Sunday, January 14, 2018
Sermon Audio
Full Service Audio
 
I think one of the troubling realities of life is that we don’t know people as well as we think we do.  Even when we have a deep knowledge of people, often it can be flawed.  Likewise, when it comes to knowledge of ourselves.  We think we know ourselves and then we surprise ourselves by what we are capable of doing.  It can be very trivial this lack of knowledge of others and of ourselves.  We make a world around the images that we have and the understanding that we have of individual people and their lives, and we craft our lives around the images that we construct in our own minds.  Even on a very simple basis we make wrong decisions about people, don’t we?  Not long ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop on Overlea Boulevard and I saw a woman sitting there who I had seen many times over the years.  She was in her usual attire:  a sheepskin coat that was badly stained from a coffee spill; her shoes were salty and worn; the jewelry that she was wearing around her neck was old and dated.  I have seen this woman for many years and constructed my own narrative of her life.  
 
I assumed that she was lonely, for she always seemed to be having a coffee and reading the paper on her own.  And she probably was not affluent, because she couldn’t afford to have her coat and boots, shoes – whatever they were – cleaned or replaced.  I concluded therefore that she wasn’t affluent, that she was lonely, and she came there for coffee because she had nowhere else to go, and her life was probably rather sad.  Then, one day, not long before Christmas, I left at exactly the same time that she did.  I saw her take off her coat before she got into her car, revealing a Dior suit.  She took off her boots and put on what I thought were a pair of Ferragamo shoes.  She got into her huge Jaguar F Pace, and I realized I had completely misunderstood who this woman was!  I couldn’t have, in fact, made a narrative that was more erroneous!  We do that, do we not, even with people who are close to us?  We don’t know their motives; we don’t know what they have gone through in life; we don’t know the deep thoughts and the recesses of their minds.  We think we know people, but we don’t.  
 
It is also true with ourselves.  Lord Byron in Don Juan put it so eloquently:  “How little do we know that which we are; how less what we may be.”  In the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul described his own anguish.  He said, “The good that I were to do, I do not.”  For Paul, even the things that he willed to do, he didn’t do.  He was flawed and knew it.  He knew that at times he didn’t even understand his own motives, and even if he knew them, he didn’t always carry them out.  How often have you felt shocked by your response to something, or amazed at your inability to do something that you clearly thought you could?  We actually don’t know ourselves very well if the truth be known. We often get it wrong.  
I think it is exacerbated in our own era by what Dr. Barbara Killinger, a former member of our church who unfortunately passed away, wrote in a book on narcissism:
 
One of the problems is that narcissism is really based on self-deception.  We build up an image of ourselves in our own minds, but we are often deceiving ourselves because we think we are better than we are, and we construct in our minds a system, a life, that is there for our own pleasure with us at the centre of it. 
 
I think that narcissism is made all the worse by our current trends within social media. We try to create an idealized image of our lives for others and it becomes self-deceptive.  For example, on Instagram and Facebook or any of those mediums, have you not found that when you post something, it is not of you washing the dishes or changing diapers or shovelling the driveway – it is you on the beach in Marbella or in southern Mexico!  It is not you having to do the ordinary tasks in life; it is you receiving an award or being with somebody who is notable.  We create this facade, a sense of delusional narcissism, where we let everybody think that we are different than we really are.  Wouldn’t it be refreshing if once in a while we showed ourselves at our weakest point and not at our strongest?
 
That is why Psalm 139 is so refreshing!  It is not about us knowing ourselves; it is about being known.  It is not us at the centre of everything; it is God, and God knows us.  This is the fundamental part of Psalm 139 and why it makes it one of the most powerful and often quoted Psalms in the whole of the Bible.  It is because it says these incredible words, “You have searched me and you know me.”  There is a geographical sense to all of this.  God knows, according to the psalmist, “when I sit down and when I rise up; when I enter and when I exit.”  The psalmist was writing probably because there was a charge that he was idolatrous made against him in the synagogue; that is what most scholars believe.  He is trying to defend himself, but at the same time having a dialogue with God, not with the people who are accusing him.  He says, “You know me.  You searched me.  You see when I rise; you see when I lie down.  You see me and you watch me and you know me.  You know my thoughts.”  Now, the biblical word, the Hebrew word for “thought” is not just the intellectual sense, “You know my cognitive powers” but beyond that, “You know my motivation.  You know what I want to do.  You know what moves me and creates my very actions.  My thoughts are not just thoughts.”  In the Hebrew they are thoughts that manifest themselves in actions. You know why I am doing what I am doing.  You know better than I know!  So, he lays it before God, the great Knower.
 
