You all know that old story about the Emperor’s New Clothes – how the king was duped into believing that he was wearing a fabulous new set of clothes that was visible to anyone who was worthy or smart. The thing is, of course, he doesn’t want to admit he can’t see the clothes, so he ends up marching through the streets with no clothes on, till a kid basically called it for what it was: he didn’t have any clothes on.
Whether he was wearing underwear or whatever, I leave up to you. The point here isn’t to be titillating. The point is to say, it’s a common basic idea that it’s scary to be seen as we really are.
I don’t mean our public image that we’ve spiffed up, the stories of our lives and relationships that we’ve tied up with a neat little bow.
I mean it’s scary to be seen and known for what we are as unedited and unfinished creatures, which we all are, no matter what our age. To have someone see the things in our lives that are still question marks, that didn’t have a clear resolution and that aren’t the story we’d want to be able to tell. The places inside that are still crying out about something was wrong in the past, or a fear in the future. And all these places in us that we don’t want seen and that maybe we really don’t want to see ourselves – that’s scary territory.
And I guess I can buy that fear. There are mature reasons that, as adults in the world, or kids, we have to edit a bit. It’s not appropriate for us to be that vulnerable all the time because there are people who abuse it. Lots of us have had painful experiences with people who knew our innermost parts, had access to those, and didn’t handle it so well.
In fact, those times – when someone knew us and didn’t really love us, even if they called it love – might have had the result that we started to break apart, to separate, the experiences of being really known and feeling really loved. Which might seem like it has a wisdom to it, except for one big danger: when we get too much of that kind of feedback from the world, we might go from feeling like being known and being loved are two separate things … to feeling like they are opposite things. To feeling like it’s really hard to reconcile letting ourselves be fully seen with letting ourselves be fully loved. To be really known is not to be really loved.
And that’s the real sadness – that as we go through life, maybe to different degrees and in different ways, we stop putting back together these two pieces that are meant to be a whole. For us humans, they can end up being hard to put together on a real day-in-and-day-out basis.
That’s exactly the putting-back-together of being known and still feeling loved that Psalm 139, the one we just read, is all about. It might sound like nice poetry, but we’re really talking about real and painful human experience that most of us can probably relate to. And it can take us pretty deep.
Because it takes us to the place that we learned long ago, mis-learned, that to receive love, there were parts of ourselves that were not acceptable.
And that’s where the real tragedy is, and here’s why. Because when we say, “I’ll show you this part because you’ll like it, but I won’t show you this part because I’ll lose the love,” it’s never just between us and the world. It’s between us and us. Those parts that we don’t want the world to know can become unknowable to us. And if we don’t know them, then we can’t love them. That’s when things get all broken up inside.
Now, only you know what those parts might be in your life, or the life of someone close to you. Whether it has to do with abilities or what the world said were limitations, or something about you physically, or your integrity of personhood, or your healthy anger or your sexuality, or whatever it was that early on, you got the message that you had to bargain it away in order to stay in the loop. That’s when things get broken up inside.
And if this were a pop psychology lecture or a self-help workshop about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, then we’d talk about all the work you have to do to love yourself again.
But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here on an entirely different basis. We’re here on the basis of grace, and while that’s a real churchy word, I’ll go ahead and say I think it means a gift. We’re here on the basis of a gift. One we didn’t ask for or work for, one that comes into us and leaves us changed. And the main thing is, it’s a gift we can trust.
That’s what the psalmist is telling us about. He’s telling us about a lover who brings together being known and being loved, when we were used to parceling all that out. And then the thing is, that weaves things back together for us.
Weaving, knitting. These images in the psalm are very tactile, you can feel what it’s about. And it’s great because it’s not about separate pieces being glued together, like a broken pot where you can see the cracks. Weaving and knitting are about strands that come together into a whole. Sure, you can see the individual lines, but you get the effect by looking at the whole thing. The larger texture, how the colors and shades blend or change.
And there’s a lot of meaning in that, in how God weaves us together. And let me make clear, what I don’t think this psalm is about is legalistic stuff on moralistic issues – the Hebrew there is just too ambiguous, deep, and metaphorical to be a prop for our current-day arguments.
What is in there in spades is this: an invitation into the mystery of identity. Who we are at our core, what makes us us, and – most importantly – how God sees that. And when I see how so many of our lives and the lives of our children really work on a day-to-day basis, I think this graceful way of seeing our identities is what so many of us are really thirsting for.
We’re so used to our identities being compartmentalized and gauged and diagnosed and categorized. What works, what doesn’t, what the world feels it can use, what makes the world uncomfortable. Those are very human designations – remember, a disability has more to do with someone’s environment, than with something that’s innate in that person. And to be sure, all that may be the stuff we have to deal with along the way, what society or others tell us our identities are, and what is or isn’t of value.
But the problem comes when we start to mistaken these mechanics of society for the truth about our identities. And this psalm can save us from that. This psalm is telling us that those mechanics of how identity is measured and labeled is not the point, ultimately.
And it cuts underneath all that crazy feedback that we get all the time to say, “there’s a whole other way you are seen. It’s through God’s eyes. That’s not just another option on the table; it’s what surrounds all the options. And through those eyes, at the end of the day, what is essentially you is wonderfully made.”
That sends us in a whole different direction from all the categories. It invites us into a lot of mystery – which isn’t easy, and it can’t be used for easy asnwers. This psalm is beautiful but it’s dangerous if it’s misused. It does not tell us exactly what God did or didn’t "make" in each of us. We all come out differently, with how we’re wired and interface with the world, with the particular body chemistry we each have and what we’re prone to, even how our limbs are formed. And if we get too literal, then it’s dangerous because we can begin to say God did something difficult on purpose. And that’s not my understanding of how God works – it’s the bad-parent syndrome that we can project onto God – but it’s not how I think God works, and it’s not what the psalmist is saying.
What is fearfully and wonderfully made is what is most essentially you – and that’s something that far greater than what humans can assess or categorize.
In that mystery of how you were made, and the pieces we can define and the pieces we can’t and how it’s all still happening till the day we die – in all of that, there is something transcendent and essentially you, and God – which is to say, love – is there on every side of it.
So – what would it feel like to bring all those parts that we can’t defend, that we can’t explain, that are bruised or fearful or ashamed or inadequate – to come forward gently into some beautiful light.
And then – one by one as those parts became lit up – what would it be like not to retreat back into the shadows? Not to pull back from the light, but to trust it.
And then finally, what would it be like to feel that light become warmth that we were bathed in, and to realize that it’s love? What would it be for all those pieces that we fear or hold in the dark to be bathed in light? Not judged, not assessed. Simply received.
Maybe... maybe with God, being fully known is not going to be bad news. Maybe being fully seen will not be too risky.
I often say that God works through invitation. So this psalm is God gently but powerfully inviting us, saying, “Come, come over here. Stand beside me. Do you see what I see? Great. Now, can you love what I love?”
See what I see. Love what I love.
And right there is where you’ll find your identity.
And right there is where you’ll be woven back together.