A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

July 28, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Matter of Time

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, 11
Matthew 6:25–33
Psalm 90:1–12

“So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”

Psalm 90:12 (NRSV)

Listen to the salutation of the dawn.
Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the realities and truths of existence:
The joy of growth
The splendor of action
The glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory and tomorrow a vision
But today well lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Live well therefore to this day.

Two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit poem

God of mercy, you promised never to break covenant with us. Amid all the changing words of our generation, may we hear your eternal word that never changes, and then may we respond to your gracious promises with faithful, joyful lives through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I wanted to read from the King James Version, not only for sentimental reasons, (1) but because there is a particular phrase in the King James translation that is not present in other translations. It is not because I agree with the fellow who objected to any modern translation of the Bible on the grounds that if the King James Version was good enough for the Apostle Paul, by golly, it was good enough for him!

In the ninth verse of the 90th Psalm, a confusion in the original Hebrew is cleared up like this. The King James Version reads, “We spend our lives as a tale that is told.” The New Revised Standard Version reads, “Our lives come to an end like a sigh,” but I am drawn to the idea of spending our lives as a tale that is told. Not the tale of which Shakespeare’s Macbeth spoke with such despondency, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” (2) but a story with a purpose and plot and an inherent meaning that not even the most daunting circumstances can ever finally diminish or erase. Our years do not proceed in mechanical succession with days and months and years stacked upon one another like saucers on a shelf. Each chapter of our lives is a part of a larger and more expansive story.

“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1). What a marvelous image, idea, vision of God—not as father, not as mother, not as rock and redeemer, but God as home. The breadth and depth and very being of God are our true home as human beings. (3)

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2). In other words, while your life and mine might be played out upon a temporal stage, the backdrop of that stage is not time, but eternity itself. There are two true things I can say to you this morning: human life is inherently good, and human life is inherently finite. (4)

This morning as I was dressing, I had the radio on, and I heard a reporter suggest that the day might soon come when human beings could have a life expectancy of 200 years or more. (He went on to say that it would take us about that long to recover our losses in the stock market, too!) But whether we live four score and ten years, or 200 years, the truth is our lives will end. Only God is eternal, and to realize that is not to diminish the quality of human existence; in fact, just the opposite is the case. If we assume that we are going to live forever, that we have all the time in the world, then we are apt to take for granted the people around us, the time that we have been given as a precious, undeserved gift. Indeed it is only when we acknowledge our inherent limits, our inherent frailty as over against God’s eternity, that we gain the knowledge to live well within each moment of our days.

I think of words attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte as he sent a young aide out on an important mission during a military campaign. He said to the young man, “Go sir, gallop, and do not forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time.” (5) Only God can give time.

The 90th Psalm is attributed to Moses, the great patriarch in our faith tradition. The setting is on Mount Nebo, the mountain at the edge of the wilderness from which Moses and the tribes of Israel could look down onto the Promised Land toward which they had traveled for 40 years. Moses has come to the end of his life and will never enter this land that he has seen for the first time. (6) There he stands, his eyes drinking in the beauty of the horizon that lies before him, realizing that his life dream and mission will be fulfilled by others but not by himself. Yet he makes this profound statement of faith. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place. . . . From everlasting to everlasting thou art God” (Psalm 90:1–2). What a benediction, what a summing up of everything that ultimately matters. To hold together the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal—that is how one comes to embrace life at its fullest measure of joy and meaning.

When the stock market plunges, when the job market shrinks, when illness strikes, when the horizons before us no longer seem limitless, then finding a long-term, faith-based perspective becomes absolutely essential to our lives.

This morning, I want to share with you a tale or two in hopes that they might serve as levers that will lift us up above our daily existence so that we can see our own lives in the context of eternity. It is quite ironic to me that in our modern age, when we have learned how to decode DNA and travel into the farthest reaches of space, we still struggle to find the wisdom to live each day as a precious gift from God. “Teach us that our days are numbered that we might gain a heart of wisdom.”

Perhaps you remember Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town and its central character Emily, a young woman who dies tragically and unexpectedly in childbirth. She goes to the cemetery on the outside of town, and she asks the stage manager, who in the play is the figure for God, if he would grant her one wish, that she could return to life and relive her twelfth birthday. In the play, we see her coming down the stairs on the morning of her birthday. Her mother is waiting for her. “Well, good morning and a happy birthday to you. There are surprises waiting for you on the kitchen table, Emily. But birthday or no birthday, I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow. I want you to grow up and be a good strong girl.” Emily eats her breakfast and then opens her presents, while her mother comments, “The one in the blue paper is from your Aunt Carrie. . . . In the yellow paper is something I found in the attic among your grandmother’s things. You are old enough to wear it now, and I thought you’d like it.”

Then you hear the disembodied voice offstage of Emily’s father, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?”

Then Emily turns to the stage manager and says, “Please, take me back. I can’t go on. Oh! It goes so fast. I didn’t realize. Good-bye to clocks ticking . . . Mama’s sunflowers . . . new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful.”

And then she asks the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they are living it?”

