“SEARCHED AND KNOWN”

Rev. Jeff Lehn | January 15, 2012 | 1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-18

In the Baptist church of my upbringing, we had an imposing Bible memory program. It spanned three years and assigned particular verses to be memorized every given Sunday. It included the Ten Commandments, a slew of Psalms, a raft of Jesus’ teachings and selected excerpts of Paul’s letters. Each week, the entire church was challenged to memorize the assigned text, and, during the announcement part of the worship service, our pastor would actually invite someone from the congregation to stand up and recite it right there on the spot. He would scan the pews for a raised hand, for some brave soul willing to give it a try in front of the gathered faithful. Believe it or not, almost every Sunday a courageous volunteer stepped up, especially if the passage of the day happened to be brief. I do remember the very shortest passage because it’s the one Sunday I considered raising my hand as a young teenager. But I chickened out. It was Psalm 55:22—“Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous fall.”

Once in a while, a child would eagerly raise his or her hand, delighting the congregation before he or she even said a word. To be seen, they would stand on the pew. To be heard, they would often speak quite loudly. Sometimes they would stumble, or mispronounce a word, but a nearby friend or parent would supply a lifeline, and before we knew it, they were back on track. How intently we would listen when a child recited Scripture for us.

Psalm 139, which we heard just a moment ago, was also a part of the Bible memory program. I think we spent four or five weeks on it, biting off a few verses at a time. Much to my surprise, I actually memorized it—but only because my youth pastor required it for anyone wanting to attend the mission trip over the summer.

1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.

That’s about all I can remember now from the version I learned it in.

Now, the good thing about memorizing is that it requires us to recite a text we care about over and over again. Until we feel its rhythm and pitch and edge. Until it becomes a part of our working memory and flows from our lips like honey. But the bad thing about memorizing is that it allows us to store up the words without grasping the meaning. To learn the phrases but overlook the beauty. To download the paragraphs but sidestep the pathos. It can deceive us into believing that once we’ve memorized the words, then we’re done with the text and the text is done with us.

But this is pure baloney. Does memorizing Hamlet’s soliloquy that begins with the famous words “To be or not to be” mean we’ve ascertained its meaning? Does memorizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech guarantee that we’ve absorbed the power of its rhetoric? Does memorizing the most well-known and demanding sermon ever preached—the “Sermon on the Mount,” delivered by Jesus himself—mean we’ve caught the essence of what it means to be a Christian? Of course not. Texts always have more work to do on us. More things to teach us. More things to envision for us. More things with which to trouble us.

For us, as Christians, this is eminently the case with our Scriptures—these ancient and layered and challenging texts that we believe contain God’s direction for us. There is always more meaning to discover. As seventeenth century Puritan pastor John Robinson once said, “God still has more light to break out of his holy word.”

Rereading Psalm 139 now, I am walloped by its shameless intimacy. This is a very personal prayer, something we’d more likely find in a locked journal than in the prayer book of the church. The psalmist freely admits that God searches and knows him—warts and all. He rejoices in the fact that God knows everything about him and that God is on his tail better than the most talented CIA agent: God knows his sleep schedule, his every passing thought before it enters his mind, his every spoken word before it falls on his tongue, his secret hopes, his biggest dreams, his silent fears, his daily travels to work, school and the grocery store. The psalmist even celebrates how God formed him from his mother’s womb—molecule by molecule, limb by limb, breathe by breathe. And then he can’t help but shout at the top of his lungs: “I praise you, O God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”

But this intimacy with God creates a tension. And the opening line of the Psalm captures it quite well: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” “You have searched me”—this verb has the sense of pursuit and digging down and excavating. From this angle, God seems invasive and edgy and unwelcome. We do not want to be searched, patted down and excavated. But then “you have known me”—this verb has the sense of deep understanding and care and attention. From this angle, God seems loving and genuine and endlessly interested in us. We desperately want to be known, heard and loved.

How difficult to be searched by God and how beautiful to be known by God.

