Tag Archives: Psalm 139

Postscript to June 2 Sermon

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Interpreting Psalm 139 starts with a moral decision: are vv.19-22 (vv.18-21 in the Book of Common Prayer) templates for our prayers? Some traditions in both Testaments would support an affirmative answer (the imprecatory psalms, Jehu’s religious purge [2 Kings 10:18ff], Paul’s comments regarding his opponents in Galatians [1:9; 5:12 etc]). Others in both Testaments a negative answer (psalms like 143 [“for no one living is righteous before you”], Jesus’ command to love the enemy  [Mt 5:44]).

My answer is negative, placing the verses in a position analogous to the many eloquent but wrong-headed speeches of Job’s friends. But why in God’s providence is it still there? A reminder, I think, that all of us remain capable of sentiments and acts good, bad, and ugly. Once we start cancelling what we don’t like we end up—if we’re consistent—cancelling ourselves (recall the guillotine). Better: that God got the divine hands dirty dealing with the author(s)/editor(s) of Psalm 139 gives me hope that God’s hands will keep dealing with me.

The Japanese have a custom of repairing pottery in a way that highlights the fractures with precious metals (kintsugi). Perhaps Psalm 139 is an exercise in kintsugi (like ourselves?).

Does our theology survive contact with the enemy? (2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 6/2/2024)

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Readings (Track 1); Psalm 139 (complete; versification differing slightly from the BCP version cited)

The Lectionary included part of Psalm 139 (Verses 1-5, 12-17) in today’s readings; what are we supposed to do with that psalm? The Lectionary offers one answer: read the parts you like; don’t read the parts you don’t like. Well, whatever text we’re reading, that doesn’t sound like a promising strategy for learning something new. So what are we supposed to do with it?

There certainly is an abrupt change in tone between vv. 17 and 18. The best way of making sense of that is to recall that some judicial processes in Israel involved a divine decision, the accused subject to divine examination (guilty or innocent?) with the decision announced, presumably, by a priest. “Presumably” because all our evidence is indirect: multiple psalms whose combination of themes is best explained by such processes. This psalm reflects such a process: the accused speaks to God regarding God’s thorough knowledge of the accused, and then calls for God’s judgment on the “wicked,” those who’d brought charges against the accused.

I say “This psalm reflects” because it’s hardly a transcript of the speech of a particular accused person. In fact, this theme of divine knowledge has expanded far beyond what the judicial process would involve, nevertheless preserving the flow from the accused affirming that just God’s knowledge of them, to crying out for that just God to punish the deserving. And in the process the psalm becomes—in its entirety—a sort of mirror for us. Let’s walk through it.

Verses 1-5 focus on God’s complete—astounding—knowledge of the speaker. It’s not that the psalmist is assuming divine omniscience. It’s more personal than that, putting experiences together. You know me, know all my tells. A game of poker against you would be folly. This knowledge: wonderful, incomprehensible. Peterson paraphrases “This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in.” But, such knowledge, welcome or unwelcome? Today, with all these databases collecting everything possible about us, increased use of facial recognition: good news? Is God having all this knowledge good news? The verses don’t say. The text invites us to wonder how we experience this knowledge.

Verses 6-11 provide a sort of answer: the speaker inventories all the possible places to escape this knowledge. But there’s no place to hide. Again, it’s not as though the psalmist is assuming omnipresence. It’s more like a wide receiver talking to a cornerback: “Just when I think I’m open, you’re there. You seem to know when I’m going to cut before I do.” Good news or bad news? The verbs in v.9 sound like good news, but then we can be lead where we want to go or where we don’t want to go.

Surprisingly, the light/darkness contrast in vv.10-11 provides a way forward, reminding the speaker of what God accomplished for the speaker in complete darkness: the speaker’s own bodily existence (vv.12-17). Verse 13: “I will thank you because I am marvelously made; / your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” Scripture’s well aware that our bodies can malfunction in horrific ways, but the uniform response is to call on God to make them work again, rather than to abandon the project. So Paul repeatedly speaks of a new body, and John’s Gospel notes that Jesus’ resurrected body is no barrier to enjoying a good serving of fish and chips. (Ketchup not mentioned because tomatoes hadn’t yet made it over from the Americas.)

