Psalm 139 "Search Me" Scott Hoezee

(Note: For the four weeks of July I was privileged to participate in the Calvin College Summer Seminar, "Creative Reading for Imaginative Preaching," led by Calvin Seminary President Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. I wish to acknowledge up front that this sermon represents not just a few of the wonderful fruits of that seminar but is based also on a brief, but elegant, meditation on Psalm 139 delivered by Dr. Plantinga in the course of this month's events. I thank him for leading this excellent seminar and for his meditation.)

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Recently the name of Scott Woodring burst onto our collective consciousness as this once reclusive figure became involved in a standoff that took the life of a state trooper and then, some days later, of Mr. Woodring himself. It was a terrible series of events, the full background of which most of us can but dimly guess at. The night before Woodring's death, my wife and I had dinner with some friends and in the course of the evening discovered that one of our friends had known Scott Woodring for years and had even spoken with him at a meeting only a few short months ago. Since then, whenever the name of Woodring has come up, I've said to people, "A friend of mind actually knew that guy!"

But, of course, my friend did not really know Scott. He could not have predicted this sad end to this particular life nor explain precisely what went on inside Woodring's mind to have brought matters to such a grisly climax. When something dramatic like this happens in the life of an acquaintance--of someone we "know"--we realize with a shock something that is actually true across the whole spectrum of life whether we usually notice it or not: namely, we don't really know each other at all.

The number of people in this world about whom any one of us could legitimately say, "I know him, I know her inside and out" is very, very small. In fact, I would wager that for any one of us the number of people we know to a significant degree is likely less than ten and maybe a lot fewer than even that. Even our own children can be something of a mystery to us as parents. Also, even short of having any huge or grave secrets to conceal, most of us who are married have never really told our spouses "everything." We just don't possess all that there is to know about any given human being.

One of the books we read for my recent seminar was Calvin Trillin's elegy Remembering Denny. The "Denny" to whom the title refers was Roger Dennis Hanson, known in his Yale University undergraduate days as Denny. Everyone loved Denny. He was a golden boy with an All-American smile, a lithe athlete with sculpted good looks and a charming, disarming demeanor. Of all the students at Yale in the early 1950s, Denny Hanson was the one person whom most people were sure had a strong chance to go on to become President of the United States one day. Denny was successful at most everything to which he turned his hand. Just prior to graduation he even attracted the attention of Life magazine which did a profile of him, including a significant photo spread done by one of Life's best and most famous photographers.

Denny went on to a quite successful career and authored a book that not only sold well but became highly influential in academic circles. But then one day Denny locked himself in a garage, started a car, and breathed in the carbon monoxide until he was dead. To his friends, like Calvin Trillin, this was a sudden development. But once Trillin began to probe the life of his one-time Yale classmate, he discovered a myriad of previously unknown, very unhappy facts. Denny, it turned out, was completely estranged from his entire family. His whole life long he had battled feelings of inferiority. While on Yale's campus in those seemingly golden years, Denny would stroll through the quad flashing that winning smile of his only to go back to his dorm room, shut the door, and fall into the black funk of a very deep depression. He struggled with a homosexual orientation which he was never able fully to own up to. His was a lonely life that felt to him a whole lot like failure at most every turn. And so one bright day he ended it all, and his friends realized they had never really known him as they thought they had.

We are each of us a mystery one to another. And let's just admit that part of us actually prefers it that way. There are things about me that it's probably just as well you don't know, and likewise there are things about each of you that I neither know nor really want to know. We all have our secrets and we prefer mostly to keep it that way. We have hidden sins: things that tempt us in ways we scarcely dare admit to even ourselves. There are things we've said about others behind their back that we'd be mortified to have them discover--and not just because we don't want to hurt the other person's feelings but also because we don't want to be seen as the kind of folks who would make that kind of comment to begin with! Keeping a certain amount of information hidden from others is simply a part of the fabric of our lives.