Then, there is a troubling line:  “You know what I am going to say before I say it.”  Now, whenever I read this – I don’t know about you – but I have a bone to pick with God because, if that is the case, Lord, why don’t you stop me from saying things that I shouldn’t say?  Why don’t you intervene?  If you know my thoughts before I ever say them, for heaven’s sake, intervene and let me know.  I could save myself a mountain of embarrassment!  I wish you would instruct some politicians maybe to do something similar.  If you know what is going to be said beforehand, stop it!  Wouldn’t that be great?  But God knows our thoughts; God knows our words, which arise from our thoughts and our intentions.  The Creator knows the creature and how we operate.  Now, philosophically this has been a major problem in the western world. This concept of a knower, as opposed to our self-knowledge, is often ridiculed, probably ever since Rene Descartes said cogito ergo sum – I think; therefore I am – the self-thinking autonomous, thoughtful person becomes the arbiter of our own existence.  The fact that we know that we exist is that we are thinking about our own existence:  I think; therefore I am.  From that, everything else follows;  the individual who knows self is the one, who becomes the subject and the object of their own life.  The moment you say “I think; therefore I am” it is both a thought and a creation of the person and the reality of that creation that come together.  That is sufficient from our point of view that philosophically determines the ground of our own existence.  The Bible then, is totally different, because it doesn’t start with cogito ergo sum, it starts with the fact that we are known and that there is a divine knower, who understands what we are thinking, knows when we rise and when we fall, and our words before we speak them.  In other words, the Divine Knower is the One who gives us our identity and our reason for being.  The fact that we can even think that we exist is a gift from the Divine Knower in the first place.
 
It turns the way that we conceive ourselves on its head.  It is refreshing because it speaks of the omnipresence of this Knower.  Further on in the Psalm, beyond what was read today, there is this incredible line, “If I ascend into heaven, thou art there.  If I make my bed in She’ol, thou art there.”  In other words, “If I go to the highest place, you are there.  If I go to the lowest place, you are there.”   There is nothing, neither in heaven, on earth, there is nowhere God is not present.  This can be a profoundly troubling thing.  For the psalmist, it was a moment of confession. Not only does God know the thoughts and intentions of the psalmist, but God is there, even at the moments in She’ol, even in the moments of darkness, even when we are at our weakest.  He confesses within the Temple that God knows us in the highest place and the lowest place. There is nowhere one can turn from the divine; no private moments; no private thoughts; nowhere to turn from God’s presence.  This was a correction as far as he was concerned.  The psalmist knew that this was a moment for confession and for the conscience. But was more than that, there was a sense of joy:  “You are my guide.  You are the one who makes my paths for me.”  God is there to direct and participate in our lives.  So our lives are not just lived on our own, they are lived with the power and the presence of God within them.  
 
There is a very old fable, probably like a lot of fables, based on some degree of history, about a church in Switzerland that was so beautiful that it was known as the Church in the Valley Cathedral or the Mountain Church Cathedral.  It was tiny but very beautiful, with the grandest columns, stained glass windows, a beautiful carillon, and a magnificent organ.  It was a place that the village and villagers could be proud of.  The organ would play and because it was in a valley the sounds would go from the church out into the community.  People would hear it in the town, and it was a beautiful thing.  One day, the organ ceased to work.  It broke.  It started to make discordant sounds.  It was not the beautiful instrument that it was.  Members of the community were so upset, because despite the beautiful pillars and the stained glass windows, what made the church special was the organ and the music.  The town elders and leaders of the church got together and decided to invite many scholars and organ makers from Vienna and France to come and try to fix the organ, but to no avail.  In fact, it was so badly gone at one point that everything was so discordant that the people pleaded for it never to be played again.  Then, one day, an elderly man showed up. He knocked on the door of the church, and invited himself in.
 
