Always?
Psalm 139, Deuteronomy 30:15-20
September 4, 2016
Rochelle A. Stackhouse
The Psalmist sings: “you know when I sit down and when I rise up….where can I go from your spirit or flee from your presence? If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall hold me fast.” (sing) “He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.”
Is it a threat or a comfort? Does having a sense that God is present and aware of you, your words and actions, every second of every minute of every day feel like a threat, an imposition perhaps, or is it strengthening and comforting to you? Or both? If I am honest, it feels like both to me. There are times when I would just as soon God was not watching or listening, and I think the end of this Psalm illustrates one of them. The Psalmist is clearly angry with someone and wishes them dead and is not afraid to show that kind of anger and hate to God. I’m a bit more reticent when I am angry. I don’t know why; God surely knows, and God is not going to do anything to someone just because I’m angry with them.
It’s a strange dance, this relationship with God. God is not Santa Claus, identified mainly with giving us what we want once a year. God’s relationship with us is ongoing, and meant to involve all parts of our lives, not just when we want or need something. This Psalm so beautifully sings of God being wrapped up in our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our actions, our relationships with other people. Even when we are not sure we want God around us, God is.
The flipside to this Psalm is the question asked by Moses in the Deuteronomy reading. It has to do not with where God is, rather it’s about where we are in relation to God. The NRSV translation uses the wonderful old phrase “holding fast” to God. You know what that means if you can imagine what it looks like. It means that not only are we aware that God is present, but that we actively reach out for God, because that “means life to” us. And doing it all the time, not just when something bad happens and we need help.
The challenge of the life of faith is in this dance: God present to us, us present to God, and that is lived out in the details, the day to day, minute to minute living of our lives, the paying attention to the choices we make to hold fast to God or to let go even in the most ordinary of things. The “mindfulness” of a person of faith has to do with keeping our mind on what we know about how God calls us to live, when we sit down and when we rise up, in the day or the night, in our bodies and our minds and our spirits, in our work and our leisure. Praying without ceasing the closing prayer of the Psalm: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any hurtful way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Now it may seem a little unwieldy to stop every minute of every day and say this prayer. That’s not what I’m suggesting. It’s a process, this working at holding fast to God. Do you remember learning to read? Maybe some of the younger folk in the room do. I don’t; it feels to me like I have always read--in English. But I had a taste of what I must have had to do as a child when I started to learn Greek. Whole different alphabet. I felt like every time I looked at a word I had to think, “now what letter is that? Is it a Chi or a Phi and no it’s not an H it’s an eta. And what sound does it make?” At first it took me forever and felt such a chore, just like learning to read in English must have been for me at 5. But the more I practiced, the easier it became.
So that, you are thinking, today I can say I am fluent in ancient Greek. Well, no. You see, after seminary, I used the language less and less. So that today, 35 years after I first learned it, I have forgotten what some of those letters look like so that if I try to read Greek, I need the help of having the alphabet on my phone or computer to remind me. Because, as you know if you have ever tried to learn a language other than your native one, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Moses says to the people gathered at the cusp of the promised land, “Use it or lose it.” “It” being all you have learned from God, those 10 Commandments and what Jesus called the two “greatest” (love God with all heart, strength mind and love neighbor), and the promise of God being all around you, yearning for you to “hold fast.” The Bible, the Church, our prayer lives, the books or blogs or speeches or videos of people of faith, all these are there, like the Greek alphabet on my phone, to remind us of what we already know and help us to hold fast to God in every part of every day. To do this when we are working, wherever we work. To do this when others are working with and for us, in how we treat them and how we advocate for others to treat them. (I often find the most difficult places to do this are when driving and at the grocery store!)To do this at school with students and teachers. To do this in our homes, with our families or neighbors. To do this in the places we volunteer, where we shop, where we play, in our social and political life. In all these times and places of our lives, to love God, obey God, hold fast to God because life in its fullness surrounds us when this holy love becomes our default setting. To ask ourselves constantly, in the words of Krista Tippett, “what would it mean, day to day, year to year, to become the beloved community. And how, concretely, to begin.”
How? (Sing) “Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon…” “Doe, a deer, a female deer, ray, a drop of golden sun…” “A, B, C, D, E, F, G…” “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so….”
We begin at the beginning, again every day, when we rise up and sit down. We begin by remembering from our first waking moment that God is all around us, oh, and everyone else, too. We begin by practicing what it means to love God in how we live out the call of God to become, in Dr. King’s words, the “beloved community,” which is what Moses was trying to shape. We begin by being mindful of not living any part of our lives as functional atheists. We begin by saying together the words which end the psalm, repeat after me: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Amen.