Because we know what can happen when the hidden matters of our lives become known. Look at all the attention that has lately been focused on basketball star Kobe Bryant. Here is a young man everyone has admired, seemed to want to admire, and yet when a once-secret sexual indiscretion comes to light, we seem equally eager to want to know all about also that (even if our knowledge of this now diminishes someone we earlier were busy making a hero out of). But that's the way it goes. We keep our hidden sins and faults and misdeeds secret for a reason. Because we all know that when such items go public, they are lapped up by society with the same eagerness as when a dehydrated man is handed a bottle of ice-cold water. Very few people respond to public scandal by saying, "You know, it's just too sad even to talk about at all so let's not discuss it." No, no, people talk--on every cable TV channel, in every bowling alley, Starbucks coffee shop, corner bar, beauty parlor and barbershop they talk all right. They snicker, they villify, and they judge.

Oddly, though, matters are not a whole lot better when the public learns about some hidden virtue or some private attempt to do the right thing. So, for instance, when a politician reveals that he or she is a Christian, immediately people's suspicions rise. He's just currying votes, he's working some angle, it's likely not sincere faith at all. If a multi-billionaire like Bill Gates sets up multiple foundations to help disadvantaged children, we applaud this only faintly even as we quietly think that there is so much more yet that he could do (or we sneer that if it were up to us, that's not how we'd spend the money if we had it. Why doesn't he do some other good thing than the one he is already doing?) Sometimes we get almost as embarrassed when some good thing about our life gets leaked as when some bad thing gets out, and the reason is the same in both cases: we just can't trust what other people are going to do with this information about us.

Psalm 139 claims that God knows us right well, clean through to the bottom of our lives. He has searched us. He has inspected us. And not just now and again but always and in every way: when we're sleeping and so lost in our dreams, he sees our dreams. When we're awake and thinking thoughts in the quietness of our own imaginations, he sees those thoughts. When we say something, God not only hears it, he senses ahead of time what we will say before we utter a syllable (and so he knows also those juicy tidbits on the tip of our tongue that we come close to saying but never do). God hems us in on all sides, the psalmist says. In fact, in verse 6 he says something curious: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty to attain." Considering that so far in this psalm this psalmist has been speaking only about how well God knows him--that is, the psalmist himself--verse 6 almost seems to be saying that God knows this psalmist better than he could ever know himself!

But you could legitimately ask, "Is this good news or bad?" Some while back in another connection I mentioned the John Grisham novel The Firm in which a young lawyer goes to work for what turns out to be a dreadfully devious and intrusive law firm populated by attorneys on the mafia payroll. The most shattering moment in that story comes when this man realizes, and then tells also his wife, that the firm has bugged their house, has recorded their every conversation, their every private moment, their every moan of sexual ecstasy. The firm has pictures and videos, transcripts and tapes detailing their lives. In short, the firm "has the goods" on these people and it doesn't take long to realize that this kind of inside information very quickly becomes the stuff of blackmail.

We know that in any given situation of this life, if any other person, corporation, firm, or organization knew us right well precisely because they had been watching us all the time, this would not just unglue us a bit, it would frighten us, make us anxious, maybe resentful, because we'd have a pretty good idea what kind of use could be made of such comprehensive information.

The psalmist is clear that God is like that. He is watching and not just that: he is also everywhere. You step into the shower in the morning, God is there. You give a two-finger little motion to a colleague at work for a word in private, and God huddles right in with you. You stop off at a cocktail lounge on the way home from work for a little pick-me-up, and God is as near to you as the dish of cashews the bartender shoves your way. When your child wins the blue ribbon and you blink back tears of joy, God is there with you. When your child rips your heart out by telling you her marriage has failed, God is with you then, too. Like the children's tale I told earlier in the service, even if like the Runaway Bunny you try to escape God's parental presence, you find he is in the very place to which you make your every attempted escape.

Again, is this good news or bad? Some of us as children sang a song that said "Oh be careful little hands what you do, for the Father up above is looking down in love, so be careful little hands what you do." And to note the merely obvious, that song contains not just a Father looking down in love, but also a veiled threat! But although you can dismiss that song as just a silly little ditty made up by a human composer, you cannot dismiss Psalm 139 which delivers the exact same message. Somebody knows you right well because Somebody is watching. Somebody knows it when I grind my teeth in pent-up frustration at the way life goes sometimes. Somebody is familiar with all my ways. Somebody other than just me knows that for the longest time now I've had to work extra hard at tying my right black dress shoe because months ago already the lace broke and I never can for the life of me remember to buy a new one! The Almighty God of the cosmos has far better things to think about, but when it comes right down to it, he knows this little quirk about me!

