Worship - Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 24, 2020

8:30 as we listen to God's Word. Let us pray. O God, our light and our life, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth. Make us hunger for this heavenly food, that it may nourish us today in the ways of eternal life. Through Jesus Christ, the bread of heaven. Amen. Our scripture reading for today is the 90th Psalm. Some psalms are love songs to God. Some are hymns of praise. Some are psalms of thanksgiving. Psalm 90 is an urgent prayer for compassion and wisdom. Listen. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

9:32 You turn us back to dust and say, Turn back, you mortals. For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. You sweep them away there like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. For we are consumed by your anger, by your wrath we are overwhelmed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. For all our days pass away under your wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The days of our life are 70 years, or perhaps 80 if we are strong. Even then their span is only toil and trouble.

10:26 They're soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you. So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a wise heart. Turn, O Lord, how long. Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and prosper for us the work of our hands. Oh, prosper the work of our hands.

11:20 This is the word of the Lord. Give thanks to God. In the 90th Psalm, the psalmist prays an urgent prayer to God. Oh God, teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart. But what does it mean to number our days? Well, part of it may simply mean admitting that our days are indeed numbered. A good friend of mine has recently been reading the best-selling book, Being Mortal. As you may know, the book is by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School. And it's a very frank description of what it's like for us as human beings to come to the end of life. It's a book about what it means to grow old, for our bodies to wear down and to fail, and especially what it means to encounter the inevitable truth that we will all die.

12:21 Well, when my friend got about halfway through the book, he confessed to me, you know, this book scares the heck out of me. Well, I understand that what frightens my friend, what frightens all of us, I suppose, is right there in the book's title, Being Mortal. We are all mortal. We know that, of course, but we tend to know it in the abstract. There's an old saying that goes, everybody knows they're going to die, but nobody really believes it. What can be frightening about this book is that the author makes us believe it. by forcing us to face the practical realities of being mortal, to face facts that we usually try to keep out of our minds, to face the truth that we are all aging. There's no way around it, no way to stop it. Despite all the vitamins and exercise and healthy diets and strong medicines in the world, our minds and our bodies will ultimately decline and fail.

13:22 that we will all eventually come to the end of our days, that as the psalmist says, we will fade and wither like a flower, our frail hands will lose their grip on life, and we will slip into the darkness of death. Now, when we're young, most of us don't think much about the end of life. It seems so far away. It doesn't even seem real. It's something that happens to other people, to old people. but it's not a part of our experience, not our concern. But of course, our youth eventually fades and we do grow older. Even so, we may still try to pretend that we're somehow immune to the aging process, exempt from mortality, not happening to us. A beautiful young people on television and in the movies joke about the older cohort, the one that I'm in, and the message is very clear.

14:22 To be old is an embarrassment, an insult, an outrage. So we older folks may believe that we can somehow avoid it. Seventy's the new 50, we say, lying to ourselves. Or as the commercials on television reassure us, just a touch of color to take out the gray and we're still in the game. or just a dab of miracle facial cream to smooth out the wrinkles, and we can be as ageless as supermodel Cindy Crawford. In one of Wallace Stegner's novels, there's an elderly man who writes in his Christmas letter one year that when anybody asks him if he feels like an old man, he says, No, no, I feel like a young man with something the matter with him. Well, as we age and move inexorably toward life's end, we can't shake the feeling that there's something the matter with us, something wrong about aging, something wrong about our mortal journey. To be old, we fear, is to be nearing the end, the end of our attractiveness, the end of our usefulness, the end of our strength, the end of our health, the end of our life.

15:41 Teach us to number our days, says the psalmist, that we may gain a wise heart. But what does it mean to number our days? One answer to that question comes to us for modern medicine. For scientific medicine, what it means to number our days is essentially to count them and then to make that number as large as possible, to postpone aging and death and to extend the length of life as far as we can. Historians tell us that the average citizen of the Roman Empire could expect to live a little less than 30 years. But today, medical science through antibiotics and surgical breakthroughs, improved hygiene and nutrition has made it possible for the average North American to live almost three times that long. And there's no reason to think as we move into the future that modern medicine will not be able to number our days with higher and higher numbers, longer and longer lives. Now that's medicine's job, of course, and we should be grateful for these advances. Children who a century ago would have died from smallpox or been paralyzed by polio now do not have to fear these diseases. Men and women who would have had their lives cut short by tuberculosis or AIDS now may live long and productive lives. And we can pray that someday the ravages of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, COVID-19, other diseases, will also be a thing of the past. So one way to number our days is to count them and to try to make the number larger and larger. But notice that the psalmist has a different idea.

17:38 He prays to God to teach us to number our days that we may gain a wise heart. Not simply that the number will get bigger, but rather that we may gain a wise heart. In other words, the psalmist reminds us that when we look at life through the eyes of our faith, the goal is not simply the quantity of life, but the quality of life, the depth and breadth and height of life, not just its length. What makes life good is not just longevity, not just living more and more days, but becoming a certain kind of person, a person whose heart is wise before God. And it's right at this point that our faith must raise a provocative challenge to modern medicine. While people of faith join with all others in giving thanks for the many ways that medicine gives us strength and health and freedom from unrelenting pain, what must be challenged is the false idea that the only way to seek a good life is the never-ending quest for more of it, for more and more days, for longer and longer lives. And lying just beneath the surface of this medical quest for unending life is the false promise, the science fiction dream, even the idolatrous claim that science and medicine will one day give us immortality, that someday medicine will genetically engineer death out of the human equation, The dream that human beings on biological grounds can live forever and that living forever would be a good thing.

