Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
February 3, 2008
Copyright © 2008, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139:1-3)

The older I get the more I find myself falling in love with the Psalms. There's a comprehensiveness of prayerful expression to these sacred worship utterances that inevitably reaches the very core of our human existence. Psalms have a way of expressing the realities of our finite human situation, all the way from the darkest, difficult and most painful crevices of our life to the ecstatic moments of mountaintop experience, and everything in between.

I find that, when my prayer life begins to stagnate, I'm wise to turn to the Psalms and pray one out loud, making my own variation on the theme. These ancient expressions are as contemporary as today. They have a way of placing on my heart, mind and lips words so accurate, prayerful expressions of who I am, even as I pray to the Creator, Sovereign God, who understands me, as the Infinite One, who can help me deal with life in all of its complexities.

One of my favorite passages from Scripture is Psalm 139. Read it carefully, and I'll guarantee it will make a powerful impact upon your life.

The great Scottish theologian and mystic, Erskine, is reported to have said that the one bit of writing he would wish to have with him on his deathbed was Psalm 139. Many others have connected it, not only with death, but even, just as significantly, with life and the stern battle for existence that is ours here on Planet Earth.

As Frank H. Ballard has written in The Interpreter's Bible:

Never, we may suppose, have men been so destitute of a sense of literary and religious values that they have been indifferent to its beauty and power. It has enabled some to sing in the midst of sorrows, to endure in the face of hardship, and to worship when aspiration has almost failed.

This is a wonderful passage. It is full of many promises from God to you. In fact, it is almost too good to be true when you live the kind of life you and I live.

Like yours, a pastor's life has many joys. It also has more than its share of troubles, as we are called to deal daily with the tough issues, the heartbreaking realities of human existence.

Occasionally, someone will come to me and ask me why I'm so negative in my preaching, talking so often about life with its many problems. The reason is that we pastors tend to confront multiple problems each day, as we engage in the complexities of your lives.

Seldom do you, our parishioners, come to us with your list of God's blessings in your lives. Occasionally, you may share a great success you've experienced or the happy advent of a new child or grandchild into your life. But, more often, you're inclined to come to us with life's tragedies. Occasionally, you'll find a health, welfare and prosperity preacher who blithely waltzes above these painful realities, living, himself, in denial and encouraging people to whom he communicates, often through television, to a similar kind of denial. When you're close to people, you cannot lightly dismiss the rugged realities of daily existence. So, as people go through the horrendous challenges of life and share them with you, the last thing you want to do is get up in the pulpit and utter pious platitudes that are disconnected from the realities of what you've been dealing with in day-to-day experience.

In some cases, we pastors begin to lose perspective. We forget that the persons in crises that we've dealt with in recent days are persons who are experiencing, at this moment, some of the greatest traumas they'll ever experience in lives that, perhaps to this point, have been reasonably stable and quite visibly blessed.

For example, in one two-hour period in the month of January, I received two startling telephone calls.

The first call was that one of our members, who also was a close personal friend, a man in the peak of health and conditioning, had suffered a stroke on an out-of-town trip. The man who, if he were at home, would have had immediate access to the top-notch facilities of Hoag Hospital, languished, triaged on a cot along with other cots, in the hallway of an emergency room. He had some strange physical reactions after his morning workout, had driven himself to the hospital and reported a bit of dizziness and lack of coordination. Whoever makes those decisions decided to deal with what seemed to be more serious cases first, only to later discover that this was a stroke that should have been dealt with immediately. It's been my privilege to stand by his side, as he fights to get back the full mental and physical agility for what he has been so well known.

In that same two-hour period, the cell phone once again rang. The word came that one of our active members, whose wife is one of our most respected adult education teachers, had been killed in a plane crash out toward Corona and Route 15. Talk about a trauma. This struck to the very heart of each of us pastors and also so many of our members who so value him and his grieving wife!