Within the human realm this is the kind of omniscience that can quickly give us the creeps. This is George Orwell's "Big Brother" nightmare. This is Franz Kafka's bizarre and weird vision of unsuspecting people being pursued by whole legions of folks who know all about them but won't reveal how it is they know so much.

But in Psalm 139 we are not dealing with the human realm, are we? Here we are talking about the God who knows us inside and out, up and down, right and left, in the dark of my secret closet and in the bright klieg light of the public square. Of course, even so, if you despise God or have a reason to think God is your enemy or that God is just generally out to "get you," then having a sense for God's overwhelming and constant presence is bad news. Just what is God going to do with all this information on me? But suppose you know God as the Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord. Suppose you know that the definitive, absolutely spot-on perfect revelation of this God's nature came through Jesus when he entered this world full of grace and truth. Both. Grace and truth. Suppose you know what we thought about last Sunday evening when discussing what it means to have proper reverence for God; namely, that for all of God's undeniably fierce power and mind-blowing holy splendor, he is equally radiant with mercy, compassion, and grace.

And so suppose that you trust this God enough just to give in to his all-encompassing knowledge of you. If we surrender ourselves to the inevitability of God--if we can say as in the children's story, "Shucks, I may as well just be your Little Bunny"--well then, what might follow from this surrender? Maybe the deep sigh of contentment. Maybe the marrow-deep comfort that comes over you when you know that Somebody knows you right down to your toenails and loves you anyway.

In the wider society, when our hidden faults become known, they become fodder for much ballyhooing, head-shaking, and delicious gossip. But when God sees those same things, they become targets for the smart bombs of grace. Grace hones in like a laser-guided missile and, BOOM, wipes out our guilt. And if even so there are things to lament and sorrow over in the midst of our sins, God will do that, too. He won't cluck his tongue and scold like some self-righteous prig but will weep with us when we fail to live up to even our own best expectations. He loves us. The love cocoons the knowledge, influencing it in every way. Yes, God sees our faults. And then he forgives them. That's who God is.

In the wider society, when even some good things become known about us, people often do not respect such good things but suspect them, questioning their genuineness, doubting or envying our accomplishments. But when God sees goodness blooming in our hearts like a field of the very spiritual flowers he himself has sown there by his Holy Spirit, he responds with the perfect joy and holy approbation those lovely things deserve. God will never envy you your goodness, never mock you for being more and more like his divine Self, never question whether you are sincere or not, because he knows. Even if others attribute all manner of bad motives to you, if you have integrity, then God knows it and there is more than a little comfort in that.

As you know, there is in verses 19-22 an odd, some think dreadfully unfortunate and out-of-place, mini-tirade against the so-called "wicked" in the world. Many people skip those verses when reading this psalm. It is odd. The same psalmist who has been crooning out all this poetry for 18 verses suddenly begins to sputter in a loathing that has been turned up to a full boil over high heat. But long about the time this diatribe reaches a fever pitch, the psalmist stops, takes a deep breath, and once again asks God to search and know him. It's almost as if to say that even when it comes to other people, yes even those whom we have good reason to regard as our "enemies," we must finally leave things in God's better, wiser hands. Because God knows also those people right well. God hems in also them before and behind and sees also their secret thoughts. Maybe they are as rotten to the core as we at times suspect but then again, maybe not. Maybe God alone knows that their nastiness is fueled by fear and a soul-crushing angst. Maybe God alone knows that they are as insecure and as needy of the Lord's grace as anyone we could ever imagine. Whatever the case, God knows it and he'll handle it. In Jesus the Christ he has handled it. God has already absorbed into himself all the loveliness, evil, goodness, terror of which we are capable. He not only knows it all right well, he has dealt with it right well through the One who has shown us God's glory by himself being so radiantly full of grace and truth.

In all things we leave it in the hands of the God who knows it fully and well already anyway. Being watched and known like that is either a specter so terrifying as to make you want to hide or a gospel truth so lyric and lovely as to make you open wide your arms and extend forth your hands so that the God who formed you and loves you can lead you in the way of life everlasting. "Have a carrot" the Runaway Bunny's gentle mother said in the end. "Come to the feast of the Lamb" our good Father will finally say to each one of us whom he knows, and also loves, completely. Amen.