October 27, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

At Day’s End

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 65
2 Timothy 4:6–18

And I was strong, strong in the sun.
I thought I’d see when day is done.
Now I’m weaker than the palest blue,
Oh, so weak in this need for you.

Nick Drake
“Place to Be”
from the album Pink Moon

My residency supervisor, Adam Fronczek, and I have been reflecting on preaching and sermon preparation, and one of the things we talked about was knowing the pastoral care needs of the congregation and using the sermon to address them. So when I was reflecting upon this text, it really spoke to me about the theme of retirement and the experiences of older age—or simply wiser years, as my mother would say—and I thought that it would be a most wonderful sermon—except, of course, I’ve never experienced retirement. I don’t even have that much secondhand experience. I just know a couple of mentors of mine who experienced retirement for almost a year before they took on part-time jobs because they said they were bored.

When I selected the hymn that follows today’s sermon, “Day Is Done,” I wrestled with whether to list this at an 8:00 a.m. service, but I feel that it pertains to our theme today, because there is something underlying retirement that, despite my lack of any direct experience with it, can be used as a lens for our lesson today.

I’ve been with you as your pastoral resident for just over a year. In some senses I still feel like I’ve only just arrived as I continue to see new faces and participate in new activities in this growing and dynamic church. The conversations have recently been peppered with “How long have you been with us?” and “When does your residency end?” (This sounds funny, of course, but it’s meant with good intentions!) This has also made me look at what comes next, when my residency ends in August of next year, just ten months away. It reminds me of transitions, something that has been thematic of this congregation’s last couple of years and in my experience of it. At good-bye receptions—a perk of being a resident who can certainly use the food—I’ve had the privilege of hearing the old “war” stories, so to speak, of the veterans of the faith, leaders and ministers in this community, just before they’ve transitioned: John Buchanan, Donna Gray, Rob Holben, Tom Rook, and John Boyle, among others. Some have transitioned into other forms of ministry, planned retirement, or eternal life.

This morning’s passage is one about transition, but first, a quick explanation is in order. Though this letter has traditionally been attributed to the Apostle Paul, a good number of scholars would disagree, but for our purposes, I don’t think this is particularly important. Clearly this letter is being written to a person familiar with Paul’s writings. His message and its power for any reader is this connection to the Apostle Paul’s story; for the readers of the past, it is an imagining or reimagining of Paul. Let us imagine that it is, in fact, Paul, looking to retire.

We see Paul in transition. The power of this letter is Paul’s humanity. Here he is not the robust theologian we read in the letter to the Romans, brilliantly espousing powerful thoughts through powerful rhetoric. This isn’t the Paul penning the poetic prose of Corinthians, with one of the most inspiring thoughts on love—“love is patient, love is kind.” This isn’t the Paul calling all back into unity and community as in Galatians and Ephesians, with the skill of a gifted orator and writer; this is a Paul at day’s end, in the sunset of his life, as his ministry, his career—his race—comes to a close.

At first, his sunset doesn’t look so beautiful. This is a Paul who has been deeply hurt. He’s been deserted, he writes, abandoned. Betrayed. He hopes Timothy comes quickly, for he feels isolated. Can you sense the loneliness in between the lines? Can you imagine this great theologian, missionary, this most famous of apostles, sharing these intimate thoughts with Timothy, that he has been harmed? He feels spent—poured out as a libation, the passage begins. He has given everything he has.

We have felt that way at times. It need not be actual retirement, though it could be. You feel you’ve given all you could to resolve a situation, to support an organization, to sustain a relationship. Have you ever experienced being at “day’s end,” so to speak, in the sunset of a chapter in your life—whether it’s work or school or with a relationship to a friend, a family member, a mentor, or even a spouse? At that end, how would you describe what you felt? Perhaps, like Paul, you felt the pain of betrayals. At the end of a particular job or program, you felt isolated. Transitions are all around us, seeming ends to one thing and beginnings to another. Perhaps you have seen your last child off to college as you now transition into the so-called empty nest. You’ve done all you could to raise children who are resilient, who have the skills to manage life’s basics in this information age; but was it enough? Perhaps you lost a job you really wanted or thought you’d have for a longer time; what now? Perhaps you’re a doctor who is witnessing the end of a patient’s life or their slow demise, the last of the possibly life-saving surgeries now only distant memories, or a lawyer, a social worker, an advocate seeing one’s client beset by a system you wish you could change, and the case you’ve argued now sits as a pile of papers in the archives of an administrative building.

Before you assume that this kind of introspection occurs only with the momentous occasion of retirement, as older age sets in, consider a man who requested pastoral care one evening here at Fourth Church. It was actually my first pastoral care situation as a resident. We sat together, he a young man, probably younger than myself, staring at one another as he looked despairing, disconcerted, and disjointed. His face was red and not just because of Chicago’s unforgiving wind and wintry air, but because he had been crying. Though not planning for retirement, he was despairing over what looked like an end to his career because of a grave error he committed; he reflected on his life as if he was just about to retire, as if he were
on some metaphorical deathbed, recounting the ways he’d wasted his life. Transitions, even momentous ones that remind us of our mortality, don’t just apply to a particular age.

