When I received this week’s question, I found myself really interested in it. It struck a lot of chords for me in terms of my own faith journey and in how it is curious about why it seem easier to be present to God in certain places and less so in others. I have no idea who submitted this; that’s the case with many of our submissions, but here’s today’s topic:
When I’m alone in nature, I can feel and believe that God knows my heart. But when I look at big cities teeming with people, I wonder how it is possible that God can know each heart personally.
I love this observation because it’s humble. It’s real. It’s a thought that I’ve had at times in my life, and I suspect that it’s something many of us have had cross our mind. It’s also very practical. So, whoever you are, thanks for submitting this one. I hope I can speak to your heart and mind today.
I’m going to take three different angles on this. First, can God know each heart personally? Second, why does it seem easier to connect with God in nature? Third, what about cities? Is God present in those too?
So, let’s start with the first one — can God know each heart personally? This really hits home for me, particularly because of my upbringing. Most of you know that my parents raised me in the Baptist Church and that attending summer camp from elementary school on was a major part of my faith story. Around the age of 11 or so, the message of salvation really struck me. I knew that Jesus died for my sins to save me; I also knew that, given the choice, I’d take eternity in heaven for sure.
That summer I was a camper at Judson Baptist Camp. It’s the camp I went to every summer and even worked at for two summers in college. The camp’s motto is “Where faith and fun meet,” and it sure was that for me. Over that week, I decided that I wanted to give my life to Jesus, so I asked my counselor how to do that. He told me to just pray and invite Jesus into my heart. So, I went back to my bunk and did just that.
Only, here was the struggle. I didn’t speak the prayer, so, I wondered, could God hear my thoughts? Then, my worry grew. There were a dozen others in my cabin. What if they were also praying right then? Could God hear me and them at the same time? What if God missed the prayer? Would the record not show that I believed in Jesus and wanted to be saved?
So, I’m pretty sure I tried to pray that prayer thirteen times that week. Later, I tried it from home. I tried it out loud. I prayed it and prayed it and prayed it, and then, when I was baptized on January 8, 1990, I finally felt like I was good. Surely one of those prayers made it to God, and at the very least, my church had a record of my baptism by then.
My young faith was wrestling with this idea of how personally God could know each of us. What I have found over time is that my understanding of God has grown, as has my appreciation for how my small mind will never be able to fathom all of the mysteries of God. Still, we have Scripture that can help anchor us, which is something I needed when I was feeling so insecure about salvation.
I think Psalm 139 is one of the most elegant and personal psalms ever penned, and I turn to it whenever I wonder whether God knows me, you, and all others personally. I encourage you to spend some time in that psalm this week. It’s balm for the soul.
It begins, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.” (Oh, how I wished I knew that psalms as an insecure 11-year-old!) The psalm continues on beautifully about how God knows this person so well, that God knows what he’ll say before he says it, that there is nowhere he can go where he can hide from God’s loving presence, that God knew him even before his own mother did.
So, I believe God can and does know each heart personally. I am not sure if I can say exactly “how” God does this, only that I am confident, thanks to scripture and my own experience, that God does. My hope for us is that we welcome that truth into our lives — even when the opposite feels true.
The second part of today’s question is the observation that God seems to feel more present in nature than God does elsewhere. I know that is often true for me too. (By the way, the church is offering three nature hikes this summer. The first is this Tuesday at 5:30 at Ottawa Sands County Park. You should come!)
I love being outdoors. When I was on sabbatical last summer, I must have averaged walking 15,000 steps a day. Some of those walks were just on my street, but many of them were in county parks or hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains or in the Scottish highlands. We have the massive privilege of living by Lake Michigan, and sadly it’s something I take for granted. But, when I take the time to sit by the lake, I quickly find myself stilled. My soul calms. I can sense God’s presence so intimately. Even though I feel small, I also feel connected to God through nature. The same has happened when I’m in the mountains. It’s all so glorious that my heart sings praise and thanksgiving to the One who made it all.
