ON KNOWING WHAT TIME IT I

January 8, 1989

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Isaiah 60:17-22
Luke 2:22-40

"Teach us to nusber our days that we may get a heart of wisdon."
-Psalm 90:12 (RSV)

Sometime this afternoon between the hours of 3:90 and 6:00, although
it will probably be closer to 6:00, something will happen at Soldier Field
that happens nowhere else in the universe. Time will actually be slowed
down and virtually stopped. Joe Montana, the 49er's quarterback, or Jim
McMahon, or Mike Tomcezak, or whoever is playing quarterback for the Bears,
will do something which is called, in the game, “playing the clock." By
adroitly choosing plays, getting the ball out of bounds and parceling out
the allotted “time outs" - a smart N.F.L. quarterback can transform
seventy-five seconds into ten minutes. It happens in professional
basketball as well. In fact, it has been suggested that the real game
doesn't start until the last two minutes, which often extends into twenty
minutes; then, there is always the hope for “overtime.” Unfortunately,
there is no equivalency to this in life; although we devoutly wish there
were,... spend enormous amounts of money to purchase the life-equivalent of
a footbail "time-out" or a basketball “overtime," and sometimes, actually
become convinced, that we are succeeding. Metaphoric consistency demands,
however, that we acknowledge that should the football game today end in a
tie - it will go into a variety of “overtime” which terminates in “sudden
death" —- which brings me to the text for my sermon... “Teach us to number
our days that we may get a heart of wisdom," or “a smart man or woman knows
what time it is.”

"If I could wish anything for a young man or woman this morning,"
said the college president in his speech at graduation, “it would be the
wish that, early in his days and far ahead of some desperate need, he could
come ta feel that his own life had eternal meaning." And then the speaker
cited Tolstoy who used to complain that we so lose the power to turn our
minds to bear on important things, that only the near thought of death

brings us to the sense of them. "This seems a pity" said the president.
"It means missing so much now - this side of the hospital corridor. So
much of ardor, so much of joy, so much of beholding." [Howard R. Lowry,

College Talks}

It is something like that sense of time which the Biblical writers
mean when they teil us that as the boy Jesus, living in Nazareth, was
increasing not only in stature, but in wisdom. To be wise in the Bible is
not to have knowledge, or technological skill. It is essentially to know
what time it is; and to be appropriate in one's accommodations to time.
“feach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom,” the
Psalmist said.

And the problem is precisely that we don't want to do that; in fact
resist doing it with everything in us. It's not fair actually. We spend
the first two decades of our earthly existence without any sense of reality
about time. It never occurs to us that this does not go on forever. At
the age of twenty - forty seems a century in the future. At the age of
fifteen the school year seems endless. At the age of ten, a few hours
doing something you don't want to do - practicing the piano, pulling weeds,
drying dishes - feels like an eternity. I will forever recall a simple
task I was assigned at the age of ten or so. My father had planned to turn
the upper part of our hilly back yard into a garden. My job was to help
clear the area by picking up rocks so that he could spade when he came home
from work. The requirement was simple: a bucketful of rocks each day
before I was free to do other things. It would have taken a few minutes.
But my memory is of sitting in what I knew must be purgatory, hour after
hour, mostly staring at the empty bucket and the rocks and wondering what I
had done to deserve the monumental oppression. Youth has a very peculiar
sense of time...

And then one day it strikes us that time, as a matter of fact, is not
only moving, it is clearly accelerating. Years speed by. We can't believe
how old we are. In a wonderful editorial at the New Year, Martin Marty
quips:

"Now when I think of my graduate students as slightly younger than I,
though their children are younger than our grandchildren: when I think
that far from being the new kid on the block on our faculty, I will at
year's end be second in seniority, one thought keeps coming to mind: they
never told us it would shoot past so fast, did they?... One thinks this
way at year's end, and finds plenty who share the thought."

[The Christian Century, M.E.M.0., 12/21-28/88]

As we write it the first few times -— "1989" - having never really
become used to writing '88 instead of '87 it seemed, we know... deeply,
profoundly as the hymn writer puts it, "Time, like an ever-flowing stream,
bears all its sons and daughters away."

There is a wonderful scene in Mike Nichol's new movie, Working Girl,
when Katherine Parker, a very successful account executive specializing in
mergers and acquisitions proposes marriage to the man with whom she has
been having an affair. It's a funny vignette because she uses the
language, not of Jove and passion, but merger and acquisitions. She puts
her arms around him and says, "Inside I can hear," and you expect her to
say, "a love song," or at least “my heart beating,” but what she says
Matter of factly is, "Inside IJ hear my biological clock ticking."

