Hilton Head Island, SC – September 7, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 139:1-24
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? – Psalm 139:7 (RSV)
The Omnipresence Of God
For the past almost eleven years, I have preached from the Book of Psalms more than from any other book in the Bible. I haven’t preached from every Psalm, but I have done so from a large number of them.
You need to understand that nobody insisted that I do that. Nor did anyone put a gun to me head to force me to do it. I did it because I think the Psalms contain some of the loftiest and most salient thoughts about God to be found anywhere in holy writ. We shall never know who all the authors of these spiritual songs were. Nearly half of them are said to have been written by King David, though it is doubtful that is historically accurate. Other authors are noted in the superscriptions at the head of various Psalms, including Moses, and that one is especially doubtful. Anyway, whoever wrote these literary and poetic gems, their meditations are worthy of our consideration, because they capture much of the essence of what it means to be a child of God and a follower of His will in His world.
I tell you all this because I am going to be preaching two more sermons from the Psalms before I hang up my Geneva gown as your full-time part-time pastor. December 28 will be my last hurrah as your regular preacher. As of September 21, however, I will have utilized my last Psalm of this year, and indeed of this eleven-year pastorate. This is not to suggest I shall never again preach from a Psalm when I am one of the four co-pastors we shall have at The Chapel Without Walls starting the first Sunday in January. But when we study Psalm 145 two weeks from now, it will complete my self-imposed goal to preach from most of the Psalms by the end of 2014. If you’re wondering what I did with Psalms 146 through 150, I used them a few weeks ago. I never said I was going to go through the Psalms in order, but rather that I was going to go through the Psalms.
Further to validate why I have done what I have done, as supporting evidence I want to note that every day of every week of every year, countless thousands of monks and nuns in monasteries and convents all over the world sing or chant several Psalms each day. I am not an Honorary Trappist by Adoption for nothing. I always liked the Psalms, but my years of visiting Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina have greatly added to my appreciation for the biblical songs in perhaps the greatest and surely the longest of all the biblical books.
With all that introduction having now been introduced, we turn to Psalm 139. The first eighteen verses of the 139th Psalm are the clearest and most compelling passage of scripture in the entire Bible for describing what theologians have long called “the omnipresence of God.” You don’t need a doctorate in linguistics to know that the word “omnipresence” suggests that God is everywhere, that He is in all (“omni”) places.
The superscription for Psalm 139 says that it was written by David. Knowing what we know of David’s life from I and II Samuel and the first two chapters of I Kings, it is easy to imagine that the complex and perplexing monarch in fact did write this Psalm. He is in awe of the omnipresence of God. He says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (v.6). Then, to validate that observation, he says, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me” (7-10). Of everyone who ever lived, David would be more eager than most to flee from God when he did something wrong, which he did with dismaying regularity.
The Hebrew word “Sheol” is translated into English as “the Pit.” Sheol is not hell as hell is commonly understood. Sheol is more like Hades in Greek mythology. Neither Sheol nor Hades were places of punishment, and certainly not places of reward. Instead they were where everyone went after death. It was believed that Sheol was a shadowy semi-existence where there was a dim awareness of things, but it was certainly not the location of everlasting punishment that hell came to connote for Christians, and most certainly neither Sheol nor Hades were anything like what heaven has come to mean in our time to many Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
The primary point of these verses is this: God is everywhere. As the last phrase of the last stanza of our last hymn declares, “And everywhere that man can be/ Thou, God, art present there.” There is nowhere in this world or out of this world we can go where God is not present. That is both an enormously frightening and comforting thought.
It is frightening because it means that no matter what ill-conceived, twisted, or sinful things we choose to do, God is there when we do them. We cannot escape the ever-watchful eye of God, or His all-encompassing grasp. The omnipresence of God means that there is no place
where sin can occur without God being there to see it, and to take note of it.
The Rector’s Wife is a novel written by Joanna Trollope. It is about the marriage of an Anglican rector in five rural parishes in England and his increasingly restless wife. When Peter was not given the promotion both he and Anna thought he deserved, their marriage started to come unglued. Parishioners took pity of them, especially on her, but in a condescending way. Of this situation Anna said, “The thing is that the validity I am assured, almost commanded, as a Christian, seems not to be carried out in my human life. I seem to have less significance not only than my husband, but than most of the parish. I’m not a person, I’m simply a sort of function, and a pretty lonely sort of function at that” (p. 170). Because that is how she feels, Anna falls into a scandalous affair with a foreigner, and she finds herself spiraling into an even deeper vortex of immorality from which she cannot escape, and where she cannot break out of the presence of God.
But as fear-producing as may be the omnipresence of God, so also is His omnipresence faith-producing. When life seems to collapse all around us, and there appears to be no way out, then is when we encounter the presence of God at His most encompassing and comforting level, and we realize that we are not alone as we first imagined, but that God is there with us, every step of the dim and difficult way. We read of soldiers in fierce battles in foreign lands, and they report that they were sustained by God in the anxiety and terror which threatened to swallow them alive. Friends tell us that when they were at their sickest, and they thought they were going to die, there was God in the depths of their illness, holding them up, guiding them, snatching them from the very jaws of death. We ourselves have been where we were certain God could not be, only to discover His astonishing presence in the midst of terrible travails and trauma.
However, dicey circumstances can sometimes lead us to the wrong conclusions as well as to the right conclusions. The last six verses of Psalm 139 are in that category. After having expressed the sublime thoughts of the first eighteen verses, David stumbles into the twisted notions of the last six verses. “O that thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God, and that men of blood would depart from me….Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord? And do I not loathe them that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them as enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way within me.” Well, King, your attitude toward your enemies could use a little improvement. “I hate them with perfect hatred” indeed! “Perfect hatred” is an oxymoron, Dave. Surely God heard you when you thought that odious thought, and then you put it on parchment.
