Psalm 139, January 14, 2018

Rev. Katy Nicole

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Psalm 139.1–6, 13–18, Pg. 577

Lord, you have examined me.
You know me.
You know when I sit down and when I stand up.
Even from far away, you comprehend my plans.
You study my traveling and resting.
You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways.
There isn’t a word on my tongue, Lord, that you don’t already know completely.
You surround me—front and back.
You put your hand on me.
That kind of knowledge is too much for me; it’s so high above me that I can’t fathom it.

You are the one who created my innermost parts; you knit me together while I was still in my mother’s womb.
I give thanks to you that I was marvelously set apart.
Your works are wonderful—I know that very well.
My bones weren’t hidden from you when I was being put together in a secret place, when I was being woven together in the deep parts of the earth.
Your eyes saw my embryo, and on your scroll every day was written that was being formed for me, before any one of them had yet happened.
God, your plans are incomprehensible to me!
Their total number is countless!
If I tried to count them—they outnumber grains of sand!
If I came to the very end—I’d still be with you.

SERMON (PASTOR) 

I had a best friend once tell me that she loved to watch me tie my shoes, “It’s as if you are still learning, saying, with each pass of the lace, the pneumonic, the rabbit goes around the tree and through the hole,” It was true, my fine-motor skills were not my strong suit, buttons, connecting zippers at the bottom, yielded the same kind of slow and steady intensional pace. Another friend, half exasperated, wanting to get out of a tent, as I sat at the entrance door putting on each sneaker, once said, “Katy, you are the pokey-est person I know.” Or, my first year skiing, on the chair lift, with Liz and her daughter Magnolia, I watched Liz clip Magnolia’s helmet, shove her gloves a little further up, and wipe her goggles clean. “Can I call you Momma-Liz too?” I asked raising my gloves for the shoving. It seemed Liz could do everything even with her winter gear on. “As long as I can call you Daisy,” she quipped in good humor, thinking of the most helpless sounding name she knew…I imagine God like these close friends. The ones who know you for your idiosyncrasies and love them, because they are you…even when they are a hassle. The friends who tease you, in the best way, about your neurocies. That way that allows you to not have to take yourself so seriously around them, the way that makes you smile because even your most self-conscious peccadilloes are embraced. I have a phrase I sometimes say which is, “To be teased is to be known, and to be known is to be loved.” I would love to hear all the things God would tease me about; I would never stop laughing, and my laugh itself would be one of them, and it would feel so good to be lovingly teased by God. All the times God has watched me tie my shoes. All the buttons with which I have struggled. All the zippers that it takes me an exorbitant time to connect. My perplexing at the conundrum of winter accessories. It makes me smile thinking of all that God would notice, that no one else even ever has, because God was there….God was there when somehow my hands were being formed, and became goofy double joined fingers which stand like chunk chess pieces, a hook in the top half and a protrusion at each bottom. God was there when, sleeping as a child, I moved them above my head, as if playing an unknown instrument of air. God was there when my elementary handwriting changed every other sentence, and when in sixth grade I began a thorough practice, and by seminary, my Greek memorization was atrocious, but my slow deliberate lettering was finally immaculate. God would laugh, I would smile, God knows me. 

And God knows you. God doesn’t just know the big stuff, or the bad stuff you wish no one knew, but God knows the stuff you wish someone saw, and the things you don’t even know about yourself. Can you imagine it? God is like your calendar, your day-planner, your calorie-counter, your fit-bit, your sleep-cycle ap., your alarm, your meal times, and snack times, you hidden away for emergencies stash of peanuts or chocolate times, and your stash is out hangry times, and bed times, and past bed times, and early to bed times, and cycling times, and your cry at commercials times, and your stressed out times, and you over welcomed with joy times, and every time you stub your toe times, and every time you notice a bird, or a bug, or a wildflower time, or your sick times, or your well times, or the times you forget the word for such and such, and gave yourself such a hard time over it, and God didn’t even mind even that you forgot in the first place, and in fact, God loved you for it, because it was you, or there is too, that thing you do that God so delights in, you know,…that thing. Revel in that thing for a moment. God totally is.

