Psalm 139Sermon preached at All Hallows by Ruth Hutchison on 16 October 2005Psalm 139 is a very well-known Psalm. I know this because even I have read it before! It is also an incredibly beautiful Psalm to read, study and meditate upon. If you are ever wondering whether your life matters or not, I would recommend sitting down with this Psalm and letting its words sink deep into your heart. If you ever feel that there is a distance between you and God, then read this Psalm until the words have imprinted themselves upon your heart. It is a wonderful Psalm of praise to God our creator, and to ourselves as creations of God. It’s the ultimate feel-good Psalm, the equivalent of five self-help books, or a long, hot bubble bath with candles and chocolate. It has the power to soothe, comfort, ground you and inspire you, if allowed. This Psalm celebrates creation — and in particular, the creation of the human being. Whilst reading and studying it, I have found three distinct messages, and it has prompted in me three challenges, which are:
So let us read this Psalm again, bearing these three things in mind — just let yourself enjoy the words. [Psalm 139] It is just incredible! Being known and accepted by GodThe first section of this Psalm is really trying to get across the idea of how well we are known by God. You can almost imagine the Psalmist smiling to himself at his discovery that he is known so intimately by God.
There is such a sense of excitement and giddiness that comes through the words, that he says to himself, it’s too much for me, I cannot get my head around the fact that you know me so well, God. And I wonder how many of us here have that feeling of being known intimately by God? And if any of us have that feeling of being known, the next question is whether that is something that makes you excited and happy, like our Psalmist friend, or whether it is something that unnerves you or even frightens you? We are told that God is ‘acquainted with all our ways’ and discerns our thoughts. It has the potential to sound a little bit scary. A bit like someone is watching you … all the time … If we are not always impressed by our own thoughts or actions, then it may not be such a comfortable feeling to know that God knows everything there is to know about us. But I would like to protest that God is not a giant surveillance camera in the sky; our ways, our thoughts, and so on are not going to be mysteriously reported to the authorities. God is not waiting to tell tales on us. (Although I’m not sure who God would report to if that was the case!) God does know us, but God accepts us as we are. This Psalm concerns itself with celebrating God’s love and acceptance of ourselves as creations of God. So maybe God is ‘ acquainted with all our ways’, but what does that matter if we know that we are accepted by God? The more I live my life and work in communities, I become more sure that one of the deep-rooted problems in our society is people’s inability or unwillingness to accept and love themselves. Daily I see such deep-rooted unhappiness, and it manifests itself in all kinds of ways and through all kinds of avenues. People who are hell-bent on self-destruction, completely wrapped up in anger or lifelong guilt-trips, people who are out to destroy things and other people because they cannot accept themselves for who they are. When I was growing up in Liverpool, my parents had a great friend called ‘Degsy’ who lived in Everton with us. Degsy had lived in Everton most of his life apart from the years when he was in the navy and afterwards when he worked on the ships. He loved Liverpool and knew everything there was to know about it. He was a Christian guy and someone who was involved in the community on all kinds of levels. He knew me and my sister and brother from when we were born, and loved us very much even though he always called us ‘snakes’ in public and pretended not to like us. So he was a great family friend and a great guy. He died a few years ago (maybe ten) from liver-related illness — basically, he drank himself to an early grave. And what I never knew about Degsy, which I found out afterwards, was that he had struggled for years with his sexuality, that he had lived his life in denial of the truth that he was gay. Degsy could not reconcile his life, his faith and his sexuality and so it became a part of what killed him. I miss Degsy, and I am sad that someone who took the time to guide me into the wider world was unable to accept himself for who he was, whilst loving me for who I was. Whilst I think we are able to live life if we don’t accept who we are, we have to ask ourselves: is this really how I was designed to live? Do I want to live my life like this? ‘All our ways’ may include some things that we are ashamed of (rightly or wrongly), something that we want to forget but can’t, something that we hoped would be different, but isn’t. But we are invited by this Psalmist’s beautiful words to really deepen our relationship with Christ as someone who knows us completely and loves us as we are. There are no secret sections of ourselves hidden from God, we cannot introduce ourselves to God as the person we want to be tomorrow, or next week, nor can we pretend that we are someone we are not. God knows us and loves us now, at this moment, in all our glory and in all our shame. The question is, really, whether we are able to or want to accept this offer and let God’s hand (the same God who is acquainted with all our ways) rest upon us and fill us with a peaceful love for ourselves as God’s beautiful creations. Fearfully and wonderfully madeAnd if we do choose to accept ourselves as creations of God, we can then spend some time seeing ourselves as fearfully and wonderfully made. Our Psalmist says:
