A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

September 9, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Known

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 18:1–6
Psalm 139:1–18, 23–24

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me.”

Psalm 139:1 (NRSV)

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest by the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver
“Praying” from Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver

There was a significant milestone last week for my family: our oldest daughter began her first day in preschool. On the surface this may seem somewhat of a minor point of passage in the big scheme of life, but we took it to heart, because we think that preschool and kindergarten are some of the most important years. It’s when a child learns to love learning.

Throughout the first couple of decades of our lives, we spend most of our time pursuing knowledge in school. No matter how many years it has been since we have sat in a classroom, because our education happens at the formative years of our development, we are wired for learning. Tennyson writes, “We develop a yearning to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.”

While most of us don’t remember the specifics of our subjects, we do remember the broad strokes: the teacher whose love for the subject was contagious, who opened us up to new ways of seeing and perceiving.

Socrates, who lived more than 400 years before the time of Christ, may have had it right when he said that true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing, and so, this is the onset of wisdom, is it not? The American humorist Josh Billings once said that ignorance is not what a person doesn’t know; ignorance is what a person “knows” that isn’t true.

Today’s lectionary brings this conversation to yet another level. Our psalm describes God’s creative activity—in knitting us in the womb and giving us life—and Jeremiah’s word is the allegory about God’s relationship with us: as a potter molds the clay, so God is continually creating and reshaping us.

When we think of our own spiritual lives, we think of the ways we pursue our knowledge of God. The Westminster Confession puts it directly: “What is the chief end of humankind? It is to love God and to enjoy God forever.” And so we come to know God and love God and enjoy God certainly here at church, in worship, and today, on Baptism Sunday, in the children we welcome into the household of God—the holiness contained in new life, in the precious face of a baby, a child. We come to know God through study, meditation, and prayer. Through quiet, through friendship, through love, through music, through singing, through nature, through our work in the world. In all these moments and in all these ways, we seek God and seek to know God.

But there is a reversal that the psalm leads us to today: while we are busy pursuing our knowledge of God, we are already fully known by God. The confidence of our faith lies not in what we know about God, but what God knows about us, and that while we know and love God out of partial knowledge, God knows and loves us out of perfect knowledge.

The psalmist’s description of God today is that God has known us since before time and we are fearfully and wonderfully made. God knows our coming and our going, our sitting and our rising, our thoughts and our ways, our words and our intentions. If we go to heaven, God is there. And if we find ourselves at the farthest limits of the sea, God is there. If we land in darkness, despair, even hell, God is there, for the darkness is not dark to God. In fact, there is no realm beyond God’s reach.

To be fully known in such an intimate way can be slightly uncomfortable for us. It makes us vulnerable. All our stuff is exposed. And when we stop to realize God’s claim on us, it disrupts our rhythm in a way, because we tend to believe we’ve got everything figured out, running smoothly, thanks but no thanks. All set here.

So God who knows us and pursues us and seeks to be in relationship with us—this God is everywhere, just like the psalmist wrote so long ago. God of creation is always about creating us—and our danger is that we call it over before its time.

We like to think of ourselves as “finished,” Joan Chittister explains. “We have high-water marks to assure us of that, and we count them off: our first day of school, our first communion, confirmation, a driver’s license, high school graduation, college, our first paycheck, and on and on. But the more we grow, the more we realize what’s missing, what’s confusing about life, and what we don’t know” (Called to Question, p. 192). Creation, she continues,

is not so simple as growing up. It requires us to grow down, to grow in, to grow beyond, so that through our human experience, we meet God. It takes a lifetime to really understand that God is in what is standing in front of us. Most of our lives are spent looking, straining to see the God in the cloud, behind the mist, beyond the dark. It is when we face God in one another, in creation, in the moment, that the real spiritual journey begins.

The know-it-all in us wrestling with this Creator God who knows us so well. We spend many a long night grappling with decisions. And we know how to hide from each other and from God. But God shows up everywhere. And we soon realize that just when we thought the master potter had completed the work in us—that we are molded and shaped and finished—that there is more, much more, because God came into the world to know us and to love us, and our Lord constantly pursues us and does not stop until he gets us back. Today in the Sacrament of Baptism, we renew our relationship with God that began at our creation, and we celebrate God’s love that seeks us and claims us and knows us before we are able to respond in faith.

So when we feel alone or abandoned, when we’re at the end of our rope, when we wonder if there’s anyone out there who knows or cares, remember, “We are not alone.” Focus not on where you are—in a time of fear or loneliness or illness or dislocation—but focus on whose you are: a child of God. The work of God is never done, and that is why we must ever be about doing God’s work and about becoming a place where the Holy Spirit makes its dwelling, so that Christ may be known in us, where the light of Christ radiates.