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The topic, of course, is mortality. One of the best teachers of
preaching, Fred Craddock, tells his students that you can talk about it in
the abstract until you are blue in the face without eliciting much more
than a yawn from the congregation. But lean over the pulpit and tell them
"Mr. Jone's son is dying” and they'll] be up on the edge of their seats
listening.

And so it is for all of us as the topic moves from the theoretical to
the factual. At year's end three close friends died; a Synod Executive and
journalist, a surgeon, and a former Clerk of Session; all men with whom I
have spent good times; each rigorous, active, with lots of time left, one
would have assumed.

I recalled my own father always turning to the obituaries in our
small town newspaper, before sports, and my thinking it was peculiar.
Someone has suggested that you can tell a person's approximate age by the
section of the newspaper he or she reads first: comics, sports, world
news, entertainment, financial pages, obituaries. It is a simple truism
that the older you get the more relevant the obituaries become.

It presents our culture with a real dilemma; this whole topic does..
In one of the last things he wrote before he died, an essay on aging,
Professor Joseph Sittler observed:

"The fact that human life has a limit, that life moves inexorably
toward death, is to the common mind of a technically informed culture of
the West an awkward fact. Popular culture is invited to assume that
knowledge, resolution, time and an adequate allocation of funds can solve
all problems." [Gravity and Grace, p. 121]

Getting older is an awkward fact. We spend an enormous amount of our
resources and energy denying it, fighting it, trying to reverse it. Some
of the effort is admirable. Some of it is necessary to combat stereotypes
of aging which have demeaned and diminished older people in the past. It
is not necessary, not healthy - to stop loving, experiencing fully, enjoy
being who we are, keeping fit, looking nice - ever. So part of our battle
with the clock is admirable. And part of it is sick when, for instance, an
earnest man leans out of the television set and tells me that the mystery
of the ages and the resolution to my own angst will be found in a product
which will restore my hair to its original color. We are obsessed with it
- with an image of humanness which is perpetually twenty-five, svelte,
trim, beautiful, flying down a ski slope or lounging on the beach, i.e.
youth... Because we are so obsessed we are willing, eager in fact, to
spend whatever it takes in cosmetics, surgery, dyes, paints, support
systems, weight loss, to pretend that what is happening to us isn't really
happening.

Sittler wrote: “We must stop this conspiracy of silence about death,
and talk apenly of it. One can go to church a whole life time and never
hear a sermon on it." [Ibid, p. 126]

The reason, [ suppose, is that the preacher is involved in the
process; getting older along with everybody else. The preacher is just as
selective about the Biblical materials which appear in the life of the

wo

church as we all are ahout the magazines that appear on the coffee table...
And I'l} confess that it will be a long time before Modern Maturity
replaces Sports Tilustrated on mine, or that my AARP card has its own
prominent special place in my wallet on top of American Express, VISA or
the Cubs schedule.

We make choices... But the fact is that the Bible is very honest and
very human on al] topics — particularly this one. You have to be more
than selective about your reading of the Psalms, for instance, to avoid
encountering absolute human integrity about time and aging and dying. I
was talking with a group not long ago about reading straight through the
Psalms as a daily devotional exercise. Someone who tried it observed
that it can become pretty depressing because there is so much violence, so
much about the "pit" and the snares of the devil, suffering, dying... so
much, that is to say, of the reality of our existence,

Tt is no sunny, superficial, "“possibility-thinking" spirituality that
we encounter in the Psalms, but a bold and honest faith that dares to look
for God and God's redemptive purposes in the worst possible situations.
That is, just those places where we need redemption, when all seems lost,
when the airliner falls out of the sky, or the earthquake kills 50,000, or
the test comes back positive, or when three close friends die... and you
know deeply and profoundly the inexorable movement of time.

We have read one of the best of them this morning -— Psalm 90. It
inspired one of the most popular hymns in our language, “Our God, our Help
in ages past, our hope for years to come." I wouldn't mind a bit if you
looked it up in the pew Bible and followed along and became personally
acquainted with it. (If you can't see it's not because age has dimmed your
eye sight, but because the light in here was not designed to help you see;
and if we turn them ali on, the people in the balconies can't see the
chancel at all...)

It is one of the Lament Psalms. It begins gloriously by naming the
Lord as our dwelling place... "in all generations," a Lord who has been
God - even before the creation of the world. "From everlasting to
everlasting thou art God."

