Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18
1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely. 5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. 15My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. 17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.
It seems, now more than ever, that there is a tremendous, collective effort to sustain and improve brain health. We see it on television all the time; PBS specials of Dr. Daniel Amen and others, talking about brain health. Supplements are advertised to improve brain health and now we're supposed to eat walnuts, because they look like the brain, so they're supposed to be good for the brain. This along with all sorts of activities that run the gamut from daily exercise to Sudoku, Wordle and the like, all for improved brain health.
The first thing I think I noticed about care for brain health was at least a decade ago when contact sports, especially football, began to realize that brain injuries were problematic, especially in retired football players. Helmets were redesigned to protect players from the severity of concussions. Overly aggressive tackles are no longer permitted. And, if and when collisions do happen, there are ‘concussion protocols’ that are immediately enacted so that players can reduce or eliminate any further brain damage. Every sport, even leisure sports, now have taken measures to seek and protect people and their brains. Now even skiing requires a helmet. When I went skiing well into adulthood, I was lucky if I even wore a hat! Further, as longevity increases, we're obviously seeing more and more older adults, being treated and cared for, who have memory issues. Memory is something that we take for granted until we begin to age and then we lose our capacity to hold all that information … (snaps fingers as she tries to recall), what was I just going to say???
I had an impromptu conversation last week with a member. As we were finishing up, I said, “there's one more thing I have to tell you about, but I can't remember what it is. I'll call you.” It took me like four days to call her and say, “I just remembered what it was!”
I was with friends over the weekend and their adult kids were there. And I asked them how they met. And it was a joy to watch them retell the story of how they met; but, of course, they both had different versions of the same story! Our memories (regardless of the accuracy of the detail) are a wonderful companion to help keep us company in our day and our night dreams. They are also very helpful in times of grief to give us strength as well as remind us of our blessings.
We're all familiar with the euphemism, ‘memory like an elephant’, which has always seemed like a strange metaphor. But we know and witness not only elephants, but almost all animals having terrific memories, (including the best place for that squirrel who wants to build that nest right outside my condo every spring).
I Googled the expression ‘memory like an elephant’ and by and large, the expression compares elephants with memory, because they have a tremendous capacity to store information; they remember the best and the safest paths to take, where food is readily available and even how they're treated by other animals and humans.
We, too, have that same capacity. We usually take the same route to work, to see family, to go to our favorite stores and, if you're traveling with your spouse, “Why are you going this way? This is the way I go to shop. How come you're not taking that road?” Even traveling to our favorite vacation spots, we have debates. Do we go all the way down the Parkway or do we take 287 and then pick the Parkway up down by the bridge? We rely on our good memory and memories to keep us in good stead. We also work at keeping bad memories (and our own bad behavior and the way that others have treated us), in the recesses.
When I Googled ‘memory like an elephant’, some sources went directly to the negative connotation, as in: ‘never forgetting how one was treated by another’; ‘holding that grudge’. I'm going to be going to my 40th high school reunion in about a month. ) I'm not sure how I'm going to lose the 50 pounds, but if anybody has any good ideas, I'm all ears.) I hope the negative memories won’t surface—"I remember the time that you didn’t do this or that”. Instead, I hope to hear, “I remember the time that you helped me do something well, or made me laugh or helped me solve a problem”.
So what does this have to do with Psalm 139? Well, depending on one's mindset, your faith, your perception, Psalm 139 can either be a tremendous comfort or mildly or even deeply unsettling. Psalm 139 is often entitled “The Inescapable God.” Now if I had been on the translation committee of the NRSV, I would not have entitled it “The Inescapable God,” because that's just downright terrifying! I would have written something like “God's Constant and Gentle Presence.” But that would be a very loose translation of this psalm.
I think you'll agree that we certainly want God to know us intimately and to see all the ways in which we are kind and caring and trusting and faithful. We especially desire this when others don't see those things in us and tend to be critical or judgmental or downright off base when they see part of what we said or what we did. But we're far less comfortable with the idea that God sees all of what we do, including those thoughts and those actions that we're not proud of, or are downright mortified by. Those things we'd rather keep under lock and key for a lifetime. And I think that's exactly what the psalmist is trying to help unburden us from; the complete knowledge that God has about us could feel threatening. Because that's a human concept.
We think this when we internally say “I'd like them to really know the whole truth about me, not just the part they are judging.” Or in a negative connotation if they knew the whole truth about me… (fill in the blank). But the psalmist is actually trying to help us to keep us celebrating that God loves and honors us fully and loves us completely. The Psalmist reminding us that our lives belong fully to God--the good, the bad, the ugly, the glorious, the wonderful and the surprising. Further, we are inextricably linked to God, because God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. We are wonderfully made and treasured by God for all, not just the part, but for all of who we are.
Psalmist scholar J. Clinton McCann says “although we're unable to comprehend God's thoughts, the psalmist is sure of one thing: no matter what, God is and will always be with us--Emmanuel (God with us) which we hear when Christ is born”. This is obviously particularly helpful when we're struggling, especially when we're suffering in silence. There's nothing like the comfort of God's presence when our pain is too great to bear and others slough it off or can't be there with us in our pain.
I don't know if you know who Aaron Jackson is. I didn't know who Aaron Jackson was until this week. Aaron Jackson goes around the world rescuing elephants who have been mistreated and abused. He is caring for an elephant in Laos right now, who was chained for 50 years as part of an elephant-riding business. That business failed during Covid. The owners of the business left this elephant chained to a tree for two years. Aaron Jackson found this elephant, unchained her, put her into a carrier and brought her to a place where she can be fed and cared for until she can be released into the wild. I'll send you the Tik Tok video, because it's so powerful to watch. I'll try to demonstrate what it looked like: (The video shows an elephant, free of chains, trying to back out of the trailer and literally find her footing for the first time. The elephant was so hesitant to even take one step that she’d take baby steps and try to put her foot down on the ground behind her. She’d put one foot down and then immediately stop and reverse her step back into the trailer. She did this two or three times because she didn't know that it was safe. Now that alone, will bring you to tears when you see it. But then there was the voice of God in Aaron Jackson, “Come on, Mama. You can do it. You got it. I'm right here with you. You're safe. It's gonna be okay. You're gonna love it.” That, my friends, is how God is speaking to us in Psalm 139 and in our heartbreak in all the places where we don't yet have courage or we still feel chained or imprisoned or left or abused or abandoned or alone.
You don't have to read all 25 or 30 verses of Psalm 139, because God is around us. And, thank God, God is inescapable, so that when we do need courage and we do need strength and we need to be unchained, God says, “Come on. I love you. You can do it.” So let's have memories like elephants from this day forward.
Amen.