HAVE YOU NOT HEARD?
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack Skiles

This mor ning's Hebrew Scripture reading from Psalm 139 is both fully and
wonderfully comforting and absolutely soul wrenchingly scary. "O God, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts....you know my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely....Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence.....you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb....I was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.....all the days ordained for me were written....before one of them came to be."

This general theme is also reflected in our Christian Scripture narrative
this morning as well. We are in the call narratives early in Jesus'
ministry as Jesus is calling together his most intimate inner circle. I have a great love for the main character in this morning's story that most probably had a great sarcastic sense of humor and got caught using it with Jesus. Nathanael is approached by his friend Phillip to come and see Jesus. Nathanael seems to know about Jesus a little already and makes a small town slur, makes fun of where Jesus is from saying, "Can anything
good come out of Nazareth ." Phillip responds by saying, "Well, 'come and
see' anyway, I know it is hard to believe that anything good can come out
of Bedford ."

Nathaniel then speaks to Jesus who tells Nathaniel that he over heard him making fun of where he was from and I suspect implied or said, "And I see fully inside of you now," and Nathaniel changed the course of his life and followed Jesus. Surely the folks who put together these two lectionary texts want us to ponder today how fully known we are by God. And, step number two is to ponder how we want to respond to the God who knows us so intimately, so fully, so very very completely.

Contrary to popular mainstream belief in church circles that tell people
that they have to invite Jesus into their heart, these bible lessons remind
us that God is already on the inside not only looking out, but experiencing
the depth, the fullness, the greatness as well as the sinfulness of our
every moment. We are fully filled by God and fully known. This reality is both comforting and discomforting all at the same time. The question is not whether we want a relationship with God. The reality is we have one, an
intimate one. The question is how do we want to develop and fully be in
conscious relationship with the God who knows us so completely?

The beauty of this reality is that no matter how we arrange our awareness of God, God remains fully aware of us. My partner, Lynn, and I have been
together wonderfully and intimately for over twenty years. The wonderful
and intimate part of our relationship is primarily determined by what we are
willing to share with each other and how we receive it and love what we tell each other. Lynn cannot know what I don't tell her and vice versa. I am very intuitive, but I can't read minds. I can make good guesses, but our
intimacy, Lynn and mine, is so very dependent on fully sharing, being
intentionally connected.

The evolution of religious experience has been fascinating to observe in our Jewish, Christian, Muslim faith traditions. Our Scriptural heritage has captured in story form how our earliest faith ancestors experienced God and even primarily looked for God outside themselves. Moses went up the mountain to talk with the God who it was believed lived in high places, just this side of the heavens.

Soon Moses arranged for God to live in the Ark of the Covenant and as the Hebrew people moved, God moved with them in the box. Hundreds of years later the Hebrew people built God a house, a temple and God stayed behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies. By the time of Jesus we have a major shift in God’s living arrangements. This reality, this most significant change is spoken of in John's narrative this morning. John is the one who says that now God has moved out of the box, the Ark , even the Temple and has become flesh. Phillip says to Nathaniel, "Come and see Jesus, a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false." Come and see the one in whom, from whom, God is fully found. So completely did Jesus allow the fullness of God to be expressed that to this day a billion of us or more seek to allow God to express God's self through us. Jesus remains our guide, our role-model, on how to be God's presence in human form.

To know ourselves fully is to know God in the midst of our unique selves. To know ourselves fully is to know the relationship we have with God. I
remember many times in my adolescence and college years straining to look up into the night sky pleading with God whom I was sure was hiding from me, to help me understand the crazy mixture of thoughts, testosterone, relationships and demands that were happening through me and around me. Growing up as I have in this area of the country, I still walk outside at night and stare up into the stars and have a tendency to smile remembering how often through my years I have looked for God near the constellation, Orion, that remains brilliantly in the southeastern skies. God is there, but God is as fully present in here, in all of us. There is no place that God is not fully present. And there is no place from which God is not fully calling us to a relationship that matters.

We are sitting on the edge of the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday
remembrance. Dr. King remains such a phenomenal example for all of us. Dr. King was a pastor's son who grew up in the church and was very happy to be like his daddy, a local church pastor. If you don't know, in most African American communities there is no vaulted position any higher, more respected, than the position of pastor. To a large degree, it is because it has historically been the highest position a black man could rise to in our culture.

We are gifted to know a great deal about the life of Dr. King. He did not
want the job of being the leader of the Civil Rights movement. Had Rosa
Parks not refused to move to the back of the bus in Dr. King's hometown, it
might have been someone else. But, fate and the sensitivity to the movement of God with himself and to the needs of the people with whom he was engaged called him forward to accept a mantel of leadership that we remember to this day.

