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A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From January 15,
2006 Even The Darkness Psalm 139: 1-18 Long before Gameboys and in-car DVD players, it was choppy reception on AM radio that kept my brother and me entertained on long trips to Gramma's house. Horribly prone to carsickness, I couldn't read or do puzzles. Instead, dreamed up questions I hoped would swallow up the miles. The best one, the question that kept the two of us talking the longest was this: if you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? Oreos, my brother would quickly insist. No, hotdogs. Wait, make that watermelon. It was a harder question than it seemed, once you got to thinking about it. In seminary, I posed a grown-up version of that question to my favorite professor. "Of all the books a person would need in ministry, after the Bible which one would you put at the top the list?" Ordinarily gracious, scholarly Dr. Mendiola shot me a death-glare, mumbled something that included the word "ridiculous" and hurried away. This morning, I want to ask you a question in this same vein. If you had to choose just one passage from the Bible to inspire and sustain you for the rest of your life, which would it be? Which passage would you want by your bedside to read every night before turning in? Which one would you want at dawn? Which passage would want close at hand on the best day and the worst day of your life? If you had to choose, which passage would you pick? I know many of you wouldn't hesitate for a minute: your choice would be the 23rd Psalm. Or you might reach for just one very specific and familiar verse. John 3:16, maybe. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." Others of you might say it's John 10:10. "I came that you might have life and have it abundantly." Me? If I could have only one passage to see me through, only one scripture to feast on for the rest of my days, I would choose today's reading, the 139th Psalm. "O Lord, you have searched me and know 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." Every time I read this, I remember a classmate at seminary who made no bones about the fact that a God like this made her feel claustrophobic. It was like she was being stalked by a God who was just a little too possessed with her. "I need breathing room," she boldly insisted. "I need some part of my life that is mine and mine alone." That my classmate found confining and intrusive, I find comforting and intimate. But I can say this because I don't think God has wiretapped my brain. God's not hiding in the bushes with a camera, watching every move I make hoping to catch me doing or thinking something embarrassing or shameful. God's not a member of the paparazzi or the CIA. Quite the opposite. This God is like the perfect lover, the kind who can't enough of you. The God the psalmist describes is like the lover who says you look irresistible as soon as you wake in the morning, who leans over to kiss you even before you've had a chance to brush your teeth. This God knows your schedule, your life, your thoughts, your favorite flower, your worst fear - all of it God knows inside and out and loves you more, not less, because of it. When this God hems us in, to use the psalmist's words, it's not meant as a sting operation, but an opportunity for God to lay a hand upon us. How else could God convey the tenderness and warmth that God feels for us except by reaching out to pull and keep us close? The scope of this intimate love is awesome. It's mind-blowing. This God who wants to lay hands on us has known and loved us long before anyone else ever laid eyes on us. "For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you," sings the psalmist, "for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. My frame was not hidden from you... your eyes beheld my unformed substance." To meditate on the truth that God has been relating to us, gazing into our eyes even before we had eyes or any form at all is to enter into a most marvelous and profound mystery. Imagine this. We have a divine maker, a divine mother who cradled us in her arms before earth ever laid claim to us--before our parents met, before their parents met, and even before their parents met. For anyone who has ever felt like an orphan, even if for an hour, this psalm is a miraculous balm. For anyone who ever thought (or was told) that they were an accident or an afterthought, this psalm is saving. For anyone who has had to grapple with their parents' failures in love or has had to wrestle with the limits of their own parenting, this psalm is a reminder that our ultimate identity is rooted in something besides biology or life circumstance. God held us and loved us and knew us through and through long before we took birth. Nothing less than this defines us. Think of it. The God of all things, the God of power and might, the God of timeless time, the God of divine dimensions undetectable to the human mind, this God seeks intimacy with us on a level so profound that it defies explanation. How is it possible for God to love me before there was a me, to love you before there was a you? How it is possible for God to author a book and create its story line when the players in that story don't yet exist? The psalmist had it right: "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." Even as my heart sings with the joy that comes from knowing that you and I are loved and known more completely than can be fully comprehended, I hear imaginary critics huffing and puffing. "How can you call yourself a Christian minister and have an Old Testament scripture be the one you'd rely on for a lifetime? Where's Jesus? Where's our Savior, God's only begotten Son?" Well, he's there - just not explicitly. Read closely and you'll see the love of God expressed in Christ Jesus is very much a part of this psalm, even if the psalmist did happen to write centuries before the stable or the cross. Listen to the psalmist. "Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there." If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you." Let me ask you: does this not describe the love of God expressed in Christ? Another wisdom teacher might have set up shop in Nazareth and had word sent out that he was ready to receive audiences, guru style. Another healer could have easily perched upon a velvet cushion and held out a bony finger when the ailing shuffled in search of restoration. Jesus could have insisted that those who needed him seek him out. But he didn't. He chose to leave everything behind to go where we were, to find us. And when he caught up with us, he followed our lead and traveled with us into the heights and depths of our human experience. And those depths, no matter how dark or dreadful, no matter how depressing or seemingly demonic, those depths never got the better of him. He never flinched, never turned back, never abandoned us. The darkest of the dark corners of life were not too much for him, not even when humanity's shadow swallowed him up and put him in a pitch black tomb. Reflect on Christ's life as you listen to the psalmist's describe God. "Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you." Clearly Jesus had his father's eyes. Eyes he uses all the time as he leads me though my inner darkness. Eyes he uses as he leads you and me through the black nights that threaten to overtake the human family: famine and flood, poverty and holocaust, violence and indifference. I trust those eyes. Those eyes that see into my darkness, into the world's darkness, eyes that even there, even there, find the light. Light that he then works to help us see and then send out into the world. Not for his sake but for ours. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
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