Then, there's our member who held a malignancy into remission, and the cancer has returned, having invaded his lungs and liver. Last night, after the Saturday contemporary service, I went to his home to visit with him. How difficult it is to observe him, his wife, his children in this time of extremity, when the lives of so many others go on as normal. He and his loved ones know, barring a miraculous divine intervention, his days are limited.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be spending time with a dear pastor friend who is now gradually sinking into the mental fog of dementia. Anne and I used to join him and his wife during the 1970s on ski trips to Colorado. This once very vital man is very aware of the cloud gradually settling in on him. And I am very aware that, similar to my father, this someday may also be my fate.

I could mention the names of these four persons. They are no secret. Some of you readily identify the persons of whom I'm speaking. I don't name them by name because what I'm trying to do is establish the reality that, at any given moment, many in our number are hurting badly, while the larger number of us continue life somewhat oblivious to that intensity of pain, until, suddenly, we ourselves, in an almost split second, find our futures radically changed.

We send our several hundred members out in servant ministry work projects each year. Two of our most faithful stalwarts, Elaine and Fritz Westerhout, have gone with some frequency to the Tenwek Hospital in Kenya. A couple of weeks ago, we included them in our prayer of commissioning. I myself expressed some reservations to them as to whether they should go at this time of political and social unrest. They did, and they've been sending us regular reports. At the present time, they're safe, but they describe tribal conflict that caused a sister hospital to evacuate most of their staff, who are not Kikuyu in an area that belongs to the Kikuyu tribe, because of death threats. Then they told of fifteen of their own doctors and nurses being evacuated from the hospital where they're serving and villagers afraid to travel to the hospital. They write:

Please do continue to pray for this beautiful country and its wonderful people. The rioting gangs seem to be in general young (under 30), rural, uneducated, unemployed and poor, and clearly alcohol has played a part. I think the average Kenyan, as is true of most people, just wants to live his life and raise his family and be left alone to do so. I fear that it will take years, if not decades to get back to where this country was on December 27, 2007, and most of the suffering will be done by people who had nothing to do with the riots.

Just this week, I received a staff report from one of our pastors telling about several of the young men and women in our Young Adult ministry who have just lost their jobs because of the economic downturn.

And never a week goes by without a pastor's heart being touch by the trauma brought to a family by a member caught up in substance abuse, sexual addiction, fears of a son or daughter posted to Iraq, an automobile accident, a suicide, the sexual unfaithfulness of a spouse or a new episode in an ongoing saga of mental illness.

So, Psalm 139, with all of its great promises, must be viewed in the context that we continue to live with the tough, harsh realities of human existence. In fact, as a Psalm, it fits in along with the others that deal in unrelenting detail with the similar struggles of life. We ask, with all these problems, isn't the message of Psalm 139 a bit too much?

Isn't it almost too good to be true?

Wait a moment, let's return to our text. Let's take a look at what it says. After all, it is the Word of God. If there is any hope in all this life, it is not in wishful thinking. It is based on God's initiative on our behalf in the person and work of Jesus Christ, in His Word written, and through the presence of His Holy Spirit, offering forgiveness, meaning and energy for our human existence.

I am prepared to plan my very existence upon the truth of God's Word. The only other option is a life of nihilistic, hopeless existence. All this preamble of life's difficulties is to simply say, as your pastor, I do not plant my head in the sand, denying the realities of human existence. What I'm saying is that, even as I recognize the complexities of our lives lived as broken, fallen men and women in a broken, fallen world, there is hope. And there are the promises of God's Word that we can claim in the very midst of life's joys and sorrows.

Just what does this Psalm say?

First: God knows everything about you and everyone else.

This Psalm stresses what theologians call the omniscience of God. He is cognizant of everything going on in your life from the most important fact to the littlest detail. And He is aware of everything from the very best to the very worst.

Concentrate on these words:

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down,

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before,

and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

it is so high that I cannot attain it. (Psalm 139:1-6)

It's almost too good to be true--but it is!

