Fearfully and Wonderfully Made | Monday Invocation
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”
Psalm 139: 7-10
The book of Psalms is a collection of 150 poems that includes a variety of laments and praises in relation to God over a span of time. Imagine if we were to all write various prayers to God and put them into a book. We would all have different laments, writing styles, hopes for the world, and ways of seeing God at work in our own lives. And yet, even with each of our voices so different, we would find that through our connection with one another, we would be able to relate to each other's words sometimes. The same remains for the Psalms, where people have looked to them in times of great joy and great sadness. Today, we turn to Psalm 139 to see how this poem can add to our lives even now.
We hear bits and pieces from Psalm 139 all the time, most notably verses 13 and 14. The verses have been used in many movements as a tool to condemn LGBTQ+ people. The implication is that: God made you, so why are you straying from ‘God’s order’. However, this leaves out God’s will for us to grow and evolve. The hope is that we will learn, start to form thoughts, get taller, wider, skinnier, grayer, and just move about life in the various ways that we do adapting to our daily experiences. We were not created to be stagnant, but to grow.
The words in Psalm 139 are intimate. The words weave through, telling us that there is nowhere we can go to run from God. God knows our every thought and move. For some of us, knowing that is intrusive; for others, it’s liberating. It’s liberating to know that God is there with us, accepts us as we are now, and journeys alongside us where we need to go, when so many people have told us that God does not remain with us because of 'choices' that we have made. God is there with us and cares for us in that ongoing partnership.
S. Tamar Kamionkowski writes in the Queer Bible Commentary that this Psalm can be used as a coming-out Psalm based on the fact that we should ‘stand proud’ in who we are for that God made us and stands with us. However, today, I would venture to say that sometimes, one of the most powerful points of coming out can be the moment in which you come out to yourself, to accept, if even for a few seconds, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. And that God’s love doesn’t stop at the point of creation. As we see that God goes with us to the ends of the earth, God is with us as we grow and continue to create ourselves together.
