SUNRISE -- SUNSET

January 4, 1987, 11;00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture

Isaiah 40:1-8
I Corinthians 13:8~-13

“..as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues,
they will cease;..." -~ I Corinthians 13:8
(RSV)

There are plenty of reminders that time is linear, not cylical. It
is now 1987. 1986 is gone. We had just grown accustomed to it and now we
have to change again. 1987. And if you forget that time moves on, your
humanity has a disturbing and sometimes rude way of reminding you. I
didn't know whether to be pleased or insulted with one of my gifts on
Christmas Day. It is a small retractable magnifying glass for the glove
compartment of my car. It's purpose is to help me do something I began to
find difficult to do recently, namely read the small numbers on a road map.
The person who gave it to me is the one to whom I usually say, “here, you
read it” and who doesn't read the small numbers very effectively anymore
either: the same one who gave me a magnifying glass to keep by the
telephone book for my birthday. There are plenty of reminders of the
mystery of time and its inexorable movement.

You recall, I am sure, that wonderful moment in Fiddler on the Roof
when, at the wedding of his daughter, Tehve sings:

“Ts this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don't remember growing older...
When did they?

Now is the little boy a bridegroom
Now is the little girl a bride
Under the canopy I see them

Side by side

Sunrise - sunset, sunrise - sunset
Swiftly fly the years

One season following another

Laden with happiness and tears."

Those lyrics touch a universally tender nerve. Even those who
ordinarily try not to respond emotionally to the sentimentality of pop

music, find this one nearly irresistibie. it has been suggested that the
real difference between human beings and the other creatures is that we are
aware of time. The others live in the bliss of timelessness, apparently.
Your cat lives in eternity as it were, with no sense of the fact that there
was a yesterday that is forever gone, that today is almost over and
tomorrow will soon be here and gone as well. We, alone in creation, know
about time, which means we know we won't live forever, which means we know
anxiety.

John Updike has a wonderful book of poems called Facing Nature, many
of which are about coming to terms with the passing of time, aging, and
mortality. I liked particularly Upon the Last Day of His Forty—Ninth
Year. 7

“Scritch, scratch, saith the frozen spring snow
not near enough this season cr the last,
but still a skin for skiing on, with care.
At every shaky turn into the fall line
one hundred eighty pounds of tired blood
and innards weakly laced with muscle seek
to give themselves to gravity and ruin.
My knees, a-tremble with old reflex resist
and try toe find the lazy dancer's step
and pillowed curve my edges flirted with
when I had little children to amaze
and life seemed endlessly flexible. Now,
my heavy body swings to face the valley
and feels the gut pull of steep maturity."

[p. 10]

All of us, I submit, know what that poem is about, even if we've
never been on a pair of skis. We know what Sunrise - Sunset is about even
if we have no children to be married. We know about the anxiety which
results from the changes time brings. Unlike the cat, you and I do not have
the luxury of living in the bliss of timelessness. It is human to know that
yesterday is gone and to regret it, to knew nostalgia and the longing for
the past which is, as the youngsters say, - “history.”

The holiday season always seems to agitate that latent nostalgia in
us. The ghost of Christmas past haunted Ebeneezer Scrooge and the memory
of Christmases past is an important part of our celebration. We remember
at Christmas. We recall how the celebration was in our childhood. We
recall with affection the people who were an important part of our
experience and who are gone now. That sweet sadness is part of what
happens to us around December 25. Then comes January 1 with its overt
celebration of time's passing, and it's not-very-subtle symbols of the Old
Year and the New Year, and we are virtually forced to acknowledge that time
has passed and we are older. 1987. Think of it!

It is more important to us than we acknowledge ordinarily. And
it doesn't take much to prompt most of us to begin reacting and responding.

The Bible is full of it. Our forebears pondered the passing of time
even as we do. We are certainly not unique in our sense of our own

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mortality. But from the beginning, the faith of God's people has embraced
time as a good part of God's creation - and has affirmed time's passing as
part of God's good plan for creation. While others are trying desperately
to make time stand stiil, or turning youth and youthfulness into an idol,
the Bible is teaching:

“For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven,
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
what is planted..."

The Psalter sees God's glory in time passing:

"Bord, thou hast been our dwelling place

in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the
world, ;

from everlasting to everlasting thou art God...
a thousand years in thy sight

are but as yesterday when it is passed."

In that wonderful hymn, Psalm 90, the brevity and transitoriness of
human life are even celebrated as testimony to God's eternity. The Psalm
teaches the precious value of time and urges the faithful to measure and
number each day.

And in that beloved passage of First Corinthians we read this morning
we heard St. Paul's uncompromising honesty about time and change.

“As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will
cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away."

