all round the edges of and right in the very heart of all that God has made. That we have come to know God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a way of saying that God’s very being is relational love. And that love, that is no-thing you can hold or touch but only feel and know, spills over into what is made. Love is not matter but it makes things that are matter matter.

There’s even an interesting hint of this relational quality in God in our text. When the poet says that we have been made a little lower than God, the word for God there is the Hebrew Elohim. It’s a plural form, which in its writing does not mean that David was prescient about knowing God as the divine Trinity, but maybe he did understand that we can’t talk about God in terms of one human life, that God’s life is too full to be compared directly to any individual. Whatever it means to be human, therefore, to be created in the image of God, cannot be known apart from relationships to other human beings.

But that leads to the heart of the poem. First, who are human beings? What are we, that God should be mindful of us?

Who Are We? Like and Unlike Creator Above and Creatures Below

In the movie Grand Canyon, Danny Glover plays the role of a tow-truck driver in Los Angeles who comes to the aid of an out-of-control Hollywood movie mogul who wanders into the wrong neighborhood and has his car attacked by gang members. Glover defends him against the injustice in a powerful speech about how violence is not the way things are supposed to be. But in one curious moment he talks about how he deals with life. He sometimes drives to the Grand Canyon and sits on the rim. He looks into the vastness of that glorious spot and considers how small he is in the grand scheme of things. It gives him perspective.

The psalmist looks into the night sky, the moon and stars suspended in space, and in the bigness of the heavens, he gets perspective. He wonders why the Creator should be so concerned with us. But that’s the joy of it and the honor. God has put something of God’s own self into us. We share something of the divine life that separates us from all other creatures and ennobles us. But this is a something we need reminding of daily, lest we slip into despair.

I spoke with my Aunt Eleanor yesterday as she was entering the funeral home in Long Island. She was about to bury my cousin Barbara, who is only a year or two younger than I. A neighbor found Barbara in the flowerbed of her back yard on Wednesday. My beautiful and talented cousin never found a way to look into the mirror and see what we could see, let alone see what God could see. She cultivated a sense of inadequacy all of her life, and then she tried to medicate that in various ways, until at last in the throes of anorexia and bulimia and a nasty divorce, and after being turned away at a hospital for an ailment they couldn’t or wouldn’t treat, she let go of her life for good. I realized as I talked to my aunt how much more the family priest I am than the nephew. She wanted me to tell her over and over again that God did not let go of Barbara’s life when Barbara did.

We live in a fragile place, you and I, between the glory of bearing the image of God and the burden of bearing the image of the beasts of the field. We share, in our roughly 30,000 genes, some 99% of the genetic material of higher animal creatures. How easy it is to descend the chain of being, how spiritually challenging to ascend to our God-given glory!

We can rise too high, though, too. God has made us “a little lower than God.” And here again, the word for God, Elohim, can also mean gods or angels or heavenly beings. The point is that for all our likeness to God, we are also unlike God. Our earthly lot limits us. The phrase in Hebrew actually means that God has “caused us to have a little lack of God.” This should keep us humble, keep us looking at the night sky or the Grand Canyon, recognizing our rightful smallness.

It should also keep us from elevating ourselves or anyone else to God-like status. When we crown our leaders or lovers with divinity, we are putting them in a position they cannot bear and we are guilty of idolatry. When Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors declared themselves gods, they were saying that they were not stuck in the middle with us; they were really part of the heavenly host that deigned to live among us. When we give princes or presidents or parents or pastors a free pass to do whatever they think best, we are endowing them with god-like status they cannot possibly live up to. You can only pray to one God, and God has only one mediator—Jesus Christ. The rest of us are on the same level—stuck there together for our own good.

So the temptation goes two ways: to be less then human or more than; to slide into the animal kingdom or to try to scale the heights of heaven. Both attempts are futile. Our glory and honor is in accepting our privileged place and living within it.

What Are We to Do? Protect and Promote Life

Which leads to the second thought: What are we humans to do? We have seen who we are: a little lower than the Creator, a little higher than other creatures. But after praising God for making us so, we have to carry out our duties, too. God has given us a share in caring for creation. We stand next to one another, and we stand over the rest of creation.

The word used here for the job we are given is dominion. We are to rule over creation. We have minds to think about the best interest of birds and beasts, of rivers and seas. But this idea of ruling can get out of hand. We are to rule not rape, to tend gently to the well being of nonhuman life. We are to be more like gardeners than strip miners, more like ranchers than rustlers. When we pollute the air and streams with poisonous chemicals that kill fish and game, we are raping rather than ruling. Our job is to be good stewards of the life God has put beneath our feet. We help it come into its own created glory, even when it does not know how to do so itself.

But more than that, we are to defend the dignity of fellow human beings and not degrade them. This is sometimes more work than it seems. I was at Cameron’s high school graduation Friday night. I brought a book of Thomas Lux’s selected poems for all the quiet time I expected during the roll call of names. Turns out I would have been better off with a Walkman and some P. Diddy rap music. They begged us to honor each graduate with respectful silence as the names were called, to hold our applause and not shout. Fat chance. I was sitting in the midst of some of the worst offenders who whooped and hollered through the whole event. I wish I could tell you that I said to myself, Celebrate diversity, George. I wish I had had the grace to allow for diverse ways in which people respond emotionally. But my instinct was to dehumanize them, to push them down the chain of being so that I could protect humanity and civilization against their inclusion. I know I am the only one who ever thinks those thoughts, so please forgive me.

But that is the very slide that leads to genocide. Racism, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings, and all kinds of violence against others begin with deciding that our enemies are devoid of any God-like element that humans possess. If we can think of them as dogs or snakes or whatever else besides persons for whom Christ died, then we can justify our deeds. This is what our soldiers in WWII gave their lives for. They were standing up against hatred and genocide and the tyranny of those who would demean others in order to divinize themselves.

But God’s dominion does not include that kind of violence over God’s enemies. The cries of infants are enough to silence God’s foes. God defends his honor without resorting to violence. This is to be our way, too.

The song in its way and the psalm in its way say “stuck in the middle with you.” But it’s not stuck really, as if there’s a way to get unstuck. We are what God has made us. We don’t get to be free of this tension, ever. We wonder over it and we blunder over it —over how to be these caught creatures we all of us are. But maybe we’d do better just to let it be, and then get on with loving the people next to us, caring for things beneath us, and praising the God over us, first and last, day by day by day.