The psalm begins and ends with the same line: 1"O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" Everything between those two lines is David working out where that majesty turns up, and he finds it in a surprising place.
He begins where anyone would, looking up. 3"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars," and the question that follows rises almost involuntarily: 4"what is man that you are mindful of him?" The Hebrew word for man in that line, *enosh*, often carries the sense of frailty and mortality. Under a sky that size, the word fits. A creature that fragile has no claim on the attention of the one who set the stars in place.
The answer is the shock of the psalm. 5"Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor." Crowning is a king's vocabulary, and David hands it to the dust-formed creature of verse 4. The dominion in verses 6 through 8, over sheep and oxen, birds and fish, echoes the creation account, where God gives humanity rule over the earth (Genesis 1:26). This glory is an inheritance handed to a creature. Nobody earned it by strength or cleverness. God is mindful of the small, and he has raised them high.
Tucked into verse 2 is a line that is easy to skip: 2"Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes." God's answer to his enemies needs no army. A baby's voice will do. Jesus quotes the line in the temple, when children are shouting praise and the chief priests are furious (Matthew 21:16). The God who crowns dust with glory also silences opponents with the weakest voices available, and his strength was never borrowed from the strength of what he uses.
Hebrews takes the psalm and reads it a second way. The author admits that we do not yet see everything under humanity's feet, since no one watching the news would say people rule creation the way this psalm describes. Then he points to one man: "we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death" (Hebrews 2:9). The order matters. He is made lower first and crowned second, and the crowning comes through the suffering and not around it. Jesus stands at the point where humanity looked least glorious, hanging on a cross, and there the psalm's promise is kept.
So the frailty this psalm names plainly is the shape glory takes. If you feel small under a big sky this morning, or small under a big week, David gives you permission to feel it. The next line of the psalm says that God is mindful of you.
Prayer
Father, when we look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, we feel the smallness David felt, and we thank you that you answer it with mindfulness. Thank you for crowning us with glory we did not earn, and for the Son who was made lower than the angels for our sake. Teach us to trust your strength when it comes through what looks weakest. How majestic is your name in all the earth. In Jesus' name, amen.