Sermon:  "O Lord, You Know Me"
Date:   July 17, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24

Psalm 139 was my mother’s favorite Psalm.  I knew that for a long time, but I never thought to ask her why it was her favorite.  So I was not surprised when I looked at her instructions for her memorial service when she died in 2006 that she requested Psalm 139 be read, “especially the last two verses.”  She had taken a community college course 30 years earlier in 1976 on “Death and Dying,” and one of the assignments was to plan your own funeral or memorial service.  That was a great blessing for us as a family, as it is any time for me as a pastor, when someone has specified in advance how they wish to be remembered.

When I saw that Psalm 139 was the suggested psalter reading for this Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, I thought it would be worth taking a look at this most personal of psalms.  The very first word of the psalm is the divine name “Yahweh,”—interpreted here as “Lord”—and the first word of verse 2 is the emphatic Hebrew pronoun “you.”  What really matters to the psalmist is that the divine “you” knows “me.”  Four of the seven occurrences of the word “know” are in the first six verses, and “search” and “know” recur in verse 23, indicating that the author desires to be and is fully known by God.  One commentator on the psalms wrote:  “From beginning to end it is ‘I’ and ‘you.’”

The psalmist emphatically declares that God knows when he sits down and when he rises up.  God knows his thoughts.  Even before he speaks, God knows what he will say.

Do you want to know how I apply that to my own life?  When I’m saying my personal prayers—prayers for persons in our congregation who need healing, prayers for tough situations that I or someone else might be involved in—I don’t feel I need to give some flowery introduction or explanation to God.  God knows who’s sick.  God already knows the situation for which I’m praying.  I believe in an omniscient—all-knowledgeable—God.  But I don’t skip the prayers because God already knows; thus, I don’t need to express my concerns.  Nor do I think reading the blue prayer cards on Sunday is useless.  We’re saying to God, “You can count on us to be concerned about that person or that situation.”  And that is where those for whom we pray derive relief, when they hear they are being prayed for by others. 

Now any linking of the fact that God already knows what I’m going to pray with the doctrine of predestination will inevitably be misleading if this doctrine is heard in the classical sense.  However, the word predestination may be applied to Psalm 139 if it is understood as an affirmation that our lives derive from God, belong to God, and find their true destination in God’s purposes.  In Romans, the Apostle Paul suggests that to be “predestined” means essentially that nothing “in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:39)  While the psalmist was obviously not directing his message through Jesus Christ as Paul was, the psalmist knew essentially the same good news about God.

Verses 7 through 12 can be interpreted in two distinct, yet differing, ways.  Is the psalmist asserting that he would like to hide from God who knows him so dangerously well, yet acknowledging that wherever he might go, God is already there?  Or is he marveling at God’s caring presence, no matter what the circumstances of his life?  Either way, God is ever-present to the psalmist, wherever he may be.  And in God’s presence we can always find safe refuge, whatever confusion, crises, despair we may find ourselves in. 

In the beautiful cadence of the King James Version, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”  From the beginning of the Bible, the word “spirit” is a way of indicating God’s presence.  The mention of “heaven…morning…sea” all recall God’s creative activity.  While this section of the psalm is often construed as a statement of God’s omnipresence, the crucial thing for the psalmist is that God’s presence is inescapable.

It was somehow appropriate that as I sat eating lunch last Friday, in the current The Christian Century (7/12/11) I came across this poem (Aeropagus) that speaks to our inescapable God.  Tania Runyan, from her collection in progress on Paul and his letters, writes:

There is no waking without him.

The creases in your sheets remind you

his job is to mess with your life.  He stalks you

into the kitchen where the coffee splashes your hand

then flings you to the cold baptism of the faucet.

No, you will not forget him when he swerves you to the edge

of the snow bank and overrides your heartbeat,

when he hunts you down with “morning by morning

new mercies I see,” the rhythm cutting

your thoughts like a blender’s metallic pulse.

You wish he never knew that sometimes

you want to grip a god you can leave behind,

the cool bronze calves of a statue

you can visit in a temple down the street,

a straight-faced fellow happy with an offering

of a charred bird or two.  You could finally be alone

with your luxurious fears, escape into the woods

without his breath blowing the leaves into your path,

the expectant open fields of his hands

waiting for you to swipe in your crumbs.

This is a provocative notion, this bothersome God who just won’t leave you alone, who’s always there, whether you remember or acknowledge or not.  It’s rather like the old insurance ad on television.  Do you remember?  “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”

In the concluding two verses, the ones my mother specifically requested be used at her service, Psalm 139 ends much as it begins, with the words “search” and “know” and now “test.”  God amazes (and likely frightens) the psalmist, but he ends up inviting God to do what God already has been doing all of his life.  Having been searched, he wants to be continually searched.  Having been known, he wants to be continually known.  Having been seen, he wants to be continually seen.  Having experienced God’s leading, the psalmist wants to be continually led, much as the divine Shepherd in Psalm 23 leads the psalmist in right paths.  This required a lot of confidence in God.  

Dare we believe that God will do in our lives what God did in the psalmist’s?  God already knows us better than we know ourselves.  Yet, do we trust God enough to invite God to search, know, and test us, to see if there is any wicked, hurtful way in us?  God will do that, forgiving us and transforming us through Jesus Christ, leading us in the way everlasting.