Greg's Sermon Manuscript

The following is the copyright material of Rev. Dr. Gregory Anderson Love.

God Knows

Exodus 33:17-20

Matthew 10:16, 24-31

Revelation 3:20

SFTS Friday Chapel

Sept. 22, 2006

by Gregory Anderson Love

Associate Professor of Systematic Theology

San Francisco Theological Seminary

Email: glove@sfts.edu

Claire is an extrovert. She likes to talk. When something good happens to her, she wants to tell someone about it. Thankfully, it is often me. When she comes home from the children’s center, she runs in the door, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, guess what I saw today . . . guess what happened to me . . . .” Sometimes she’ll want to drag me outside to see the sight. Last winter, it was usually another snail she found crawling up our front steps. “Touch him, but don’t squish his shell, Daddy.”

She wants to share not only the wonderful things of her day, but also the troubling things, things that scare her or wound her. I hear about her falling down on the way home from school, how her knee and hand hurt.

Though I am more introverted than Claire is, as a child and youth I, too, wanted to share the important experiences of my life with others. Julie and I have been married almost 20 years. When I came out to interview for my teaching post at SFTS, I remember taking my rental car one afternoon and driving along Sir Francis Drake to Olema; driving up highway 1 to Jenner, crossing inland along the Russian River, stopping at a fruit stand in Sebastopol. It was the first time I had been to all these places, and I remember wanting to have Julie, or my twin brother, or somebody with whom I could point and say, “Isn’t this wonderful . . . it’s so beautiful.” The experience felt incomplete, only having myself witnessing the beauty.

But the incompleteness occurs equally for the frightening, painful experiences. I have had two times in my life when I have been depressed for extended periods. One was when I was sixteen. Externally, my life had not changed. I still had friends, still did fine in school, had a stable home life. But I felt lonely . . . utterly alone. And I wondered if anyone knew, if anyone could tell, if anyone saw me. Could they see me, see that underneath the façade, there was a pit inside me, and I was falling in. A couple of friends knew, but didn’t inquire all that often into how I was doing.

Mostly, I experienced my depression alone. Instead of the weeks I anticipated, it lasted a year—a long time for a 16-year-old. I kept a journal back then, in the form of letters to God. The one thing I held on to that year was this thought, given to me by my youth leaders the year before: God knew. God knew about my depression, my feeling of loneliness, the pit, the falling. And Jesus knew. During my months of utter aloneness, I found that Jesus was my friend. That friendship was of a sort only Jesus could give me. Jesus knew of my pain not only from the outside, but also from within, because he lived in me and went through it all with me. It was a gift from Jesus I’ve never forgotten.

* * * * * *

When a systematic theologian hears a phrase like “God knows,” it conjures up all the abstract traits we’re trying to figure out—in this case, the divine omniscience.

But, in fact, the divine all-knowingness found in the Bible is very practical, very this-worldly. At its heart, the divine all-knowingness is about us living within the embrace of God. As the Brief Statement of Faith rightly says from its first words, “In life and in death we belong to God.”

In the first sense, the divine all-knowingness points to the judgment of God. Like Jesus on the cross, there are times when certain individuals must feel they have been abandoned by every living person, human or divine. “The disappeared,” whether they are left in some unmarked grave near the lynching tree, or in El Salvador during the 80’s, or Gitmo today. The Armenian women, children and men, 1.3 million of whom were rounded up by the Turks, sent away on trains, and slaughtered in last century’s first, but little remembered, act of genocide.[1] They all must have wondered, “Does anyone see me? See what is happening, what has happened to me?”

And here is one of the surprises, the good news, something which makes that strange Jewish God Yahweh stand out from all the others: God sees. God knows.

One night in July, I watched a documentary about WWII. Toward the end of it, they announced that Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 2, German resistance in Berlin crumbled, and the Red Army was in complete control. On May 5, a few retreating SS soldiers fired on some Russian soldiers. One Russian soldier reported what he did in response. “Only now can I admit it,” Ludlin Anshishkin (sp.) told the BBC interviewer. “I was in such a state. I was shaking.” He called the German soldiers into a building one at a time for ‘interrogation,’ and as each reached the basement, he knifed them. “I slit their throats. I knifed a lot of them.”

Toward these Germans, he thought, “’You wanted to kill me . . . for four years, you’ve been killing. . . . God knows how many of my friends you’ve killed.’”

