By Peter Lockhart based on Psalm 139
I want you invite you to think for a moment about the people
that you know.
Who do you think knows you the
best of all?
It may be your best friend.
It may be a sister or brother.
Maybe it’s your spouse.
Or maybe it’s one of your parents.
How long have they known you?
What secrets do you share with them?
What secrets do you keep from them?
How will do you think they really know you?
Do they know everything?
I know when I think about the most intimate relationships
that I have there are still things that the other person does not know about
me. Things that they do not see about,
feelings I have that I do not share. Thoughts
that I keep to myself. The same is true for all of us. No one knows us or anyone else perfectly.
Yet, these intimate friendships are so important to us
because we feel that when others know us, and more importantly love us, it
affirms our very existence.
In Psalm 139 we hear a strange and mysterious message that
God knows us in a way that no other person does or can. We hear that God is acquainted with all of our
ways, God sees through the barriers we construct and the personas with put on.
God knows us. And it
is an incredibly intimate knowledge.
The word in Hebrew for know that is used here is the same
word that is used in Genesis 4 when we read that Adam knew Eve and conceived
and bore a son.
God knows you and I intimately, personally, lovingly and in
being known by God in this way there is a wonderful affirmation for each one of
us that we matter in our life and that we matter in our existence.
For many people this notion that God knows us so thoroughly
can be more than a little confronting, for we know ourselves and the darkness
we hide from others, and the dark thoughts that beset our minds.
Yet, the promise of the Psalm is that “even the darkness is
not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to
you.”
God sees beyond the darkness that we might perceive within
ourselves and others, and in God’s knowing of us in this intensely intimate and
personal way God continues to love us.
Despite this intensity of the intimacy describe in the words
of the Psalmist there is a paradox, an irony even, and this Psalmist knows this
too well:
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is so high that I cannot attain it.
The experience of the intensity of God’s knowing of us is
beyond the Psalmist, so high he cannot attain it. To return to the story that we heard from
Genesis at the beginning of the service, this conundrum is express in Jacob’s
words:
You were in this
place, but I never knew.
I sometimes wonder whether it is our inability to connect
with this God who knows us so well that is the cause of so much pain and
anguish in the world. Feeling
disconnected from the intimacy of God’s embrace we become anxious about our own
identity and anxious about the world and the people around us.
In this state of feeling anonymous our anxiety causes us to
turn away from God and so also each other.
The message of Jesus presence in the world comes to us as
God’s way of reaffirming us and confirms the fact God knows us so well. Through the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus God goes beyond the darkness we experience and perpetuate and draws into
the intimacy of God’s own life through the power of the Holy Spirit.
In his letter to the Romans Paul meditates on this reality
reminding the early Christians, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are
children of God.”
Of course like the Psalmist there is a grounded realism in
Paul’s meditation as he too declares:
Now hope that is seen is not hope.
For who hopes for what is seen?
But if we hope for what we do not see,
we wait for it with patience.
As Christian people we hope for what we do not see: the
perfection not simply of our personal relationship with God in which we
discover and experience the full weight of God’s love, but that very same
renewal for all things and all people.
In this matter we need to be reminded that our relationship
with God is intensely personal but it is not private. The intimacy God has with each of us God desires
and has with all people and all things.
So it is that Paul describes the creation groaning in
longing for the fulfilment of God’s loving promises and we too groan as we
wait: our hearts break as we wait.
Our hearts break as we hear of children killed in the
conflict between Palestine and Israel.
Our hearts break as we see the images of the airplane
wreckage in the Ukraine.
Our hearts break as we read about the millions of Syrian
refugees.
Our hearts break as we wonder about asylum seekers and their
children in limbo on the high seas.
Our hearts break as we hear of the breakdown of
relationships and the terrible blight of family violence in our Australian
culture.
And our hearts break as we hear bad news again and again and
again and we groan with longing for the promises of God to be fulfilled.
It is more than a little difficult to be patient in the face
of such disasters. The Psalms are always
gritty and honest and in Psalm 139 we hear the Psalmist cry out in frustration:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the
bloodthirsty would depart from me
It can be more than a little difficult to be a people of
hope and love, yet this is what we are called to be. We are reminded week by week in this place the
intensely personal and intimate way God knows us and loves all things. It is in these reminders that we can long to
be transformed into people who do not want to respond to violence with violence
but with love.
The reality though is this: we hope in what we cannot see,
and even in what we do not fully experience for ourselves: that God knows us,
that loves us so deeply, that in Christ God has renewed all things and that
through the Spirit we have been drawn into God’s life together.
Know and believe this good news: you are known intimately and
you are loved deeply. Amen.
I stumbled onto your blog as I stumble onto most Internet things, with Google! What would we do without it!!?? We're working through a Faith and Science series in Sunday School and I found this piece the perfect antidote to our scientific quest of reductionism - reducing life to atoms, molecules, and brain synapses. This is why science, as fascinating and important as it is, doesn't give us answers to real questions that we ask - no love!
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