The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

Have you ever had the experience where someone shares their thoughts about who you are or something you did, and for whatever reason, as they share these thoughts, you realize that you are known by them? Somehow in the way they speak about you, you realize that they really know you. This can be both an unsettling and comforting experience. Unsettling because we can feel exposed before a real knowledge of who we are and Comforting because we can also feel that life passes us by as though we were invisible. But either way, to be known is a great gift.

Perhaps this is why we Christians rehearse the fact that we are known in the very depths of our being right at the beginning of our gathered worship services: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid…

This Sunday, I would like to take a look at this prayer, the Collect for Purity, the prayer we pray every week with the hope that we might be enabled to grasp—or better, be grasped by—the reality that we are known—and known in such a way that doesn’t simply confirm what we know about ourselves, but in fact, to be known in this way reveals to us who we are. Is it possible that our knowledge of ourselves isn’t the most truthful or the most accurate knowledge there is about us? What if there is a knowledge of us that is more true, more beautiful and more good than any knowledge of ourselves ever could be? Could we hear it? Could we acknowledge it?

I look forward to exploring this with all of you on Sunday—see you then!