Music notes: Proper 18

2025.09.07

The reasons for the appointment of Psalm 139 this week are obscure: if anything, this Psalm seems to echo the beginning of the Book of Jeremiah, which we read two weeks ago. There the prophet recounts his calling:

The word of the LORD came to me saying,
‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’

Like any number of great prophets and saintly leaders of the Church chosen directly by God or by popular acclaim, Jeremiah promptly protests his unfitness for the job – whereupon the Lord reaches out his hand and touches the prophet’s mouth to put words in it: an intimately physical act, and at the same time a sharing of the divine mind.

The Psalmist clearly believes in knowing and being known by God – and not only known, but accompanied; pursued, even – offering a profound meditation upon this wondrous relationship between Creator and created. The human frame is not only made, we read, but fashioned, knit, woven, written: the psalmist describes God’s creative work in terms of the highest human cunning and handcraft, capacities given by God and therefore sharing somehow in God’s creative work and impulse. Even at the scarcely imaginable edges of the writer’s world, God is relentlessly there.

Our world today is both much bigger and much smaller than that of the psalmist; today’s most miraculous technologies are more removed from the physical world and at the same time often incredibly intimate, with consequences all too real for whatever they touch. Creation still has unfathomable depths, but unfathomable also are the depths of depravity into which we often drag it: yet God is to be found in them all – in the most far-flung war zone, in the most notorious prison, in the face of every affront and in the shadow of every dehumanizing and destructive act and law and institution. For to God, ‘darkness and light are both alike’.

An early-twentieth-century paraphrase of Psalm 139 is found at Hymn 702, in an inspired pairing with an early-nineteenth-century American folk tune. As with a number of other hymns and tunes not in the congregational repertory of the parish I serve, I have written a choral setting of this hymn, ‘Lord, thou hast searched me and dost know’, with its given tune, ‘Tender Thought’. Much of the setting, aiming at simplicity, restricts itself to the six notes of the scale used in the tune, with a nearly constant drone intended to invoke a sense of mystery ( and help the choir maintain pitch! ). The last stanza uses a much richer harmonic palette to portray ‘deepest darkness’.

This Psalm, like all scripture, calls us to both contemplation and action. If each one of us is marvelously made, then each other of us is as well. This should prompt us to live in perpetual amazement at, and profound respect and gratitude for, the wondrous creatures ( including humans ) we encounter in every moment – and to seek the well-being of each and every one in all that we do. God sees and knows each of us inside and out; we should live into this radical being-known, learn to see ourselves as God sees us, and seek to see and know those in our society who are too easy to overlook. We share in some way in the creative thought and work that wrought, and continues to fashion, the cosmos, and this divine power is radically, intimately present with us; we ought to seek out God’s mind, will, and presence, and live accordingly, as hymnists have written, ‘in wonder, love, and praise’.