I know one you as a congregation do. I think God delights every time one of you makes a googly-eyed, or silly, or aww-isn’t-that-cute face, at a kid or a baby in this congregation. And you love them, especially the little ones, perhaps even more, when they are doing that thing about which their parents get a lil’ embarrassed. We loved Kyra hoisting May off the ground; I miss Coleman’s skeptical furrowed brow; or the little one who came back from the Children’s Sermon on Christmas Eve saying, “Well, that wasn’t funny,” or Kennedy’s faces that totally were. We looked forward to Alex’s outbursts, or Sloan singing along. We don’t forget Avery’s apprehension and Nora’s embrace at their baptism. Or Luke Rembold grown child of the church just beams at Jake and Silas who have the offering down, as Luke and his brother Jed used to do. I think God delights in this congregation in the way your cup runs over with pride at our youth, when they read scripture, or preach so bravely, or come back from college and jump in to help, or Evan Bigler coming on his own, becoming baptized and then a faithful ordained elder. These youth and these kids cannot even fathom how much you love each and every one of them. And you know what, God loves you like that. At every thing you do. The things which would make your mother roll over in her grave, and the things which would make your father beam down in pride. God knows you like that. God loves you like that. Yes, God even loves you for that too. and that, and that, um humm and that. 

So what does this mean? We as a culture have taken God’s omnipresence to be like Santa, “Making a list and checking it twice, going to find out who’s naughty or nice,” but what if instead God’s omnipresence means, that you are more loved than you could ever fathom, by someone who knows you more completely than you know yourself, more completely than your closest friends, more completely than your spouse, your family, your kids, your teenagers who often believe they know all your shortcomings, your siblings. I just spent a week with my sister, she knows me. We were in a room together; Diana knew when I sat down, when I got up, when I blew my nose, when I coughed, when I woke up randomly and couldn’t sleep, when I went back to sleep for an hour and a half at 7:00 and then was cranky when her alarm went off at a reasonable time. Diana knows me, but God, God knows me even more. God is cracking up at me getting cranky (any church member who has been on a trip with me probably is right now too) like how Annalea says, “Your not a morning person, your not a night owl, strictly daylight.” Yeah God is cracking up, God knows us, God loves us. God loves you all the time, even when you are cranky. There is not one thing you can do that will stop that. 

There is nothing you can do to stop God from noticing, and nothing, nothing you can do to stop God from LOVING!!! Not even the worst thing you have ever done….God loves you even in that moment. Maybe God’s heart was breaking but God didn’t stop loving you. Didn’t stop being with you. Would not let you go. Still will not let you go. Is sitting right beside you, God puts God’s hand on yours, “Nothing my child, nothing child of God,” just the same as you would tell any one of these kids we call our own. “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you.” And you haven’t. I think of Andy Ferns, who struggles heavily with addiction, I think of how I have never heard any one of you ever tell a bad story about him, instead you talk about how smart he was and is and tell stories, stories which relay, “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you.” I think of Cameron McCallister, who openly struggles with depression, you tell a really funny story about him in school saying he hated his teacher Ginger Rembold, and how Ginger didn’t even react, “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you,” and how later he felt horrible, but you all knew it was just a thing he was going through and loved him anyway and because of it. You tell stories of the super reserved, well mannered, Peter Clarke once getting in a fight during a Christmas play with the Episcopals and you tell it because it is so funny because it is the last thing you would ever imagine Peter Clarke ever doing, “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you.” Ditto Elliot Averett might be agnostic or an atheist, you really don’t know, or frankly care, and it’s great because the stories you tell about him are about Mock Trial, and his letters to the editor that you had to read with a dictionary, and just how smart he is, “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you.” Not loving these children of the church never even crossed your mind. It doesn’t cross God’s mind either, whether is it a child of the church, you sitting in the pews, or me up front. 

And, yeah,…you tell stories of your pastors, Al Fry who sounded like Darth Vader when he breathed into the mic. Susan Barnes who held a sex-ed retreat for the youth that sounded like the most awkward retreat ever. And…I have asked what mine will be, Luke said in preaching it will be the phrase, “I wonder,” and in life, Kate Averett said, “You will probably be remembered as the pastor that went out.” I pray, and I know, “Nothing I can do will ever make you stop loving me.” I learned that my first year after I got divorced and you kept me around then and you still keep my name in your prayers now. Even us adults get grace sometimes too, and you as a congregation give it so much, and God, God gives it even more. And God gives it to you. 

But the hard part is to give it to yourself. To see yourself with a modicum of the eyes that God does. The eyes of a a loving congregant, who has anticipated your coming, who misses your furrowed brow, or remembers the way you reached out or were scared when you were baptized, or who has watched your grow and has loved you since before you can remember, and is so proud of you, and tells the best stories of you, even in your darkest most ashamed hour, that God delights in you, in every ounce of your being, especially that thing you do, yeah, that one, and the gazillion you don’t even know, because even at the end of God’s counting, God is there there, loving you. Amen.