The interviewer asked Ludlin, “Don’t you think it was a war crime?”

“What?”

“What you did to those Germans?”

“Do I think it was a war crime? No, I don’t. . . . Don’t look at me as if I were a criminal. It was a long time ago. As one of our poets says, ‘Those years have passed into oblivion.’” Ludlin gave a slight grin.[2]

But the Bible points to Yahweh, the all-knowing, and proclaims to Ludlin and those in the graves, “God knows.” The incidents haven’t “passed into oblivion.” This is the first meaning of God’s omniscience, its ethical sense.

But there is a second meaning to the divine all-knowingness in the Bible. Instead of coming from the public sphere, it comes from the private sphere, from home. Instead of political, it is intimate. Like a mother who notices all the little things that go on in her child’s life—the scraped knees; the first water-color, half on the party dress; the dream late at night—God notices, God sees. Like Jesus who, when the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years was healed, turned around, saying, “Who touched me?”, Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, notices the particulars, and won’t be rushed on by his handlers.[3]

* * * * * *

This intimate noticing of Jesus points to the friendship of Jesus, and the friendship of God. When I was sixteen, this intimate noticing was important to me because, having no one with whom to share my sense of loneliness, I found that I could share it with Jesus. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found another way Jesus’ attentiveness feeds me. There are times not only when we have no one with whom to share an important experience of beauty or pain, but when we lose the person with whom we shared an important experience in the past.

An anniversary of some event in your life comes along—something precious and wonderful, or something awful and terrifying. The date comes, and you remember. But only you. Only you know the significance of that past event. You think about it as you drive to pick up the kids, stir the soup on the stove, commute home. There is a private loneliness to the day, whether that past event was joyous or painful. And then a card arrives: “Remembering you and thinking of you this day.”

If you lose those persons with whom you shared those experiences in the past, those persons who know what they mean to your life, know that there is one who remembers those events with you, and who cannot be taken away. Jesus remembers them, too.[4]

* * * * * *

This all-knowingness of God the Mother/Father and of Jesus may not be good news, or so we may feel. We may fear the judgment of God, this God who remembers. Moses could not see God’s face and live, for the holy God cannot abide human sinfulness.[5] In the section right before our passage in Revelation, Jesus tells those in the church in Laodicea:

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. . . . So, because you are lukewarm, . . . I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.[6]

One wonders if Ludlin Anshishkin would find it “good news” to hear Jesus say his acts against German prisoners were not yet “passed into oblivion.”

But deeper than even the ethical sense of God’s all-knowingness is the intimate sense. Like a mother who washes her daughter’s hair, like a father who wipes the sweat from his crying child’s hair, even the hairs on our head are counted.[7] God knows. Jesus knows us.

Perhaps this intimacy itself causes us fear. Perhaps we want to keep Jesus at a safe distance. At least, then, we rightly know that something is at stake in knowing this Jesus.

But this is who Jesus is. This is what he intends. His omniscience is his omnipresence. He notices. He notices you. He remembers the significant experiences of your life. He wants to know you, and be known by you. This intimacy he offers is either a wonderful gift, or a frightening prospect to us, and we all must decide what it is we want in our relationship with Jesus, whether we want this intimacy or not.

But make no mistake; this intimacy is what Jesus wants. When you feel like you are the only one who knows what you are going through, Jesus knows. When you have lost those persons who remember significant events, or fear your own loss of memory of them, a message comes from him: “I remember.” He knows the strands on our head, this friend who will never, never forsake us. “Behold, I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”[8]

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[1] For a detailed account of the Turkish killing of the Armenians in the 1890’s and the first two decades of the 20^th century (especially 1915, under the cover of WWI), see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.

[2] From “Vengeance,” the fourth episode of the four-part BBC Documentary, War of the Century.

[3] See Luke 8:43-8.

[4] For examples of the fear of losing threads of meaning from one’s life as people who remember them die—whether a beloved family member or friend, or one’s own memory—see for example, David Guterson, East of the Mountains, pp. 32-4; and Edward Beauclerk Maurice, The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming Of Age in the Arctic, pp. 385-92.

[5] Ex. 33:17-20.

[6] Rev. 3:15-17.

[7] Matthew 10:29-31.

[8] Rev. 3:20.