2018-06-04
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
So, God knows everything about us! There’s nothing about you and me that God doesn’t know inside and out! On first glance, it may seem to be an unmitigated blessing that God knows us as intimately as this astonishing Psalm (139) says God knows us. When I chose this psalm, weeks ago, as the focus of today’s worship, I thought, “What a comforting word from God. Let’s explore it.”
As I started to live with the psalm this week, though, I began to wonder if it was as much of a blessing as my first impression had led me to believe. Is it really a plus that God knows our every thought? If you’re like me, not every thought that goes through your head is the holiest and loftiest thought ever. The other day, for example, I lost a tiny little part on my Fitbit tracker, which keeps track of my daily steps, and I fretted that the newly-exposed rough edge might rip my pants. I swear I can obsess about the most minute details. And I’m not sure I want anyone, least of all God, to be privy to all that trivia.
And it’s not just the trivia that I’m afraid of others knowing. I confess to harboring some unkind thoughts, as well. I may or may not have thought harsh things, for example, about the Golden State Warriors in their NBA Finals appearance against the Cavs the other night. If I did do that—and I’m not saying one way or the other—I’m not sure I’d want God knowing that.
Many of us can be judgmental, can’t we, and it’s probably not our best feature. We look at the way someone eats or speaks or looks or dresses; we hear their opinion about a social or political issue; we engage with a store keeper or medical professional or preacher; and inside we are all over that person: “Can you believe what she said?” “What a nincompoop!” Or as a relative of mine in Maine used to say, “He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.” Maybe you have your own version of that sort of dismissal—that somebody’s “a few threads short of a sweater”; “a few sandwiches short of a picnic”; “a few fries short of a Happy Meal.” We may not want anyone, least of all God, to know how hypercritical we can be.
It’s not just the trivia and the criticism we’d rather keep quiet, either. Maybe you’ve indulged in that form of comeuppance perfectly described by the German word “Schadenfreude”—when you have just a touch of gladness at someone else’s failure, when someone else’s misfortune is strangely satisfying. Maybe your boss spills coffee on his tie, or your self-righteous co-worker has a fender-bender, or your neighbor’s apparently perfect child makes a massive blunder, and all you want to do is laugh. This pleasure, too, that we feel at others’ failures we may not want anyone, especially God, to know about.
And then there are the deeper and more troubling parts of ourselves. Maybe you have a consuming envy of a friend or sibling or competitor in your field. Maybe opioids or alcohol or porn has gotten the better of you, and you can’t bear to have anyone know it. Maybe you harbor a deep hatred for a neighbor or relative or public figure. In many cases, we’re ashamed of these shadowy parts of ourselves. If we could pretend they weren’t there, we would.
So what’s it like to hear the words of this psalm? What’s it like to know that God does, indeed, know the thoughts of our hearts, that, in Eugene Peterson’s version of this psalm, we’re “an open book” to God, that we’re never “out of [God’s] sight,” that “even from a distance, [God] knows what [we’re] thinking” (139:2-3, The Message)?
There can be something colossally sobering about confronting this intimate knowledge God has of us. Our fears? God knows. Our small-mindedness and hatred? God knows. Our self-obsession, our desire to feather our own nests, our indifference to the suffering of others? God knows it all. God doesn’t just know it. God knows it better than we know it ourselves: “God, you have searched me and known me” (139:2). From one angle, it may be a horrifying thought: God knows me at my worst.
Not only does the psalmist says that God knows everything about us, all our warts and virtues and everything in between. This same poet apparently adds to the discomfort when he or she says to God, “You hem me in, behind and before” (139:5), and once again we wonder: is this is a good thing? In what way might it be a blessing to be hemmed in? God knows everything? God hems us in? I don’t think so. Thanks, but no thanks.
And at the same time, what is the psalmist’s verdict on all this? “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me” (139:6). Hard as all this may seem from one angle, from another angle this intimate way we’re known by God is sheer joy. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (139:14). Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it: “I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation!” And this knowledge God has of us is such an incredible gift because it is not the kind of knowledge discovered by a private investigator looking for dirt on us. It’s the kind of knowledge that comes from the most intimate and sustaining kind of relationship. It’s not investigation and verdicts that are the key. It’s connection and affection.
