Preacher: Dana Cassell

Date: January 14, 2024

Scripture:  Psalm 139: 1-6, Psalm 139: 13-18

Are any of you RPG gamers? RPG stands for “role playing games,” like Dungeons and Dragons. I was never a gamer until the pandemic, when my friend Carynne and her gamer husband Garrett gathered a group of us to play RPGs online every week. We weren’t playing Dungeons and Dragons, though: it turns out there is a whole world full of RPGs, in every flavor you can imagine. We played one game based on Pride & Prejudice and then we stumbled into Brindlewood Bay.

Brindlewood Bay is the tiny northeastern town where the Murder Mavens live. The game is sort of a mash-up between Murder She Wrote and The Golden Girls: all of us in the game were members of a retired lady book club that also happened to regularly solve murders around town. Mavens has been one of the best gifts of the pandemic.

In an RPG, you get to be someone else. Different games assign roles differently, but in the games that I’ve played, I get to choose my character, my new name, and my new identity. In Mavens, I am Muriel Knickerbocker, a former elementary school lunch lady who loves to walk laps around the mall and dresses in very snazzy windsuits. Muriel has special powers and cool tools to use in her murder-mystery solving world.

Gaming is fun because we get to create a totally different world than the one we actually live in, and inhabit totally different identities than the ones we have here in reality. During the height of the pandemic, it was a relief to shrug off my real world responsibilities and make jokes and solve murders as a retired lunch lady whose biggest concern on any given day was whether or not she beat her own record for mall laps.

Shrugging off one identity and putting on another can be a relief. It’s playful – kids do it all the time – and inventive, and engages parts of our imaginations that we adults so often neglect.

Being Muriel regularly for the last few years has also made me think about identity, mine and everyone else’s.

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The psalm for today is one of my favorites. I’ve used it time and time again with groups and in Bible studies, because it is both beautiful and rich. It’s worth reflecting on, meditating on, paying attention to. The psalmist is speaking directly to God, who, she says, KNOWS her. The psalmist uses the Hebrew word for “know,” yada, seven times in this passage.

O Lord, the psalmist says, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I stand up.

You know what I’m going to say even before a word is on my tongue.

There might be an edge of threat in this picture the psalmist is painting of God: really? God knows…everything? All of that? Everything about me? Even the things that I was going to say but managed to bite my tongue before they made it out and hurt someone? God HEMS ME IN? That seems…uncomfortable.

And actually, I think being known – really known – IS uncomfortable for many of us, especially those of us formed in American culture of rugged individualism and independence. It can feel intrusive to be really and truly KNOWN, both the good and the bad, the days filled with wins AND the seasons full of losses. It’s easier, right? to live as Muriel Knickerbocker, or our smooth-edged professional identities, or the polished images we share on social media.

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Some of you probably know that last year I had my ordination removed for officiating the wedding of two women in my former congregation. That process of being defrocked was long and painful. I resigned from my beloved Peace Covenant CoB congregation at the beginning of October in the wake of all the defrocking drama, and shedding that layer of my own identity – pastor, church leader, ordained minister – is really weird and uncomfortable.

I wasn’t just ordained; I was the primary writer for the denominational ordination polity. I wasn’t only a congregational pastor; I worked for more than a decade in the denominational Office of Ministry, supporting pastors across the country. Figuring out who I am without those roles, titles and responsibilities is really WEIRD.

But it is also really GOOD. Being forced to ask who I am without the title of pastor, without the affirmation of the church institution, without the daily professional responsibilities of caring for other people has made me consider who I am and where, exactly, my worth and value are rooted.

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Losing a job or a credential isn’t the only situation that can push us into this kind of reflection on our own identity. Other kinds of losses force us to ask who we really are, too: the loss of a spouse or partnership or even a hard break-up, that stage when kids move out and parents become empty nesters, when a church or school or institution that formed us closes its doors or become unrecognizable. All of these things can force us to ask, “well, if I’m not THAT, then WHO am I?”

