Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Pentecost 15: September 9, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton<
Psalm 139:1-5, 13-18
1
LORD, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
2
You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.
3
Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.
4
You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.
6
Where can I go then from your Spirit? *
where can I flee from your presence?
7
If I climb up to heaven, you are there; *
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.
8
If I take the wings of the morning *
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
9
Even there your hand will lead me *
and your right hand hold me fast.
Who would’ve thought that in 2007, the subject of God would be such a hot topic? Who would have thought that we would hear so much about religion and politics—both national and international? Who would have thought that religion would be such a potent force that a Christopher Hutchins would feel the need to publish a book entitled God is not Great: How Religions Poisons Everything?
Many of us baby boomers had a different picture of what it would be like today in terms of religion and culture. We believed that in 2007 we would be living in a world that was thoroughly indifferent to the idea of God, that as priests and as churchgoers, we would be seen as benighted, deluded wishful thinkers, who, as my Southern pragmatist mother used to say (and I quote) “cannot face reality and need religion as a crutch to make it through the day.”
Here in the Northwest, of course, things are a little more as my fellow baby boomers and I had imagined they would be in 2007. For as a region, fewer people here assume that organized religion belongs in their lives. For this reason the NW is referred to as “the None Zone” in that more people here than in any other region of the county say they have no affiliation to a particular church or religious tradition.
And so while the broader culture engages in a debate about God, here in the NW, some embrace an eclectic spirituality that doesn’t value the more bracing parts of the Christian God who is the God of Jesus and of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, while others find God and communities of faith to be completely odd—or as a former Warden here put it: “When someone asked me what I was doing over the weekend, I just couldn’t tell them I was going on a retreat for my church. They would’ve thought I was completely weird.”
In all of these perspectives what strikes me is that the discussion assumes that God is some a kind of object, out there to be scrutinized by our rational minds and accepted or rejected based on that scrutiny, or out there as a part of some kind of spiritual smorgasbord for us to cherry-pick in terms of which pieces we like or don’t like, which pieces make us feel comfortable and which do not.
Our psalmist, of course, holds a very different view of God. Our psalmist does not portray God as an object outside ourselves. Instead, he or she seems to experience God as what theologian Paul Tillich calls “the ground of our being”: inescapable, as close to us as our thoughts, potentially terrifying in that nothing can be hidden from him or her.
Tillich makes some of these points in a sermon based on Psalm 139 entitled “The Escape from God.” In it he looks at some of the ways the psalmist describes trying to escape God. He does this as a way to understand who this inescapable God of ours is. . “God is inescapable,” Tillich begins (God) is God only because (God) is inescapable. And only that which is inescapable is God.”
The psalmist first talks about trying to escape God by climbing up to heaven. Heaven, of course, is where we might suppose God might be, so it’s an odd place to think of going in order to get away from God. But as Tillich says, this is just what those of us who are idealists try to do. “They (try) to leap towards the heaven of perfection and truth, of (ideal) justice and peace” as a way to escape a God who is not about the abstract and perfect way things ought to be. Trying to escape God by climbing up to heaven, then, is about our tendency to live up in the clouds in our lives and in the world, to flee what is close at hand.
The second place the psalmist describes that one might go to hide from God is the grave. How many of us have longed at one time or another, Tillich says, to escape our lives and the God who asks us to find our way there. How may of us have longed to escape the real questions, the real murk, the real day-to-day challenges of our lives by stepping out if it all—whether that means giving up, giving in or checking out. This is the grave that we might want to retreat to in order to get away from the living God.
And finally the psalmist speaks about trying to escape God by “taking the wings of the morning and dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea.” Tillich interprets this as our tendency to try to escape God by “flying to the ends of the earth,” that is, by trying to find a center outside ourselves by “rushing ahead… trying to be always active, to be always planning, and to be always preparing.” This frenetic activity is a way we can try to escape a God who, as the ground of our being is already our center.
And so, what are we to do with a God who is inescapable, who is with us though we would try to escape up into the clouds into the heaven of idealism, though we would try to escape down into the grave of giving up on the real challenges of our lives, though we would try to escape by rushing headlong into desperately trying to find a center outside ourselves?
“God is inescapable.,” Tillich says (God) is God only because (God) is inescapable. And only that which is inescapable is God.”
Tillich makes it sound so frightening and, of course, in many ways it is: in the words of a beloved prayer, God as the one “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.” Yes, for our psalmist and for many of us it’s frightening to experience God this way, to be in the constant presence of one who knows all our ways and who because of this, Tillich would say, has a claim upon us and demands a response from us.
And yet there is more. “I will thank you because I am marvelously made” says the psalmist. “Your works are wonderful, and I know it well. My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book.”
What our psalmist comes to, then, is a sense of wonder in his or her own creation, a sense of oneness with God from the beginning, a sense that though it may be frightening for God to be this close to us, that the closeness is ultimately to one who is friendly, who is for us, and who is about guiding us into a life that fulfills and realizes who we are as God’s own marvelously made creatures.
For us as Christian people, God’s ultimate closeness to us is realized in the life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the one who is forever close, forever bracing and forever for us, the one who by taking on our own flesh shows us a new image of what it means to be fully human and what the journey is like that will lead to our full humanity.
It is, as our gospel for today says, a journey that will cost us dearly for it will mean staying with ourselves and continuing to come back to the reality of our lives. It will mean trusting that God is there and active, a friendly presence who speaks to us both through what gives us and the world joy and through what causes us and others pain.
In another of Tillich’s works entitled The New Being, Tillich describes his understanding of who Christ is for us, what it is to experience the Christ who our new being”
“Where the New (Being) appears, one feels united with God, the ground and meaning of one’s existence. One has what has been called the love of one’s destiny, and what, today, we might call the courage to take upon ourselves our own anxiety. Then one has the astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self….in a deep self-acceptance. One accepts one’s self as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted….There is a center, a direction, a meaning for life. All healing—bodily and mental—creates this reunion of one’s self with one’s self. Where there is real healing, there is the New Being, the New Creation.
Works cited or consulted
“The Escape from God,” a sermon preached by Paul Tillich, date unknown. For the full text, see http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=448
The New Being by Paul Tillich. For the text, go to
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=375&C=15
