Year B, Epiphany 4: The God of Human Moments

Year B, Epiphany 4
I Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
I Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
Greensboro, NC

Note: If you've never participated in Episcopal worship you have to know that there is a prayer commonly said at the beginning of each celebration of the Eucharist called the Collect for Purity. The prayer goes like this: "Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord, AMEN."


“Lord you have searched me out and known me
You know my sitting down and rising up.”

IN THE NAME OF GOD WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE.

Nathaniel scoffs at the thought of a Nazarene Messiah
The Corinthians are scolded for their
apparently amoral gallivanting
The priest Eli coaches the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
and we. gather for one more week
in the midst of war and burden
to ask that God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit
that we may perfectly love him
and worthily magnify his Holy name
through Christ.

Anyone who spent pubescent
years in an Episcopal Church
can surely recall the acute sense of horror
that accompanies this weekly recitation
of the Collect for Purity.
“Oh God,”
we’ve heard each Sunday,
“to whom all hearts are open, all desires known
and from whom no secrets are hid,”
And typically at this point
if there are any thirteen-year-olds in the room
their eyes hit the floor,
heavy with the thought of a God
who knows exactly what happened last night,
not to mention what we thought of on our beds
the night before.
Some of us,
confronted with the strains of such divine surveillance
opted out of church life altogether
in exchange for a happily unexamined private one instead,
one complete with guilt-free binge-drinking, swearing, cigarettes
and, in grand Corinthian fashion, other pleasures of the flesh
that we deemed had no business to do with God at all.
Ironically,
when some of us made it back to Church after all that
it usually had something to do
with being so completely known by God
that we couldn’t find any good reason to stay away.
And it is somewhere
in this range of experience
That Psalm 139 comes singing to us.

Our psalmist, this morning,
has reconciled herself
To being completely known by God.
This psalm is one of the biggies,
One of the biblical corner stones
in attributing omniscience
and omnipresence to God
and then wrestling through the implications.

The words we sang this morning have empowered many.
Generations have resisted
literal readings of the Bible meant to diminish them
By finding strength in this particular image of God:
The God who watched in silence as our DNA
clicked like clockwork somewhere in our mother’s womb
somewhere with the stardust and the stones
that we came from.

We have been reassured by these words
That the presence we are so aware of
pressing in. on. us. at all sides
like a well sewn seam pulled tight
IS, in fact,
the God our predators have tried to warn us of.
And we have slept at night because of this understanding.

But there is more to this psalm than what we sang.
There are verses of this psalm
That- for the sake of brevity- our lectionary leaves
on the cutting room floor;
And something of this psalms heart is there with them.

Verses 7 through 12, which we do not read in Church
are more than just a variation
On the theme of an omniscient God,
They are a development into inescapability.
Where can I escape your Spirit? she asks
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb to heaven you are there
If I make my bed in the grave, you are there
If I take the wings of morning
and settle at the furthest limit of the sea, you are there
Even there your hand guides me
Your right had holds me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness conceals me
The day around me like the night
Even darkness is not dark to you, O Lord,
and the night is as bright as any day.

Some psalms wonder at the lack of God’s company.
Psalm 139 marvels that she cannot get away.
There is a strong chorus running through the psalms
That demands to know where God is,
that pleads for God’s presence.
Psalm 10 asks why God stands so far off
to hide in a time of trouble
13 joins in with 83 to ask how long it will last:
Will you hide your face from me forever?
_Why have you forsaken me, inquires 22
from amidst a clutch of dogs teeth.
And 88 goes so far as to plead for salvation, if only
because there will be one less voice to praise God's holy name
Should that voice be lost to death.
“Is your steadfast love declared in the grave”, that psalm asks
“or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?”
Psalm 139 looks up from the other corner of that grave
and simply answers: Yes.

Yes, God is here, she seems to tell us.
This, too, is a Godly moment:
the chill you felt when God's face was hidden
As much as the thrill of victory.
God was here when our legs became like wind
And carried us to victory
just as God was here when we celebrated too much for it
And crushed our front teeth on the pavement.
God witnessed the breathless pause you took
with the ruddy sunrise this morning
Yet not the pause only
But also the red face you got
when you wrestled with the tangled power strip on Tuesday
and finally pulled it out of the wall.
God sat next to you in the car
While you cut through three lanes of traffic,
and when you yelled at your kids
and when you sat on the couch not really watching any program
but just letting your eyes glaze for a bit.
God stood by as you made breakfast
hung the laundry
and fell asleep before remembering
to say goodnight to your spouse.