God’s involvement with the psalmist started from the moment of conception. Amazing—but also in need of a sidebar. We’d misuse the psalmist’s testimony by dragging it into the current arguments about abortion. The psalmist is celebrating the care and continuity. The psalmist is not asking when this “unformed substance” (so the NRSV in v.15; “limbs” in the BCP) became a legal person. In Scripture that question is only implicitly addressed in the Exodus law dealing with fight between men that injures a woman that results in a miscarriage (Exod. 21:22ff). There the Greek translation introduces a distinction between a child not fully formed and a child fully formed, with personhood implied only in the latter case. So Thomas Aquinas’ position that the fetus received a soul 40 or 80 days after conception is representative. In the Roman Catholic Church ascription of personhood from the moment of conception may first appear in the 19th Century. Among the Evangelicals, as late as 1968 their flagship magazine, Christianity Today, sponsored a consultation on abortion. Participants disagreed on many points but reported “about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”[1] But back to the text.

As in the previous sections, the psalmist is overwhelmed by the qualitative difference between God’s knowledge and theirs, and this becomes the focus of the section’s concluding verses (16-17):

How deep I find your thoughts, O God!
how great is the sum of them!
If I were to count them, they would be more in number than the sand;
to count them all, my life span would need to be like yours.

But all that doesn’t derail the train of thought from God the judge examining the accused to calling on God to give the accusers what they deserve (vv.18-21).

What’s striking is that the intensity of the psalm seems to increase at v.18. God’s innumerable thoughts (vv.16-17) are important; God doing something about the enemies is really important. Somehow, once the enemies come on stage, all that celebration of God’s knowledge and creativity goes into the background and God’s role is reduced to destruction, to doing what the speaker can understand very well, thank you very much.

That’s the mirror that I think’s important here. We’re happy to celebrate God’s knowledge and the life-giving ways that God’s knowledge surpasses our own. But when the enemies come on stage, too often all that recedes, and what we want from God is that God do things we understand very well.

We remember Jesus’ “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). But sometimes we’re not there yet, and in those cases better to pray all of Psalm 139, than stop at v.17, hoping to convince ourselves that we’re farther along than we are.

To come at it from a different angle, the enemies provide an unwelcome helpful reality check: my talk of God’s amazing knowledge and competence: quarantined in the distant past, or the ground for trust and confidence in the present? That’s the recurrent challenge for God’s people in both Testaments: can the celebration of God’s past actions translate into trust now? Our enemies—alas—help us sort that out.

The last two verses attempt a sort of summary of the psalm. And they can serve as a sort of summary for our interaction with the psalm.

“Search me out, O God, and know my heart;
try me and know my restless thoughts.”

“Search” and “know”: verbs from the beginning of the psalm. So God should keep doing what God’s been doing, despite our recurrent ambivalence about whether that knowledge is good for us (“restless thoughts”).

“Look well whether there be any wickedness in me”

Perhaps that petition was originally formulaic, spoken assuming that of course God’s going to find me innocent. But after all the attention to God’s qualitatively superior knowledge, perhaps at least for us it can destabilize the assumption of a firm distinction between us and the wicked.[2]

“And lead me in the way that is everlasting.”

And in particular, “when the enemies come onstage, don’t let our vision shrink to what we’re capable of imagining you doing.” The military has a proverb: no plan survives encounter with the enemy. We might ask: does our theology survive encounter with the enemy? That’s the challenge Psalm 139 poses to us.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480, accessed 5/30/2024.

[2] The Pharisees as portrayed in Mark’s Gospel would have had no problem praying Ps 139 straight through and understanding their conspiring against Jesus as assisting God in the fulfillment of vv.18-21.

“Know me…lead me”: A Meditation on Ps 139 (2nd after the Epiphany)

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Readings; Psalm 139

A curious set of readings! The Gospel: the calling of Nathael, picking up in a general way the Epiphany theme. The calling of Samuel: probably chosen as an Old Testament parallel to the Gospel. The reading from 1 Corinthians: well, it looks like the Lectionary editors wanted to put these chapters somewhere, and ended up distributing them in all three years of the Epiphany season. As for the psalm, the editors probably chose part of it for the theme of divine knowledge present both there and in the Gospel. We read all of it this morning, because in its entirety it’s worth a sermon. So, please open the BCP to pages 794-795.

