“O God You Have Searched me and Known Me” (part 2) Psalm 139:13-18

A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

August 3, 2008

Last week I when I began this series on Psalm 139, I shared with you that my ruminations began with an old bible and a pad of paper sitting on the porch of my family’s cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Just inside the cabin, hanging on the wall is the Taylor family crest, the coat of arms for the Taylor family. On it  you will find the lion of St. Mark’s;  the Latin words  "nil sine deo"- meaning "nothing without God".  You will see the icon of a bible with the words, “search the scriptures”, and above it all, an eye, representing the divine eye. Divine eye you say, never heard of it? Well maybe you have seen the divine eye and didn’t realize it. If you have a dollar bill take it out and you will find the symbol of the divine eye suspended over a pyramid. In most all of the world religions and certainly in our Judeo-Christian tradition, the eye represents the  all-seeing God who searches the human heart. And the highest goal of the spiritual life is to learn to look upon all things through the Divine Eye, seeing them as God sees them.  At one end of Psalm 139, the psalmist says in verse one: O God you have searched me and known me. And in the last verse the Psalmist says, Search me O God and know my heart. And in between  the beginning and end of this psalm are these verses, 13-18. If you would like to, open your pew Bible to Psalm 139 and let us see what we can see, verse by verse.  The Spirit of  Jesus, our Rabbi is here, the  one who healed the blind of their physical and spiritual blindness, is here and he says to us, She who has eyes, let her see!

The Psalmist acclaims the Creator God You created my inward parts.  You could translate inward parts. One translation put this as kidneys.  According to the body language of the ancient Hebrews, the kidneys or inward parts were the seat of our deepest affections and loyalties, residence of  truths that live in our guts- as it were.  The Psalmist proclaims that through and through to the core of my being. I am made by god and belong to God. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. Interesting metaphor of knitting that the Psalmist repeats. Now I might have expected the Psalmist to employ the metaphor of God being a potter shaping the clay which is used in several other places in scripture. But no, God is portrayed as a weaver, knitting together human life. In either case, as potter or as weaver, the Psalmist believes that God is an artist and you, well you are a work of art!  Now instead of thinking of God as this gray bearded grandfather type sitting in the clouds, we can think of God as the Guatemalan campesina  sitting in front of her adobe house or in the marketplace. She is wearing the beautiful multi-colored stitch clothing that her mother knit for her. And she  herself is weaving a dress for her new baby girl strapped on her back.  

I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works that I know very well.  Here the Psalmist surveys the wonder of the human body and steps back in awe and  gratitude. We take the body so for granted don’t we?. We live inside of this awesome, fragile gift of our bodies that every second carry out millions of life-saving transactions on our behalf. Consider the human eye: some 450 million years ago cells began to coalesce in tiny microscopic sea creatures that have led to this amazing instrument: the human eye. I wish we had here my best friend in seminary, a brilliant OT scholar who left seminary after two years to become eventually an eye surgeon. I wish Steve could give us his testimony about the reality of the human eye. Steve could explain to us just how is the eye able to distinguish depth, color and shape all at once.  Steve could describe the amazing journey of light that travels through the pupil which automatically regulates the amount of light that the eye can receive. The light hits a panel of cells called the retina which converts the light to a signal that is sent along the optic nerve to the brain. And we see! The writer Mark Gerzon joins the Psalmist in proclaiming the wonder of the human body, especially when we are not completely well.  I quote:“ Our bodies can be our wisest teachers, our most enlightened gurus. Perhaps it is a headache or backache, slumping shoulders or chest pain, failing eye or constipated bowels. Almost always hidden in the wounds of our body is something that will enrich and deepen our lives. Your body ultimately knows itself far better than any other person can. In its cells have been stored every experience that has ever happened to you since before you were born. It knows more about you than your own mother, more about you even than your own mind. Our bodies will teach us more than we can imagine, if only we will listen.” How do we as Christians reclaim the all important reality of the body in our spirituality, in our way of understanding our existence? How do we become better stewards of our body? These are worthy questions for on-going conversation within the Christian community.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret intricately woven in the depths of the earth. The Weaver image for the Creator is again invoked but this time the weaving is occurring in the depths of the earth. What’s that about I wonder. The depths of the earth could be a metaphor for the womb or it could be that your birth,  your coming into being hearkens back to the original moment of creation, when humankind was formed from the earth, male and female God created them. And God saw everything that God had made and it was good. It was so very good. All questions of identity for the Christian ultimately lead us back to the foundation of Christian spirituality, our faith in the goodness of God’s creation. We are made from earth, for that is what Adam means, of the earth. And we are made in the image of God. This is the divine wellspring of goodness that flows from deep within us, washing over the totality of who we are, our psyche, our emotions, the goodness of our body.   But let’s go a little deeper: Why would the Psalmist  link the birth of the individual human being to the creation of humankind? To answer that question we have to think about the whole question of human identity. Are we simply isolated individuals or is each one of us fundamentally related at the core of our being to the entire human story? Each of us is so much more than the profile of our present circumstances. We are a part of a story that is unfolding in human history that embraces the whole human family from beginning to end.  

