University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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7.  "Oh, The Places God Goes"
a sermon preached for University Presbyterian Church, Chapel Hill
by Anna Pinckney Straight
July 18, 2010

Psalms 139

 1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.
5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"
12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
18 I try to count them--they are more than the sand; I come to the end--I am still with you.

19 O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
20 those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
22 I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies. 

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.
24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

It, this Psalm, Psalm 139, starts with a proclamation of truth.  A statement of faith, of what the Psalmist believes. 

God.  You know me.  You know when I sit down.  You know what I am going to say before I even before my brain sends the impulse to my tongue. 

What does it mean to be known by God?    To be loved by God.  To be knitted together in love?   Wonderfully and fearfully made.    Or as another translation suggests, "to be awesomely distinguished."[1]

What does it mean to have our inward parts known and knit together by God?  The more accurate translation of the inward parts found in our NRSV Bibles is "kidneys."   God formed our kidneys.  The kidneys, seen in Biblical times as the "seat of feelings and reactions,...  disposition."[2]

God is with us.  God knows us.  Completely and intimately.

It's not the kind of knowing described in the movie The Truman Show[3], where a man spends his life unknowingly participating in a reality TV show, having every move watched by millions.

It's not the kind of knowing like in the book "The Runaway Bunny" where the little bunny talks of running away only to have his mother tell him that if he becomes a fish she will become the fisherman who catches him, or if he becomes a sailboat she will become the wind that blows him where she wants.[4]

It's a different kind of knowing, presence, and love, entirely.

God is with us.  God knows us.  We have nothing to fear, we are known intimately and completely.  The words of the Psalmist speak to community.  To presence.  To knowledge.  Not expectation or obligation or duty, but love.  And knowledge.

There is no place we can go where God is not. 

There is no emotion we can feel that God has not already felt.

There's no point in sweeping the dust under the rug.  There's nothing to be gained by hiding the truth, maintaining a bluff, or pretending that you can keep what's inside of you a secret. 

God knows us. 

And the Good News?

God still loves us.  God is still with us, and invite us to be with God.  Completely.  Totally.

We're not loved by God in the abstract, God knows us , each and every part of us, and chooses to love us still.

Psalm 139 starts with a proclamation of truth.  A statement of faith, of what the Psalmist believes. 

Of course, it doesn't stop there. 

There's the matter of verses 19-22.  The part where the Psalmist asks God to kill the wicked, and declares his hate for those who hate God.

It may be of interest to know that the lectionary leaves those verses out. 

And the Psalm flows better without them. 

Our lives would flow better (wouldn't they?), if we didn't have the difficult parts.  The unpleasant parts.  The injustice.  The wars.  The embarrassments.

The Psalm may flow better, but it wouldn't be true without these verses.  For Psalms are not about the imaginary life of faith, they are about the life of faith, full of sin and forgiveness.  Repairing someone else's roof and needing a helping hand.

Gene Rice writes:[5]

These words blemish the charm of the Psalm. But one has only to recall the intolerance, the injustice, the oppression, the violence practiced with religious  sanction to realize that this passionate, self-righteous outburst of the Psalmist is also a fact of spiritual experience. While most of us censor this aspect of our spiritual pilgrimage, the Psalmist had the honesty and courage to admit and include it....  Genuine commitment to God entails an abhorrence to and intolerance of evil....  The spiritual life is not lived apart from other life, but in its midst.

In its midst.

Melissa Tidwell writes[6],

The generations of Jews that assembled the Psalter were comfortable with opposing voices in scripture. They understood how it is possible one day to affirm that the wicked will die, but on another day to admit ruefully that the wicked prosper. One moment a psalm may reawaken an experience of God as angry, and we are reminded of the need to have proper reverence for God; but in another moment, another experience, we know God as tender and full of mercy. We moderns sometimes resist these opposing voices. We call it inconsistency. We think we want consistency, resolution, certainty. But what the Bible gives us is another voice, another chance to see God as God is -- not a static entity, but a vast, dynamic reality whom we can only comprehend indirectly, in mystery, poetry, and paradox."

It is tempting to do what the lectionary does.  Leave out the unpleasant middle part.  But that leaves out part of the story.  Our story.  And if we accept, embrace, are thankful for being known by God, then that means we can't edit our story to make it more palatable. 

It is the mixture of truth and grace that propels us forward into what God has in store.  Being known by God is a signpost on the journey of faith, not a point of diversion.  For what comes next in the Psalm, after the Psalmist has opened his heart?

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.  See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Search me, God.  Know me, God.   Lead me, God.

It is a reminder.  God knows us.  We are not abandoned by God in our lowest valleys.  We are not more loved when we are on our highest peaks.  We travel with God on all the steps-high, low, and in-between.

And God not only comes to us, we are called to go to God.  To go to the places where God has been before.  To remember that our call is not to ask God to bless where we are going-we are called to go where God is blessing.

