Lectionary meditation

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.

5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

18 I try to count them--they are more than the sand; I come to the end--I am still with you.

The gospel just didn't speak to me on Tuesday when I read through the lectionary, neither did the other two readings. This doesn't happen often and when it does I usually wait for S's sermon on Sunday and just write a meditation/response on that, she always manages to trigger something for me. But on a whim I read the psalm for this week and immediately copied it into a blogger draft post. I had no idea what to do with it, but I knew I had to do something with it.

This psalm could sum up the ride I've been on.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

Is there any doubt? I can't seem to get away from this God. I have done a good job of hiding and hiding myself, but it doesn't work. God is always searching always discovering my latest hiding place. And always asking me that original question, that first hurt. "Where are you? Why are you hiding?" Why? What a question. Why wouldn't I?

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
...
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

I know what the psalmist means when he says God has hemmed him in and placed His hand upon him. God is inescapable, omnipresent. But that hand is not hard or oppressive, it is not something I fear. Because this is a psalm about wonder. The psalmist might have been a doctor, a scientist so exquisitely he describes the body and creation. As the words roll off my tongue my mind feels the lift and fall of my chest, the steady wonderous beat of my heart. Flex your hand, feel the thousands of tiny precise movements to fold and extend those fingers. Twist your wrist and an organic machine so complicated we still cannot duplicate it moves with flawless, effortless precision.

The microcosm of creation in a sheath of muscle and tendon and bone. And the macrocosm. There is a movie, I've forgotten which, where a human fetus hangs superimposed on a field of stars, and nebulae. A human forms before our eyes amid the vast fire of creation.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Creation is infinitely large, impossibly grand and yet the act of our own creation and formation is as infinitely improbable. The same atoms that make up the stars knit together, in us, for something utterly different and equally divine.

The psalmist knew, all those years ago, something we still struggle with today. God is beyond our comprehension. God is not trapped in the sky, does not sit far off in heaven. God is woven through creation itself. God is present in the nuclear furnace of a star, and the womb where we grew and became. God is present in our breath, the flow of blood through our veins. Miles of blood vessels, thousands of miles of nerves, millions of muscle fibers. Creation's infinity captured within us, and down to our last atom, infused with the presence of God.

Of course hiding did not work. Of course God found me:

I come to the end--I am still with you.

There is no ending. As the universe in its infinity curves back upon itself so there is no way to outrun God who is present in it. We can find no end where there is no God, nor beginning. There is no place to hide and that is fearful, and wonderful knowledge. Amen.