Fortunately, for David and for all the rest of us, the God who is omnipresent is infinitely more gracious toward us than we are toward one another. Even though He closely observes our faults, He is always willing to forgive, as the Sweet Singer of Israel often noted in other of his Psalms. God will forgive us, if we realize our sins, and then refrain from repeating them.
If God is everywhere, it must mean He is in places where we would least expect Him. For example, millions of people go to Las Vegas each year. Hard as this may be to believe, many of them end up in the casinos which line The Strip. I know you fine folks can’t imagine that, but having been to Las Vegas once (which was sufficient for a lifetime), we saw thousands of people crowded into the casinos, and almost no one out on the street in the 107-degree weather. We couldn’t understand it. Every Sunday conscientious Catholic gamers go to church, as canon law requires. When it comes time to receive the offering, some of them put gambling chips into the baskets instead of hard currency. The chips are turned into the diocesan office, where they are sorted out for each casino. Then, at the end of each month, a Franciscan friar is delegated to deliver them to the various gambling establishments to be turned into cash for the diocesan budget. The man who does this is known by everyone in Vegas --- I am not making this up --- as the Chip Monk.
“And everywhere that man can be/ Thou, God, art present there.” “If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there.” God does not choose to dwell only in an antiseptic heaven. He is wherever people are, and where everything else is. Ultimately, the omnipresence of God is an eternal saving grace. Without it, our worst might overcome His best. But His best is with us in our best as well as at our worst, and He will not abandon us, even if we attempt to abandon Him.
Marilynne Robinson is a novelist who wrote two outstanding novels about religious people working out their religion as best they could in a small town in Iowa in the Fifties through the Seventies. In the one called Home, she tells the story of a family of six. The father, John Ames, was a minister, and the mother died years before. Of the four children, there were three sons and a daughter. It is through the daughter’s eyes that the story is told. She came home to take care of her father in his advanced years. Her brother Jack had left home when he was still a boy, and unexpectedly he too came home. Jack had been a determined ne-er-do-well alcoholic drifter, and he had sowed his wild oats by the bushelsful.
The minister father had always favored Jack, perhaps because he was his namesake and he knew he was such a troubled young man. But Pastor Ames came to be both perplexed and heartsick because of his son. After Jack had been home for a while, and before he took off again, we are told this episode, in a conversation with his father and sister: “Jack cleared his throat. ‘It’s been good to be home. It really has.’ The old man raised his eyes and studied his son’s face. ‘You’ve never had a name for me. Not one you’d call to my face. Why is that?’ Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t know, myself. They all seemed wrong when I said them. I didn’t deserve to speak to you the way the others did.’ ‘Oh!’ his father said, and he closed his eyes. ‘That was what I waited for. That was what I wanted’” (p. 311).
The thing John Ames most wanted was for his wayward son to admit the pain and sorrow his wayward behavior had caused the family. When Jack spoke those few words to his dying father, Pastor Ames knew that Jack had finally understood that he bore the responsibility for his own self-absorbed behavior. Now the old minister could die in peace.
When other Jack Ameses own up to their mistakes, misjudgments, and outright sins, God is surely present in the process which leads them to that insight. We are all John Ames, and we are all Jack Ames, and God is with us in all the mountaintops and valleys of our lives. This was the comforting knowledge which flooded over David in Psalm 139. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” We can never be separated from the presence of God --- thank God! David was completely a John Ames and completely a Jack Ames, and he came to see that God was always with him, no matter which side of his personality was evident at any given moment.
Nevertheless, even though God is always with us in every situation we encounter, we cannot automatically conscript Him into our own purposes. That is illustrated by an old preachers’ story about a little boy and his grandfather. The three generations of this family were on vacation together, and the grandfather and his young grandson were sitting by the swimming pool while the others were out on the beach. They were each drinking a glass of pop (or soda, if you prefer). The boy looked out at the sparkling ocean, with puffy clouds floating by. He told his grandpa how pretty it looked. “That’s because God is there,” said the grandfather. “He is?” the boy said, astonished. “Oh yes,” said Grandpa, “God is everywhere.” “Is He there on the beach?” “Yes, He is.” “Is He beside those people walking on the beach?” “Yes, He is.” “Is He here at the swimming pool?” “Yes.” Then, looking at his nearly empty glass, the boy asked, “Is He here inside this glass?” “Well, yes,” said the startled paterfamilias, “I suppose He is.” With that the little boy clapped his hand over the top of the glass and said, “Gotcha, God!”
The omnipresence of God does not guarantee us that He will do everything we want, simply because He is everywhere. God will be God, and we will be humans, and that means we will still live with pain, uncertainty, illness, sorrow, and ultimately death. But if God is everywhere, there is nowhere we can be where His loving grace cannot sustain us. When tragedy strikes, as inevitably it shall, God is there. When loss sweeps over us, as when someone dies whom we have greatly loved, or we gradually or suddenly lose a physical ability we always took for granted and now it is gone, or when our mind loses some of its acuity and it throws us to realize that it has happened, God is there.
God is not obligated to be with us ever, let alone to be with us everywhere. But for reasons known ultimately only to Himself, He has chosen to be omnipresent to everyone everywhere. A God such as that is the best and the only kind of God to have. And that is the God of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Peter, and Paul. He also is our God.