The sexton said, “Hello”.
 
The old man said to the sexton, “Do you think that I could have a look at the organ?  I hear you are having problems.”
 
The sexton said, “We brought in experts from Austria and France. There is probably nothing you can do for us. 
 
The old man replied, “I would love to have a try. I think I can solve this.”
 
The sexton said, “All right, there is nothing to lose because they are not playing it now so, you have a day.”
 
The old man worked on the organ throughout the rest of the day and night and got up in the morning, to work on it again until dusk.  When the time arrived for him to leave, he started to play the organ and it was gorgeous.  The air was full of the sound of it.  It was clean and crisp.  There was power in it.  It was in tune!  It was beautiful – just like it had been when it had been made!  The Sexton came up to the old man and said, “How have you done this?  How on earth have you been able to do this?”
 
The old man replied, “I am the one who built it in the first place, and I know it better than anyone else.”
 
Is that not what God, as the Creator, is like with his creatures?  Is it not God who says, “I know you; I made you.  I know you better than you know yourself.  I am the One who is with you always.
 
This leads to the last part of this Psalm.  On two different occasions the word “wonderful” or “wonder” is used.  For the psalmist, it is “too wonderful” to imagine that there is a God who cares for us.  It is “too majestic” to contemplate.  Then there is another phrase later on in the Psalm when he says, “We are wonderfully made”.  So creation, the wonderfully made, and the wonder that there is a God who is the Knower, do influence the psalmist.  He knows that this is wonderful and that the Creator knows the creature and he is wonderfully made. 
 
I often receive gifts, as I am sure you do at Christmas time, of coffee table books.  I received a coffee table book years ago – don’t worry, none of you gave it to me!  It was never read, it sat on a table or it was on a shelf, and I may have had a couple of coffee cups on it that left rings on the cover, and the poor book really suffered greatly, until one day, I thought, “Oh, I might as well just read this thing a little bit.”  So, I am flipping through it, only to realize that this was one of the most beautiful books that anyone had ever given me.  It is a book of the world’s great religious art.  As I thumbed through it, I saw all the favourites, but then I stopped for a moment – it was just before Christmas – and looked at one page in particular in detail.  It was the Creation of Adam by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel.  I looked at it in a whole new way.  I had always looked at it as a piece of grand art and dismissed it because it is so like the old white guy in the sky pointing down to, you know, a rippling Adam, and it just didn’t seem real to me.  But as I studied it more, I realized the imagery was powerful.  God’s right hand reaching down; Adam’s left hand and finger reaching up; God’s arm around a female figure, could have been Mary, could have been Eve, we don’t know; children and others in the background in heaven, but Adam on his own with a finger raised, pointing to God, not quite touching.  They don’t touch because Adam isn’t God and never will be.  Nevertheless, God has created Adam, and Adam is responding in praise to God.  There is this incredible sense of wonder, and while you don’t take these things literally, they are artistic renditions of a theological reality.    
 
Last week I went to great lengths to talk about God as the Creator from Genesis 1.  I hope you have an opportunity to read some of those points I made simply because they lead into this very moment of the Psalm:  “We are wonderfully and beautifully made”.  There is awe in the knowledge that God actually knows us and that we were made to be known.  Wonder and splendour are things that I think are tragically missing in the world.  I agree with the great G. K. Chesterton, who once said, “There is one thing that we will not starve for, and that is wonder, but there is only one thing that we really need, and that is wonder.”  The awesome recognition that there is a Knower and that we are known goes right to the heart of our ethics, and to the way that we live with one another, no matter what continent we are from, and regardless of our origins.  Regardless of who we may be, God knows us.  God knows the homeless person lying on a cot in a shelter on a cold night; the child sitting in a hospital room at Sick Kids hospital unsure of the future; the banker sitting in her office trying to figure out how things should be done ethically and properly; the teacher in a classroom; the politicians who sit on high, and to you and to me: We are all known!  When God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into the world, the one thing that is displayed is that the Knower has come in person to those who are known and that is the most wonderful thing in the whole world! Amen.