What sort of psalm is it? The requests starting in v.18 suggest an individual petition. We find vv.18-21 uncomfortable enough that the Sunday Lectionary always omits them. The Psalter itself seems to work more on the principle articulated by John Chapman: “Pray as you can; don’t pray as you can’t.” If vv.18-21 are in my heart, the Psalter thinks it’s better to get them out there on my lips so God and I can deal with them together.

What of vv.1-17? They’re some sort of lead-in to vv.18-23: you, Lord, with your wonderful knowledge, are well-positioned to respond to the requests. But vv.1-17 really look like they’ve taken on a life of their own past any narrow rhetorical use, exploring this wonderful knowledge in surprising ways. So let’s start there.

Verses 1-5, addressed—like the whole psalm—to God, put God’s knowledge center-stage. What isn’t clear from these verses is whether the speaker is celebrating or complaining. Governments these days are getting better at surveillance, a trend Orwell worried about in his book 1984. We’re all over the map in our responses to this, but what when God’s surveillance capacities dwarf them all? What does God do with all this knowledge? The speaker/the poet hasn’t tipped his/her hand.

Verses 6-11 and 12-17 explore the theme in space and time. Space: wherever I go, you’re there. And in the middle of vv.6-11 the first clue as to what God is doing with this knowledge:

Even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand hold me fast.

“Lead…hold me fast.” God’s using knowledge for the speaker’s good, and is not about to let go. We might think of Jesus’ words in John: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (10:27-28). “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; / if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.” That’s something to hang onto.

Moving from the abstract darkness of v.11 to the darkness of the womb, the speaker describes God’s knowledge and involvement from their beginning: “you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” “I will thank you because I am marvelously made” or, as Alter translates it, “for fearsomely I am set apart.” That’s not an affirmation reserved for Olympic athletes; the Psalter invites us to echo it, to claim it, even while dealing with demanding limitations. And if we claim it for ourselves, we claim it for our neighbor, also when (thinking of our southern border) it’s inconvenient to do so.

Returning to the petitions starting in v.18: obviously Jesus’ teaching (commands!) and example expand our prayer options regarding the enemy. To the degree that we’ve let Jesus mess with our imagination, what do we do with these verses? The desert fathers probably got it right, understanding the enemy as—to use the language of our baptismal service—the “sinful desires that draw you from the love of God.” With care, a certain ruthlessness is indicated: “And if thy right hand offend thee…” (Matt 5:30).

What of vv.22-23? The speaker is self-aware enough to understand that this divine scrutiny is still needed, self-aware to know that “whether there be any wickedness in me” is an open question. (There is perhaps a gentle irony in this coming right after the imprecations of vv.18-21.) “Search… know… try… look well” “and lead me in the way that is everlasting.”

That final request is perhaps the most interesting line in the psalm. We might wonder why it’s necessary: the speaker surely has Moses’ law. As Joseph said to his brothers, “Do this and you will live” (Gen. 42:18). And here we might recall Psalm 19, back on p.607. Immediately after exuberant praise of the law (vv.7-11), we encounter “Who can tell how often he offends? / cleanse me from my secret faults.” The law is necessary, but—given our limited self-knowledge and our recurrent desire for self-deception—not sufficient. “Cleanse me!” Or, in today’s psalm’s language, “lead me.”

OK, and how does God do that? Scripture’s counter-question might be: Is there any means God doesn’t use? Joseph’s dreams, that angel-in-disguise who guided Tobias, Balaam’s ass, John the Baptist (Whose head do I want on a platter this week?)… There’s that lovely line from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack… in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” There’s profound divine humility here, our God being happy to use the smallest crack. But it does require at least some part of us to be listening, to be awake.

John, author of today’s Gospel, incorporates this appreciation for divine knowledge in his portrait of Jesus. When Jesus is surrounded by an enthusiastic but unreliable crowd John tells us “But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone” (Jn. 2:24-25). Recall too the Samaritan woman’s testimony: “He told me everything I have ever done” (Jn. 4:39). So, in today’s reading, Nathanel: “Where did you get to know me?” (Jn. 1:48)

And if we return to the question of what God/Jesus does with this knowledge, with Jesus’ leading: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Nor does this seeing leave Nathanel/us unchanged. Paul, writing to those exasperating Corinthians, some of his least promising hearers: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).