Psalm 139:17-24
How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand — when I awake, I am still with you. If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
That's an awkward bit of scripture, isn't it? "I fall asleep counting your thoughts... Kill all my enemies... Tell me if I'm getting anything wrong." It’s really tempting to take a pair of scissors to that passage, and cut out those middle verses, but much of the power of the psalms is in their honesty, and so I think we have to be prepared to take all that they offer.
I also think it's a good moment to remind ourselves that not everything in the Bible is meant to be a pattern for us to follow. A fellow minister once asked a rabbi friend what she thought was the strangest thing that Christians did with the Hebrew scriptures, and she answered that she finds it bewildering that we seem to take everything as a positive example, when for her a lot of it is embarrassing family history, like when Uncle Benjamin got drunk and started a conga at Cousin Hannah’s wedding. It happened and the evidence is in the photo album, but you don’t draw attention to it and you hope it doesn’t happen again. I’m paraphrasing what she said, but I believe that was the gist.
We can’t get away from the fact that there are passages like this in the Bible, but it doesn’t mean that God wants or has ever wanted us to pray for the destruction of our enemies. The role of God in the violence of the Bible is a complicated subject, but while there are many passages that suggest God was happy to do some smiting, the scriptures also contain rather a lot of evidence to the contrary. God called the people through the prophet Jeremiah to pray for the welfare of the city they had been taken to in exile, and Jesus told his disciples to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. On the whole I would say that God seems rather more interested in redemption than retribution. And so if these verses make us uncomfortable, that’s probably a good thing, and we can hold that discomfort and let it teach us.
This plea for destruction is a good example of something though, and that is complete candour before God. The psalmist doesn't hold anything back, doesn't try to be pious or polite, just spills out their frustration as well as their praise. Obviously we only get one half of the conversation, so we don’t know how God responded to these violent desires, but the fact that this passage and others like it became part of the canon of scripture speaks of a belief that God will hear whatever it is we have to say. God may not want us to pray for the destruction of our enemies, but our ancestors in faith knew that God still listens when we do. They understood that God can handle all of our ranting and our raving, and so there is no need for pretence, even if sometimes there is a call for repentance later.
I have always been quite particular about the way I use words. I rehearse conversations before I pick up the phone, and the last time I tried an improvisation exercise I left in the early stages of a panic attack. I’m not claiming that any of my sermons are word perfect, but I preach from a full script because I definitely make more sense when I’ve got everything down on paper first. For a long time I brought that same anxiety to prayer, and I would find myself practising my prayer in my head, before praying it again in my head. It was complete madness, because God had heard the garbled mess O began with, and understood it just as well as if I’d polished it into a sonnet. I still try to arrange my thoughts a little before praying aloud in a group, but I have learnt in my private prayer life to be content with half finished sentences, and even the wordless groans that Paul tells us the Spirit speaks with. It really is the spirit and not the letter that matters when we pray, and that spirit should be one of honesty and humility, speaking freely and listening openly.
I want to create some space for us to speak freely and listen openly now, so let us take a few moments just to tell God what is on our minds. Don’t worry about getting to a point or a question, just go for it. Then stop and listen for what may come from the silence, as a word or a picture or a feeling.
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I want to end by looking at the final two verses of this psalm. “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” I wonder if the psalmist suspected he may have gone too far in the verses before and this was his way of asking God to let him know if he was indeed at fault. Or perhaps he was oblivious to the fact that his hatred may have been just the sort of offensive way he was asking God to look for. We are all capable of a remarkable degree of contradiction, and that is just why we need God to examine our hearts, and reveal the things we can’t or won’t recognise for ourselves.
Either way it is a bold request, the ultimate in not holding anything back. You may recall that this psalm began with the psalmist declaring that God has searched him and knows each word before it is on his tongue, so he already knows this is what God does, but now he is deliberately inviting it. More than that, I think he is wanting to learn from it. Surely when he asks God to see if there is any offensive way in him, and then to lead him in the way everlasting, he is making a connection between the two things. He wants God to reveal the offensive ways so that he can learn to walk in the everlasting way instead. I wonder if we are ready to make the same request, to invite God’s knowledge to inform and reform us.
You may have picked up from the Contact that the theme for this morning was meant to be ‘we are understood’, but that perhaps hasn’t come through so far. I’ll be honest, this is another sermon that has veered from where I thought it might go, but I do still think that these verses speak of a God who does not just know us as a collection of facts, but understands us as whole people in a way no one else can. To know our hearts and our anxious thoughts is to know the depths of our characters and the things that both drive us and hold us back, and that knowledge surely brings about the most intimate kind of understanding. I think recognising that is important for two reasons.
First, it assures us that we are always understood. I’m sure we have all struggled with feeling that others don’t understand us at times, scrambling for the words to express what is in our hearts and put our anxieties into words, and it can be a really painful and alienating experience. One of my favourite novels is The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and there is a scene in that where the protagonist tries to explain what she is thinking to her sister, who replies with a confused “what?”. I couldn’t find the exact quote, but she is gutted because the person most like her in all the world hasn’t understood her, at a time when she so desperately needed it. Knowing that there is one who understands even when the world doesn’t, even when we barely understand ourselves, can be a great source of comfort.
Second, it helps us appreciate the fullness of God’s love for us. In his wonderful prayer at the end of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul prays that his readers “will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge”. If we are going to comprehend that love, then we need to recognise that it is not abstract. God loves us as we are because he knows and understands us as we are, while giving us the freedom and encouragement to grow into what we can be, as we thought a little about last week. As one worship song puts it, “you see the depths of my heart and you love me the same”, and that is a powerful thing to be able to remind ourselves of when we feel most misunderstood or unlovable.
I want to leave a little more space here, in which we might invite God to search our own hearts, that we might be led in the way everlasting. For me there is a particular resonance in the reference to “anxious thoughts”, and perhaps for others too this might be a moment to ask God to speak into and calm our anxieties.
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