Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
“What Are We Made Of?”
September 8, 2019
Many of us grew up hearing the nursery rhyme describing little boys as being made of “Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails” while little girls are made of “Sugar and spice and everything nice.” Some of us may never have heard how that pretty lengthy rhyme ends, after detailing what babies, little boys, little girls, young men, young women, sailors, soldiers, nurses, fathers, mothers, old men and old women are made of but it all finishes by answering the question, “What are all folks made of?” It is “Fighting a spot and loving a lot.” Those were the thoughts of English poet (think spot of tea, I guess) Robert Southey back in 1820 and it’s hard to know what his inspiration was but his description of we human beings is fairly accurate still today.
Consider that single individual that has known you best in all of your life, the one who could often finish your sentences or accurately predict your choices – maybe infuriatingly so. God does even that nearest and dearest person one better. To be known starting from the inside and working outward is God’s work alone. Contrast this with how every human relationship begins, even the closest ones we’re a part of, by first forming an impression physically of what makes us uniquely ourselves – our smile or the way we walk or the sound of our voice while we are forming an opinion of them, using similar outer clues. After that we are able to move onto the important inner traits but they are all received based on what we each offer – opinions, ideas, dreams, questions. There is a finite amount we can share about the totality of the person we are because with every breath we take we are in the process of becoming. Becoming is also the title of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s best-selling memoir and she explained it this way, “For me becoming wasn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
The psalmist here is speaking of God’s knowing of each of us that is so deep and wide that it belies description. Instead metaphors must suffice. Don’t you love the image of being knit together in the womb? I imagine every stitch to be unique with just the right tension and a ball of yarn that doesn’t tangle but instead puts our parts, like the Operation game that the children and I just examined, in their places so much so that if we take a moment to look at another person with just a fraction of God’s love and mercy and grace we might have the chance to experience real change. Try it out now on someone sitting by you without creeping them out or the next person you are tempted to write off as a total and absolute jerk or even look at your own hand, each finger, each finger nail. It was Maya Angelou who pointed out “While I know myself as a child of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.” To see another with wonder and thanksgiving at how amazing it is that we have each been created in God’s image is to treasure being known and held by this God of us all. To allow the awe that the psalmist is filled with, and that harkens back to Genesis when God declared all of creation good, is to hopefully recognize the miracle of it all.
This is a psalm that is different from others and probably why it is so treasured. The unknown writer is often thought to be David but most Biblical scholars doubt that and see that attribution as a tribute to David done in his name. This is an attempt to try to grasp a measure of God’s greatness by considering our own greatness. This message of being known and loved in spite of the bad choices that we’ve made, bodies that decline with time, moods that can move from total glee to profound and utter sadness in the blink of an eye and to be totally surrounded and lifted up by God is to acknowledge our vulnerability. We need God and we spend our lives striving to know God and loving God along the way while God knows every ounce of our being and loves us in our entirety from before birth, through life and beyond death.
When we consider the people who are hurting the most right now – the ones held imprisoned or caged against their will, those who’ve just experienced the death of one they love, the ones who are trying to dull their pain with increasingly more powerful drugs or drink, those who’ve just had their homes and lives destroyed by a hurricane – these are the ones we need to assure that they are known and loved by this God who is holding onto them when they don’t know it or can’t feel it.
Today marks the beginning of a new church school year and it provides us with a fresh opportunity to offer our children the knowledge that they are fearfully and wonderfully made. We get to take our lived experience of joys and wonder and awe and share those with the youngest ones in our midst as a way of showering them with the love God has for them. We can do it as teachers or assistants. We can do it when we integrate them into worship. We can do it when we engage with them during Fellowship time. We can do it by supporting them in the things that are important to them. In return, we also get a dose of the wonder and awe that comes naturally to children. Their excitement and curiosity are ways of teaching us again that God is at work through each of us. Their questions and fascination with how things work can reinforce the idea that every one of us is always in the process of becoming that which God is always creating within and through us.
To capture that which is part of the God within and the God beyond our imagining is our shared life’s work. The psalmist gives voice to God when he says, “I am still with you.” This is not in spite of but because of everything we are. This is the Good News we get to share. We are good enough because we are seen and known and treasured by God. Consider, then these beautiful images from Presbyterian minister Todd Jenkins:
Just words, connecting the dots
enough to sketch the big picture;
remembering that, with water color
or crayons or charcoal or even
a bucket of house paint,
however and in whatever shade
your life is decorated today,
the One who dreamed
and drew you before you were born
has your image on the fridge;
your outside-the-lines self
that sometimes feels insignificant
and hurts in ways and places
you’d prefer to have never known.
Never beyond the divine gaze,
your pain and passion,
your hurt and hope
are always on God’s heart;
your wholeness being whispered
onto the canvas this instant.
(“Painted,”Tuesday’s Muse 2 by J. Todd Jenkins)
Amen.