Contemplate the fact that the God of the Universe is intimately involved in every detail of your life. He knows you. He knows when you sit down and when you rise up. He perceives your thoughts. He understands when you go out and when you come in. All your ways are familiar to him. He knows what you are going to say next. He simply besieges you, surrounds you with His concern, shuts you in with His love. It is impossible for you and me to fully comprehend this reality. But what a comfort it is to be assured that whatever others think and say, the God of all the Universe sees the totality of your existence as it fits into the rest of His creation. His judgment is unerring, and His mercy is unfathomable. The Scot poet, Robert Burns, put it in these words:

Who made the heart, ’tis He alone

Decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord, its various tone,

Each spring, its various bias.

What's done we partly may compute,

But know not what's resisted.

Second: God is lovingly present everywhere you go and everywhere everyone else goes.

Not only does God know us. He is with us wherever we go. This Psalm underlines what theologians refer to as the omnipresence of God.

This means that God is there even when others have forgotten. Have you ever been forgotten? Have you ever had that feeling that life has moved on, the action is elsewhere, and you are left behind, fulfilling responsibilities while the more important things are happening somewhere else?

Many of us remember a previous era of leadership here at St. Andrew's. It was back in the late 1980s. At that time, our business administrator was Art McIntosh. I'm a bit embarrassed to tell this story, but it illustrates how sometimes we must feel. On a given Tuesday, we were having out staff retreat for our Program Staff. We had met in my office all morning. That noon, we got into three or four cars and headed over to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Candy Baylis, Lydia Sarandan and Art McIntosh were in my car. We had a wonderful lunch. It was a good time of fellowship and conversation. Then, we loaded back into the cars to come back to the church. Steve Murray hopped into my car along with Lydia and Candy.

We were sitting around the circle, resuming our staff meeting. One chair was empty. I assumed that Art was tied up with some details in the business office before coming back up to my office. So we went ahead and started the meeting. A few minutes later, he walked in and sat down.

Later in the afternoon, we went around the circle to see who had matters of business or any personal concerns that needed to yet come up. When we came to Art, he said, "I can be the last one to log in, as mine tend to be more mechanical in nature. Let me say one thing. I have certainly had my exercise for the day."

Instantly, it became apparent to all of us that I had driven all the way back, leaving him at the restaurant to pay the bill. None of us had missed him, and he had to walk back to the church. I was so embarrassed at the very thought of what he must have experienced that, for the next few days, I didn't quite know how to look him in the eyes without anything but stating an additional apology for my insensitivity.

We human beings are forgetful. We human beings have a way of deserting people, causing them to take long, lonely walks. God's not in that business. The Psalmist goes on to muse:

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night,"

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:7-12)

God is with you wherever you go. Don't forget that.

It's almost too good to be true--but it is!

God is with you in those times you acknowledge Him and want Him to be with you. There are those moments, aren't there? Who of us has not cried out with the psalmist of old, "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Psalm 42:1-2).

Not only is He with you in those times you acknowledge Him and want Him to be with you. He is also there when you try to hide from Him.

Adam and Eve found that out. You and I do, too. We are pretty sophisticated in the ways we try to get away from Him. In the final analysis, though, most of our intricate systems of concealment are nothing more than fig leaves, not so neatly arranged. We end up standing naked in the presence of the Living God. He has been there all the time. What we thought was so clever on our part was simply the closing of our eyes to the reality of His loving, ever-caring presence.

Francis Thompson states it so succinctly in his poem, The Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Thompson goes on to declare that universal truth of today's text, "God is always there." He's unrelenting in His search for us. He is the Hound of Heaven who tracks us down, no matter how secure may be our hiding place. And when He finds us, He embraces us in His arms of love.

He is there even when the fates seem to have hemmed us in, blocking off the possibilities of which we dream for in life. Actually, the fates are left helpless. God is the One who is there. There is nowhere where I can go from His Spirit. No, it is impossible to flee from His presence. If I go up to the very heavens, He is there. If I make my bed in the depths, even the very place of the departed spirits, He is there. If I fly off on the wings of the dawn at the speed of light, God is there. His hand will guide me. His right hand will hold me. Even darkness does not get between God and me, as His X-ray vision sees through the darkest night and makes it shine like the light of day.