For Dr. King it was not the constellation of Orion into which he looked as he sought God, it was around his kitchen table in the late night hours with the awareness that angry racists were threatening to shoot into his house where his children lie sleeping. In his kitchen table prayer where he acknowledged how scared he was, praying remove this cup from him; what he received was not a release from God's call and intimate relationship, what he received was the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that allowed him to drink of the cup of calling in this life knowing that no matter if bullets rained down, that God's purposes were at play in him. In a true resurrection moment, Dr. King arose from the kitchen table and we know the rest of the story and his life and what he died for is a model for us to draw upon.

 

From those kitchen table moments fearing from himself, Dr. King arose to understand and teach like Jesus did that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. That the hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, sisterhood and brotherhood. That human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

We prefer not to have to work that hard. We are a people who love miracle stories, stories of the miraculous. You know what I mean. We love stories where God acts so that we don't have to. Many of you, I suspect, were with me, captivated by the good fortune of the 151 crew and passengers of the airliner that crash landed into the Hudson River on Thursday. The Governor of New York played it out as the Miracle on the Hudson to go along with the Miracle on 34th Street . That was one very fortunate group of people.

I found most enlightening the words of the pilot's wife who spoke on camera with her two adolescent daughters the day after the incident. She and her girls were obviously relieved and happy people. She said that what we all needed to understand was not that there was a miracle, though it seems miraculous what occurred; but that her husband was a pilot's pilot and that he loved the art of the airplane. God did not miraculously save those 151 people from dying. A lot of luck and a pilot's expertise and love of the art of flying combined to produce the result and God smiled, I have to believe.

 

God sees a lot of death and so do we, though we often only pay attention to those few who die around us. On the world scene there is one death every 2 seconds, 107 deaths every minute. During this sermon there will be 2,140 deaths. People do die during sermons. At my last church the previous pastor's wife died in the pew during one of her husband's sermons. People said they didn't think the sermon was that bad. I hope this one does not kill, but rather inspires us. Each day 153,000 people die, 56 million a year and in the average lifetime of 70 years 3.9 billion people will die around us. The statistics were not greatly affected by the 151 passengers who lived on Thursday.

 

God spends a lot of time crying and being in despair with us. When young children die, God cries and wishes they had not. God grieves with the parents and surrounding family members and friends. God has lured us time after time in our learning and in our discovery of how to combat the natural diseases that come with living on this planet and heal from the injuries that happen to us. God desires for life to be abundant and good and fulfilling...for all God's creation. God inspires learning and actively desires that what we learn might be for the good of all creation. It is a miraculous act of creation that we are so able to learn and discover the richness of our existence.

 

We had to learn to split the atom. Surely God lured people's learning forward toward the understanding of nuclear fission. But, it is contrary to the will of God that the atomic bomb is used to destroy thousands of people and that nuclear waste is allowed to poison the water and land that sustains our lives. We must demand of our governments and industry and of ourselves as consumers moral and ethical standards far beyond what we have yet done as we seek to heal our planet which is so badly scarred from varied uses and abuses of it.

 

God is in the planet, as God is present in all of creation. God is no less present in the copper mines, the coal mines, the polluted air and ocean than God is in you and in me. Creation spirituality demands a stewardship mentality that begins with understanding that what we do to anything, we are doing to God. There is no good way to pragmatically argue doing injustice to God. It is a losing argument!

The Psalm we began with this morning suggests that we were knit together by God in the wombs of our mothers and that all our days were ordained even before we were glimmers in our parents eyes. I hope that we can stand apart from the literalism of the Psalmist statements. Our learning has evolved wonderfully in the last four thousand years since this Psalm was penned as a beautiful piece of religious prose. Those of us in religious circles have been slow to demand of our Scripture traditions what we expect from other disciplines of study.

God does not need us to defend God by remaining fixed in ancient formula's, creeds and interpretations. I don't even think God needs our traditional worship forms. I suspect more what God desires is a living celebration of justice filled living which is perhaps the truest form of worship.

The Prophet Micah was alerted by God to what really matters in the midst of our discovering the depth of our relationship with God. We all have God deeply embedded and available to us and as we stare to the stars or whether we bow our heads around a kitchen table, Micah says that we are urged by God to love justice, to do mercy and to walk humbly with God I don't think God who is closer to us than the synapses that relay data in our brains can be fooled by anything else and simply desires our humble acceptance that God wants us to love doing justice and being merciful and to be humble in the performance of both tasks.

The God who is both deep in our soul and reflected from the expressions on our faces may we know how deeply loved and challenged we are by God and might our hands, our feet, our voices proclaim the justice and the mercy which such a loving relationship demands.