“Known”
15th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 139:1-18
Download the sermon (mp3)
If you are not a person who spends much time on the internet, you may not realize this: you can learn almost everything you never wanted to know about anyone else there. Friends, acquaintances, strangers – they will tweet, blog, or update their statuses with the minutiae that fills their day. “I just sneezed five times in a row,” one of my friends once tweeted. “Jane had blueberry pancakes for breakfast,” a status update reads. “Stuck in line at Kroger,” someone else writes.
Updates are not limited to trivia. Important news, news that used to be reserved for face-to-face interaction, or at the very least a phone call, now gets trumpeted to anyone who logs on. “We’re getting married!” “We’re having a baby!” “I lost my job.” No news is too big or too small for sharing on the internet.
It all gives us the impression that we know each other very well. We are more connected than ever before. In fact, we never ever have to be alone anymore. Insomnia used to mean long hours alone in the night. Now it doesn’t have to – just turn on the computer. Going off to college used to mean letting go your high school days and forging new relationships, and maybe even a new identity. Spending a semester abroad, or spending a summer backpacking, or spending two years in the Peace Corps – all of those things used to mean a certain distance from family and friends while you acclimated to a new culture, found your own way in a big world. No more. The world is small now, and you never ever have to face it alone. You can carry all your friends and acquaintances with you in your laptop or your hip pocket.
But for all of our connectivity, for all of our sharing, for all of our lack of privacy, are we really less lonely? How intimate, how real are the relationships we have? Are we deeply known by anyone? Or just widely known? Of all the friends you have – online and in real life – how many would you say know you very well? How many of them would you trust with the deepest parts of yourself?
The truth is, for whatever bits we share online, or otherwise publicly, aren’t there just as many facets of ourselves that we have kept hidden? The internet is like real life, only amplified and put into hyperdrive – we still mostly only share those things that fit with the persona we want to project.
Regardless of how much we appear to share about ourselves with others, all of us carry around our little bundle of secrets, don’t we? Some of them may be huge – an affair, an addiction, a crime, a deception – things that might destroy us or others if they were revealed. Others of us carry around smaller secrets, but still shameful. None of us is fully known, and none of us fully knows anyone else.
How much hiddenness there is in each one of us. How many untold stories. How much hurt, how much deception, how much fear, anger, longing – so much of it stuffed down and concealed from everyone around us, and sometimes even from ourselves. We keep our secrets for good reason. We fear the harm they would do.
The irony is this. We keep secrets because we fear the truth would somehow separate us from the people we love. But the reality is that our secrets divide us. Those parts of ourselves that we hold back keep us from being fully known. It is not just the secrets themselves but the shame we feel over them – the embarrassment over some awful thing we did or that was done to us, the guilt over some sick habit we have, the fear of being found out, of people knowing what we’re really like. We can be petty, and unkind, and vengeful, and lazy; prideful, deceitful, jealous, greedy, lustful, hateful. We are capable of so much ugliness. And we aren’t going to publicize any of that on the internet or anywhere else, if we can help it.
Who of us really wants anyone else to know the worst stuff about us?
To be human is to yearn to be known and to be loved. The problem is that there are parts of us we fear are too awful to be both known and loved. We feel we must choose. If people really know us, they may not love us, or even like us. So what we most want becomes what we most fear – being known.
Some of us are fortunate enough to have found a person or a handful of people with whom we can trust our real selves. To have a friendship or a marriage in which another person knows your flaws and some of your secrets, accepts you as you are, loves you deeply – this is a powerful thing, and it can go a long way towards your health and your wholeness. But isn’t it true that, even when we have found such a relationship, there is still a part of us that is hungry for more? There is still a part of us that yearns to be known more fully, more perfectly, and loved more completely? There is still a part of us that feels alone. We are haunted by a loneliness that no human relationship can touch.
It is from a sense of that haunting, and that hunger, that the psalmist raises his prayer:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord you know it completely.
Here is One who knows the word we are thinking of speaking before we even say it. The One who knit us together in our mother’s womb discerns our very thoughts and knows all our habits, all our deeds, all our misdeeds. One who cares about the big news that we share with everyone, and the small news that bores our friends, and all the news we would never share with anyone. Even the parts of us we wish most to hide, are not hidden from this God.
Can we handle being known like this? The words are meant as comfort, but there is something frightening in them, too. Theologian Paul Tillich asks the question bluntly, “Who can stand to be known so thoroughly even in the darkest corners of his soul? Who does not want to escape such a witness?…. God knows what we are, and (God) knows what we do.” (Paul Tillich, “The Escape from God,” The Shaking of the Foundations,” 43)
We fear being truly known because we fear being judged, we fear being shamed, we fear being abandoned. But this God comes only in love, and with an embrace. “You are behind me and before me,” the psalmist says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”
There is no kind of experience we can have that can separate us from the love of God. Even at our lowest, God seeks us out. Even at our meanest, our baddest, our angriest, God pursues.
All over the world, there are statues of Jesus standing in high places. He towers most famously, perhaps, over Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Art Deco statue of Christ the Redeemer. But did you know that there are also a series of statues of Christ that rest on the floor of the ocean? The original is a bronze sculpture at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Italy, and it is called Christ of the Abyss. He stands there at the bottom of the sea, arms lifted up in a blessing of peace. Most of us will never see him there, but there he stands, a reminder that no matter how deep we go, no matter how dark the waters which threaten to overwhelm us, no matter whether or not we can see him, God in Christ is with us. Whatever the darkness, whatever the depth, God has searched us and known us, and Christ stretches his arms out toward us.
God knows all the sad and hopeful and helpless and fearful and angry and secret places in our hearts. Knows the depths of us that we cannot comprehend ourselves. What’s more, God knows the best in us, too. God sees the hidden beauty, hears the hidden music, and wants to call forth that gorgeous best in us that we ourselves barely think is true. The Christ of the Abyss will also be Christ Exalted – he will beckon us to our highest purpose , our truest witness, and our most beautiful goodness if we can allow ourselves to be searched by him, known by him, loved by him, and led by him.
Most of us came here this morning seeking to know God a little more. But in the end, it is not we who do the knowing – it is God. The great Jewish teacher Abraham Heschel argued that our true task “is not to know God but to be known to God,” and he believed that we become human “by becoming a thought of God.” (Abraham Heschel, Insecurity, 254ff). Imagine that. You are a thought of God. It was by God’s thought that you were so fearfully and wonderfully made, and your humanity comes to its highest expression as God thinks you into your truest self.
The psalmist started his prayer affirming that God has searched and known him, but he ends it by asking to be known more – “Search me, O God and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.” This is what prayer is – the intimate, open, direct, and intentional laying bare of ourselves before God, including the thoughts, feelings, urges, and secrets that we would keep from others. It is not that God does not already know these parts of us; it is a matter instead of opening ourselves more completely to God’s knowing. “Here is my hurt, God. Here is my grief, my rage, my anxiety, my lust. Here is my yearning, my love, my mess, my hope, my joy, my sin. Here is my heart. Take it, Lord, it belongs to you.”
And does it? Will it?