June 30, 2013 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Our Heart’s True Home

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 90:1–6, 10–17
Matthew 16:24–26
John 14:1–7

The spiritual gift on the inner journey is the knowledge that death is natural and that death is not the final word.

Parker Palmer
“Leading from Within: Reflections on Spirituality and Leadership”

When I was younger, I didn’t think much about my own mortality. Of course, part of me has known since I was a child that I would die someday. In fact, death had a mysterious fascination for me when I was younger. When our pet goldfish died, my family carefully placed it inside a little white cardboard box and buried it in the backyard. A few weeks later—or maybe it was just days—my two sisters, brother, and I dug it back up to see what had happened to it. I remember being disappointed that the little goldfish just seemed more dead, in a box that was a bit more tattered. In junior high school I used to walk around our little town’s cemetery, reading the tombstones, doing the arithmetic to figure out how old each one was upon death, wondering what killed them and who they had been in life. Still, my own death seemed far removed. Unlike many of the children in our city’s neighborhoods, I was blessed with growing up in a safe environment and never feared for my life. My mortality felt distant and abstract.

That changed recently. For some of us, it is a significant birthday that hits us between the eyes with the likelihood that we have only a few years remaining on earth. For me, it was a recent family reunion that brought this home. My parents, my generation, and the next generation were all together watching a video of a previous family reunion, fifteen years earlier. Fifteen years earlier, when my hair was totally dark brown. Fifteen years earlier, when my dad enthusiastically emceed the series of skits performed by the children when they were still children. It seems like only yesterday. When I could eat whatever I wanted and not gain weight. When my dad still had an impeccable sense of direction, astute memory, and vigor. After watching the video, my mother spoke about the recent deaths of my dad’s older brother and his wife. They are the first of their generation in our family to die and were just a couple years older than my mother and father. My mom teared up as she spoke. And I began to feel sad, because I knew that the number of times we would all be together, including both my parents, are limited. Where did the time go? Life is so short. The years pass by quickly, and then they are gone.

At Fourth Church in the past five years, several of our members and a pastor died far too young, and some quite suddenly, leaving us reeling with shock and grief: Dana Ferguson, Steve Bumpus, Sarah Goenne, Kristi Walker, Doug Voyles, Lisa Armstrong, plus others who come to your mind. And even though our long-time associate pastor Dr. John Boyle lived a lengthy and full life to the age of eighty-seven, his death, too, brings home the reality of our mortality.

“Our years are soon gone, and then we fly away” states Psalm 90. Psalm 90 is often read at funerals. It laments the hard reality of the brevity of life, saying to God:

You turn us back to dust. . . .
A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past. . . .
You sweep them away, they are like a dream.
They fade suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green and flourishes;
in the evening it is dried up and withered.
Our years come to an end like a sigh.
The span of life is seventy years, or eighty if we are strong;
yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow,
for they are soon gone, and we fly away.

This psalm puts it right out there, no pretense or nuance. That is the beauty of the psalms: in whatever emotional state we find ourselves, we can find its expression in the psalms. Whether we are experiencing joy, awe, humility, gratitude, or praise, or discouragement, anger, anguish, sorrow, or abandonment, the psalms give honest, sometimes raw, voice to our feelings.

Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses, the Hebrew leader chosen by God to liberate his people from slavery to freedom. He spent forty years of his life leading his people through the wilderness to the promised land. Moses journeyed as far as Mount Nebo, from which he could view the land that was to become their new home. This is the land that God promised to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the land to which Moses spent the majority of his adult life faithfully guiding his people. He can now see it with his own eyes, but it dawns on him that he will die before he can enter it. As Walter Brueggemann notes, Moses accepts the painful reality that his life pursuit of obedience will stop short of fruition. He submits to that reality from God, but that does not stop his yearning (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, p. 111).

Oh, if life were not so short! Oh, if we only could see the results of our labors or knew that our efforts would bear fruit and prosper, making a difference beyond our years! “Prosper the work of our hands,” dear God.

We can try to put off aging and death. We can seek to extend our years by exercising often, eating the right foods, not smoking or drinking much, decreasing the stress in our lives. In fact, these are good things to do as responsible stewards of the body God has given us. But nothing we do can erase the fact that our life on earth is short, like grass that in the morning flourishes and is renewed, and by evening fades and withers.

