Known And Loved

June 23, 2024 - Psalm 139: 1-18

I once had a woman tell me her favorite time to pray was on her long commute to work in her car.  She told me she didn’t listen to the radio. She didn’t call her friends.  She talked to God.  In fact, this woman traveled for work by car. So, she drove a lot.  And, she talked a lot.  She would have quiet conversations.  She would tell God the story of her day.  She would scream and cry and demand of God to know “why?!”  all while driving down the road.  She would even crack up over the stories she told God or the ironic, dry humor she swears she heard come back at her. 

She talked so much that she started to get weirded out by how weirded out other drivers got by her when they saw her animatedly talking to herself in her car. She joked with a friend that maybe she should get a mannequin of some kind so that other passersby would assume she was talking to another person and not worry so much about the lady in the car talking to herself.  Well, her friend didn’t have a mannequin but they did have a huge, adult human size stuffed teddy bear.  The idea tickled both the friends so much that they set the bear up in the woman’s passenger seat, and as long as I knew the woman she traveled across the Midwest with a large stuffed bear riding shotgun. 

I don’t remember what she named the bear.  And I don’t know if it made people stare at her more or less as she chattered away zipping down the highway.  What I do know is that she had found a means of prayer that worked very well for her. 

Psalm 139 proclaims God’s all-knowing nature with the words:

“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 my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.”

This may be so. God knows our stories without having to be told.  But for some reason, it really seems to help some of us to tell them to God anyway.  Whether we’re screaming our stories out in the car, whispering them to a trusted friend or counselor, or writing them down in a journal, there’s something about being heard that can lead us to powerful healing. 

If we believe God already knows our stories, when we prayerfully tell them to God, we aren’t saying anything God doesn’t already know. Rather, what we are doing is trusting God to help us hear our stories, to help us face them, to help us learn from them, and to help us experience God’s holy love and grace right there in the middle of our stories, too.

I have often found that prayerfully sharing our stories with God can also be a way of letting go of harmful stories: the ones some of us have about ourselves

–how we’re not deserving of love and kindness, and the ones some of us have about others

–how they’re not deserving of love and kindness either. 

Psalm 139 speaks to those last stories.  It does it in the last part of the Psalm in the words we don’t usually read in church because they take a lot of unpacking to be helpful.  There the Psalmist writes: 

“O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—

20 those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!

21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Is there any one among us who hasn’t had rage-filled thoughts?  The psalmists words here strike me as true in the sense that, yeah I’ve been there, too.  At the very least, there are people I find it harder to love than others. I suspect most of you can relate.  Usually though I find that challenge to love someone has something to do with the harmful and narrow story I have about them.  When I learn more about someone’s humanness it doesn’t mean I’m less hurt by anything that they have done but it does thicken their story for me.  It does help me to see how God can love and use us all.  Then, God’s Spirit often nudges, if I turn that kind of compassion on myself it’s easier to love my own less than lovable parts, too.  I find it easier to let go of these harmful stories I have about myself or others if I can remember we are all created and loved by God.  “For it was you,” the psalmist tenderly confesses to God, “who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” God created us, loves us, and is with us still. 

For me, stories have always been one of my favorite things.  Since I have been little they have been part of how I have understood my world. I’m certainly not alone in that. But I tend to enthusiastically embrace it, listening for others stories, writing my own, and reading voraciously.  Yet, only in the last few years have I come to think of reading fiction as a form of prayer. Maybe it’s different for you but what fiction does for me–especially imaginative fiction in which the normal rules of physics and existence don’t necessarily apply–is it helps me to expand my heart in ways that make it easier for me to grow spiritually.  

Reading stories about forgiveness–even fictional ones, help me to practice forgiveness in my own life.  Reading stories about different worlds in which everything I know is upside down help me to wonder why not all God’s children have what they need and if the less than ideal way things are really has to be that way forever.  Reading stories about hard times and hard-won triumphs help me to feel not nearly so alone in all the things I go through in my life.  Even stories whose conclusions or philosophical viewpoints I disagree with teach me something and can carry a powerful message to me.  In this way, I experience stories as an important means of prayer in which I often hear God speaking through the words of mere mortals. 

How many of us have turned to these stories in books or videos to help us through this pandemic? When they lift us up and help us feel closer to God and to each other, why not respect them as the means of prayer that they can really be? And if the stories we’re consuming aren’t helping us, why not wonder about why that is? After all, whatever stories we are telling, being told, or living through, God is right there with us through it all. 

As Psalm 139 asks God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, 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. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day.”

Wherever you go from here, may you know find God powerfully with you in the stories you tell, the stories you let go, the stories you are told, and the stories you are living through. 

May it be so. Amen.