The God Who Knows You and Me

The God Who Knows You and Me

Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18
September 9, 2007—Kick-Off Sunday

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I
know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven
in the depths of the earth.
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.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.

There is a story about a small-town prosecuting attorney who was calling his first
witness to the stand in a trial—she was a grandmotherly, elderly woman. He
approached her and asked, “Mrs. Jones, do you know me?” She responded, “Why,
yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I’ve known you since you were a young boy. And
frankly, you’ve been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, you
manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you’re a rising big
shot when you haven’t the brains to realize you never will amount to anything more
than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you.” The lawyer was, of course, stunned. Not
knowing what else to do he pointed across the room and asked, “Mrs. Williams, do you
know the defense attorney?” She again replied, “Why, yes I do. I’ve known Mr. Bradley
since he was a youngster, too. I used to baby-sit him for his parents. And he, too, has
been a real disappointment to me. He’s lazy, bigoted, he has a drinking problem. The
man can’t build a normal relationship with anyone and his law practice is one of the
shoddiest in the entire state. Yes, I know him.” And you can imagine the laughter at
this point, so the, the judge rapped the courtroom to silence with hig gavel and called
both lawyers to the bench. In a very quiet voice, he said with menace, “If either of you
asks her if she knows me, you’ll be jailed for contempt!”

I suspect that is one of the things you sort of live with if you grew up in small town,
right? People know you and they know your sins, your troubles, your struggles, the
things you could hide if you live in a much larger city. Its an odd thing to live so close to
the church, in the parsonage as Douglas and I do, because you realize that people
know who you are even if you don’t know them, something that really wouldn’t be an
issue if I we were still living in Houston or Dallas. Now, there is a good side to that as
well, and I think many of you in this place you can testify to that, because you have
remained here. Because people do know each other in this place, because we can’t
become lost in the anonymity of a large, impersonal city, people come out in droves to
help each other. I was really impressed in the late Spring of 2006, when the Search
Committee of this church and I were still in conversation about me possibly become
your pastor, about how this tiny town rallied around Brian Rogers, the son of Becky
Rogers, who is downstairs teaching Sunday School, how people came out and raised
thousands of dollars to help with his care. And then recently Dennis Nitz became sick
and we rallied again, raising thousands of more dollars to help with his care. That is
something you wouldn’t see in larger cities, at least most cities, and to come here and
see how people know each other, for better or worse, is really something amazing, to
be honest, and there is a good side, despite the Mrs. Jones’s that we have probably all
experienced in places like Coloma—remember, I spent most of my high school years in
Hemphill, Texas, a town about the size of Coloma, so I know!

But that potential to be known, to not get lost in the crowd, to be seen in world that
seems to run at 100 miles an hour—that is something to be treasured, to be valued,
and celebrated, and that is exactly what our psalmist is doing in the reading we heard
moments ago. There is something beautiful about this passage, and I have over the
years suggested it to families who were looking for the right passage to celebrate the
life of a loved who passed on from this side to the eternity to the next. The psalmist,
the writer of this text, really believes that we are known from the inside out, that the
days of our lives are stretched out before God like a great map, where from the
moment of sunrise to sunset, God knows what we will do before we even do it. Our
words, our getting up and our lying down, our everyday moments at the post office, the
book we will read tomorrow, the television show we turned off years ago because it
bored us to tears, the kiss and hug we shared wit those we will share with a loved one
hours from now, on this particular day—each of those is known by God. This is a God
who knows the present, the past, and the future, according to this ancient writer. And
the reason why we are so known, so intimately known is because the One who knows
us is the One who created us, who formed us in our wombs, who loved us before even
our parents did, who amidst the great work of scattering the stars, of molding the
galaxies of the universe, of putting the song in the sparrow, also stopped to attend to
your creation, to my creation—it seems to have mattered to the creator of our galaxy,
to our universe, that you and I were worth paying attention to, when we were in our
mother’s womb. It is a level of intimacy that is sometimes heart-stopping, really, and
maybe even a little uncomfortable, to be known so deeply and so completely.