What a wonderful and frightening conclusion to come to. How different our world would be, I wonder, if we were able to see ourselves and others around us as wonderful creations of God? Instead of beating ourselves up for our weaknesses, our failings, our flaws, we could set about each day looking at ourselves as wonderful creations. We could look at our hands and be thankful at their ability to move, to hold things, to play instruments, to hold books so that we can read. Simple things, but we must start somewhere if we are to value ourselves as creations. We could be thankful for our mouths, our legs, our eyes, our ears, so many simple things, that we often forget just how great they are. When we view ourselves as wonderful creations, a whole world opens up to us as we consider what we have been given the chance to do. And by doing so, we praise our creator and life-giver, the one who knew us before we began to breathe, the one who watched us while we were being formed in our mother’s womb. A God whose eyes ‘beheld our unformed substance’ and who saw us being ‘intricately woven in the depths of the earth.’ This is a God surely worth praising. And it would be rude to value ourselves as anything less than wonderfully made. And just as we are wonderfully made, the Psalmist uses the words ‘fearfully made’ — quite a puzzling description. But I think this hints towards the seriousness of creation. It is not something to be taken lightly or regarded with disdain. We have been made into powerful beings, and yet we have been given choices. At the after-school club where Elaine and I work, we have a card game with all different kinds of dangerous animals, including mammals, reptiles, insects etc. You deal out the cards and then you win them from the other players by rating their scores against each other for different categories. These categories can include length, speed, all kinds of scary things, but the most scary is the killer-rating category. And they have all the high-scoring killer-rating animals like sharks and venomous snakes and alligators (all readily available in Australia). But the only one that gets 10 out of 10 is the human being. And I think this is such a good reminder of how powerful we are as people: we have the potential to be dangerous, harmful, cruel and vicious. We are fearfully made, and as we recognize ourselves as God’s creations, let us take seriously the lives that we have been given and use them as God desires — to love our neighbour as ourselves, the most important commandment of all, and to act as servants to one another. We are children of God called to be guardians of creationAnd as we turn our thoughts and our praise to our creator, let us remember that, while we are each a unique creation, we are but one part of a wider creation. An acceptance of ourselves as God’s beautiful creation does not come without responsibility. If we are children of God, we are called to be guardians of creation. As we learn that we are known and loved, let us use some of the life-giving energy from that to turn some of our attention outwards towards the rest of creation. We are but one part — an important part, but still just one part — of this wider world that is also fearfully and wonderfully made. So fearful and wonderful is our world, that new-born babies and life-destroying waves can arrive on the same day. If we listen carefully, we can hear our world groan from the abuse that we have inflicted. We have forests being cut down at frightening rates for our demand for paper and beef. By our choices and demand for fresh flowers, we have developing countries growing flowers for us instead of crops for themselves. We have more cars than ever before, and aeroplanes waiting to fly us to anywhere in the world we want to go. Can we as children say that we look at the world (the people, the land, the sky), the whole world as God’s gift to us, to be cherished, befriended and protected? Sarah and Hannah gave a talk a couple of weeks ago about creation as part of the Together for Peace festival in Leeds. And there they did a great exercise called Global Footprints, which I’m sure some of you will know about already. The basic idea is to measure your global footprint upon the earth, from the way you live your life at the moment. There are different categories, including travel, where you measure your score from 10 to 70 according to whether you travel mainly by car (70) or travel largely on foot and public transport. Other categories include holidays, electricity, heating, food. And it’s a fascinating exercise to do, to measure the impact your lifestyle has upon the earth. At the end we had a discussion which included looking at ways in which we could make those changes in our own lives, some surprisingly easy. Taking on the guardianship of creation is not as distant or as untouchable as it may seem. And this exercise is just one of the ways in which we could begin. We do have a level of control. We can exercise our roles as guardians in a way which adds to the tide of moral indignation at the mistreatment of our world. We do have the choice to live more responsibly. We have the choice of how many unseasonal vegetables we eat. We have the choice of how many journeys we make by car. We have the choice to throw that plastic container in the bin or the recycling bin. In the same way that we would not disregard a person who we value as wonderfully made, we have an invitation to stand in a relationship of solidarity with nature instead of abusing it. Creation is to be taken seriously and treated with reverence and respect, whilst still to be enjoyed as beautiful and wonderful. Creation is both fearfully and wonderfully made. We, as parts of creation, are fearfully and wonderfully made. God calls us to look at the world through Christ’s eyes. If we truly do, then we will see ourselves and others as beautiful creations of God, and then we will be able to take on our role as guardians and lovers of creation. Amen. 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