“Time and God” based on Psalm 90:1-10, 12 and John 7:37-44

There is a story, maybe for kids maybe for adults, called “The Little Prince” which centers on the experience of a small human from another planet who accidentally comes to earth and notices things that regular inhabitants do not. Copyright law prohibits me from reading the section of the book to you that our scriptures reminded me of, and so, alas, you are stuck with my rather boring summary instead. There is a scene where the little prince meets and chats with a railway switch-man, and maybe it helps to know the book was published in France in 1943.

The railway switch-man describes his job as sorting out travelers, by the thousands, and sending them off either to the right or the left. The Little Prince wonders why they’re hurrying around so, and is told no one knows. When another train goes by, the Little Prince wonders why the people aren’t satisfied where they once were, and is told no one is satisfied where they are.

I often think of that rail-station perspective as I watch cars veer this way and that way, while pedestrians walk up and down the street, and we each go about our lives. Where are we all going? Why? Do we know why?

Our Psalm today reminds me of this little rail-side story, in that it puts life into a larger context. The Psalm feels like standing outside at night in a dark deserted place and seeing uncountable stars, and noticing the vastness of the universe and the smallness of each of our lives. Or, perhaps, the Psalm feels like standing at the end of a pier looking into the ocean, with waves upon waves upon waves coming in and and unending horizon of water. Compared the vastness, we are so very small.

Sometimes in the awe of those moments, in the immensity of what is, it is possible to rest more fully on the Divine, and remember that our problems are also quite a bit smaller than the vastness of the universe and the infinite Holy One. And that can be truly lovely.

But, we come back, away from the ocean, and Schenectady isn’t a great place for star viewing, so our problems usually return to their normal sizes in our lives. We forget that “a thousand years in” God’s “sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night.”

A colleague at Schenectady Clergy Against Hate reflected this week that at this moment in history humans are doing truly horrible things to each other and it is hard to make sense of it. That colleague then mentioned that this isn’t any different than any other time in human history. Which, I fear, is pretty true. It is also good perspective.

How do we hold the struggles of our own lives, which are often very significant, and the struggles of the world, which are often very significant? How do we hold them in tension with hope? How do we hold them in tension with love, and joy, and laughter? How do we hold them in tension with beauty and wonder? OK, let’s be honest – how do we hold our struggles and the world’s struggles without letting them drown us? That’s the question I’m really after.

How does God hold these struggles, and does that teach us anything about how we are to hold them? Our Psalm reading today ends with the words, “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to Wisdom.” Perhaps that contains answers.

The Psalm, and those nighttime skies I’m so fond of, make us pretty small, right? The Psalm says, mortals, the women born, become dust again.

You sweep them aside; they are an illusion;

in the morning flourishing and in the evening wilting and withering.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;

in the evening it is dried up and withered.

Or, to speak of a human life, “The span of our live is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass quickly and we are gone.” The Psalm calls us to remember our mortality, and to hold that reality that our lives will be finite.

Now, there is a lot of pressure to ignore our own mortality, right? But its truth remains. And sometimes the way to hold perspective in life is to remember that we have only this one short span of time to savor, and it is worth holding it sacred and using it with some intention. There is a value in the goodness of life, AND there is a value in creating more goodness in life. There is plenty of sorrow – the Psalm doesn’t hold back on that reality does it – but it isn’t the whole story.

I could answer some of the Little Prince’s questions, I think. Most of the people are going to work or from work, some to visit others, some to vacation, some to pick up things they need (or want), and maybe a few are trying to get away from it all. Most are probably missing the wonder that is life, the scenery passing by the windows, the human interactions happening on the train, the simple wonder of taking breathes in and letting them go. Some are bored, some are scared, some are angry, and some are happy, some are excited, some are hopeful.

Most of us, most days, are a little bit of all of the above.

Next week we will celebrate the Saints of God who have passed out of this life in the past year. It is a holy and sacred time, a reminder of the the great cloud of witnesses who surround us and wish goodness for us. They are also people we miss dearly. Ones who taught us lessons, ones we laughed with, ones we sought out for companionship. We miss them, we wish to have more time with them, often we wish for them a fuller live.

So how do we lead lives that are full? How do we make the best of the time we have on earth? How do we learn the lessons of the saints, and how do we hold tragedy and joy at the same time?

I certainly need regular reminders that God WANTS a full and abundant life for me, just like for everyone else. I need reminders that both rest and joy are forms of resistance that build the kindom AND enable the building of the kindom. I need the reminder that it is OK to savor the goodness and not just wallow in the brokenness. I’m quite thankful for prayer time which offers me those reminders – along with a good spiritual director.

More and more I’ve come to believe in the wisdom of bodies, I mean the physical bodies we inhabit (and sometimes too the groups of people we variously call bodies or the bodies of Christ). But let’s start with our physical bodies, that have sensations that we can learn to identify as emotions, and that our emotions are REALLY wonderful clues to our needs and our responses to what’s going on around us and when we take our bodies seriously we can take both our feelings and needs seriously and that this is actually CENTRAL to our spirituality which is CENTRAL to full and abundant lives.

About 4 weeks ago, after a week of feeling a little under the weather, I developed ear infections and then both of my ear drums burst. Let me assure you I haven’t appreciated that. It hurt, my hearing is slowly resolving, rather despite the best efforts of modern medicine. Nothing helped, until one of you suggested that if anti-biotics and allergy meds don’t work, maybe my body needs rest.

(It is said all preachers preach to themselves, you are welcome to laugh at me all you want.)

Maybe my body needs rest. Maybe I can’t just keep on pushing. Huh.

Dear ones, we can’t end suffering in our own lives or in the world. Violence is. Wars are. Cancer is.

When paying attention to the suffering is something we do because we have compassion to offer, or wonder, or love, or care, that’s wonderful! But I fear sometimes we pay attention because we think we “should” when that very attention does us harm. Because we now have access to information on suffering in nearly infinitely ways in nearly infinite places, and it can drown us.

So, when comes to our own lives and our loved ones, we can take the time to listen to our bodies, our emotions, our spirits (I think they’re all one), and hear what the Sacred is Calling Us To in order to have abundant lives. When it comes to the world around us, when we are centered and have heard ourselves, we are able to offer the love and joy the world is desperate for.

AND ALSO, the one who holds the world on their shoulders is the Divine, who also holds the world in their heart, who also holds the world’s aches and delights. God doesn’t actually call us to the full heartbreak of the whole world. Our beings hear bad news 4 times louder than good news. Which means that to have a balanced understanding of the world we need to seek out the good news A LOT, because the bad news SELLS and is ever present AND we have a bias towards it.

Beloveds of God, we are not called to give up our lives in grieving for every tragedy around the world. The only one who can do that is God. We are allowed to stop, to stop knowing, to stop listening, to stop taking in the hurts. It isn’t our job to grieve for everything.

I fear that there pressure on us to know and understand every injustice from every angle, to be informed, to be responsive, to be aware. But we can’t, and trying may break us. In our relatively short lives, God calls us to abundance, to joy, to goodness, to living and savoring life and making it possible to help others do the same. But we don’t have to solve all problems, or even know about them. We can let God be God. Phew. And we can let God, “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to Wisdom.” May it be so. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 Pronouns: she/her/hers http://fumcschenectady.org/
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October 29, 2023