19:17 Our quest for immortality, for a life that just goes on and on forever, is actually based on fear. A fear of running out of time. A 30-year-old man who was dying of leukemia was having an urgent conversation with his physician. I don't think I'm afraid of death, he said. what I'm really afraid of is the incompleteness of my life. When the New York Times essayist Anatole Broyard was dying, he wrote, I want to be a good story. Down deep, that's what all of us fear, that we are incomplete. That the story of who we are supposed to be is never finished. Indeed, fear comes from believing that there's not enough to go around, not enough to finish the story. Not enough time. Not enough joy. Not enough strength. Not enough love. Not enough nourishment.

20:18 Not enough me. Not enough grace. We're afraid that we're running out of time, and when the end comes, there will only be nothingness, darkness, an empty hall, a bare table, and an unfinished story. And so we turn in desperation to medicine pleading, give me more time. Give me endless days. Don't let me die. Don't let my life be incomplete. What I'm really afraid of, said the dying man, is the incompleteness of my life. But medicine cannot give us immortality, and it cannot even give us a sense of the completeness of life. It can only at best postpone the inevitable, prolong life a few more days, a few more months, a few more years. Only God can give us a sense of completeness.

21:15 And because God is the one who gives us completeness, from the point of view of faith, it's actually good news that we're not immortal. When we acknowledge that we are mortal, temporary, provisional, unfinished, incomplete. When we gain the deep knowledge that we are limited in days and incomplete in ourselves, this can draw us ever closer to the God who is immortal and who brings our life to completion. That's what the psalmist means when he prays, teach us to number our days that we gain a wise heart. Teach us to number our days so that we will gain the wisdom of knowing as St. Augustine prayed, O God, thou hast formed us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee. That is also why the first word of Easter, the first word from the risen Christ, is do not be afraid. The risen Christ is saying to us, you are so anxious and fearful about how your life will end, but do not be afraid. This is how it ends, in resurrection.

22:31 To belong to me, God says, is to be given the gift of life that we could never achieve in our own power, that no earthly physician can provide, no medicine can produce, the gift of being gathered in glory and joy into the eternal life of God, that's how it ends. So do not be afraid.

22:54 The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney died nearly seven years ago at age 74. After collapsing on a Dublin street, he was rushed to a hospital and then taken into the operating suite where, unfortunately, he died before surgery could take place. Minutes before he died, Haney, the poet who loved and mastered language, communicated his very last words on this earth in a text message sent to his wife Marie, who was in the surgical waiting room. The text was two words in Latin, Noli to Mary, which means do not be afraid. Haney learned these words from Jesus, learned them from the story of Easter, do not be afraid. Haney was raised in the Catholic Church, but he had his quarrels with the church and even with the faith. Nevertheless, there at the end of his life, these old words came back to him.

23:53 His mortality drew him toward God, toward the promise that our restless lives find their rest in God, and we are surrounded by the promises of God's grace. So, no lie to Mary. Do not be afraid. The choir in the church where my family once worshipped had a wonderful and unusual custom. Whenever a member of the congregation was admitted to hospice care and was facing the last few days of life, the choir would go to the hospice to sing to them, to sing the great anthems of faith. The singing was a comfort, yes, but it was more than that. It was a confession of faith that we are surrounded in life and in death by the gospel story. This is God's story and the story of our lives too, the story that gives us meaning and makes us complete. The completion we desire in life has been provided as a gift from God, the God who was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. Christ, who is our Alpha, will also be our Omega. Years ago, a friend of mine was in the hospital dying of cancer. Near the end, she called her pastor and said, I've been reading the Bible, the place in the book of James where it says if you're sick, you should call the elders of the church for prayer and anointing with oil.

25:26 I'd like you to come to the hospital and do that for me. Her pastor seemed to hesitate, and my friend asked, what's wrong? I don't know, he said. It seems a little like magic, anointing you with oil. I mean, I practice ministry, not magic. Well, my friend became angry. Look, she said to her pastor, I'm dying. I know I'm dying. I will probably be dead in the next few days, then why do you want me to come and anoint you with oil? Because, she said, it will remind me of my baptism. It will let me know that the Christ who was there for me in the beginning will be standing with me at the end. And so it was that a few days before she died, her pastor and some others from the church came to the hospital to anoint her with oil and to remind her of her baptism and to assure her that in life and in death, she is made whole in the grace and mercy of God. When the well-known Jewish author and neurologist Oliver Sacks turned 80, he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about his life and what he saw ahead of him. At 80, Sacks was still strong and productive, and he wrote, I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing life means. Sachs had no way of knowing that only two years later he would have received a diagnosis of terminal cancer and that his body would be weakening and failing by the day.

27:09 But Sachs had been given, I would say by God's grace, a heart of wisdom. And just a few months before his death, he wrote another op-ed essay in the New York Times. This time, though, he knew he was dying, knew he was mortal, and he was not talking about completing his life, but about the Sabbath. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, he wrote, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done and one may in good conscience rest. The Sabbath, of course, is God's gift to us. It's not our achievement. It's God's gift. Six days shall we labor and do all our work, but the Sabbath, the seventh day, the completion of all things, the end of all things, is pure grace, pure gift. So whether you're in the springtime of your life or in the winter, the first day of your life's week or the sixth day, whether you are young or old, whether you are in full strength or your body is failing, whether you are at the beginning or nearing the end, noly to Mary. Do not be afraid. Grace is infinite. God is love. The Sabbath banquet is set and waiting. So number your days, confident that when you come to the end, the risen Christ will be there to receive you, to say to you, you're home now. You have a place at the table.

28:56 There is plenty to go around. Let us pray. Almighty God, our eternal refuge, teach us to live with the confidence that you are our Alpha and our Omega. You were there at our beginning, you sustain us all the day long, and you will be there at our ending. Give us such freedom from fear and such depth of faith that we can number our days, gain wise hearts, and rejoice in the promise of your glory, which is revealed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord.