Sermon Title: "Searched and Known"
Date: January 18, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Psalm 139:1-6; 13-18

There is little doubt that the 23rd Psalm is the best known and most quoted of the 150 Psalms.  Many of you could recite it from memory.  I recall that’s when I had an MRI of the brain, although I was so distraught by the banging of the machine and the feeling of claustrophobia, that at first I couldn’t even get the verses in order.  After a few attempts, it had a calming effect on me as I gradually got it right and I felt my beating heart slow down to a normal rate.

If the 23rd Psalm is the most familiar, Psalm 139 is also a well-known treasure.  You might not have remembered its number, but I suspect when you heard it read today, you’ve heard the words before.  It sets before us the premise that our God is a God who knows us inwardly and intimately.  It acknowledges that God made us and knew us even while we were in the womb. 

But on a closer reading, I began to ask myself some questions.  Verse 4 declares, “Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.”  Last Monday, as I studied it, I thought back to my prayers of the day before.  I pray first before 6 a.m. every Sunday for those of us involved on leading worship.  At 8:30, I prayed for the opening of the Parish Outreach Commission.  At 9:20, I prayed with the choir before entering worship.  During worship, I prayed six times, five prepared or in unison; the pastoral prayer alone being extemporaneous.  At 11 a.m., I prayed at the beginning of the Worship Commission meeting, and at 11:50, I prayed at its close.  At 12:05, I prayed over the phone in a group conference call with an associate minister candidate.  At 1:30, I prayed for our committee as we closed our meeting.  At 6:30 that evening, I prayed at the bedside of a patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange.  And sometime between 7 and 7:30, I prayed with my family at the dinner table.  By my total, that’s 15 prayers—five prepared, ten spontaneous.

What I wonder is, did God know all the words in prayer that were going to utter forth from my mouth last Sunday, “even before a word is on my tongue”?  I surely depend on the Holy Spirit to inspire and lead my pastoral prayers, which, except for Christmas Eve and Easter, are extemporaneous.  But does God know everything before I say or pray it?

How about verse 17?  Speaking of God knowing our inward parts even as we were being knit together in the womb, the Psalmist then declares:  “In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”  Does God really know how long each of us will live?  What about illness, or a sudden, tragic accident that takes ones life?  If God knows the number of days allotted for us, how far is that from predestination?

Maybe the Psalmist implies that God is like a mother.  Any woman who has carried a child from conception through birth might well say, “I knew you before you were born.”  She might say, “You kicked all the time.  I knew you would be an active child.”  Or of another child, “You were three weeks past due.  I knew you’d always do things in your own good time!”  Even I as pastor have said to dozens of children here, whose mothers I knew when they were pregnant, “I’ve known you since before you were born!”

Sometimes people hear the verses about God’s “wonderful” and complete knowledge as threatening.  Does the image of a God who “hems us in” speak of protection or prohibition?  Does God really know everything we are going to say and do before it happens?  Are our days actually numbered?  If God knows all things in advance, is there any free will for human beings?

It’s all a mystery, the Psalmist says.  God’s thoughts are too weighty for us to grasp.  What we do know is that God is good and wants what is best for us.  God knows our faults and our gifts, and continues to love and care for us.  This frees us to proclaim the good news of God’s goodness and loving care that protect and surround us.  We praise God, though we do not understand everything about God or how God works.

In a novel recommended by several of you, The Shack, the main character Mack has suffered a great tragedy in his family.  He receives a strange summons, believed to be from God, to return to the shack where this tragedy occurred so that Mack and God might meet.  Mack had some issues with God as a result of the tragedy.  Without telling his family, who understandably might think he was crazy, Mack makes his way through the winter snow to this place in the mountains where he had last been four years before.

“He now faced [a] dilemma.  What should you do when you come to the door of a house, or cabin in this case, where God might be?  Should you knock?  Presumably God already knew that Mack was there.  Maybe he ought to simply walk in and introduce himself, but that seemed equally absurd.  And how should he address him?  Should he call him Father, or Almighty One, or perhaps Mr. God, and would it be best if he fell down and worshipped, not that he was really in the mood.”  (William P. Young, The Shack.  Los Angeles:  Windblown Media, 2007, 82.)

As Mack would soon discover, none of those names for God were appropriate, but the premise that the Psalmist sets before us in 139 is that God knows us, God knows our name, God knows what’s going on with us.  And isn’t that what you want?  Don’t you want a God for whom you don’t have to struggle to define your hurt, your confusion, your indecision, even your joys, because God knows.

Over the years of my own prayers, either about personal matters or ones affecting my church or members of the congregation, I have come to believe I don’t need to give God all the background information.  God already knows.  I just need to confess my need for guidance, for help, for discernment in seeking out a solution to the problem.

Psalm 139 confirms, even reassures us, that God already knows us, and in the Psalmist’s eyes, that is a good thing.  It is a psalm about creation, our creation, our own identity within it, and how near God is to it all.  If such nearness of God is uncomfortable or disturbing to you, you need to explore why that might be.

Wrestling with questions of identity and the meaning of life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor and theologian, wrote a poem in prison as he waited to be executed by the Nazis for being part of the Resistance movement.  He ends the poem by asking, “Who am I?  They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.  Whoever I am, thou knowest, O [God], I am thine.” 

While we immerse ourselves in identity politics and divide our communities by labels, whether we are for or against something, setting one group against another, we are reassured by Psalm 139 that we belong to God and that we are intimately and steadfastly loved, with a tender and everlasting love by the One who fashioned us, each in the quiet darkness of our mother’s womb.