You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. … Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:1-2,23-24)   Psalm 139 begins and ends in exactly the same way.  The psalm praises God in deeply personal and poetic ways for his infinite knowledge, presence, and power.  From that basis, the psalm asks God to do it again: "O God who knows me, know me again—here, now today.  O God who searches my heart and mind, search me again.  O God who is present everywhere and everywhen, lead me into your everlasting presence again today." There is something incredibly comforting about this psalm.  We use it often in worship and devotions.  Many of us know parts of it by heart.  Perhaps we don't think often enough of how frighteningly intimate this psalm is, however. That God should know every thought and deed of our entire lives—that he should be present as witness in every secret room where we have ever given in to temptation—is actually quite a frightful thought.  This is the very thought that sent Adam and Eve off to hide in the bushes when they realized they were naked before the eyes of God and one another.  We fear being known so intimately.  It takes a great deal of trust built over a great deal of time to be willing to reveal and entrust ourselves—warts and all—so fully to another.  This is part of the wisdom that leads the Christian tradition to restrict the naked vulnerability of sex to the safely guarded commitment of marriage: in doing so we claim that intimate knowing of one's body, just like intimate knowing of one's self, ought only be offered in a setting of highest, deepest trust and commitment.  This is just that sort of relationship, and I'd say an even deeper one, that psalm 139 describes.  In a marriage, it remains true that one never fully knows the other.  Who of us can truly plumb the depths of mystery and living reality that is another human being like ourselves?  We can't.  But God can, and does.  We are fully known by God.  The crazy step of faith that psalm 139 takes, is that it recognizes that God knows our true and authentic self more deeply than even we, ourselves ever will, and actually invites that knowing.  "Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."  Far from a cynical, deterministic, or fatalistic look at religion, the psalmist claims a place of agency and responsibility within the relationship with God.  Yes, God knows the psalmist anyway, but the psalmist has also come to know and to trust this God.  The psalmist is not merely a passive participant in a pre-determined world.  There is a relationship here: God created it that way.  And so the psalmist has a role in inviting that relationship: inviting God in to see and to know and even to speak into the psalmist's life in ways that lead into even deeper knowing of self and even deeper relationship with the everlasting God.  Our relationship with God is our first relationship of intimacy, our first experience of being seen, known, and yet loved all the same.  Will you continue to invite that relationship as psalm 139 does, so that you too can experience what it is to be seen and known, and yet loved and led into even deeper, trusting places of relationship?  The grace, forgiveness, and peace of Christ assures us that we can.  

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