I’m not alone in this. So many of the psalms look at God’s handiwork in nature and make connections to God’s goodness and care for it all. There’s the awe expressed in Psalm 8, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
Psalm 65, which we read most of earlier in the service, traces God’s careful attentiveness to the creation. “By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might. You silence the roaring seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples…You crown the year with your bounty…The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.” (I actually really resonate with that last part because it’s an image of how the work humans do with the world — keeping flocks and raising crops — are part of the praise of God.)
Jesus even turns to nature as a way to understand how God knows us. “Consider the lilies of the field,” he says, “how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
One of my favorite contemporary poets is Mary Oliver. She has a poem called “The Summer Day,” which captures the awe that comes from paying attention to the world around you, and, friends, there is something holy is paying attention to even the smallest details of the world around us — the way a moth flits near a light, the ant colony hard at work in your yard, the finches nesting near your home. Oliver’s poem urges worshipful attention. She writes:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Here’s why I think we often feel connected to and known by God when we’re in nature. Sure, I think what the psalms say is true; there’s a certain aspect of this that God made us so that our hearts would sing God’s praise as we recognized God’s goodness in the world around us. But, what is more, I think that we sense God’s presence when out in nature because we’re often quiet and alone. If we’re with others, it’s often people we have a deeper relationship with, which makes space to go deeper. We also get introspective when we’re in nature. The hustle and bustle of Michigan Avenue in Chicago draws our attention to just getting where we need to go. Don’t get hit by the taxi. Is someone going to ask me for money? Where is that restaurant? Those thoughts don’t cross our mind when gazing at Lake Michigan or hiking in Hoffmaster, and so we have head- and heart-space to experience God’s presence.
But the last part of this question also has caught my attention because I believe God is just as much present in a city as God is in nature. As I said earlier, it’s my belief that God does indeed know us all deeply and personally, so even the masses of people who live in Beijing or Tokyo or New York or Rio are known just as much by God as the silent monk who has retreated from the world in a monastery in rural Quebec. (That’s a Louise Penny reference for those of you who enjoy the Inspector Gamache novels. I read them all over the past two years, and, yes, they’re that good.)
God loves cities every bit as much as God loves the wild places. You probably know the story of Jonah, the Israelite prophet whom God sent to the city of Nineveh in a far away country, so that Jonah might call the Ninevites to repentance. Of course, Jonah not only refuses, he heads exactly in the other direction, hitching a ride on a boat going west into the Mediterranean. God sends storms. Caught, Jonah offers to be tossed into the sea; he’d rather die than go to that city. So, God sends a big fish to keep Jonah safe until it brings him right back where he started on dry land.
This time Jonah goes, preaching God’s judgment and calling Nineveh to repent. In surprising and overwhelming fashion, they do. Even the animals repent and put on sackcloth as a sign of repentance. All of this upsets Jonah, and the book ends with God speaking these words to Jonah. “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (I’ve always loved that the book ends including the animals because God cares for them too!)
Here’s a biblical text that shows us that God indeed cares for the people amassed in the city. God cares so much to send, capture, and resend Jonah to get the job done. None of us has the capacity to know 120,000 people, but God clearly does, which gives me hope for everyone, including those in cities.
Finally, I have to point this out. The biblical story begins in a garden, but it ends in a city. We dwelled on Genesis 1-2 last week, so I won’t stay there. But God put humans in a garden and commanded them to cultivate the earth. That is, they are to make culture out of the stuff of creation. Culture includes gardening tools and fertilizer. But culture also includes our stories and buildings and cathedrals. God made humans to develop the creation, so the Bible itself moves with the development from the garden to the holy city, the New Jerusalem.
That’s what we read from the second to last chapter in the Bible. John has eternity in his sight, and it’s the new heaven and new earth, with this holy city coming down “like a bride adorned for her husband.” It’s a picture of where heaven and earth are finally one, and where God’s created intention has reached it’s culmination in this city.
You’ve asked questions about eternity, so I’m not going to go there in this sermon. (Stay tuned.) But God’s presence will be everywhere — in nature, in the city — and those loving connections we experience in a dimmer fashion now, will be glorious then. If what I know about God now already gives me comfort and joy and hope, I can only imagine what that will feel like in eternity.
