20150118 2nd Sunday after Epiphany B
Title: Has God Crossed the Line?
Text: Psalm 139
Thesis: We are fully known… and fully loved.
Introduction
Edward Snowden was so concerned about the way that NSA was invading the privacy of American citizens that he exposed a ton of the National Security Agency’s data to whomever might be interested in it. He is currently enjoying asylum in Russia.
Meanwhile NSA has a number of Data Centers in the United States including one here the Denver Metro area which targets, tracks and downloads intelligence from satellites. The most noted center is near Bluffdale, Utah and is less than a mile from the headquarters of the largest sect of polygamists in the world. Just off Buffalo Hollow Road is a 2 billion dollar, 1 million square foot data center that is our country’s biggest spy center.
The NSA is thought to be the largest, most covert and potentially intrusive intelligence agency ever.
How many data centers are there and what do they do? We don’t know.
But we do know that they monitor and process the content of telephone calls, email correspondence, Facebook postings, text messaging, internet trafficking, transmitting of documents, files and photos (and who knows what else). And we know that they process whatever they collect in 150 sites around the world.
Most of us would say that NSA has crossed the line in what they think they need to know about us. And if we think NSA is intrusive, what do we think about God’s gathering of our personal data? Has God crossed the line? (I ask that with tongue in cheek.)
Unlike NSA which is primarily in the business of scrutinizing our lives, God is in the business of securing our lives. That is not to say that God does not see or care about sinfulness but God’s objective is not to ferret out our stuff but rather to rescue and redeem us.
Psalm 139 clearly teaches us that we are Fully Known. There is nothing about us that is hidden from God.
I. Fully Known, Psalm 139:1-12
A. Intimately Aware, 139:1-6
O Lord, you have examined my heart and your know everything about me. Psalm 139:1
In the film Shall We Dance there is a bit of dialogue that is fitting for us today.
…in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things … all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying, "Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness."
We all want our lives to matter, and we believe they only matter if they are noticed by someone.
I recently did some research and found there are a bunch of social networking sites and that there are 15 social networking sites I should be using (again, tongue in cheek.). I asked two of our students, “What are the most popular social networking sites among your friends?” And they both said Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
It could be said that there is a bit of narcissist in everyone who blogs or Tweets or posts… but more than that I wonder if these are ways we go about making sure others are aware of our existence.
Skye Jathani says, “Isn’t that what fuels a lot of blogs, Facebook, and especially Twitter. We want someone, anyone, to take notice … to care about us … to watch us and by their attention communicate, "You matter. Your life counts." (Skye Jethani, "Why I Don't Tweet," Skyebox: The Weblog of Skye Jethani, 11-12-09)
Our text today speaks of the biggest and best witness to our existence in the universe. God!
God is omniscient. God knows all of our stuff. Psalm 139 says it best:
O Lord, you have examined me and know everything about me. You know when I sit down and when I stand up. You know my thoughts. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say before I say it. You go before me and follow me.
God is intimately aware of you. Us. God is Intimately Aware of everything about us including our blogs, Facebook and Twitter postings…
Not only does God know everything about us, God is everywhere with us. We call that omnipresence.
B. Inescapably Present, 139:7-12
I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! Psalm 139:7
The film Wit is based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning play about a single woman's battle with terminal cancer. No longer able to continue her work as an English professor, Vivian Bearing deals with experimental cancer treatments and the humiliation that she is no longer in control of her life.
The scene begins in a hospital bed where Vivian, bald and wearing a hospital gown, lies slightly crouched to the side. Her face rests on the arm of her visitor, E. M. Ashford, an elderly woman who had been Vivian's college English teacher. E. M. reaches into her handbag and takes out a children's book titled The Runaway Bunny.
E. M. began to read. Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I'm running away."
"If you run away," said the mother, "I will run after you. For you are my little bunny."
"If you run after me," said the little bunny, "I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you."
"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you."
"If you become a fisherman," said the little bunny, "I will be a bird and fly away from you."
"If you become a bird and fly away from me," said the mother, "I will be a tree that you can come home to."
"Shucks," said the little bunny. "I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny." And so he did. (Wit, 2001 from HBO Films; written by Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols, directed by Mike Nichols, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Margaret Edson; submitted by Jerry De Luca, Montreal West, Quebec, Canada)
God’s presence is inescapable:
• If I go up to heaven or down into the grave… God is there.
• If I ride the wings of the morning flying at the speed of light… God is there.
• If I live in a little bungalow by the sea on a desert island… God is there.
• If I hide in the deepest and darkest place on the planet… God is there.
Wherever we are, God is!
We could understand this truth to mean God is always in hot pursuit… but the truth of the matter is this: Wherever we go God is already there waiting for us. “Wherever I go, you are there!”
Psalm 139 not only teaches us that we are Fully Known, it teaches us that we are Fully Loved and Marvelously Made.
II. Fully Loved, Psalm 139:13-18
A. Marvelously Made, 139:13-16
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. 139:13
Alexander Tsiaras, a mathematician and visual artist, uses special visualization software to explore the unseen human body. In a 2010 TED.com lecture, he explained how his technology has enabled him to scan the development of the fetus from conception to birth. Throughout the lecture Tsiaras refers to what he calls the "marvel" and the "miracle" of an unborn baby's development. Tsiaras highlights the miracle of life with the following examples:
• At 44 days the fetus has become "something that you can recognize."
