September 4, 2022: May God’s words be spoken, may God’s words be heard. Amen.
When I was a little girl, I remember hearing in Sunday School that God is always watching us. Probably, the teacher was trying to say “watching over us,” but given that I also loved Christmas and Santa Claus, I probably conflated it with the song that says “He sees you when your sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Anyway, when we got home, I was really thinking a lot about this whole thing and wondered if there was a place God wouldn’t see me. So, I crawled under the coffee table. Yup – definitely a good hiding place – from God and from my parents. My mother was not amused.
Whenever I hear Psalm 139, which we read this morning, I think back on that moment. Now, if we actually read the full Psalm, you’d understand, but since, for reasons I just don’t understand, we skipped verses, this isn’t all that obvious.
Now, we generally end the psalm when read in church or the daily office at verse 17. Still, the verses left out today are usually included, and I think are very important for us to hear. What’s more, I think it would be good to hear the whole psalm, including the missing verses. I will read the full psalm, but not as we do liturgically, pausing at the asterisks, but instead as the poetic prayer it is:
O God, you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You trace my journeys and my resting-places, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, but you, O God, know it altogether. You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.
Where can I go then from your Spirit; where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night,” Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.
For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well. My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book; they were fashioned day by day, when as yet there was none of them.
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 need to be like yours.
Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God! You that thirst for blood, depart from me. They speak despitefully against you; your enemies take your Name in vain. Do I not hate those, O God, who hate you, and do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with a perfect hatred; they have become my own enemies.
Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my restless thoughts. Look well whether there be any wickedness in me and lead me in the way that is everlasting.
This time, the lectionary truly does a disserve to the listener, because those missing verses in the middle are not only poetic, but powerfully uplifting, especially for us now. And the ones toward the end have a message for us today too.
As a little girl, I discovered that hiding under a coffee table doesn’t keep God (or my mom) from finding me, but that was just the curiosity of a child filled with imagination and wonder. The psalmist is speaking to a world that seems filled with evil, wickedness, hate…and yearns to be seen by God – to be truly known, to find that there is no darkness that God’s light does not overcome.
Do we not sometimes feel that our world is much that same way – filled with hate, violence, oppression, and poverty – praying to God for some relief from it all – praying that our God is on the side of justice?
Though we know that there is no “perfect hatred,” and that we are called to love as Christ loved us, we surely understand righteous anger against injustice, feel it deeply, and act to defeat hate with love in our actions in the world – and we feel deeply the desire to know that God is aware of all that is happening, knows us, and is never far from us.
Holding all that in our hearts, let’s turn to the reading from Jeremiah for a moment.
Now the Psalm is supposed to serve in our liturgy as a response to the first reading, and here, well, the lectionary is spot on. So, let’s also take a look at what the psalm is responding to this morning.
The prophet is called into the potter’s house, where he watches the clay being shaped and re-worked in the potter’s hands. It is a metaphor for the way in which God is at work with God’s creation – most especially with all of God’s children. We are human, and deeply flawed, but through all of time, God continues to be at work in us – shaping us, forming us, creating new life for us.
Have you ever worked a potter’s wheel, or shaped clay by hand – even if it was playdoh? There is an intimacy between the creator and the created as the hands mold the clay. It is a tactile relationship of artist to work. This is particularly true with the potter’s wheel, where clay, water, and artist become united to rise up again and again from the wheel until the shape is what the artist had hoped for when that lump of clay was first placed on the wheel. The artist knows the clay as though it were an extension of their own hand.
Or as the psalmist put it, “You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me… I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.”
These two passages – Jeremiah and the psalm – become for us a response to the deepest questions of our lives today.
For, how many of us yearn to be known – really known – not for who others want us to be, but for who we truly are?
How many of us pray that God really does see all that is happening to us and to our world – that the darkness of our time is not dark to our God?
Yet God does see us, and knows us intimately well as a potter does her clay. This doesn’t mean we will be perfect, for we are made with the clay of humanity. But God will continue to work us day by day to be what God dreams for us, and that dream doesn’t require perfection, just the willingness to be healed, to be worked by God, and to do the work of God in the world.
I am reminded of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with gold dust and resin. The result is a stunning work of art that doesn’t try to hide the imperfections, but allow them to be expressed as a part of the history of the piece, even the most aesthetically pleasing part of it.
We, who are crafted by the divine potter’s hand, can often feel like a broken piece of pottery – like our cracks are so visible, and our world the proverbial bull of our personal China shop.
We may find ourselves like the psalmist, crying “Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my restless thoughts.”
Yet we are marvelously made – cracks and all – and God is still at work in us, filling the broken places with the brightness of Christ’s light, that restores us, and shines through us, for all the world to see.
We are truly known.
We are deeply loved.
And we are still being formed by God’s grace to be the transforming agents of Christ’s love we were created to be in a world that so desperately needs to be seen, to be heard, to be truly known, and to be loved.
Amen.
For the audio, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here (also available on Audible):
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
September 4, 2022
Pentecost 13 – Year C – Proper 18 – Track 1
1st Reading – Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
2nd Reading – Philemon 1-21
Gospel – Luke 14:25-33
