“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

Ray Pontier, a graduate of New Brunswick Seminary and a model of the radical liberal Christian of the 1960’s and ’70’s, died a few weeks ago, but his last piece of work was a book entitled “Saving Jesus From His Friends”. In the book he took some healthy swings at the modern smiley face, I Love Jesus, simplistic religion toward which much of North America has been sliding for a while now, and he demonstrated that the fires in his soul had not diminished in his retirement years.

I like to think that if he had more time Ray might have expanded his horizons and written something about “Saving the Bible From Its Friends”.

And he might have started with this verse from Jeremiah:
     “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

You see this verse has suffered greatly at the hands of those who love it, it has been thrust into service as a weapon in the abortion wars of the United States, presented as Biblical proof that we are all pre-existent and therefore abortion at any stage, or even the prevention of pregnancy, is murder.

Well, whatever your beliefs are on the question of abortion – and I know and respect good Christians on both sides of the debate and I know that in this room there are good Christians and some strong feelings on both sides of the debate – but wherever you fall on the issue this verse is not part of that argument.

This verse is poetic hyperbole, it is in the tradition of Christ talking about a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle, it is in the tradition of a lover telling his beloved that he will love her until the 12th of Never, it is in the tradition of a Cubs fan looking ahead to next fall’s World Series date and planning her calendar around it.

The beauty of such devotion can inspire us but to take it as mere literal truth diminishes that beauty.

And it is the beauty of this verse is that we belong to a God who knows us better than we know ourselves, a God whose interest in us – individually and personally – exceeds the boundaries of time and of place, a God who has created us to be a very certain person and when we understand that and submit ourselves to that design, we find the fulfillment of scripture, we find life as we were meant to live it.

Christians may be a variety of things in this world, but in the heart of God we are never anonymous, we are the unanonymous people.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

To be known is a deeply ingrained, fundamental human need.

We need a circle of family and friends, those people who are most important to us in life, sometimes they are born into our lives and sometimes they have just lived their way into our lives, but they are the people who have shared the intimacies of our successes and our failures and our everyday routines. We need those people to understand us and to recognize – almost without our explanations – what the things are that touch us and motivate us and satisfy us.

We need that.

And when we don’t get it, as Jesus didn’t when his brothers and sisters and mother came to take him home for some rest, because obviously, to them, he was coming unglued, when we don’t get it we ache for it, as Jesus did when he cried out “my family is those who do my father’s work.”

We need to be known.

And we need to be known in our world.

We need jobs that give us more than a paycheck, we need activities in our lives that give us an awareness of being alive. We need relationships, we need to be known by others.

Now there is a down side to this being known stuff and it is the old sin of familiarity breeding contempt, the people of Nazareth were willing to listen to Jesus as long as he read the good and wonderful words of Isaiah, the prophecies that applied to their forbearers.

But when he began to criticize them and their understanding and their expectations and their limited dreams and visions, then the fur began to fly and the very people who praised him were ready to throw him off a cliff.

We’ve all known that feeling haven’t we?

Sometimes we’ve been the one who was taken for granted, the one who would always be there and never needs any attention, and sometimes we’ve been the one who gets upset with the voices of challenge and change and criticism and we want to know who they think they are!

And all of that happens because we don’t know who we are talking to, because people are a moving target always changing. Jesus had changed.

Yes he was still the son of Joseph the Carpenter, but he was different now and they wanted to freeze him in place, they wanted him to act and speak and just as he had always acted and spoken and been.

One of the hardest lessons of parenthood, and this is not to discourage you who have younger children, but one of the hardest lessons of parenthood arrives during Christmas break of a college student’s freshman year. They come home with bodies that are running on dorm time, where nights end at about the point where most of our days are beginning and going out at 1:30 in the morning for something to eat is normal and no one asks where you are going unless they are trying to decide whether or not to go with you. And they bring those bodies and time values – and I won’t even mention those table manners - into homes where the 10:00 news is watched from bed, with the timer on, so it goes off when you doze off.

They’ve changed.

And we don’t know them anymore, but we can if we invest the time and effort and patience and vision that are required.

Or we can try to force them to be who they were until we are practically driving the reality of their identity off a cliff.

Knowing and being known in our world is built upon living, flowing, changing relationships in which we seek and find the presence of God.

Virginia Wiles is the New Testament professor at NBTS and she wrote an essay for me this week for our Alumni newsletter on the theme of vocation and these words have struck me as being applicable not only to the vocation of ministers of word and sacrament, but to the daily routines of everyone called Christian:
“. . . perhaps this is precisely the ministerial vocation: that we might see the “hidden lives” in the world, that we might honor those many silent acts of faithfulness among our people—and among those who are not our people—that we might faithfully draw back the curtain to display, not our own hidden lives, but the hidden face of Christ among the various and curious inhabitants of this world.”

That is the job of all of us, to know the people around us and to see and identify and celebrate in them, the image of God in which we have all been created.

In this season of Epiphany, this season when we recognize that God reveals herself in unconventional ways to and through “various and curious inhabitants of the this world” what are you doing where you work and worship and shop and play and learn to know people better?

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

And that brings us full circle to Jeremiah and God’s knowledge of him that was so deep that it transcended time, the same way that God knows each of us.

And I would suggest, based upon my own limited experience of life and upon my observation of so many others over the years, that our need to be known can only be filled by our families and friends and our world, however we define it, if we have first realized that we are known by God and then discovered how God knows us and how God understands us and what God has created us to do and to be.

Each year when I try to give the Confirmation Class an inkling of what Communion is all about, because I don’t completely understand it and so I don’t expect them too, I use a story. I say to them, imagine you are walking through Bridgewater Commons Mall in mid-December and you look across the way and you see someone waving at you.

You don’t recognize the waver, so you presume the wave is meant for someone around you and there are plenty of candidates. You stick your hands in pockets and shuffle on with the crowd.

Then a few minutes later, the waver stands right in front of you and sticks his hand out and calls you by name and asks how you are doing.

Can you doubt that the greeting is meant for you?

Of course not.

That is what will happen here in a few minutes.

Every Sunday I stand up here and I wave words at you on behalf of God and they are meant for you, but I know what it is like to sit out there, I remember.

The waving words of comfort must belong to someone more deserving, someone more religious. The waving words of challenge must belong to someone better equipped to respond. The waving words of criticism must belong to someone more sinful.

And so you can come here and let it all slide by you.

But then comes Communion and you hold the bread and you hold the wine and they enter you and you must acknowledge – one way or another – that they are for you.

They are the outward and visible signs of the inward and invisible reality that the God who knows you and understands you and created you is now nourishing you individually and personally and in his eyes and heart we are never anonymous, we are never just one of the crowd.

You have been known and loved beyond any boundaries – time, space, faithfulness, education, race, wealth – you have been and always will be known and loved individually by your God.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”