We have all been searched. We go to the airport to board a plane. An otherwise kind man in a uniform barks at us drop our bag. In no time our luggage is unzipped and the gentleman is rummaging through our personal belongings, our neat packing now in disarray, shifting his flashlight to and fro. We may pass this stage of the search, but we’ve already taken off our shoes, unhooked our belts, removed our coats and put our poor laptops in a special bin. As we walk through the narrow gate, it beeps at us. Now we’re in for it. An otherwise jolly woman motions us to walk over to a spot that fools no one in giving the illusion of a veneer of privacy. She commands us to lean over and stretch out our arms. Our body parts are frisked and patted down one by one. We may pass inspection once again, but we are rattled, we feel violated—we have been searched.

When the psalmist says, “O Lord, you have searched me,” we feel uncomfortable, claustrophobic, a little threatened. But we know that it is true. God searches for us, like the one lost sheep, the one lost coin, the one lost child. God searches for us, when we hide or run away. God searches for us, when we think we’re fine and self-reliant and life is hunky dory. God searches for us—searches us head to toe—when we lose sight of our call to be children of God in the most humdrum of tasks and routines.

We have all been known, whether by a marriage partner or a parent or a dear friend. And some of us have been known deeply—so much so that someone can finish our sentences, pick out the perfect gift for us and help us discover our true calling. Of course, we’re always grateful to be known up to a point. Until someone really sees us, sees us when we blatantly mess up, when we run our mouth off, when we feel so miserable we can’t muster the strength to get out of bed.

When the psalmist says, “O Lord, you have known me,” we feel understood and our hearts are strangely warmed. God truly knows us, knows every glorious and despicable part of us, and yet vows to go with us to the farthest reaches of the sea and the lowest basement of hell. God truly knows us, and loves us anyway. God truly knows us, even when our memory fades and our self-identity crumbles.

Jeremy Troxler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, writes about visiting a cemetery in the Channel Islands dedicated to the unknown dead of World War II, where the remains of soldiers have been interred. “No one knows exactly who is buried there. No one knows what birth date or death date to inscribe on the headstones. No one even knows the names. But God knows: the one who holds and beholds the unnoticed sacrifices and sufferings of our world. Across each gravestone are inscribed the words ‘Known by God.’ ‘Known by God.’”

If God already knows us fully and won’t stop searching for us, we may as well surrender, even if it’s painful to do so. We can drop the false piety and pretense of control. We can stop arm-wrestling for our share of recognition. We can give up the quest to perfectly understand ourselves on our own—our motives, our moods and our mannerisms—because in the end we remain mysterious, even to ourselves. As much as personality assessments try to pigeonhole who we are—and, trust me, I have taken enough of these to say this with some authority—they only skim the surface. What Myers Briggs, Strengthfinders, Enneagram and MMPI, along with dozens of others, can’t tell us is the answer to our most essential question: “Who am I?”
It was with this very question that Dietrich Bonheoffer was wrestling during his imprisonment for resisting the Nazis. So he wrote a poem about it, contrasting what others said of him with what he knew of himself.

“Who am I?” he asks.
“This man or that other?
Am I then this man today and tomorrow another?
Am I both all at once?
An imposter to others,
but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?
... They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know me, O God. You know I am yours.”

Bonheoffer’s right: Only God truly knows who we are. Only God knows our capacity for good and evil. Only God knows the pain we’ve endured, the joy we’ve experienced and the dreams we’ve deferred. Only God knows the difference between the image of ourselves that others perceive and the unvarnished reality behind the closed doors of our hearts.

But God is not content with merely knowing us. God also searches us, excavates us, pokes around our bodies and minds and wills. Because God wants to transform us from the inside out, room by room, leaky faucet by leaky faucet, rusty nail by rusty nail. Not just so we’ll be kind and gracious to our like-minded family and friends and be good church members on Sunday, but also because God wants to change the world through us, one person at a time.

God searches us and fills us with compassion for those in need: those who are hungry are fed, those who are without a home are sheltered, those who are nothing in the eyes of the world are lifted up. God searches us and short-circuits our destructive behavior: the stubborn pride, the complacency, the spiteful words, the workaholism. God searches us and upends our priorities: rejecting the narrative that promises fulfillment to those who accumulate the most stuff and the most money and the most power, and replacing it with God’s narrative of being transformed by joining a community and building relationships and bearing one another’s burdens.

“O Lord, you have searched us and known us.” How beautiful and difficult it is. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Jeff Lehn
First Presbyterian Church, Fort Wayne
January 15, 2012
1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-18

“Searched and Known”