Each of those passages represents the Biblical approach to time and
mortality, the honesty of which, at times, can makes us uncomfortable. The
Bible does not deny or disguise it, but affirms as natural and as good, the
process of aging in which everyone of us is involved.

By contrast, you and I are inciined to deal with the process - either
by ignoring it, or more assertively - defying it. We try, for instance, to
reassure ourselves that the years are taking their toll on our friends but
not on us. We attend the class reunion and spend at least some of the time.
privately comparing ourselves favorably with our classmates —- who are truly
showing their age. Hundreds of products are marketed on the basis of the
promise to recover our youth or preserve what is left of it. To a degree
that is distressingly consistent, youth - youthfulness, is the ideal, the
model for clothing, jewelry, music - of course; there is even a drink which
not long ago presented itself to those who think young. Orthodox marketing
dogma dictates that maturity not be mentioned .. older people don't usually
make it into the ads - except for chair lifts, nursing homes, and denture
adhesive.

Ernest Campbell, formerly pastor of Riverside Church, New York City,

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coined an unforgettable phrase for it once. He called it the Ponce de Leon
Anxiety. Ponce, you will remember, was the Spanish conquistidor who set out
to discover the legendary spring, the waters of which would make the old
young again. What Ponce discovered instead was Florida. He was 52 years
old when he set out to discover the Fountain of Youth. Campbell observed:
“Those of us who have known the heat of forty summers or more can readily
identify with this quest. We fight the calendar the way a losing football
team fights the clock."

We are, in fact, learning a lot about aging, and thanks to groups
like the Gray Panthers and others we are learning that what we thought we
knew isn't always accurate. .We are learning that retirement at 65 was an
economic determination made in another age and was never based on the
performance, potential or capabilities of actual people. We are learning
that there is lots of life to be lived in later years. Ernie Campbell
quipped that there is no reason to roll over and play dead at 40 or 50 or
60 or 70. The older I get the older my heroes become. Football fans may
remember how George Blanda, a reserve quarterback for the Raiders, used to
shuffle out onto the field in his late 40's and perform magic. Sinatra and
Horowitz are still at it with consumate artistry. Last summer Phil Niekro
pitched regularly for the New York Yankees and at 47 won nine games and
with each one made every middle-aged fan stand taller. When Niekro takes
his cap off he is so gray you think you're seeing one of the player's
father. There is great precedent. Moses, the Book of Deuteronomy
announces, died at the ripe old age of 120 and his eye was not dim, nor his
natural force abated.

The refusal to roll over and play dead is healthy but it can become
neurotic. When it is determined refusal to deal with reality it is
unhealthy. The Biblical position is realism - life lived fully and
intentionally, but age and aging embraced as part of the wonderful and
surprisingly graceful plan. At some point Updike should take his 180
pounds of tired blood and innards and put them on cross country skis before
he kills himself, and Phil Niekro will have to take up softball. Coming to
terms with mortality means cultivating the integrity of age, the grace of
living honestiy with the changes that happen te us. And that is’ most
difficult, in fact impossible, if our lives are driven by an obsession with
youthfulness.

We can elect to deal with time by ignoring or defying it, or we can
resign stoically to its inexorable movement and look to the past as the
source of all meaning and all authenticity and all joy. That dynamic has
always been powerful. There has always been a sense in which the glories
of the past define the possibilities of the present. In the process of
course there is a lionization of the past, an idealizing of the way things
used to be so that, through the soft filter of memory, the past seems ail
positive, pleasant, happy. —

It seems that the whole of American culture, sometime around the end
of the Vietnam War deliberately and concertedly turned 180 degrees and
began to look to the past, not only with affection and pride, but with a
nostalgia that bordered on sickness. The assassinations of the late 60's,
the loss of innocence which Vietnam was, and then the collapse of
credibility from which we have not yet recovered, al] conspired to make the

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past more appealing to Americans than either the present or the future. We
entered a period of cultural nostalgia from which we have not yet emerged.
The trouble with that is that when we are engaged in nostalgia we are
engaged in very selective remembering, we have the soft filters on,
everything looks lovely, .. and the values and attitudes and political
opinions based on that selectivity are simply not relevant to the ambiguity
and complexity of the present. They aren't relevant to anything because the
past wasn't as simple as nostalgia memory reconstructs it. And in the
present they can be destructive. When a government official, for instance,
suggests that the way to deal] with the teen-age pregnancy epidemic, unwed
mothers and the consequent total disappearance of the nuclear family, is to
tell young women to say "no," it is an exercise in nostalgic irrelevance,
which would be silly if it were not so utterly tragic. Harvey Cox
discussed the symbols that are important to our culture in his book, The
Seduction of the Spirit, and found them largely idealizations of the past.
Cox doesn't think much of Disneyland, for instance, which he calis "a
consumer's Oberammergau, a permanent tribal dance-marathon for middle
America." It occurred to me that Cox wrote it before Disneyworld and Epeot
Center opened in Florida, but the real trouble with Disneyland, he wrote,
is that “It is an inspired repristination of small-town America, a never-—
ending liturgical celebration of the legend of the American past, and our
effort to conjure a manageable future." [p. 293]