The psalmist reminds us that there is no place we can go where God will not be. In Jesus Christ, all of life has been made holy, even the ordinary day-to-day things are hallowed. As Peter Gomes says,

God hallowed the world by his own presence in it; God hallowed the cross by his presence on it; God hallowed the grave by his springing forth from it; God hallowed death by passing through it; and God hallowed life by giving it freely. God hallows you and me by choosing to dwell in us and by becoming one of us; and in each of these places, we are invited to faith, and to fear nothing where God has been. (Peter Gomes at Harvard, p. 122)

The poem on the cover of our bulletin today is from Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, and it is from a collection of forty-three new poems. In it she reminds us that God is in the lustrous blue iris just as God is in the weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement. And to commune with God, we need no fancy words, just us—our attention and our posture of gratitude and the ability to hold silence so that another voice may speak. “There might be in the soul halls of space, avenues of leisure, and high porticoes of silence, where God waits,” another poet Jeremy Taylor, writes.

And in The Praying Life, Deborah Smith Douglas leads the reader to think of Jesus’ words to pray on—from five-word phrases such as “I will be with you,” “I am the good shepherd,” “Rise and have no fear,” “Why have you forsaken me?” and “My peace I leave you” to clusters of three words such as “He is risen,” “Come and see,” “Go in peace,” “Jesus is Lord,” or two-word phrases such as “Stand fast,” “Jesus wept,” and “Yes, Lord,” to simply “Alleluia” and “Amen,” which are really all we need most of the time (The Praying Life, p. 5). Prayer is the river that runs through all of life, just like the waters that baptize us even deeper into the new creation; we might aim for prayer that is alive and “deep enough to swim in” (p.11).

From his book titled And Now I See, Professor of Systematic Theology at Mundelein Seminary, Robert Barron says that

we are all children of God, shining like the sun, that there is in every one of us a mark, a seal, a reminder of the Merciful God who continually creates us. Despite our humanness, our tendency to turn from God, there is a power whose light is in us all, and whose light is unquenchable. The key is to transition from a mind of fear to a mind of trust. Due to the relentless love of God, God and the world, the infinite and the finite, heaven and earth, fulfillment and hope, these that we never thought could come together, actually can in Jesus Christ our Lord.

“The light of Christ is everywhere,” Barron continues,

in churches and poetry, in stained glass windows and in the lives of saints, in tragedies and comedies, in the bird’s song and in existential laments, in images, and hymns, and the Bible, in the pronouncements of popes and in the soul-hunger of the poorest of the poor. Christ’s healing and transforming power must be tapped and unleashed in the world.

“What would happen,” Barron asks, “if we had the courage to believe we are known, that we are loved, and that we belong to God in Christ?” (pp. 220–221) We might just light the world.

Over the last month I had the privilege of getting to know a marvelous person. She had just celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday, and she welcomed the opportunity to make a new friend in me. She liked reciting scripture and talking about God and reflecting on her long and good life with gratitude. We would read our favorite Scripture together: I’d read and she would recite the words, and one we read together was today’s psalm. She knew every word. She was the kind of person who is able to grow in grace through her years, with the sense of openness and wonder to what God is doing next. There is always more to learn to understand. She had begun to be curious about heaven. During our visits she would mention that in her own way, and I caught it. It was almost like she had an excitement in her, to meet her creator, at long last.

She died at the end of August, peacefully and at home in the care of her loving, devoted daughter. Last week her daughter showed me the draft of the bulletin the family had put together for the memorial service. It was full of pictures and so personal—a tribute to a grand woman who lived with a faithfulness and a closeness to God that, even in her last days, made her radiate.

At the back of the bulletin was a closing image that stays with me. It was a picture of my friend, a great-grandmother and her great-grandbaby in her arms. My friend’s face was plain to see, and of the child one could only glimpse the top of the head. She was holding the baby in her arms, and in her face was the most marvelous expression, the kind that only a lifetime of love can create. Her eyes were full of light and joy, seeing there in her arms the sure sign of God’s creative love, there in her hands. In that photo you can see the look of one who knows she is known and dearly loved and whose faith is rooted in eternal things, as if to say to the babe in her arms, “Look at all that lies ahead of you.” She had the light of Christ.

There is not so much that differentiates any of us from my friend and that baby in that photograph. We might imagine ourselves somewhere in the spectrum of knowing and being known that that picture represents. For we are a family of faith, the household of God, and when we believe that we are known and held in the hallow of God’s hand, Christ’s own forever, and the Holy Spirit makes a home in us, we become a place where the light of Christ may dwell. Amen.