God knows us better than we know ourselves. We find this out when we can find ourselves agreeing whole-heartedly with psalm 139. It’s one of my favorites, and part of the reason is that I think this psalm is a Reformed psalm through and through. It is the ultimate prayer of recognition that “God is God, and we are not God.” I also like its double meaning. The first person author of this prayer could be praying a prayer of feeling comforted by God’s presence or feeling overwhelmed by God’s ever-gazing stare.

When we as a community of faith pray this psalm together, we admit that God knows our every move from the moment we hit the snooze for the third time to the time we drift off during late night TV. God is with us waking or sleeping. God knows our every word, the ones of thanks we’re glad we thought to say, to the ones that we couldn’t scoop back into our mouths fast enough. God knows our childhood fears and our grown up frustrations. God knows if we are looking at the world through the lenses of the holy kingdom or whether we find ourselves in hells of our own making. Even in our deepest, utter darkness, God is there. Even when we feel totally abandoned, God has not left us to our own misery.

The psalmist speaks honestly that the great mysteries that are known only to God are to be for us reminders of our own insignificance. Only God can know us before we are even born, before we are even zygote material. In secret, God knows the number of our days, and all the choices we will make during them. Like the grains of sand on the beach are God’s thoughts, God’s infinite details. Our minds are too little to wrap around any of this other than to give our thanks and praise that God is doing God’s job – and we don’t have to.

In the truthfulness of this prayer, God even knows the depths of our anger – as much as we would like to hide it – even from ourselves. God knows that human beings make and hold on to enemies. God knows that we are not capable of the love for which we were created. God knows the inner workings of our hearts – both the love and the wickedness that reside therein.

But really, I can’t imagine it any other way. For those of us who are tempted to believe that human agency has no limits and God is nothing more than an observer of human behavior, I shudder to think what kind of world we might have then. Though God’s knowledge could be perceived as that tiger waiting to pounce, I’d rather think of it as the fabric that holds our universe together. I do find this to be a psalm of comfort and relief that God is in control – not us. That way even vengeance is God’s alone. Punishment is not ours to dole out. It’s God who searches the heart and finds out our innermost thoughts and feelings. It is God alone who can tell the wicked and the bloodthirsty from the kindhearted, and it is God alone who knows for certain that we are tossed back and forth between hate and love all the time.

As I pondered the depths of this psalm this week, the pastor who was at my home church during my early teenage years sent me a prayer by email – the prayer that is on the front of your bulletin today. It’s attributed to St. Theresa, but other than that I don’t know its exact origins. The second line got me. After a line of prayer for inward peace, the prayer is not just to know, not just to feel, but to trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. Simple. Yes. Profound. Absolutely.

“It was you, God, who knit me together in my mother’s womb.” It was you, God, who has graced me with the love of my life and my two beautiful children. It was you, God, who called me into the ministry. It was you, you, you, you, you.

If I told you all of those stories today, how I met Chuck, how we’ve welcomed children into our family, how others nurtured my call into the ministry, there’s God lurking behind every last one of them. A friend in Altoona told me once that her family had a proclivity for recognizing these moments and therefore labeled them D.C.C. - for divinely caused coincidences. God is active in our lives, and I can tell you that it’s in the small moments just as much as in the big life changing ones. When you think to call a friend just at the time she breathes a sigh of relief and says, “I’m so glad you called,” you might as well believe that’s the Spirit’s nudge. It happens to me too often to deny it. I’m running late for something, but get to Kroger’s just in time to see someone from church who needs to tell me something. I get an email from my past and it speaks to the present moment. It’s a matter of trusting, really and completely trusting, that you are exactly where you are meant to be right now, in your pew, in your family, in this town, whatever tells God’s story.

Yes, there will be times when God calls us out of our comfort to something new. That’s all part of the plan too. Trusting that you are exactly where God means for you to be doesn’t give us the option to quit listening and stagnate where we are. God may be in control, but that doesn’t leave us to be puppets in God’s side show. We are participants in God’s plan. Our possibilities are infinite, St. Theresa reminds us, when they are born of faith. We have gifts we must pass on, and love that we are destined to receive. The blessing of knowing that God knows us so well is a sort of contentment – a joy filled relaxation at knowing that we are God’s beloved children that were known from even the time before we were.

God has searched us, known us, and loved us for a very, very long time. In this, we are free – free to allow that love to settle into our bones. We are therefore obliged in fact to dance, sing, praise, and love knowing that you are God’s. God’s knowledge is too wonderful for us, and yet we are privileged to know that we cannot know it all. We can only trust that God’s plans are even more wonderful, even more delightful than anything we could come up with on our own.

May today there be peace within.

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

May you use those gifts you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.

May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

It is there for each and every one of us.

Amen.