institutions do that as well as people by the way ~- look backward to
find a way into the future. Mainline churches, for instance, are having a
very difficult time dealing with their overwhelmingly minority status in
the new pluralistic American culture which is emerging. Presbyterians,
Episcopalians, Congregationalists, constituted the dominant theological
force in the early days of the Republic. Through the Second World War, we
were the mainline religion of the Nation. We are no longer. And it makes
no sense whatever ta wish it were 1937 instead of 1987. And it makes even
less sense to structure our corporate life and plan our programs and
conduct our mission as if it were 1937.

The trouble with locking backward, as institutions, or as
individuals, is that we will have to live in the future. It will not go
away. We do not really have the option of living in the past. 1987 will not
become 1986 or 1985 no matter how desperately we wish it would.

Our faith has an important and perhaps saving word for us at this
point. It is that time itself is an instrument of God. It is that our
time is in God's hands. It is that God is in the future as well as the
past. "The Lord is my Shepherd. We leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness," the beloved Psalm promises, which means that because we
remember God's leading in the past, we can walk into the future with
confidence because God is there as well.

In a fine year-end editorial Martin Marty listed some of the
frightening threats which make us all long for the simplicity of the past,
real or imagined. “The AIDS epidemic, Pakistan and Israel have or can have
the bomb, ozone layer problems. Terrorism is on the increase." With
tongue in cheek Marty quipped, “We don't know enough about the future to -be
absolutely pessimistic." And then, at the end, the quietly understated,
but rock-like faith of the Christian... “We do know just enough about the

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God of the future to picture this God 'being there,' which gives us, as we
move into the new year, some measure of hope, some basis for resolve.'
[Context, 1/1/87]

So we can deal with time and change by ignoring and denying it, or by
looking somewhere else for meaning and joy, or — as faith would seem to
suggest, we can say 'yes' to time and embrace change, and see each new day
as opportunity for growing, experiencing, learning, broadening, deepening.
That's a faith position, based not on shallow piety which looks for God's
protection from time and change and aging and sickness and trouble and
death. It is a faith position based on something we celebrated two weeks
ago - the coming of God's love inte life in the birth of Jesus Christ, the
incarnation of God's power and grace and mercy into human history ~ into
the future, that is to say.

How sad, D. H. Lawrence wrote longingly, that Christmas is only “a
damestic feast of sweetmeats and toys, a sort of bank holiday that fades as
the day wears on.“ If that's all it is, the ghost of Christmas past is all
the meaning there is and memory is the essence of it all and nostalgia is
appropriate indeed

But the birth of Jesus, we believe, is God's promise about the
future.

We hear its echoes centuries before...

“fhe grass withers and the flower fades
But the word of our God will stand for ever."

We hear its affirmation in an angel's song about Good News to all
people.

We ponder its thoughtful reflection by an Apostle - "Prophecy will
pass away, tongues will cease, knowledge will disappear. But love never
ends."

And we encounter its reflection in the durable human hopefulness that
emerges, by the grace of Christ, in the darkest and coldest places.

In the December 24 mail were two Christmas cards with difficuit
personal messages, each a kind of eloquent Christmas sermon by a thoughtful
Christian.

The first was devastating in its announcement of the end of a
marriage after 23 years... She wrote, "In spite of al] the wrenching pain
and despair, there was still God. And that makes the celebration of
Christmas not only possible but imperative."

The other spoke of celebrating Christmas after the death of a beloved
father. She wrote, "The wound does heal, if slowly. At first the healing
frightened me —- [ felt that by moving on I was abandoning Dad. But I know,
in fact it is quite the opposite. As Dad used to say, 'Life is for Living,
not for looking back.' Thus the greatest tribute I can pay Dad - is to go
on living with vigor."

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The birth of Jesus Christ is the sign of God's love. The promise is
that God's love for us and for our dear ones is the one thing that does not
change. The promise is that time and change are part of the gift and that
we are gloriously free to affirm it, instead of clutching desperately at
the past.

The birth of Jesus and the celebration with its sweet sadness invites
us to look back with deep affection and gratitude and at the same Lime to
lock forward with eager anticipation and joy and hopefulness.

"Sunrise — sunset
Swiftly fly the years" - is one way to put it

Another way is...
“Our God, our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come,
Be theu our guard while life shall last

And our eternal home."

Amen.

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