The picture I’m attempting to paint is that transitions—seeming ends and beginnings—stir up for us our sense of mortality, our finitude, our limits. The side effects can be severe: regret and remorse, wishful thinking and guilt, a hope lost, a faith that has faded.

The Paul writing to Timothy seems a broken man, at the end of his days.

It reminds me of another man, Santiago El Campeón, from a book I’m reengaging with—Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Like Paul in this letter, it is about a man toward the end of his career, facing one of the biggest trials of his life, and the book chronicles this epic journey. Throughout the book, Santiago El Campeón—Spanish for the Champion—reflects on his loneliness and on his ending days. “If only the boy was here . . .” He remarks about the loneliness of fishing, the misfortune of his fishing (he has caught none in a while). We are told that he’s taken the picture of his wife, who has passed away, down and put it under his pillow, because his humble abode feels so lonely without her; his dreams are only of lions he encountered in his youth, perhaps at a time when he felt as strong, fierce, and youthful as those African lions. In Old Man and the Sea, we still see a strong old man but losing his strength, with aching hands and scars of labor, marking his days on the sea and his looming day’s end on earth.

We are afraid of these transitions, of these seeming ends, because we sometimes wonder whether we’re alone, and at other times, we are nearly convinced that we are.

But there are three takeaways from what seem like a dire end full of hurt for Paul that I want to leave you with. First, this is a letter of instruction for Timothy. Though Paul is struggling with the end, because he’s been harmed and feels isolated, he also knows that he must look to the other generations. He is a mentor, and in this way, even in his loneliness, he is a companion on the spiritual journey to another.

Have you considered being a mentor? It could be a colleague at work or your child that you’ve sent off to college, but staying in relationship, telling your story, offering the truth of your journey, can speak into the abyss of human isolation; if you’re truth-telling, your story will be full of faith and doubt, of hardship and joy, of God’s seeming absence and of God’s abundant grace. Paul knows the change of the seasons when he sees it and knows when to let go and not stay in denial about the changes, about transition, and the seeming end.

Second, Paul doesn’t allow the story he’s sharing with Timothy to end with a recitation of his painful betrayals. Before the greetings that officially end the letter, Paul actually offers a prayer. In the midst of what he is experiencing as total desertion—“all deserted me, no one was there for me”—he musters his God-given strength to proclaim not only that God has been with him before, but that God will continue to be with him. Our life begins and ends in prayer. In prayer we realize we have never been alone and never will be. In prayer, we realize that our limit, our finitude, our mortality has been with us from the beginning and will remain with us even at our seeming ends. We can’t fix everything; we can’t always keep the relationships that have broken; we can’t redo all of the things we wish we could. We will never have said all that we’ve wanted, gone to all the places we hoped to see, or done all the things we’ve desired. But that isn’t the final word.

We can lament, as Paul does, and share the wounds of our hearts, but we can join Paul in a prayer of gratitude for the God who is faithful, even at day’s end, even in the sunset of our lives, even as we transition from a seeming end to a beginning.

Third, in writing to Timothy, and addressing other brothers and sisters in the faith, Paul is also saying that ultimately the community that God has called is with him, even when it seems like it’s not. You see, brothers and sisters, it is with those seated to your right and to your left, in the pew behind and in the pew in front, that you find the community to which God has called you, the community the Spirit has gathered. We’re not perfect. We fall short. We don’t always support one another, and we often feel isolated even in a crowded city like Chicago and in a big church like Fourth Church. But our story doesn’t have to end in isolation; instead, with our God-given strength, we can be community with one another, neighbor
to each other, brothers and sisters, who, by God’s grace, offer support and help, encouragement and hope, in the trying times, in the times we feel most isolated.

It is in this Spirit-gathered community that we see the manifestation of the God who has promised to be with us always.

It is in this community that we can tell a young man sitting with me on a cold night recounting how he’s wasted his days that, empowered by God’s grace, he need not waste them any longer. It is in this community that, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, we can face with courage what are sometimes the overwhelming challenges in our lives.

It is in this community where I’d like to share a quote that has been life-forming for me, the one I used for the bulletin at my ordination service—a time of great transition for me. The quote is by Henri Nouwen, an inspirational writer of theology and spiritual discipline, who reminds us,

As we grow old, there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.

It is my prayer for all of us here today, whether you have retired or are close to it or are only beginning your career or have yet to start, that in the all the transitions of your life, as you grow, as the seasons change and the chapters of your life unfold, be surprised by joy and not pain, that you might be able to join Paul, in the midst of struggle, doubt, and isolation, and proclaim, “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.” Thanks be to God. Amen.