But I have to ask something, something that has been weighing on me since I’ve been
sitting and mediating with this passage: do we REALLY believe it, that we are known,
that God really does know us intimately, that nothing passes by the Divine gaze without
God being acutely aware of it. I ask that question because I think many of us spend
our lives doing a lot of hiding—we spend our lives hiding from others, emotionally,
sometimes even spiritually, or we spend our times hiding our beliefs and opinions about
this or that issue. We pretend to be people we are not, or to care when we do really do
not care or to not care when we deeply care about what is done to us or said about us.
We put on masks to hid ourselves, our opinions, our emotions, our hearts, sometimes
even our joy, so that we will NOT be known by our friends, our family, strangers even.
And the reason why I think this is a spiritual matter is because some of us even think we
can put on a mask before God, and that somehow that will fool the One who created
both the mask and the one who wears the mask. I’ve often said that salvation is the
moment when we realize that God really does love us, and has been deeply in love with
us even before we were a twinkle in our parent’s eyes. But the problem is that we don’t
live like we are loved by our creator, and so we don’t love as deeply and intimately and
freely as the One who created us, who first loved us. So too I think we often feel talk as
if we believed that God knows us, but we don’t live that way—we moan and groan about
being misunderstood, we think no one knows our pain, our struggles, even our joys—
we live life as if we were alone, and no one got us, understood us, believed in us. In
the end, we humans can only know each other so much, at least on this side of eternity,
there are limits to how deeply we can make a home in each other’s hearts, but there is
no limit, no mask, no moment that you and I are not completely understood, that we are
not embraced, shadows and all—there is not a moment when we are not known, even
to the core of those places we’ve hidden away from the world.

And maybe that is what we are so scared of, why we put on the masks, and pretend to
be people we think people want us to be—that if God and others really knew our secret
sins, our deepest shadows, that we would not be lovable anymore, by either our loved
ones or even God. We believe that lie because we really don’t believe that anyone
could love us if they knew who we really were. And yet, for most of us, we are not as
bad, or sinful as we think we are, but, on the other hand, we are also not as good as we
often credit ourselves as being. We are really a mixture of shadow and light, maybe a
reflection of the creation, the universe, the galaxies, the dust from which we were
created. Still, there are those who challenge us, to be honest, because their souls
seem mostly shadow, if not completely shrouded in deep night. My friend Patricia in
Seattle is a parole officer who once worked in a prison that only dealt with sexual
predators, the worst of the worst when it came to sexual predators, and now she works
with them after they have been released into the community. The stories she would tell
me about them—these men who had spend their lives hiding behind deep masks in
order to prey on innocent people, who seem to say and do everything with a calculation
towards trying to manipulate you…it was hard to hear how dark the human heart can
become, and I know it is really hard on her, my good friend Patricia, to do her work with
these men. So many times these men, and sometimes women, had themselves been
preyed upon as children, and thus the cycle never ceases, the sins of the past being
visited upon the present, the sins of the father being visited upon the children. But
here is the question: does God know these evil men, does God see beyond the masks
of these monsters, is there any light to draw out of hearts so blackened with evil? I can’
t imagine that there isn’t, even if I cannot see it, or we cannot see it, especially if we are
to believe our psalmist this morning. And if God can look at those hearts and souls so
corrupted by sin and meanness and ruthlessness, and still love them, I suspect we too
are loved by the same God who has looked into our less than perfect lives, and loved
us, right where we are.

When I was younger, I used to think that I wanted to be loved by someone who knew
me, who knew me like I knew myself, maybe even more than I knew myself, when I was
good in my better moments, and not so good in my worst—and would still stick around
despite my imperfections, as I would do likewise. I still think that is a good measure of
love, of loving someone in their beauty and ugliness, of remaining present when they
are not as good as they ought to be, and celebrating the moments in our lives when
they are better than we ever thought imaginable. But now I realize that I have always
been loved that way, even before I found the one in my life who has taught me much
about human love, I have always been known as deeply as I had wanted to be known—
and I had been accepted and embraced and loved. Now, that doesn’t mean that God
doesn’t want you or me to work on our shadows, to seek paths in our lives that bring in
more light to our souls and more light into the world, but in the journey towards bringing
that light into our lives, God never gives up on us, and we probably ought not to give
up on each other. You know, this is a God who knows all of our business, as Mrs.
Jones did with the prosecuting and the defense attorneys and is still madly in love with
us. Our passage actually ends with the psalmist being in wonder of this God who
knows us so deeply, this God who thoughts are like grains of sand—uncountable. With
all that knowledge, with all that deep intimate knowledge of us, the good stuff and the
bad stuff, we are still loved, and not despite the fact we are known by God, but because
of it. That truth, that powerful pervasive truth can change our lives, because maybe
then we can get a hint of how God sees us, the whole of us, and then maybe we will
see what God sees, that we are worth loving, and that each of us is worth gambling on,
because of the One who knew the long odds, and still thought it was worth being with
us, right to the end, on the cross, with us until our dying breath. “I try to count them,”
these thoughts of us, and of God, the psalmist writes, “they are more than the sand. I
come to the end—I am still with you.” Amen