There are people--I hope you're not one of them--who spend a lot of time reading their astrological charts. They take very seriously whatever their "sign" happens to be and, in some cases, almost self-fulfill those predictions, putting their confidence in such spiritually unhealthy notions.

I beg you to resist such nonsense. The Apostle Paul restates these words of Psalm 139 in Romans 8:35-39, describing the omnipresence of God, writing:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Height nor depth refers here specifically to first-century astrology. There's nothing new about astrology. The Bible calls it an abomination. Our trust is to be in the living, omnipresent God, not in the stars. Do not put your trust in anyone or anything other than the Living God, whose name is Jesus Christ and who is present in His Holy Spirit. There is no force so powerful but what His presence is sufficient. There are other forces. There is the world of the demonic. Satan even can take quackeries and insanities of astrology, sorcery, divination, levitation and all the rest of these black arts, which God's Word labels an abomination, and bring you into bondage. The point is that God is always there, yearning to break that bondage and set you free, if you will only open your eyes to the glory of His presence with you. Or, for you, you may not even for a moment think of these black arts activities. You may just be stumbling along, assuming that you're alone in the universe, that there is no God who cares and is aware of you.

Never forget His love seeks you out, yearning to embrace you with His care.

Third: God is also the Creator who has shaped you as unique and as of infinite value.

That's right. This very God of the Universe is part of everything you are. He is the Creator. You are the creature. In this Psalm, we have seen God as omniscient, that is all-knowing. In this Psalm, we have seen God as omnipresent, that is everywhere. In this Psalm, we also see God as the Creator, one who has formed you in the very womb of your mother. This is what theologians refer to as God's omnipotence.

Contemplate these words of the psalmist:

For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

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.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them--they are more than the sand;

I come to the end--I am still with you. (Psalm 139:13-18)

It's almost too good to be true--but it is!

How graphic is this picture? It says succinctly that you are not an accident. You were created with intentionality. The very God of the Universe shaped you in your mother's womb. Never forget that fact. Long before you were conceived, His eyes saw your unformed body. And He yearns to be in relationship with you. This passage is a favorite of those who are opposed to abortion. I would agree with them on this, as long as they do not exclusively interpret this to deal only with life in the womb but are prepared to carry it on through to life outside of the womb also. One of the sad realities of the culture war debates in the United States is the chasm between those who emphasize the rights of the unborn and those who emphasize the rights of the born. This should be a whole piece of cloth. God values life and wants us to bring justice, righteousness and mercy, upholding the rights of that little life taking shape in the womb, as well as working to provide a healthy existence for that life outside of the womb.

A great example of this "whole piece of cloth" understanding of life both in and outside of the womb was the birth and life of Mother Teresa. During the late 1980s at our General Assembly in St. Louis, my colleagues in the "Presbyterians Pro-Life" movement, of which I am a board of advisors member, hosted Mother Teresa, who so eloquently addressed this whole matter. She declared, "God has greater things in mind for an unborn child, created in the image of God. Abortion is killing the living reality of the tenderness of God's love." She went on to say, "Abortion is the greatest destroyer of love and peace in the world. We are fighting abortion by adoption--by care, love and making the mother safe and wanted. How will we face God if we will not help a little child. . . ." She called for a life of prayer. "Nakedness is not a piece of cloth, it is a loss of purity, chastity, virginity. The greatest gift a young man and woman give to each other at marriage is a pure and chaste heart and body. . .we must protect the life of purity in the hearts of our children. . .I ask you to pray: God will help you, protect you, you will receive peace and our Lord will say, 'Come, receive the kingdom that I have prepared for you.' Through the love of God you will become Holy. It is a simple duty for each one of us to be Holy and to live holy lives. We are spreading the love of God. We will pray for you. . .you pray for us. . .God bless you. . . ."