We can go far with this idea of God’s
inescapable omnipresence,
and in most modern readings of this psalm we do.
And the danger here is how perfectly
we can make this psalm fit
with our creeping Western suspicion of always being watched.
Of being the star of our own personal reality show
That everyone is tuned in to.
Of being the author of books and blogs and sermons
Whose readership and audience is infinitely extended.
Of being guilty, mostly, of personal sins
Such as sex outside of marriage
Or having too strong a fondness
for chocolate cake.

But that would simply be a performance.
Perhaps one elaborately staged
To avoid the more awkward truth
That there is something much more profane,
and frustrating, and inadequate, and vulnerable
In other words,
Something much more whole emerging
In the eyes of our Great Beholder:
Less a life of Godly moments
and more a God of infinitely human ones.

Reconciling ourselves
To being known by this God
Who knows the world so fully
May be disconcerting.
We who have grown accustomed
To keeping dark things hidden in the dark-
the poor silent in their ghettos
and our own skeletons wrapped neatly in our closets-
may be reluctant to show ourselves
In a light so indiscriminately embracing.
We may have to contend with the fact
That this constant companion of ours
Is more deeply world-weary
Than what we might care to invite
into the privacy of our homes.
The longer we let ourselves sit
With the steady, loving, gaze of our Redeemer
The more frequently we may find
That we share the same place there
As the Haitian mother trying to decide which of her children
will eat tonight.
The more frequently we may find
That our fascinating table conversation
Is more or less as valued
as dangerous children's play by cook fires in Guatemala.
The more frequently we may find ourselves
in the company of Palestinians as they retrograde
with each explosion past the meager vestiges of progress
They had managed to claim thus far.
We might even begin to ask
How much we really value God’s presence after all
At least Over things like comfort, safety, health, food
or even spiritual well-being for that matter.
We may find ourselves as frustrated
With the seeming lack of God’s action
In the world
As those psalmists who have wondered at the lack
Of God’s presence altogether.

Near the end of 139- a section also left from our lectionary-
the psalmist rises up with the heart of the matter
& cries:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with a perfect hatred;
I count them as my enemies.

By the end of it, 139 is not much different from the other psalms.
Whether aware of God’s pervasive presence or not
The psalmist is still faced with a world
that seems to be at the mercy of the godless
Waiting for God’s intervention.
A waiting made all the more plaintive
Because the psalmist has known
That God is here, witnessing with God’s own self
the devastation we have wrought.
That God must know the pains of this life of flesh
even as we wait,
wading in the thick of it.

Search me, O God, and know my heart
test me and know my thoughts, the Psalm ends
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, O God,
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, we join.

By the end of it, the psalmist
opens herself to what is truly liberating about
an omnipresent God-
the possibility of being known by an Other
more deeply than she knows her self-
and in that possibility
being open to the unknown direction that might take.
The possibility that the wickedness
she deplores in the world
may be held within her
as much as she is held within
the world her God is watching.
Perhaps it is the best concession one can make
upon discovering ones own belonging
to a world so wholly caught up
In God’s redeeming work.

Eli, after all
cannot train the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
Without risking a message from him
that tells of his own demise.

Nathaniel cannot judge the unlikely origins of the Messiah
Who will save him
Without surrendering that judgment just as quickly
When confronted by a teacher so clearly possessed
with a prevenient understanding of his life.

Paul cannot introduce a liberating theology of God’s grace
To the Corinthians
without the risk of them extending the applications of that Grace
in directions he never dreamed of and could not condone.

And we cannot pray to a God
To Whom All Hearts Are Open
Without the danger of opening Ourselves to All Hearts
An endeavor that pinned our own Christ to the cross;
An impossible task that may very well crush us too.

But that is the Good News of our faith:
That in the crushing there is cleansing
That night is as bright as any day
That in crucifixion the Spirit Thrives.
That the steadfast love of God is declared in the grave
As often as in our victory over it
That wonders will be known in the darkness after all.
May we all love God more perfectly because of it
And worthily magnify her holy Name
through Christ our Lord, Amen.