It’s pretty easy to imagine someone digging through your proverbial trash to find out something about you in order to hurt you and expose you. This is not, though, what the psalmist thinks God is doing. No, for the psalmist, this God is an utterly trustworthy partner in life. What God knows about us God knows by way of affection. It’s knowledge not for prosecution but for support and fondness and forgiveness.
Here’s what I want you to imagine, or remember. Maybe there’s someone in your life who has always believed in you. Maybe it was your mother or father, or a teacher, or a grandparent, or a spouse or a sibling. Maybe it was a mentor or a therapist or a 12-step sponsor. If you’ve never had anyone in your life like that, I invite you to imagine it. This is the person who, when you break the crystal vase, hugs you and tells you it will be OK. This is the person who, when you when you finally say aloud that you’re an alcoholic, says “I get it.” This is the person who, when you first dare to say you’re gay, says, “I’m glad for you.” No dismissal, no fiery rebuke, no withheld love. Just affection. Just embrace. Just grace.
This, says the psalmist, is how God is with you and me. This is not to say that we never do anything wrong, or that anything goes, or that there is never any need for us to change our ways. Far from it. God wants us to stop the actions and habits that hurt others and maintain our own privilege and abuse the earth. It’s just that that insistence on doing what’s right and good comes not from a place of judgment, but rather from a place of deepest delighting.
And when we take that in, we operate in an entirely different way than if we think we always have to be on the defensive, guarding our secrets with everything we have because we don’t dare show any weakness or vulnerability. I once had a colleague in ministry, Robin Carden, who used to say she was happy when she made her first mistake of the day—which usually happened, she said, before breakfast—because that was her first opportunity to confess and to know the grace of the God who wanted the best from her, but who also delighted in her no matter what she did.
Toby Cosgrove, the recently retired CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, gave a commencement address at Case Western Reserve University this spring in which he told the graduates how important failure is in our development as human beings. In 99% of his heart surgeries, he was successful. But it was the 1% of failed surgeries from which he learned the most. Failure, he said, “provides an opportunity to admit defeat, to learn and to advance.” If we’re not willing to risk failure, he said, we never take the chances we need to take, we never learn and grow, we never discover the richness of new truths (The Plain Dealer, May 27, 2018, p. E2). But this freedom to fail and our ability to learn from it, we might add to what Cosgrove said, can only happen in an atmosphere in which we know we’re not going to be squashed. In order to be willing to fail, we need a space of acceptance and forgiveness.
One of the compelling images of this magnificent psalm is one I had frankly paid little attention to before. “You . . . lay your hand upon me” (139:5), says the psalmist to God. And I’m guessing that there are some here who have an understandable ambivalence about the sense of touch. If you have been abused by someone you loved, you know how badly that sense can be misused. Touch can be the source of deep pain.
Touch, though, has the power to hurt precisely because it can also be such a healing and grace-filled act. When I had my prostate biopsied a little over a year ago, the doctor came in and did the procedure with not even a word to me, and I remember feeling like the object of an experiment. When the procedure was finished, though, he came around the table, and bent low so he could talk directly to me. He told me it had gone well. Then he looked into my eyes, laid his hand on my knee and wished me well. And that single touch had more healing power than almost any procedure he could have done. It gave me a deep sense of peace.
If Mary takes my hand when I’m anxious, it has an instantaneous soothing power. When I have the chance to hug our sons and daughter-in-law, it fills me with joy. And when I touch the little feet or stroke the pudgy arm or kiss the crown of the head of our granddaughter Allie, I’m transported to a place that I can only imagine must be a slice of heaven.
This is something like the touch of God’s hand. It’s the tender touch of one who adores us, one who revels in our very being. And it’s the touch, too—like a hand at the small of our back—that guides us to where we ought to go. The deepest truth, the truth of this fabulous communion meal, is that God knows and loves us as we are. As we eat the bread and share the cup, may we be freed to live a kind of joyful life, ready to extend God’s affection to everyone we meet, ready to fill the world with kindness and justice, ready to be agents of God’s acceptance and grace. May it always be so.