The stage manager answers, “No. Well sometimes, perhaps, the poets and some of the saints do.”

I believe that saints and poets are not the only ones, that you and I have the capacity to live each day with joy and praise and perspective. Several years ago I came across an autobiographical piece by a man named James Baker, a college history professor in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Dr. Baker wrote,

Sometimes it is possible to find the universe in a grain of sand. I did last summer, quite unexpectedly. There had been a storm. A late afternoon’s dark clouds, then thunder, then wind, then rain, had brought a hot summer day to its knees. Trees had swayed and snapped. Then there was peace.

My daughters and I waited for the storm to pass. Then we sat on our stone front porch—for the first time at night in years—and soaked up the soft, cool breezes that timidly followed in the wake. We sang songs, argued about religion, and told each other stories. . . . Our stories were mostly about family members long dead, the kind of stuff scholars now call “oral history.” My daughters especially enjoyed hearing about their great uncle Goob Talley who was entirely bald, but who had three hairs that grew over his left ear, and how he used to comb them all the way over from the left side to the right side. There, in the soft light of early evening, I saw something of my father’s features in my children’s faces. I realized that I was the bridge between his yesterday and their tomorrow, and I thought to myself, if that is all my life has stood for, then that would have been more than enough. Life is very good.

Some of you are like me in that we have had the privilege of caring for our own mother or father during the last chapters of their lives. I have been drawn for a number of years to the writing of a woman named Betsy Barron, who describes caring for her own mother during the last illness of her life. Barron writes,

There is a strange heightening of life that takes place if we live within the sight of the end of life. There is acute sadness, but also a deep beauty to each moment. It is like standing with a foot in two kinds of streams. One stream is made up of grocery shopping and paying the bills and rotating the tires. The other stream is made up of tenderness and hope and love beyond imagining, of the widest and deepest stretches of the human spirit.

To live like that, aware of these two streams . . . is to hold up the finiteness of human existence against the infinite burning glass of God’s eternal love.

There is also a strange heightening of life when we live with small children. This afternoon, Al and I are getting on an airplane and flying to the South Carolina coast to meet our son, daughter, and granddaughter. We will probably recall sometime during the week an incident that happened years ago when our son was three years old. We had gone to the beach for our summer vacation. Al and I had unpacked the car, and we were setting up the groceries on the kitchen shelf. Elizabeth was helping us. We were distracted by what we were doing, and some time had passed before we realized that Sam was nowhere in sight. We searched the house, the car, the backyard, the front yard. We ran down to the beach, and I can remember so vividly running up and down the sand, the wind snatching the words out of our mouths as we yelled his name, “Sam, Sam!” About a half an hour later, we found him in the yard of a beach house a quarter of a mile away. He feet were full of sandspurs, and he had been trying as mightily as a three-year-old could to find his way back home.

When we remember, we remember with some laughter, but also with tears and with gratitude that we have recalled once again that every human life is precious. Human life and love is a gift beyond measure, never, ever, to be taken for granted.

The 90th Psalm suggests that human years are like grass that fades in the evening, or like dreams that are swept away at waking. Our one true dwelling place is God, who, unlike grass and dreams, lasts forever.

I close with one final story about a minister friend of ours who has had a long and distinguished career as a Presbyterian pastor. One day almost exactly 10 years ago this July, my friend went out into the front yard to mow the grass. The lawnmower ran over a yellow jackets’ nest in the ground. The yellow jackets swarmed and stung my friend. When his wife found him, he was lying in a coma in the grass, and when the medics came, my friend was not breathing and had no pulse. They rushed him to the hospital and put him in the intensive care unit. Later that night, miraculously, he came back to life. It was perhaps six weeks later that I happened to call my friend’s home on a Saturday morning. He said hello, but said he could not speak for long because he and his wife Janie were about to have breakfast. “It’s going to be good, too,” he said, “blueberry pancakes, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and I’ve just put the maple syrup in the microwave so it will be nice and warm.”

“Oh,” I said, “What’s the occasion?”

He said, “Life. We are celebrating life today.”

“Do they ever realize life while they live it?” Emily asked the stage manager in Our Town. God knows, we ought to realize it.

I have been with you five months now, and I think I’ve got your number. You, like me, are busy and distracted and overscheduled. In honor of these five months, I want to make five simple, direct suggestions for wise living these summer days. If you like pancakes, heat the maple syrup. If you like music, find your favorite symphony and put it on the CD player and listen to it from beginning to end. If you are young, find some older people to sit with and have a conversation. And if you are grown up, find some kids to sit with and have a conversation.

I leave with you now a magnificent suggestion from the poet William Butler Yeats:

And pluck ’til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. (7)

May your hands be open to receive the golden apples of the sun this summer and the always bountiful, everlasting love of God. Amen.

End Notes
1. The Bible from which I read was given to my grandmother by my uncle Ralph on Christmas Day, 1923.

2. Act 5, scene 5

3. Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 120-121.

4. Ibid.

5. R. M. Johnston, The Corsican

6. Ibid., Bass.

7. “The Song of Wandering Aengus”