And then the Jamenting begins - the Psalmist complains. It isn't
fair; a thousand years is Jike one day for you, but we are swept away like
the grass... even long life is soon gone and ends like a sigh. It's a very
bold and very authentic expression of something which is in the heart of
everyone of us. There is no pretending here, no denial, no sunny
superficiality. This is real...

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom."
Wisdom means knowing what. time it is and acting accordingly. Today's
English version translates it with simplicity and clarity:

"Teach us how short our life is so
that we may become wise.”

The concluding section asks for two simple gifts - a measure of joy
and gladness in the time which is ours, and the blessing of God on the work

1/8/89

we do — that in this brief time, we might do something which has lasting
value. How very human and honest and wise that is... God is our dwelling
place, our true home. We don't like the brevity of life, but if it must
be, instead of playing games of denial, we'd love to be glad in it, to live
it fully, and to leave something of value behind.

What I never noticed before was that the subtitle of this Psalm is "A
Prayer of Moses, the Man of -God." No one knows exactly what that means but
ene scholar, Walter Brueggemani, has come up with the intriguing
proposition that Moses prayed it on that day at the end of his life, at
Pisgah, when he stood looking over the river into the promised land "to
which he has been headed all his life. Now it dawns on him that he will
not go there. He embraces that painful reality but does not stop
yearning." [The Message of the Psalms, p. 110]

Now it is precisely that integrity, that bold honesty about matters
that we know and fret about and lie awake at night pondering, which are the
glory of the Psalms. You and I can pray that Psalm. We have, in so many
words, many times.

It's goal —- and it is a good one - is wisdom. The wisdom which
begins in the knowledge that our true home is God and because of that we.
are gloriously free to stop pretending, stop playing the games to which the
world invites us, and simply, gratefully, "number our days."

There is a big issue here... Time ran out for Meses before he made it
to the promised land... but the work of his hands was established. and the
people crossed over after him... Time does move, with us or without us.

The important issue in the Biblical idiom is to be part of it, to
acknowledge and embrace it, instead of wasting so much of it pretending,
denying it, disguising it.

Wisdom is knowing what time it is. Wisdom is not putting things off,
not postponing doing what we ought to be doing, not neglecting to tell the
people we leve that we love them, never neglecting to love, to give
ourselves fully to those who love us and need us - who we enjoy and who
enjoy us. The heart of wisdom is, I submit, an economist's valuing of
time. It is to give ourselves so thorough to our life that at the end of
the day we can rejoice and be glad and know that we have lived as fully as
we were capable of living.

There is a wonderful paragraph in Frederick Buechner's book, The
Alphabet of Grace, which follows the clock through one morning in the
author's life. It is a favorite of mine:

"You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it
will not be so forever. But it is so now. And what is it like: to be
alive in this maybe one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a
day of it and see. Take any day and be alive in it. Nobody claims that it
will be entirely painless, but no matter. It is your birthday, and there
are many presents to open. The world is to open." [p. 36]

There is a big issue here. It is to be wise enough to know what time
it is and to number our days. There is an even more important issue: the

biggest one of all... Are we really, as the complaint part of the Psalm
laments - little more than grass which withers and fades and is swept away?
Are we just animals in quick transit between our birth and death;
“Accidental Tourists" through life? Or is there something eternal about
the equation? Is there something here that lasts, that is permanent,
something about_us that participates in that “everlasting to everlasting”
which is God. Is the power of the clock ticking, time running out, the
ultimate world about us?

The Psalmist calls us, across many centuries to trust a Lord who is
our dwelling place - our true home, a God who is from everlasting to
everlasting.

It is not, for us, a matter of hope, or theological speculation
only. We have celebrated the birth of a child recently. We have
celebrated light in darkness. What that child means is barely able to be
contained in our theological formulas and sermons. We dare to believe that
that child means the power of time - which is power of death - has been
broken. Our lives, because of Jesus Christ, are not a gradual
diminishment, but an upward growth to completion and fulfillment.

Professor Sittler loved Psalm 90. It turns up in much of his
writing. One time he used it as the text for a memorial address at
Rockefeller Chapel.. He concluded with restraint - but great power.

"He is the light in which things are beheld.

He is the light that fallisiupon things by which they. are
beheld. And he is the light of the beholding eye.

He is road and he is goal, ‘and he became the traveler.
He is where I began, he is my journey, and my home

at the last." :

{The Care of the Earth, p. 108]

The promise of Psalm 96 is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Because of
him -

“Our God, our help in ages past" is “our Hope for years to come”...
our beginning — our ending - our home at the last.

Amen.

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