As Dr. Seuss wrote, "You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?"[7]

And faith says, "yes."  We dare to go.  Because wherever God calls us, God has gone first.  God goes before us, behind us, beside us, around us. 

The places God goes, God calls us to go, too.

Being known isn't the end point of faith, it is what propels us forward, confident that we do not go alone, and we need not be afraid to fail (or succeed), and that the only true failure is giving up on the vision God has for us and for this world.

Jon Acuff, in his online journal entitled, "Stuff Christians Like,' wrote this entry in April of 2009:[8] 

I don't want to brag, but I'm pretty awesome at applying band-aids. And make no mistake, there is an art. Because if you go too quickly and unpeel them the wrong way, they stick to themselves and you end up with a wadded up useless mess instead of the Little Mermaid festooned bandage your daughter so desperately wants to apply to a boo boo that may in fact be 100% fictional.

Half of the injuries I treat at the Acuff house are invisible or simply wounds of sympathy. My oldest daughter will scrape her knee and my 3-year old, realizing the band aid box is open will say, "Yo dad, I'd like to get in on that too. What do you say we put one on, I don't know, my ankle. Yeah, my ankle, let's pretend that's hurt."

But sometimes the cuts are real, like the day my 5-year old got a scrape on her face playing in the front yard. I rushed in the house and returned with a princess bandage. As I bent down to apply it to her forehead, her eyes filled up with tears and she shrunk back from me.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I don't want to wear that band-aid." She replied.

"Why? You have a cut, you need a band-aid." I said.

"I'll look silly." She answered.

Other than her sister and her mom, there was no one else in the yard. None of her friends were over, cars were not streaming passed our house and watching us play, the world was pretty empty at that moment. But for the first time I can remember, she felt shame. She had discovered shame. Somewhere, some how, this little 5 year old had learned to be afraid of looking silly.

If I was smarter, if I had been better prepared for the transition from little toddler to little girl, I might have asked her this: "Who told you that you were silly?"

I didn't, though. That question didn't bloom in my head until much later and I didn't understand it until I saw God ask a similar question in Genesis 3:11.

To me, this is one of the saddest and most profoundly beautiful verses in the entire Bible....  He [God] appears and asks them a simple question: "Who told you that you were naked?"

There is hurt in God's voice as He asks this question, but there is also a deep sadness, the sense of a father holding a daughter that has for the first time ever, wrapped herself in shame.

Who told you that you were not enough?

Who told you that I didn't love you?

Who told you that there was something outside of me you needed?

Who told you that you were ugly?

Who told you that your dream was foolish?

Who told you that you would never have a child?

Who told you that you would never be a father?

Who told you that you weren't a good mother?

Who told you that without a job you aren't worth anything?

Who told you that you'll never know love again?

Who told you that this was all there is?

Who told you that you were naked?

I don't know when you discovered shame.

I don't know when you discovered that there were people that might think you are silly or dumb or not a good writer or a husband or a friend. I don't know what lies you've been told by other people or maybe even by yourself.

But in response to what you are hearing from everyone else, God is still asking the question, "Who told you that you were naked?" And He's still asking us that question because we are not.

In Christ we are not worthless.

In Christ we are not hopeless.

In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.

In Christ we are not naked.

With God we are not naked.  We are known.  Completely. Fully.  You.  Me.  Us.  Them.  From before we are born through each of our days.  We are known.  We are loved. We are called to recognize God in our midst and God calling us to go and be disciples in the world.

It doesn't make life perfect or wound free,  it allows our lives to be lived with human faithfulness, known by God, to live that love in a way that shares-so that those to whom love is a stranger, we can be generous friends.

It allows us to be led in the ways of God, towards the way everlasting.  God's Way.

So says the Psalmist.

Amen.  Amen.

[1] C. John Collins, "Psalm 139:14, ‘Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," Presbyterion: Covenant Seminary Review 25/2, 1999,  page 116.

[2] Booij, Th., "Psalm CXXXIX: Text, Syntax, Meaning," Vetus Testamentum, 2005, page 6. 

[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/trivia 

[4]  http://drbristow.blogspot.com/2006/07/runaway-bunny.html

http://www.amazon.com/Runaway-Bunny-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0060775823/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

[5] Gene Rice, "Psalm 139: A Diary of the Inward Odyssey," Journal of Religious Thought,  37 no. 2 Fall-Wint 1980-1981, pages 66-67.

[6] http://www.upperroom.org/alivenow/2003/julaug/editor.asp?week=1&itemid=129714

[7] http://www.mit.edu/people/adorai/seuss/seussboy.html

http://www.amazon.com/Oh-Places-Youll-Dr-Seuss/dp/0679805273/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279461994&sr=1-5

[8] http://stuffchristianslike.net/2009/04/512-thinking-youre-naked/