One of these days I am going to do that National Geographic program where you send  in your DNA as a genetic sample in a dab of your salvia. Then National Geographic will run a genetic history, tracing the path of your ancestors back for millennia, all the way to our primeval origins in Africa. Perhaps the geneticist, the anthropologist, the historian and the theologian might all agree that the whole of human history is present in each one of us.  Not just the abstract whole of history, but the history of your family is present in you in ways that you can know and in ways that we can never know. For me the writer Wendell berry says it best when he writes. “ the man who was my grandfather is present in me as I felt his father was present in him. You work your way down or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present until you come to the beginning”.  There is in each one of us a story that is being written in our lives that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve and all the way forward to the end of time. All of history is present in us now. All those grandfathers and grandmothers are in each of us.  In this sense Psalm 139 invites us to work our way back into our family histories, going down into the archaeology of our origins, the depths of the earth, going into the past which is always the interior of the present.  

Your eyes beheld my limbs, all my days were written in your book they were fashioned day by day when as yet there were none of them.  These last few lines caught my eye because I know that John Calvin or any old school Presbyterian might have a field day with this verse: here is the text that proves the doctrine of predestination. It seems odd to me that Presbyterians are still associated in the popular mind with this idea of  pre-destination: that God has pre-determined the ultimate fate people for salvation or condemnation.  I am not sure that even Calvin believed that and I know I don’t.  If pre-destination means that everything is fixed and orchestrated by the divine will for good or ill and I am only playing out a passive role then I reject that the notion of pre-destination. Pre-destination understood this way strips humankind of our freedom and responsibility and represents a cruel and arbitrary god not worthy to be worshipped. But what does it mean when the Psalmist says all my days were written in your book they were fashioned day by day when as yet there were none of them. I believe the Psalmist is saying to each one of us that we have a destiny, a calling, a purpose that predates our very existence and informs every one of our days given to us. Our lives are derived from God, belong to God, and find their true destiny in God’s purposes for us. We are made in the image of the Creator God and our highest calling as human beings is to be co-creators with the Living God. If God is like the old woman-weaver weaving a beautiful fabric from human existence, then we are called to be her apprentice, to learn the art of weaving something beautiful from each day that we are given.   

Vs. 17: How deep I find your thoughts O God. How great is the sum of them. If I were to count them they would be more in number than the sand. To count them all my life span would be like yours. When I awake, I am still with thee. When I awake, I am still with thee. It almost sounds like the Psalmist grew weary from counting the thoughts of God and fell asleep. And of course the ancients of the bible believed that the dreams that come to us in our sleep are God’s secret language, the way in the divine communicated with the human. But there might be another  possible interpretation? Some translations of the Psalm render this verse not as “when I awake, I am still with you” but in this way: “When I come to the end, I am still with you!” Perhaps what the Psalmist is suggesting is this: When each of us comes to our dying day and we step into the nothingness of death, we will be recreated from that nothingness, resurrected into new life in the presence of the Creator. And try as we might, we can come up with no better analogy than waking up from sleep. This verse makes me think of the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 cor. 13;  Speaking of the end of time, the resurrection of the dead, Paul says, now we see in a mirror dimly, But then, then! we shall see You face to face. Now I know only in part, but then I shall know, even as I have been fully known.  Maybe then we will understand what the mystic Meister Eckhart wrote many centuries ago:  “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me”.

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