Fully Known
I also use this text regularly in the worship I lead weekly at Penn Foundation Recovery Center. It's beautiful in whatever version you read it in.
Sermon on Psalm 139
Welcome Church, July 31, 2022
When I sit at my desk, I look up at a print of a famous Russian icon — The Holy Trinity, created by Andrei Rublev in the 15th Century.
It depicts the circle of love within the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit gathered around a table and a chalice of wine. Their eyes draw the viewer around the circle of divine love and we notice Christ holding his hand, two fingers extended to signify his divine and human natures, over the chalice. But the Spirit is pointing downwards. To what?
On the front of this altar is a small rectangle the Spirit points to. Some art historians speculate that a small mirror may have been placed there, so that the viewer would see his or herself invited to the table, included in this divine circle of love.
I think of this icon when I read Psalm 139. The psalmist’s prayer is a mirror that invites us into the writer’s intimate relationship with God. She knows that while life has its dark and isolated places, she is never alone and unseen by the Holy One.
This psalm is a beautiful description of what it means to be “fully known.”
God knows when you wake up in the morning and when you nod off to sleep.
God knows what you are going to say before you think of the first word — in the way that close friends and partners talk finish each other’s sentences.
God is always present and close enough to touch!
This kind of closeness can make us vulnerable, and that can be scary. We all have those things that we would prefer that people not know about us. So I understand why the writer muses about fleeing from the divine presence, as Adam and Eve did to hide their shame.
Yet the writer finds that Divine Presence whether she is having a mountaintop experience or bowed down in her own personal hell.
What is more amazing is that this psalm was written during a time of trouble and oppression. The psalm continues to tell us that unknown enemies — bloodthirsty and wicked — seek ill for the writer and her community. This sounds a lot like our world today: People in Ukraine are losing their homes and being killed during a brutal invasion. Some people we know are getting sick or dying from viruses that we aren’t being protected from. We exist in a system that only works if many people don't have jobs or are underpaid, and which is ok with many not having shelter, or enough food, or access to medical care.
This is what is so beautiful about this psalm. The God who created us for good is not hidden from us during the dark times when we come up short or are weighed down by the world
The God for whom darkness is the same as light is pursuing US with, as the song says, rare, relentless grace.
The triune God, the father, son, and Holy Spirit, invites each of us to come to the table to see ourselves as part of the dance of divine mystery, and to see the image of the Holy in our selves and each other.
Now that is knowledge that, as the writer says, is too wonderful to fathom, too much to take in.
May you be loved and known by the God who leads you in God's way everlasting, now and forever. Amen
Bonus: "Known" by Tauren Wells really captures the mood of this scripture and sermon:
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