• At nine weeks it "is really like a kind of little human being."
• At 25-28 days, the baby's heart, which resembles a "magnificent origami," is developing at a rate of one million cells per second.
• At 32 days the arms and hands are developing.
• Within five weeks you can start to see the heart's early atrium and ventricles. A week later the baby's heart is actually becoming mature.
• At 52 days the retina, nose, and fingers are developing.
• By the time the fetus is full-term, it has 60,000 miles of vessels inside its body—although only one mile of vessels is visible. The other 59,999 miles of vessels are quietly working to bring nutrients and dispose of waste.
• Tsiaras calls a pregnant woman's body a "walking immunological cardiovascular system that … can actually nurture and treat this child with the kind of marvel that is beyond our comprehension." (Alexander Tsiaris, "Conception to Birth—Visualized," TED.com (12-10), [accessed 4-26-12])
We are marvelously and wonderfully made!
When someone pours their heart and soul into making something it is an act of love. I remember when our grandson wanted to give me something to take home with me… he went to his bedroom and returned with a watercolor he had done on a sheet of paper. I could see in his eyes that this was something he really did not want to part with and asked him if he would like to keep it and give me something else. He quickly grabbed one of his mother’s catalogs and gave that to me. He obviously loved his creation. My guess is that most of us still have stuff tucked away in which we are emotionally vested, so we hold on to them and treasure them.
Such is the heart of God who made us and loves us so much that he will not let us go.
As Fully Loved people we are taught that God is Infinitely Mindful of us.
B. Infinitely Mindful, 139:17-18
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered. 139:17
This is not mindful in the sense of being watched… it is about being thought about.
There is something of a twist in these verses in which the Psalmist is thinking about God’s thoughts about him… David is thinking about God’s love for him.
Your brain weighs approximately three pounds. It’s not pretty… just a wrinkly glob of matter but it is the most complex thing we have ever discovered in the universe. Your brain is where everything you think happens and your brain is what controls everything you do. No computer can match the processing that occurs in the human brain.
A National Geographic article I read claims our brains contain 100 billion microscopic cells called neurons… so many that it would take us 3,000 years to count them all. Whenever we dream, laugh, think, see or move tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron highways. The activity in our brains never stops.
Your mind is like a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, never standing still.
Have you ever thought about your thoughts? Have you ever noticed that when try to not think thoughts your minds kicks into high gear and thoughts seem to race through your mind? Experts say that the average person thinks between 50,000 and 80,000 thoughts each day… that’s between 2,100 and 3,300 thoughts each hour. In a given year 29,200,000 thoughts go through your mind.
So what do you think about while you are thinking all those thoughts?
Knowing how God Fully Knows us and Fully Loves us triggers the realization of a couple of truths.
1. An incomprehensible truth
[God’s thoughts] cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them… 139:18
Out text says that God’s thoughts about him cannot be counted. God’s thoughts about us outnumber the grains of sand in the sea. In other words, God is infinitely mindful of each of us. We are always on God’s mind.
Infinite mindfulness is an incomprehensible truth!
The second thing that informs us is that this knowledge is a precious truth.
2. A precious truth
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. Psalm 139:17
When I read or hear the word precious I get cynical. I don’t like the word. It’s a sappy word. All I can hear in my mind are things like, “God bless your precious little heart.” Or “Isn’t he a precious little thing?” The use of precious is inspired by sweet, sticky, sentimentalism.
The thought that God is looking down on us with his hands clasped under his chin, watching his adorable children kind of turns me off.
But then I looked at that verse again I realized the verse is not about God’s thoughts being precious thoughts… it is about our response to the realization that God is infinitely mindful of each of us. It is our response to the knowledge that God is Intimately Aware and Inescapably Present and Infinitely Mindful of us that generates within us an awareness of who God is and how much God loves and cares for us. It the awareness that the mindfulness of God is invaluable and precious beyond price.
Conclusion
I tape a couple of television shows each week… one is Person of Interest. Now in its 4th season it has become a little too complex to follow but I’m hanging in there. It is a story about an eccentric and reclusive billionaire who is also a software genius who created The Machine. The Machine is an omnipresent surveillance system that sees everyone everywhere and detects when someone is about to be involved in an imminent crime. The Machine then sends Harold Finch the Social Security Number of that person (of interest) and then Finch dispatches Reese to stop the crime and save the Person of Interest.
This is the season opening voice over of Harold Finch introducing Person of Interest:
"You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people; people like you. Crimes the government considered 'irrelevant'. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find you".
The thinly veiled messages Harold Finch is sending out is that:
1. If you are a perpetrator, we know who you are and where you are and we are coming after you.
2. If you are a victim, we know who you are and where you are and we are coming to save you.
For some the thought of God knowing who we are and where we are:
Is intrusive and scrutinizing and cause for concern and perhaps even alarm which is needful to remind us of God’s grace and mercy. For others this knowledge is unintrusive and securing and cause for calm.
We are fully known… and fully loved!
Thanks be to God!
