September 6, 1998
Rev. Eugene Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
Psalm 139:1-18
Several years ago, Madeleine L'Engle taught an after-school writing seminar for high school students in New York, actually Harlem. What fortunate students they were. One afternoon, one of her students, a fifteen year old girl named Una, asked her out of the blue, "Do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?" L'Engle answered, "Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts." The other students seemed interested in this topic, so, in L'Engle's words, "I plunged in." And this is what she told them:
"There are three ways you can live life. You can live life as though it's all a cosmic accident; we're nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything is a bad joke. I can't.
"Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he's aloof, indifferent to this creation. He doesn't care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don't much matter to him, I don't matter to him. I can't live that way either.
"Then there's a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That's the only way I can live."
Clearly the Psalmist agrees with her:
"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...
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth."
Knit together in our mother's womb by the very hand of God. What a wonderful image that is - an image which speaks of the uniqueness, the preciousness, the sacredness of each and every human being.
Sounds good - each of us a wonder, each of us a miracle, each of us lovingly knit together by the hand of God. Great stuff . . . But do we believe it? Are we even encouraged to believe it? I fear that, more often than not, our experience is closer to that of Charlie Brown:
In one cartoon, he overhears two of the girls talking about him. "Violet, do you really think that Charlie Brown is as hopeless as you make him out to be?" Violet responds, "He's worse! He has NO redeeming features whatsoever! I just can't think of enough bad things to say about him." Then off they go, leaving Charlie Brown to look out to the reader and say, "I'm infinite!"
Another time, Lucy the psychiatrist insists to Charlie Brown, "I helped you a lot! I pointed out all your faults!" (Anybody ever do that for you? Touch any familiar chords?)
Yes, often Charlie Brown identifies with the Psalmist, but not with the hopeful words we heard earlier. Rather, he identifies more closely with Psalm 69: "Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none and for comforters, but I found none."
We begin life as wonders - fearfully and wonderfully made in the very image of God. But what happens? Somewhere along the way we forget that, or perhaps have it pounded out of us by a world that doesn't much care what the Psalmist thinks. "You're stupid, you're ugly, you're fat, you're incompetent, you'll never amount to anything." We hear it so much that after a while, it's hard not to believe it's true.
Henri Nouwen, that great saint of the church, reflected on this when he wrote: "Do you believe that you are a chosen one of God? Because somewhere in us an enormous temptation is lurking, maybe the greatest temptation in life, that of self-rejection. I tell you one of the most painful sufferings is that of self-rejection. 'I'm no good...I'm not wanted...I'm really not desired.' Although it isn't immediately expressed it's lurking there somewhere. I wonder if anyone lives his or her life without that feeling coming up, 'I'm not chosen, I'm not seen, I'm not unique or precious in somebody else's eyes'...A lot of anger, violence, and war comes out of that place where we do not believe we're seen in our uniqueness, in our preciousness...that's where the real suffering is - that people can't see themselves as precious and special in God's eyes and the eyes of God's people."
In a book titled, Eskimo Realities, Edmund Carpenter wrote about Eskimo ivory carvers with these words: "Carving, like singing, isn't a thing. When you feel a song within you, you sing it; when you sense a form emerging from ivory, you release it. As the carver holds the unworked ivory lightly in his hand, turning it this way and that, he whispers, 'Who are you? Who hides there?' He rarely sets out to carve, say, a seal, but picks up the ivory, examines it to find its hidden form and, if that's not immediately apparent, carves aimlessly until he sees it, humming or chanting as he works. Then he brings it out: Seal, hidden, emerges. It was always there; he did not create it, he released it; he helped it step forth."
Perhaps that is what we need to be about in the church...recognizing the preciousness, the wonder, the sacred in each other and releasing it, helping it to step forth...tracing in every face, something of the face of God.
Each week in worship we hear the prayer concerns, and there's so much more that goes unsaid. Here is someone for whom death has become an intruder; another whose life has been wrenched by divorce; another who has suffered a failure which feels literally like the end of the world...all here - people who are vulnerable, hurting, dying, hoping, dreaming. And we cannot always offer quick solutions or easy answers. In fact, more and more, I am convinced we have no answers at all. But we can remind each other and we can affirm in each other - you have a name, God knows your name - God has known you and loved you from the very beginning. And nothing can take that away. You - we - are God's beloved sons and daughters; you - we - are wonders; each of us a miracle in the mirror.
But understand that we don't stop with the mirror. To affirm our own belovedness, preciousness, is absolutely crucial, but it then leads us inevitably into the next step of affirming the belovedness, preciousness, of everyone else. Do you recall that moment in Graham Greene's classic, The Power and the Glory, when the old whiskey priest is finally hunted down and captured by the government? He is tossed into a filthy jail. He is surrounded by the dregs of humanity, thieves, killers, scoundrels of the lowest sort. But he sees none of this. Instead, as he looks around, all he sees is the broken and battered body of Jesus. And Greene writes "At the center of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery...that we were made in God's image; and that something resembling God dangles from every cross..." and we might add, is found in every prison, lurks under every grimy face.
To affirm our own belovedness leads inexorably to the challenging task of affirming the belovedness of everyone else as well, to treating each person with a measure of awe and wonder. In the words of Yale University's Stephen Carter, "This means that members of the Christian Coalition must search for the face of God in the leaders of the gay rights movement...and also that the leaders of the gay rights movement must search for the face of God in members of the Christian Coalition. And it means that the strangers we meet on the street or our opponents in a debate are as entitled to our respect - to that sense of awe - as the people we love most in the world."
All of us wondrous - all of us fearfully and wonderfully made - all of us miracles in the mirror.