Unfortunately for me, I was not at that General Assembly. A number of years later, I heard her express the same thoughts at the National Prayer Breakfast. She stood, tiny little person, at the podium right next to the then-President of the United States, Bill Clinton. On two different occasions, she turned to him, begging him to change his views on abortion and to be as consistent about the unborn as he was about justice for those outside of the womb. In fact, she went so far as to declare to him and the rest of us, begging that if these unborn children are unwanted to us, let them be born, give them to her and to her sisters, and they would raise them, for they were valuable in the sight of God.

Not only is the unborn child of infinite value to God. You are too. He shaped you from the beginning of time, when you were but a cosmic speck. When we baptize the little infants at St. Andrew's, we are declaring that they are of infinite worth to the Lord. He already knows their futures and the kinds of decisions they will make, as influenced by our faithfulness to the vows we have taken on their behalf.

And He knows us intimately. In all the circumstances of life with which I began this message, He's no less interested in the young father dying with cancer, my friend with the stroke, the widow of the one killed in the plane crash, my pastor friend with dementia and all the others dealing with the tough stuff of life. You see, God sees what we do not see. He understands what we do not understand.

The Psalm goes on to express the yearning which we have to be protected from evil. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if we lived in an antiseptic world? The reality is that God has given us enough free will for us to mess up this planet. The fact is that the next world will be one in which there will be heaven and there will be a hell. There will be the division guaranteeing the environment in which Jesus Christ will reign supreme. There will be no sin, no brokenness, no pain, no hunger, none of these complex issues that confront us today in this broken, fallen world, which tend to make the words of this Psalm almost seem too good to be true.

The psalmist concludes:

O that you would kill the wicked, O God,

and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me--

those who speak of you maliciously,

and lift themselves up against you for evil!

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?

And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

I hate them with perfect hatred;

I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:19-24)

Is this your prayer? Do you want God to search you and to lead you in the way everlasting?

A good friend, Harold Myra, in his book Living by God's Surprises, described a time in his youth when he found a small deer inside an eight-foot-high fence surrounding a barnyard in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where he had spent his childhood. He had no idea of how it had gotten inside. As soon as the deer saw him, it ran as fast as it could toward the fence, gathering speed, but it couldn't clear the fence. Instead, the deer smashed against the top and fell hard. It shook itself, stepped back, and started running again, giving the attempt every ounce of energy possible. Once again, the poor creature smashed against the top and fell hard to the ground. The only other exit was through the barn. He tells how he left the door open and tried to herd the little deer through, but it cowered back and then ran off. Again, it leaped high, this time its little body smashed so hard it bowed the whole fence, which just as quickly snapped back, throwing the animal down so brutally it appeared its neck had been broken. Despite that, the deer's terror got him up, moved him back into position, and he launched himself against the fence again and again, until finally he lay exhausted, open-mouthed, tongue out, eyes darting in panic.

Myra described how he touched him, spoke gently, patted his head, as the deer lay still:

My finger felt little nubs of horns; he was a button buck. I lifted him, wanting to allay his terror, but knowing I couldn't until I had walked him through the barn and set him safely outside the fence.

As I released him, he hesitated only a moment, and then bounded away.

And I wondered, as I watched him go, if the little buck ever understood that without my lifting him in my arms, he would have remained trapped, helpless.

Like us.

We Americans carry our pioneer self-reliance even into our spiritual lives. No fence is too high to leap. Like the button buck, we believe that with enough effort and energy we can scale whatever height might block us. If we smash against a fence, we try harder, refusing to believe we can't scale it. Only when events like rejection and illness and death and divorce finally crush us do we lie there, exhausted.

If we were to look up at those moments, we might see the God who stands by, waiting to lift us into His arms. We might allow His hands to lift us before we become bruised and broken on the fences. We might understand we really are helpless. . . like that young button buck. . . .

It's almost too good to be true, isn't it--but it is!