And so? So, the psalmist wrote, “So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.” That we may gain a wise heart. What is a wise heart?

In Psalm 90, a wise heart means having a disposition in life that is attuned to and responsive to the purposes of God. A wise heart discerns and lives God’s ways. As the prophet Micah said, what God desires is for us “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Psalm 90 begins by honoring God for being our refuge, our home, our dwelling place—forever, from everlasting to everlasting. Later, the psalmist implores God to “satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” What brings us wisdom and joy is being aligned with God’s will and assured of God’s love, even in the face of our mortality.

A wise heart receives and gives love. It does not take anyone or anything for granted. It savors the gift of each day. A wise heart does not let the sun go down on one’s anger or allow alienation from others to linger. A wise heart takes care of unfinished business. I don’t mean paying your bills or getting rid of stuff you no longer use or letting someone know your end-of-life wishes, though those are good ideas. I mean letting go of regrets, forgiving others and yourself. A wise heart lets go of grudges, resentment, and estrangement and seeks reconciliation. A wise heart does not put off spending quality time with loved ones, showing an act of kindness, helping the down and out, or writing a note to people you never told that they have had a positive influence on you. Wisdom of heart includes doing what makes your heart sing. Don’t waste time in meaningless or joyless activity.

There is a documentary called Happy, which explores levels of happiness experienced by people all over the world. Psychologists in their research found that happiness has little to do with image, status, and money. Many people who had very little in the way of material goods were quite happy. In the United States, where we can easily compare ourselves with others who have more, we ranked twenty-third on a fifty-country-index for happiness. This week’s issue of Time magazine reported that, worldwide, having more money does make one happier to a point, but not if one’s desires outpace what one can afford (Jeffrey Kluger, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Time,vol. 182, no. 2, 2013).

The documentary revealed several dimensions that were repeatedly discovered to increase happiness: continuing to learn and grow, sharing love with family and friends, and serving others with compassion. Don’t these sound like living God’s ways?

The lowest level of happiness was found in Japan. Since World War II, so much emphasis has been placed on national productivity, work, and efficiency, that little time is spent with loved ones or relaxing. People are increasingly tired and overstressed and dying at younger ages.

Thomas Merton warned against depending too much on the hope of results for our efforts. He wrote,

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important. . . . All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. . . . The real hope . . . is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good come out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do [God’s] will, we will be helping in this process.

God is intimately involved in our lives with an everlasting love. To know this is to be wise in heart. This is lifted up in two creeds embraced by the Presbyterian Church (USA): the Heidelberg Catechism and the Brief Statement of Faith, a portion of which we will say together later. Both affirm that “In life and in death, we belong to God.” Jesus Christ came that we may know life—life abundant (John 10:10). As a beloved child of God, you are never truly homeless or alone. Your home is not a place but a relationship, an eternal abiding with God. In life and in death, you belong to God.

A recently published book called Proof of Heaven was written by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, about his experience of the afterlife while he was in a coma for seven days. He was amazed and transformed by his experience of God’s unconditional love. Alexander describes having visions of shimmering beings singing beautiful, joyful sounds, plus much more. What struck me most was his account of being accompanied by a young woman. He wrote:

“She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. . . . Without using any words, she spoke to me. . . . If I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say it ran something like this:

‘You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.’
‘You have nothing to fear.’
‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’

Dr. Alexander knew he would have difficulty finding people to understand or give credence to his experience. One of the few places he didn’t have trouble getting his story across was in church, a place he hadn’t been to much before this experience.

He said,

The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school. . . .

Reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show a universe as evolving, multidimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child. (Eben Alexander, “Proof of Heaven,” Newsweek, pp. 31–32)

Wow. Let us rejoice in God’s steadfast love. And with the psalmist, let us pray:

O God, our heart’s true home,
with the dawn of each day
break into our lives with your eternal love and grace
so that we may rejoice and be glad.
However brief or long our life on earth may be,
enable us to follow your will and purpose for creation.
Remind us that we belong to you, always.
Imprint upon us your brand of ownership,
and place us within your plan and objective for our lives.
(Leslie Brandt, Psalms Now, p. 141)

Amen.