In the northern hemisphere, as the days grow shorter, the lectionary readings also grow a little darker. We’re invited to reflect on endings – the end of the world, our own mortality, the final judgment. I don’t know how preachers in South Africa, Argentina, or New Zealand are dealing with this – talk about endings when your world is bathed in spring, in colors and light and beginnings. November is just right. Light is dimming. Colors are fading. Leaves are falling. Everybody’s feeling a little melancholy anyway.
The psalm for this Sunday, Psalm 90, opens with the grand vision of God who has been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. The words breathe eternity and awe. And then the psalmist quickly turns to the impermanence and brevity of human life, speaking of years passing like a dream, and lives briefly flourishing before withering like grass. There’s no room here for celebrating our being fearfully and wonderfully made, no room for marveling at the wondrous beauty of creation, no room for rejoicing in life’s gifts. The psalmist is looking at life in a crisis moment when apparently none of that matters, a moment when loss is threatening to overwhelm hope.
The book of Psalms is divided into five smaller books, and the individual compositions aren’t randomly thrown together, but carefully arranged. In Psalms 73-89, Book III of the collection, prayers lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem are given voice, and Psalm 89 concludes that section with a powerful plea in the face of profound loss, God’s rejection of the covenant with David and of Jerusalem as the center of that covenant: How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? Lord, where is your steadfast love of old? Remember, O Lord, how your servant is taunted![1]
Psalm 90 opens a new section, and it moves from lament to confession, inviting those who say it, to follow its movement: We are consumed by your anger. We are overwhelmed by your wrath. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
There’s a recognition, or at least an invitation to recognize, that the overwhelming experience of losing the city, the temple, and the throne of David was not caused by an arbitrary withdrawal of divine favor, but was an act of judgment, a justified act of judgment.
“Who considers the power of your anger?” the Psalmist asks. Who considers the power of your anger over our loveless, self-serving ways, our convenient idolatries, our endless justifications of injustice, our apathy, our numbness, our daily rebellion against the demands of your love? “Your wrath is as great as the fear due to you” we hear the Psalmist say, and like generations before us we struggle to make these words our own, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, “Your wrath is not some random explosion of divine fury triggered by who knows what. Your wrath fully corresponds to our lack of reverence for you and for each other! It is not you who, out of the blue, broke your covenant; we did it, with our countless, daily failures to love you with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might.”
“The days of our life are seventy years,” the Psalmist muses in this moment of loss and recognition, “or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” “Only toil and trouble” may sound a little over the top for some of us, but we know that these words continue to ring true for many who never get a taste of life’s fullness and can only imagine it in their dreams. And so we hear these words with them and we say them prayerfully in solidarity with them, affirming that life is not full for any of us until all people and all living things share in its fullness.
But we also say these words remembering that the wrath of God is neither the only nor the final response to our failure to live faithfully in communion with God and with each other. As Paul assures us in today’s passage from 1 Thessalonians, “God has destined us not for wrath but for attaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.”[2] God has destined us for fullness of life through Jesus Christ.
Verses 13 and 14 of Psalm 90 are not included in today’s reading, but they should be. “Have compassion on your servants!” we are encouraged to pray, trusting that God’s compassion is greater than God’s wrath. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days!” We believe and affirm that in the life of Jesus — his whole life, including his death and resurrection — God has answered our prayers and revealed to us the depth of God’s compassion and the boundless range of God’s mercy. We believe and affirm that on the cross, in the radical vulnerability of love, our sin is judged and sentenced, and we are set free to live fully in this love, now and forever. “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God,” wrote the English mystic, Julian of Norwich (1343-1416), “is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”
When we hear the words, “Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart,” we may think of making the most of each day, of living each days to the fullest. When Warren Zevon, who was dying of cancer, was asked by David Letterman what his illness had taught him about living, he said, “How much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”[3] So true. Every sandwich. Every sip of coffee. Every glorious small thing we habitually take for granted. To taste and see the fullness of life in each moment.
But the wise heart is not merely mindful. The wise heart is joyful and hopeful. In Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry recommends,
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.[4]
It’s November. Light is dimming. Colors are fading. Leaves are falling. Everybody’s feeling a little melancholy. We’re open to thoughts about life’s brief span. We’re open to consider our mortality and the impermanence of all things, and the poet-farmer tells us to “expect the end of the world.” What do you expect the words after that to be? “Stay awake“? “Get ready”? “Accept the inevitable”?
He says, “Laugh … Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” I don’t know what he means, and I have wondered if that’s the farmer’s madness talking. But perhaps it’s not mad laughter at all. Perhaps it’s the laughter of one who is living gladly because of the knowledge of God’s love. Perhaps it’s the laughter of one who has heard the apostle Paul say that “when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.”[5] Perhaps he says, “Laugh” because he knows that the One who “formed the earth and the world” will not let creation fall into oblivion but bring an end to its incompleteness. Perhaps he says, “Laugh” because “when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”[6]
But who can laugh when they’re worried? Ann Lamott, back in 2003, wrote,
Some mornings I wake up and I instantly feel discouraged by the world and my government and by my own worried mind. It’s like my brain has already been up for awhile, sitting on the bed waiting for me to wake up. It’s already had coffee, and has some serious concerns about how far behind we are already. So I always pray, first thing upon awakening, very simple prayers like the one [my son] Sam prayed years ago when his head got caught in the slats of a chair: “I need help with me,” he whispered.[7]
We need help with us because we’re experts at getting ourselves caught in all kinds of situations that looked so promising before we got into them. We need the courage to let the One who has been our dwelling place in all generations be our dwelling place. The courage to be at home in the steadfast love of God.
[1] Psalm 89:46, 49, 50
[2] 1 Thessalonians 5:9
[3] Ann Lamott https://www.salon.com/2003/02/14/sandwich/
[4] https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html
[5] 1 Corinthians 13:10
[6] Psalm 126:1-2
[7] Ann Lamott https://www.salon.com/2003/02/14/sandwich/