The God Who Knows Too Much

Epiphany UCC

Psalm 139

1O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

2You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

3You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

4Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

5You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

13For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

15My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

16Your 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.

17How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

18I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.

Our text today from the book of Psalms, Israel’s own ancient hymnbook, is one of my favorites, primarily because it offers us a vision of God that is profoundly intimate, one in which God sees us and knows us, in all of our complexity, in all of our goodness and badness, so to speak. I often suggest using this text during a funeral or memorial service because verse 18 reminds us that God is with us, until the end, a reminder, surely that God was present the moment we are born and still with us, even at the end of life on this side of the veil. I’ve even included this text as one that will be used at my funeral service, all of which is written down in a detailed email about I’ve sent to Douglas, and which he has hopefully saved in his email program. But I do sometimes wonder whether or not we are actually as welcoming to that truth, the truth of being known fully and completely by God, as we think we are. Friedrich Nietzsche, the great atheist and German thinker of the 19th century, once complained that he found the idea of God knowing us, the idea of an omniscient God, an all knowing God, as revolting and an affront to human dignity– I mean, who wants a god who is a voyeur, meddling, and knowing all of us, including the things we don’t want to be known, by either human or the divine? Is there no zone of privacy for us humans, a place where we can truly keep our own counsel, guard our own right to human aloneness? I don’t think Nietzsche was trying to hide any especially awful secrets from us or God, or at least no more than any of us want to hide some things we’re not proud of from each other. But maybe he was pointing to the truth that we actually sometimes don’t want to be seen completely for who we are in total, because there are parts of that sum of us, the total of us, that aren’t pretty or easy to look at, by us or by others.

The quote from Martin Luther King’s book The Strength to Love hints at perhaps the reason why we humans don’t always want to be known – because to be known is to be shown and ultimately known to be imperfect, sometimes profoundly so. King talks about the bridge between what we say and what we do, our profession and our practice, our noble ideas and the failure to actually live out those ideals. “This strange dichotomy,” he writes, “this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.” As Paul writes in Romans, chapter 7, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” I have ideals, I have beliefs that I and others should act and be a certain way, and yet we just fail those ideals, we fail to act and be a certain way, over and over again – indeed, as both Paul and King write, it is a part of the human condition, this elemental hypocrisy that all of us share with each other, across all of humanity. All of us are hypocrites, even our many of our heroes, including Martin Luther King, Jr, all of us fail our own words and our own ideals, and to be known by God is to have someone, something, some other, know that truth about us completely – this God not only knows the goodness we often practice before each other and that we practice before no human eyes, and that God also knows the badness we often practice before each other and that we also practice before no human eyes.

There is a story about a small-town prosecuting attorney that brings the point home to us, a judge who was calling his first witness to the stand in a trial, 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. Jones, 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 his 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!”

Funny as that story is, and how frightful it may for many to know that God knowsus, I still want to make a case that this knowledge of us is a good thing, despite the hypocrisy it exposes in us. 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 will share with a loved one hours from now, on this particular day—each of those is known by God. One can argue the theological and philosophical problems with this kind of knowledge and over the God who knows our future before it actually happens, but that is what the psalmist arguing – that everything is known, including that which has not yet happened. 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, of 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, of particularity 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 we 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 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 gets us, understands us, believes 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 for years

And maybe that is what we are so scared of, why we put on the masks, and pretend to be people we think other 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 difficult people 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 an officer who once worked in a prison that only dealt with people who were prosecuted for the worst of sexual crimes, people like serial rapists and habitual child molesters. Now she works as a parole office with the same type of folks, but it hasn’t gotten to her over the years, working with this population. 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 also know THESE men? Does God see beyond the masks of these folks, who often manipulate the light in others to ultimately betray them? Is there any light to draw out of hearts so shadowed with night? I think the answer is that I can’t imagine that there isn’t, some light within them, 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 at.

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 who would still stick around despite my many imperfections, as I would do likewise with them. 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 someone in my life who has taught me much about love and loyalty, 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 actually because we actually are known by this God, for real. 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 with us, 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.