Scriptures: Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 139
Romans 8:12-25
Do you remember that familiar late 19th century poem by Francis
Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”? It starts like this:
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 mist of tears
I hid from Him.....
The “Him” is, of course, God, which is obvious to the reader since it’s capitalized. And in the last line of that first stanza God accuses the writer of the poem:
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I first read or heard this poem it really scared me. Mentally, you conjure up this image of a huge hound – maybe today we’d even picture it as 2,000 pounds of pit bull – constantly chasing through all the years this poor, frightened, confused supposed believer. The thought behind the poem would seem to be that God is always and ever after you – and there’s nothing you can do about it to make it right.
The scriptures today’s have something of that same effect – yet, with a twist that we’ll get to at the end. Jacob leaves Beersheba running away from God. But he has to stop to sleep, and even though he’s sleeping on a stone pillow (shades of hair shirts and self-flagellation) God finds him in a dream and confronts him. Now, even though what God wants is to give Jacob a promise about his future and that of his offspring, Jacob wakes up afraid. God has been after him!
Psalm 139 is another Bible passage with a full litany of how God knows what’s happening to the writer of the Psalm: “You know when I sit down and rise up...you search out my path...even before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely” – ending with the plaintive cry, “...where can I flee from your presence?” But Paul, in the passage we read from Romans, tries to help alleviate some of these feelings of fear, summing them up with “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.....” Paul finds in the coming of the Christ a reason to hope that our fear of God’s finding us might be overcome through God’s adoption of us. But it’s not easy, as Paul says at the start: “...for if you live according to the flesh, you will die.....”
How about it? Would you really want God to know all about you? Would
you want God to know your every thought? Do you really want to be found by God, unlike the poet being chased by the Hound of Heaven? Abstractly, I suppose, we know that God as the Omniscient One does know everything about us, but I doubt that such knowledge is part of our everyday awareness – if it were, it would be anxiety-producing indeed!
Here’s another speculative question that these scripture passages trigger for me: suppose you could be like God – would you want to know everything that everyone around you was thinking?
Science-fiction writer John Christopher wrote a short story that I read many years ago – so long ago that I’ve lost the book it was in and can’t remember the title. But the story itself has stayed with me all these years. It is the early 21st century, and two great scientific discoveries are about to be put into practice. One is the invention of faster-than-light speeds which will allow for the exploration of distant stars. The problem is that because of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity the astronauts making a five-year trip will not return to Earth until 100 years into Earth’s future. The other discovery is the introduction into the human genome of telepathy, so that from this point on every child that is born will be able to read or hear everyone else’s thoughts. Two young scientific lovers are working at the core of each of these discoveries, and the young man – we’ll call him Mike – is determined to go on the first space flight to go faster than light. He tries to persuade his girl-friend, Susan, to go with him, since he would return long after she would be dead. But Susan has helped to perfect the telepathy gene, and she wants to stay on planet Earth to see the glorious future that this wonder will bring about – which she describes to Mike in glowing terms and tries to convince him to stay to see it with her. He refuses, and they have a bittersweet parting – each convinced that he or she is pioneering the greatest scientific break-through of the age.
When the spaceship returns 100 years later – but five years of the crew’s subjective time – instead of a wonderfully glowing new future they fly over cities that are overgrown with weeds and crumbling buildings with wild animals roaming free. There are no human beings to be seen anywhere. They land, and after a time a doddering old man comes up to them. He introduces himself as the last baby born before the telepathy gene took over. “What happened?”, they ask. “It was terrible,” he responds. “They all saw everyone’s thoughts – all the lusts and fears and angers and hatred of one another. They couldn’t cope with what they heard. Brother turned against sister, friend against friend, wife against husband. War after war broke out, until the last humans left clubbed each other to death, fearing the thoughts they were hearing. But I have kept myself alive until your return in the hope that the human race can start again. The old records show that there were two women among your crew. It can start all over again.” John Christopher then gives a sardonic and ironic ending to his story. After the old-timer’s final words the crew’s shoulders slump, and they turn sadly to head back to their ship. Mike turns back to him and says, “Yes, there are two women crew members among us – Louise Parsons, age 58, and Myra Smith, age 56.”
It is a cynical story, illustrating the worst of what goes on inside the human psyche and the terror we would face if we knew all of that. (Although, come to think of it, maybe we would have been better off if we could have seen into the heads of the officials at Enron and WorldCom and Martha Stewart before it all hit the media!) You and I both know that there is more to the human experience – there is love, and giving, and selflessness – and these, too, come through in our deepest thoughts. Yet, the reality behind that idea we call “original sin” is that our baser nature tends to rule us.
The story of Jacob at Bethel builds on this reality. Jacob is running from the God whom he thinks will challenge him, and in his dream a ladder goes between earth and heaven – which means that God will find him no matter what. And God does find him – and offers Jacob a great promise: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land…and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.”
What a great promise! And what does Jacob do when he wakes up? He becomes afraid, because how could he, imperfect human being that he is, deserve such a promise? The Psalmist, too, seems like he can’t take the intimacy of God’s knowing him: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.”
Here’s the twist in the scriptures that I mentioned at the beginning: the wonderful paradox of our faith is that while God searching for us and then finding us is a fearsome prospect, when God does find us it is to offer us such a great promise. God knows everything – I mean, everything -- about us...and loves us anyway! Jacob calls Bethel the House of God because of the peace he has found in that place despite his fear. The Psalmist opens himself up in a way that might boggle our minds: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.” And ultimately the Psalmist is able to say, “I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” In an earlier Psalm – Psalm 8 – this paradox of what it means to be human before God is most succinctly put:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
And then for those who have accepted Jesus the Christ as Lord and Savior, Paul sums it all up for us: “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh….. For all who are led by the spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear [we don’t have to be afraid like Jacob, like the Psalmist], but you have received a spirit of adoption.” An adopted child, as those of us who have adopted know full well, is a great gift, and I know there are several adopted children in this congregation.. The “spirit of adoption” is God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ, welcoming each of us into God’s family.
Despite everything, despite our basest thoughts even, God has adopted us and made us God’s children – God’s heirs – joint heirs with Christ. And so you, my friends, are free – free to be servants of God.
Remember the wonderful old Gospel song, “God’s Eye is on the Sparrow”? “God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I know God watches me.” That could be heard as a worrisome, fearsome thing – God keeps God’s eye on me all the time, just as God watches every small creature in this world. But listen again to how the gospel singer responds: “I sing because I’m happy; I sing because I’m free.” God’s eye constantly on us ultimately frees us.
And finally the poet Francis Thompson realizes this, too. At the end of “The Hound of Heaven” God says to him: “Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me?” And the final line: “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!”
God has found us and knows us. In that we can rejoice.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
January 29, 2006