“Search me, O God, and Know my Heart” (Psalm 139:1-12)
A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church
July 27, 2008
I have just recently returned from a wonderful vacation spent at my family’s cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, reading, hiking, enjoying many lazy hours sitting on the porch and watching the birds come to the feeders. Built by my grandparents in 1952, this cabin has been a cherished destination for my family, providing us hospitality, refuge and retreat. With the never ending changes of my life, that cabin, that place has been a faithful constant. Knowing that I would be preaching on this text in a few short days, I opened the Bible to this my favorite psalm- Psalm 139. O Lord you have searched me and known me. With these opening words the psalmist offers praise to the Living God who searches the human heart. For this God who created heaven and earth is also closer to us than we are to ourselves. This morning let us join with the Psalmist in an exploration of this vast, beautiful and sometimes terrifying universe that exists in the “I-Thou” relationship between God and each one of us.
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 afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all of my ways. I like the way another Biblical translation renders this last verse “You trace my journey and my resting places”. Our God traces the lines of our journey like a cosmic finger moving across a map. God knows this path that we have walked through the years of our lives because God walks with us. This God who traces our journey and our resting places helps us to connect the dots of seemingly disconnected random events. This God enables us to weave together a meaningful plot line to this story of our lives, giving meaning to where we have been and clues about where we are going. And the Psalm continues in vs. 4. “Even before a word is on my lips, O Lord you know it altogether”. From the first sounds we utter as toddlers learning how to talk to our dying words, God knows what we will say. The tongue of Human speech encompasses everything about our social existence, the trillions of words spoken and heard across human society every single day: words that reveal the human spirit for good or ill. There is the hurtful word uttered in a moment of carelessness that can divide us. Or the loving word that comes from a deep place of compassion and creates a sense of connected one with another. This God, Our God knows the word that is upon our lips even before we say it. And might we add our own prayer from Psalm 19, “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy Sight O Lord my Rock and Redeemer”.
Another contemporary translation of Psalm 139 renders the next verse this way: “I look behind me and you are there. Then up ahead and you’re there to. Your re-assuring presence, coming and going. You lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is so high I cannot attain it. I believe that within every human heart there is a deep desire to know God. We were created with a capacity for intimate communion with God but knowing God is not the same as gaining information about God. The most sophisticated theologian might read Psalm 139 and point out in these verses evidence of the theological doctrine of divine omniscience, that God knows all things, and divine omnipresence, that God is everywhere, and divine omnipotence that God is all-powerful. The theologian could point to all this doctrine about God and still not know God, still not experience God. We live in a society that increasingly believes that mystery is simply that which we do not yet know. But we will eventually know it and it will no longer be a mystery. This is not true with God. No matter how much we come to know about God, God is beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to even imagine. God remains a mystery. I have been drawn to the testimony of the mystics who speak of their knowledge and direct experience of God. But finally the mystics themselves will be the first to admit that no theology no matter how articulate and no experience not matter how perfect can express or contain God. Our knowledge of God always begins and ends with a humble acknowledgement of God’s mystery.
Vs. 7 Where can I go from Your Spirit/ and 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 dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me and thy hand shall hold me fast”. The God who knows us intimately is the same God who accompanies us throughout our journey in life no matter where in the world that journey takes us. This is a comforting message of God’s faithful accompaniment. But what I find most intriguing about these verses is a hint of ambivalence about this God. Am I reading into it or does the Psalmist reveal a sense of maybe I don’t want to be circumscribed by the divine presence that is always behind me, always before me. Maybe God’s hand on me does not always feel like a blessing. That ambivalence surfaces more strongly in this verse: Where can I go from your Spirit? And where can I flee from your presence? Is the psalmist confessing that within the human heart is a desire to flee God’s presence? And could it be that the Psalmist is not alone in this? While back home in the Carolinas I mentioned to my brother David who is also a Presbyterian preacher that I was wrestling with this line from psalm 139. And David responded with a laugh not so much as a preacher but as a brother who knows me pretty well. He said “where can I flee from God’s presence? You should know having spent your whole life pushing against the outermost boundaries of God’s love and mercy.
This week I rediscovered a sermon on Psalm 139 by the theologian Paul Tillich entitled Escape from God that meant a great deal to me when I first read it early in my college years. Tillich wrote “It is safe to say that the person who has never tried to flee God has never experienced the God who really is God.” If we have never felt the desire to flee God we have only been dealing with the many gods of our own making, gods made in our image. We have not dealt with the true God who looks with eyes that see everything; the God who peers into the depths of the human heart and beholds all our ugliness and beauty. Our entire life is known to God. And we simply don’t want to be known that well. At times we may want to flee this Divine Witness, this all seeing, all knowing God who is our constant companion. You might be thinking that sitting in church is a strange way to flee God. But aren’t we an ingenious bunch? We flee God by finding whatever we can find to fill this God shaped hole in the heart. We try to fill that God-shaped hole with lots of things: from addiction, to consumerism, to busyness, to religion itself.
The relentless persistence of this God is portrayed in the famous poem the Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. “I fled Him down the nights and down the days. I fled Him down the arches of the years; I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from him and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; from those strong feet that followed, followed but with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace they beat and a Voice beat more instant than the feet –Naught shelters Thee that will not shelter me”. Thompson’s poem the Hound of heaven offers searing insight into the endless capacity of the human soul to evade our Divine Lover. And after reading it you almost begin to hear the baying of the divine hound following the scent of our trail. Maybe this is the knowledge of God that we most need to have. God wants to be in relationship to you! God cares for us, and will pursue us like the hound of heaven. Or as Augustine wrote in his classic confessions, “my heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee”.
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me fast. And then comes the climax of this 1st half of Psalm 139, verse 11: “Darkness is not dark to you for the night is as bright as the day. If I say let only darkness cover me and the light around me become night, even the darkness is dark to thee, the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.” No lines from scripture have offered me more comfort than these in times of personal struggle and grief, what the mystics have called the dark night of the soul. You have known those times I am sure as Jesus did in Gethsemane. When we cry out My God, My God why has thou forsaken me. When God’s presence seems like absence. And there is no light to guide our feet along life’s pathway. Mystics and ordinary folks equally testify to those moments when all light seems to be extinguished. But the Psalmist calls us to remember that this darkness that surrounds me is no different from the light of God. We may feel lost, alone and enfolded in darkness but in those moments we can remember with the Psalmist that if we cannot see in the darkness, God can. God can see for darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day. But there is a truth here that concerns not just the dark night of the soul but also our living in the light of day.
In the 14th century an anonymous English monk wrote a book entitled the Cloud of Unknowing. This book was intended to offer spiritual guidance to a young person who passionately wanted to know God. The Cloud of Unknowing encourages encouraged that one pilgrim and millions since then who have read this spiritual classic to seek God not through knowledge of God in the abstract but through a deeper knowledge that to the world seems to be a kind of unknowing. Quoting: “Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in Simple love. If you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest to know God. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God. The author of the Cloud of unknowing offers us a way of walking humbly with God. A way of understanding that we can never comprehend God. It is only by a naked intention and a blind love that we place ourselves in the presence of god. And so the monk writes: “I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. Knowledge is full of labor but love, full of rest”. When it comes to knowing God, we all exist in a cloud of unknowing. But we are put on this earth with one spiritual task. We are put on this earth to learn how to bear the beams of divine love.