And it’s not just losses that ask us to reconsider who we are, either. Good, happy changes can force the question, too: a new job, a new role, a new child, a move to a new place. Who am I NOW, we have to consider, in THIS context, with THESE people. The question of identity, who we are, is just a fact of being human.

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The psalmist offers us an invitation to root our identity not in jobs or titles or relationships, but in the fact of our createdness, in our relationship with the Creator. “I praise you,” the psalmist says, “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” “You formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

That’s a pretty tall order, to root ourselves in the knowledge that we were created lovingly and that we remain, wherever we are, whatever the context, beloved and known. But I suspect that as we learn to understand ourselves that way – as fearfully and wonderfully made, thoroughly known and thoroughly loved – then we simultaneously learn to understand others as ALSO fearfully and wonderfully made, ALSO thoroughly known and thoroughly beloved.

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My interview with the Virlina District Board, the meeting that ultimately led to that body removing my ordination, was chaotic and contentious. It was clear to me that this group had not spent significant time together praying, studying or reflecting on the questions before them. I ended up to defining terms, explaining polity and exegeting scripture. My biggest wish, leaving the interview, was that those folks had access to intentional discernment and scripture study around sexuality like what my congregation did, years ago.

As the interview ended and we were beginning to leave, I went up to shake the hand of a colleague who had been one of the driving forces behind removing my ordination. “I genuinely appreciate you,” I told him, which was, much to my surprise, TRUE. I DO appreciate this man. I think he is deeply, dangerously misguided, but I also cannot help liking him as a human being.

And this man looked me in the eye and said, “Hey, you’re a lot better in person than you are on Facebook!”

To be honest, I think I’m pretty good on Facebook, too. I like using the internet and social media as a means of connecting and conversing with people, and even with its flaws and dangers, Facebook helps me know and hear others in ways that I wouldn’t otherwise get to do.

But: OF COURSE I’M BETTER IN PERSON! Every single one of us is better in person than we are on the internet, because the internet cannot hold the rich, complicated, messy, beautiful fullness of a human being’s identity.

I suspect that learning these truths about ourselves, acknowledging our messy realities, accepting our challenges and celebrating our growth, grounding our identity in the truth of our connection to the one who created us and loves us unconditionally, eternally, whole-heartedly is what enables us to see those truths about others, too.

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When I share this psalm with groups and bible studies, I often invite people to reflect on its words and their impact on their own lives, on their own sense of who they are. One way of doing that kind of reflection is a practice called “lectio divina.” Have any of you practiced this before?

Lectio divina is a way of reading scripture – or other sacred texts – that is meditative, designed to let the words settle deeper into our hearts and consciousness.

You listen to the text three times in a row, each time paying attention to a different question:

First, just listen to hear the words and shape of the passage.

Second, listen for a word or phrase that stick out, strikes you, or seems to be “sparkling.”

Third, ask yourself what God might be speaking to you in that word or phrase.

Let’s try it.

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
139:1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

139:2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

139:3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

139:4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.

139:5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

139:6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

139:13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

139:14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

139:15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

139:16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

139:17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

139:18 I try to count them — they are more than the sand; I come to the end — I am still with you.

I don’t know where your identity is anchored, these days. Maybe a lot of your time is spent in the role of parent. Maybe you are navigating a hard break-up, or considering a big move. Maybe it’s not even an external reality that is forcing you to consider who you are or where your worth is found, just a little internal itch that keeps begging to be paid some attention.

But I invite you to hear this psalm as an invitation to ask what kind of identity is beneath all the titles, roles and responsibilities that demand your daily attention; to consider the ways you are, and have always been, fearfully and wonderfully made, fully known and fully, deeply, unconditionally beloved. And I wonder how settling into that identity, that knowledge of who you are and have always been, might shift the way you move through the world, the way you see and treat others, as well.

Because if we believe the psalmist, if we believe God’s own word, then who we are is known, beloved and GOOD. Thanks be to God.