Many of the Psalms are personal—"The Lord is my shepherd . . . I lift my eyes to the hills, from whence does my help come." Psalm 139 is intensely personal, an intimate confession of a person whose life-long relationship with God was a result of God's persistence, God's search and pursuit, and ultimate finding of the individual.
That is a very different idea of God, one that puts religion in a whole different light. Instead of the human pursuit of God, religion becomes the activity, the place and way human beings respond to God's initiative.
Does any of that sound familiar to you? We Presbyterians are not very good at talking about our personal religious experiences. We're far better at discussing ideas about God than describing personal experiences of God. And, as far as conversion, a topic Martin Marty recently described as "one of the most private acts in life . . . which occurs in the deepest recesses of the heart . . . ," we aren't at all comfortable talking about it.
And the reason is that for many of us, at least, we cannot pinpoint a time or date, there was no singular moment, but rather a life-time of moments, a long and slow process, both hot and cold, including times of certainty and times of doubt. Psalm 139 suggests that our conversion is, in fact, a process, and that God has been pursuing us across the years.
People who think and reflect about their religious experience are helpful. Writer Anne Lamott describes it in terms of a slow, gradual return to church and faith out of a life that was falling apart at the seams, standing outside a little Presbyterian church, looking in, listening to the singing, one day stepping through the door and acknowledging that God had been pushing, nudging, prodding. Finally she said simply, " 'I quit.'" Actually she punctuated it with an earthy phrase that is not "pulpit friendly." "I took a long breath and said out loud, 'All right, you can come in now.'" (Traveling Mercies, Some Thoughts on Faith, p.50)
Kathleen Norris, raised in the faith, but self-exiled from it for years of seeking, searching, dabbling here and there and finally, returned to her family's farm and went to church in Lemmon, South Dakota, writes: "I came to understand that God hadn't lost me, even if I seemed for years to have misplaced God." (Amazing Grace, p.104) Kathleen says that suspicion of religion ran so deep in her that she feared conversion, thinking it might silence her as a writer. She credits several unconscious mentors who nudged her gently, without even knowing they were doing it. But her observation that God had not forgotten her even though for years she seemed to have misplaced God, sounded familiar. Or, as someone said, "If you don't feel as close to God as you used to, who do you supposed moved?"
Perhaps it's because it sounds so familiar, but Frederick Buechner's story is my favorite. It's in a book he wrote years ago entitled, The Sacred Journey. Life, according to Buechner, any life, his or yours or mine, is a sacred journey into which God speaks and comes. That's what makes it sacred.
Buechner's was not a church family. What religion he had came in bits and pieces from occasional visits with grandparents. After college, he taught English for a while, joined the army, and ended up in New York trying to be a writer and discovering that he could not write a word. He tried a number of options, including a love affair that failed.
He wrote, "Every door I tried to open slammed on my foot. It all sounds like a kind of farce when I try to set it down . . .Part of the farce was that for the first time in my life that year in New York, I started to go to church regularly, and what was farcical about it was not that I went, but my reason for going, which was simply that on the block where I lived there happened to be a
church . . . and I had nothing all that much better to do with my lonely Sunday . . ."
I can't improve on the way Buechner tells it.
The church was Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. The minister was a man named George Buttrick. Sunday after Sunday Buechner went. "It was not just his eloquence that kept me coming back." He writes:
"What drew me more was whatever it was that his sermons came from and whatever it was in me that they touched so deeply. And then there came one particular sermon with one particular phrase in it that does not even appear in a transcript of his words that somebody sent me more than twenty-five years later so I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and liked it—and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of all of us. Jesus Christ is King, Buttrick said, because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, among confession, and tears, and great laughter.
It was the phrase 'great laughter,' that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then. It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon." (p.108/109)
"Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?"
And so, just on the outside chance that you may be fleeing from God, living your life in what seems to be a normal, ordinary way, but is actually a way of holding God at arm's length, this idea of God's persistent pursuit should be at least tantalizing.
And if your life is so full; full of job and family and complicated relationships, professional demands and tight schedules, your bosses' expectations which regularly exceed the number of hours in the day, and long days with no time for leisurely lunches or even pleasant human conversation, not to mention praying, you just might find intriguing the ancient suggestion contained in these words:
"You know when I sit down and when I rise up,
You discern my thoughts from afar."
And the next time you have to hurry to catch a plane after a busy day and a stressful trip to the airport, fighting crowds, escalators, ticket counter, falling into your seat and, after the irritatingly inevitable wait out there at the far reaches of Intercontinental finally take off, and reaching cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, you might find interesting and comforting and maybe even provocative, these ancient words:
"If I ascend to heaven, 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 hold me fast."
And tonight, or tomorrow night, when you fall exhausted into bed, you might be intrigued by:
"You search out my path and my lying down."
And if your life can only be described as hellish: if nothing is working, if it all seems tragically empty and lonely, if relationships are sour and work is boring—and there is no light on the horizon—no promise, no hope—hear these words:
"If I make my bed in Sheol," which is another word for hell, "You are there."
And if you find yourself thinking a lot about your own finiteness, if the recent death of a loved one, a close call, a dreaded lab report, the worst diagnosis you could imagine, if you find yourself thinking about what someone called "the insult of our mortality," hear these words which I think should be the very last words any of us is privileged to hear:
"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.'"
"He fumbles at your spirit," Emily Dickinson wrote.
And Frederick Buechner, again:
"What I found was what I had already half seen, or less than half, in many places over my twenty-seven years without ever clearly knowing what it was I was seeing or even that I was seeing anything of great importance. Something in me recoils from using such language, but here at the end I am left with no other way of saying it than what I finally found was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter which." (p. 110)
I love that tiny vignette in the first chapter of John—John's different version of the call of the disciples, Philip and Nathaniel. Nathaniel is, apparently tending to his own affairs, living his life, going to work, paying his bills, taking care of business—and Jesus sees him and approaches him, and Nathaniel says—"How do you know me?" and Jesus says simply, "I saw you under the fig tree."
That, I submit, is how it happens and how it is. Into our lives Christ comes. Into our lives God speaks our names, doing what we do, sitting where we sit . . . and waits, doesn't force the issue; speaks our name and waits as long as it takes . . . for our response, our faith, our trust, our love, our 'yes.'
"If I take the wings of the morning, and settle at the farthest limit of the sea, even then your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast."
Amen.
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~Adopted from a sermon on Pslam 139 by John Buchanan, Pastor, The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
