Sermon preached at Kirwan Uniting Church 7 September 2025
I had the privilege of baptising a young baby this morning. It never becomes routine. Whatever the promises which parents and godparents make, however we might privately make unsupported, subjective, judgments about those, and we shouldn't, the real promise is from God's word to the child: Luke 18: 'People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to bless them and pray for them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and don’t hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."' This from a promise-keeping God described in Deuteronomy 7: 'Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations.' Baptism is the most generationally witnessing of the church's sacraments.
Sometimes the lectionary readings of the day are as inappropriate as you could possibly imagine, not just for a baptism, but for any occasion! Today's Psalm of the Day, however, was just right. Not only for a baptism: As a hospital chaplain, I often used it by the bedside during a patient's last hours. Ps 139 v 18: When I awake, I am still with you.
So, to this morning. Here's my sermon. It's a sort-of hybrid aide memoire notes on which I hang a sermon, and verbatim words. It's what I printed out for me to preach, not a devotional for folk to read. But if you were at Kirwan Uniting, it might call the service to mind.
Imposter syndrome
The psalmist says, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me.”
“You have searched me” - the word can have the sense of digging into, of drilling down. “Lord, you have excavated me.” One contemporary translation is, “Lord, you dig me.” “You dig me, Lord.”
God digs you. When no one else notices you - when no one else has the time to bother - God searches you. You are endlessly, fascinatingly interesting to God. God doesn’t get tired of you. God searches you.
God knows you. This is the God whose eye is on the sparrow. This is the God who keeps your tears in a bottle. This is the God who took out the divine knitting needles and crocheted you together, stitch by stitch, in your mother’s womb. This is the God who tallies the number of every hair on your head - admittedly easier for some of us than others, but still ...
This is the God for whom there are no anonymous sheep, to whom nobody is a write-off, for whom no one is lost in the crowd. The personal God who loves the number one: one lost sheep, one missing coin, one sinner lost and found.
Unknown soldier. No one knows exactly who is buried there. No one knows what birth date or death date to inscribe on the headstones. No one knows the names. But One knows: the One who holds and beholds the unnoticed sacrifices and sufferings of our world. Across each gravestone are inscribed the words “Known to God.” “Known to God.”
Beatles searching for God. But really it’s God searching for us, and searching us. Not a peremptory pat-down.
The psalmist knows this. The psalmist marvels - or is it laments? “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” The Hebrew word for “hem in” used here doesn’t mean cuddle. It doesn’t refer to a protective embrace, a great big bearhug, or to being wrapped in Bubble Wrap. The word for “hem in” is the word used when a city is laid under siege. “You besiege me, O God.” “You hem me in. You besiege me. You entrap me. You encircle me. You beleaguer me, behind and before. You will not leave me alone.”
But the truth is, we do not want to be known through and through - by anybody. We want to maintain strict control over who knows what about us and how much they know and when they know it. Isn’t this why marriage is so hard? You get married, and suddenly you can’t get away from this person! They know everything about you. Isn’t that why people resent their parents? Because they know that sometimes their parents really do know them better than they know themselves, because they’ve watched us since we bounced on their knees. And we resent that.
We don’t want anyone, even God, to know everything about us, no matter how much we say otherwise.
“Come and see a man,” the Samaritan woman said, “who told me everything I have ever done.” And not too many other people would take her up on the offer. Jesus would look at a person and would stare into their soul, his eyes digging into them, excavating the deepest recesses of their being, seeing them through and through. And we can only take so much of that.
We say, “Jesus, we have to watch ourselves too much around you. We feel hemmed in around you. Now you go back home where you belong and be a good God, and maybe we’ll see you on Sunday morning.”
It is a fearful thing to be known by God. We do not want to be known, but this searching, all-knowing God won’t leave us alone. This God will not go away. Some people tried to kill him, and even that wouldn’t work. Jesus just came back and said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” and you wonder sometimes with the psalmist whether that is a promise or a threat. Post-Easter, “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”
The psalmist again: “If I top the clouds and mount up into the stratosphere - You. If I roll out a sleeping bag down in the lowest basement of hell - You. If I catch a pre-dawn flight over the farthest ocean - You.”
This is the breadth, length, height, depth of the love of Christ. “Even there your right hand holds me by the scruff of the neck.”
St Paul Ephesians 3
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being planted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
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