1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our heavenly Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word as we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday is taken from Psalm 8 and it’s entitled, “Mindful of Tiny, Little Us,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. In Dr. Seuss’s beloved story Horton Hears a Who, the tiny residents of Whoville live in a universe no bigger than a speck of dust, carried around on a clover by a patient elephant named Horton. Most of the Whos go about their days unaware of their true size. It takes a crisis, and a great deal of noise, before they finally wake up to the truth: they are tiny, they need Horton, and Horton has been caring for them all along. That humbling realization, far from crushing them, turns everything around for the better. When we, too, wake up to the truth — that God is God and we are not, that he is the Creator and we are his creatures — it goes better with our souls. And suddenly, it becomes the most astonishing news in the universe: the almighty Lord of heaven and earth is mindful of tiny, little us.
3. The psalmist David marveled at this. Standing under the open sky, gazing at the work of God’s fingers (Ps. 8:3) — he broke into a question that is really a hymn of praise: “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4). The Hebrew word translated “mindful” means to think about, to call to mind as a present, passionate concern. Like a mother who wakes in the night, not because her baby cried, but simply because her mind is full of her child. That is how God thinks of you.
4. But we must be honest: we don’t always find this comforting. When we examine ourselves according to God’s Law, we have long lists of things of which we are ashamed (1 John 1:8). We wonder: Why is God thinking about me? Is it to settle a score? We look at the troubles of life — the plans that fell apart, the prayers that seemed to go unanswered, the suffering that came anyway — and we begin to suspect that God’s attentiveness is not warm but accusing. We imagine him less as a loving Father and more as a cosmic auditor, reviewing the ledger, noting every deficit.
5. Or maybe the temptation runs the other direction. We think, of course God is thinking about me — I’ve earned it. We are good neighbors, faithful spouses, generous givers. We say our prayers and show up on Sunday. God is pleased with me, and his attentiveness is our reward. We don’t say this out loud, but self-righteousness is a very quiet sin. It betrays itself when things go wrong and we grow angry at God, as if he has broken a contract.
6. Both errors share the same root: we place ourselves at the center. We stare inward for our ultimate meaning, for our worth — using the mirror of our own hearts as the final authority. But as Martin Luther knew well, the sinful self is curved in upon itself. The heart turned in on itself sees everything — including God — through a distorted lens. We become our own judges, our own gods, making the same fatal error as Adam and Eve in the garden, and as the devil, our ancient enemy himself.
7. But, here is the wonder the psalmist sings: the God who set his glory above the heavens (Ps. 8:1) — the God before whom even angels veil their faces — has been thinking about you. Not occasionally or grudgingly. But, tenderly, with the focused care of an artist over his finest work. Notice how David describes creation: not as a cosmic explosion, not as the detached decree of a remote deity, but as intimate craftsmanship — the work of your fingers (Ps. 8:3). The God who flung the stars into place did it with the kind of care a father gives to carving a gift for his child. The logic of the psalm is breathtaking: if this God gives such lavish attention to the moon and the stars, how much more does he give to you, the crown of his creation, the one he made in his own image (Gen. 1:26–27)?
8. And if creation already reveals this love, the incarnation shouts it from every rooftop. God didn’t merely think about mankind from a safe distance. He became one of us. St. Paul says that Jesus the Son of God,“being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing”* (Phil. 2:6–7). He who made the stars with his fingers took on fingers of his own — infant fingers, clutching in a manger, stretched open on a cross. And this is why Psalm 8 found its fullest meaning not in David, but in the Son of David, Jesus Christ.
9. When the author of Hebrews quotes our psalm — “What is man that you are mindful of him?” — he applies it to Jesus (Heb. 2:6–9). Jesus is the true Son of Man who was made, for a little while, lower than the angels. He entered fully into our weakness, our death. He bore our shame so completely that from the cross he cried out with the words of another psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46). The Father’s attention didn’t waver then — but for one dark hour, the weight of all human sin broke the fellowship between them, so that it might be restored forever. The bone God had to pick with sinful humanity, Christ settled with his own bones on the cross — he who is “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh” (cf. Gen. 2:23).
10. Here is where the gospel becomes very personal. God thinks about you because you are in Christ. Through Holy Baptism, you’ve been clothed with Christ (Gal. 3:27), joined to his death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3–5), inscribed with his holy name. When the Father looks at you, he sees his beloved Son. The psalmist’s words — “You have crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5) — are words God now speaks over you, because you are hidden in Christ who is your life (Col. 3:3–4).
11. Every time you remember your Baptism, the finger of God — the same finger that carved the stars — traces his name on your heart again. Every word of absolution that I speak as your Pastor is God himself declaring that you are forgiven, that you are not forgotten, that you are always on God’s mind. Every time you come to the Lord’s Table, you receive the very body and blood of the Son of Man — “Do this in remembrance of me” — which is to say: Remember that God has not forgotten you. He is here. He is present.
12. You are not a Whoville resident too small to matter. You are a child of God, bought at a great cost, crowned in Christ with glory and honor. The Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — went through the whole cost of creation, incarnation, atonement, and resurrection for you. That is how much you matter. That is what God thinks of you.
13. There is one more turn in the psalm, and we dare not miss it. God, who is entirely self-sufficient and self-existent, directs his attention outward — to creation, to mankind, to you — not for his sake, but for yours. And as he thinks of you, he turns you outward too. “Out of the mouth of babes and infants, you have established strength” (Ps. 8:2). Jesus quotes this very verse when the children cry out his praises in the temple and the chief priests object (Matt. 21:15–16). The gospel goes out through small, seemingly powerless vessels — like you. Like the Virgin Mary, who carried the Son of God and went to share the good news with her cousin Elizabeth. Like those first disciples, standing on a mountain in Galilee, commissioned in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit to go and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19).
14. God has turned your eyes outward — away from the mirror of self, toward the faces of your neighbors, your children, the stranger, the suffering one down the street. You were made for this. You are Christ’s Body in this world, and as he was sent, so you are sent (John 20:21). The same God who can’t stop thinking about you calls you to think about others — to carry the good news that the great and majestic God of the universe is obsessed with them, too. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps. 8:1, 9). He made the stars with his fingers. He made you with his heart. And he has been thinking about you — in love, in Christ, forever. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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