Knowing and Being Known

St. Andrew's Episcopal, Mer Rouge, La.

Today’s lessons are about knowing, not knowing.., and being known. We’ll begin with Samuel, if for no other reason than because it is one of my favorite call stories in the Bible. Samuel reminds me so much of us much of the time!

Samuel is, of course, Eli’s helper in the Temple. He goes to bed one night and hears a voice calling his name. He thinks it’s Eli. Eli says, Nope, not me, go back to bed.

And this happens three times. But in the midst of this repetitive and seemingly redundant story of God calling Samuel, and Samuel thinking it’s Eli, we finally get a statement of the obvious: "Samuel did not yet know the Lord..." 

And it takes Eli, the High Priest, being awakened in the night three times to figure out what is going on! One would think the High Priest would be a little more in tune with God and God’s ways of calling people.

How like we humans this is! We do not know God well enough to hear God’s call. Or, we doubt our senses and our sanity, or we second guess ourselves or we are skeptical.., and rightly so.

I have certainly heard people claim that God had called them to do something that I don’t believe for a moment God would ever call anyone to do. I once was trying to counsel a woman who kept getting fired from jobs for passing out religious tracts while on the job, and she insisted that God was calling her to do it.

Human knowing is always imperfect. However wonderfully we are made, however great our capacity to use science or intuition or whatever to understand humankind and our world, there’s always more to know.., and that’s in part because the universe is dynamic. It constantly changes.

But at our smartest and wisest and best, we cannot and will never fully know God! Indeed, the erroneous belief of some people of all faiths—Jews, Muslims, Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, Buddhists & Hindus—that they have God all figured out… has caused some of the greatest violence and grief and misery humankind has ever known.

I believe it was Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan and Roman Catholic priest, who said, “The moment you become certain you know the mind of God is the moment you’re no longer dealing with God.”

On the other hand, God does know us. And we get a glimpse of that in today’s Gospel story. Phillip brings Nathaniel to Jesus, and Jesus welcomes him with a most unusual greeting. Aw, he says, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!

Nathaniel asks, Where did you get to know me? And Jesus answers, I saw you under the fig tree before Phillip called you. 

Here is where our understanding of scripture is limited by lack of knowledge of other faiths. In Judaism, being “under the fig tree” means “studying Torah."

Now remember that when Phillip first goes to Nathaniel, he is skeptical. Can anything good come out of Nazareth, he asks. But he comes anyway, and he meets in person the one who already knows him, and whom he is prepared to meet because he has spent time studying Torah. Studying Scripture should open your mind, not close it.

In other words, Jesus basically says, ‘We’ve already met. We met in Torah. I’m the one you’ve been reading about in Holy Scripture.’ And Nathaniel recognizes him and declares his faith: You are the Son of God! 

God knows us, and knows us well enough to find us, to call us in a way that we can hear—if not the first time, then the second or third. It’s okay to question. It’s fine to be skeptical. But trust that God knows us and will use Holy Scripture, other people, whatever.. to find us and call us.

So… I wonder how it feels to you, to each of us this morning, to contemplate being known by God. Can we wrap our minds around that? Can our soul bear it? Is it the best news ever? Or does it strike fear in our hearts?

I’m guessing some of all that. And isn’t “all that” what we heard in today’s Psalm? 

Lord, you have searched me out and known me,
   you know my sitting down and my rising up;
   you discern my thoughts from afar. 

The Psalmist acknowledges that God knows us. But by verse four, the response to seems a little stressed out! 

You press upon me behind and before
and lay your hand upon me. 

Another translation uses the phrase “hemmed in,” not at all a comfortable feeling. And I am immediately reminded of fights in bars and movies that begin with, “Get your hands off me!”

In other words, knowing that God knows us, deeply and truly, each one as we are, is not entirely comfortable.

On the one hand, humans long to be known and understood, not only by God but by other humans. On the other hand, being known too well strikes a bit of fear into our hearts.

We are deeply flawed creatures. We would love to be known for that which we are proud of, for those aspects of ourselves we find acceptable, lovable, attractive. We do not want others to know our flaws and shortcomings. We would hide them from each other, and perhaps even more so from God!

Moreover, who among us has not been deeply wounded by another human who used his or her knowledge of us to hurt us? Who among us has not been wounded by revealing ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable to another human, only to be betrayed by that trust?

But the Psalmist takes us in another direction. God’s knowing is deeply and perfectly loving. God is with us in heaven and in the grave, in air and sea. God’s hand leads us and holds us fast. 

And then the most loving imagery of all: 

For you yourself created my inmost parts;
     you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
     all of them were written in your book. 

God’s beloved. That is who we are. That’s what it means to be known by God. And what can we do in response? Just two things: Love god back, and our neighbors—all of them—as ourselves. Everything else follows.                     

AMEN