Sermon: Knowing our mortality

1^st Sunday after Trinity ,  Matins

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days.

Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long

and my age is even as nothing in respect of thee.

O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength:

before I go hence, and be no more seen.                                  

from Psalm 39

Words from this morning's Psalm, no. 39, familiar to us from Maurice Greene's evocative anthem, which we often hear in Lent; words that reflect poignantly on the brevity of life, and the certainty of death.

Now the last thing I want to do this morning is send us all into depression, in a Private Frazer, ‘We're all doomed', kind of way. What I want to do, is to bring some reflections arising from this Psalm on our human existence in the sight of God, and of a developing sense in Scripture of a conviction that comes to fruition in our Lord Jesus Christ.

So, let me begin by considering this Psalm.  The first thing to say is that there a clear personal context for the Psalmist.  Consider his words:

Take thy plague away from me:

I am consumed by the means of thy heavy hand.

Hold not thy peace at my tears.

The Psalmist is clearly suffering. Perhaps he is desperately ill, or has experienced some kind of grievous accident.  Whatever the case, human life seems very tenuous; he can see death staring him in the face; keenly he feels his own mortality.  He may be elderly, and he reflects on how the beauty of youth passes through ageing, through illness:

Thou makest his beauty to consume away, as it were a moth fretting a garment.

However, as a person of faith, he does not see his suffering as merely the result of chance or circumstance.  He relates it directly to God; indeed, the Psalm is an impassioned plea for God to change his circumstances.

The Psalm begins with a statement of self-discipline. The author makes a promise that he will keep his mouth shut, that he will not sin with his lips:

I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not with my tongue.

I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight.

This opposition is either from those who say ‘there is no God', and pour scorn on godly people who suffer, or it reflects a strand in Old Testament thinking that said this:

If you are righteous, godly, pious, law-abiding, you will prosper.

If you are wicked, ungodly, a breaker of God's law, you will suffer.

So, when suffering came, the question was: ‘what have you done wrong, for God to punish you in this way'?

And it seems that this poor man was at the receiving end of such nonsense. He tried not to retaliate, but it was desperately hard:

I held my tongue, but it was pain and grief to me...my heart was hot within me; the fire kindled....

But his impassioned outburst was not to his opponents, but to God himself:

            Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days.

And this is the rather moving and distinctive feature of this Psalm. He doesn't ask for vengeance on those who oppose him; nor does he simply protest his innocence; rather he makes a plea for God, who is all-knowing, to remember that human life is brief; and in remembering that, to have mercy upon him.  Life, he says, is only ‘a span long'; the years of our life are but as nothing to God who is eternal; so brief, life is but vanity, as nothing, a fleeting shadow. We try to prolong life; we attempt to heap up riches, as if they will give us ultimate security, but even they are blown away, and don't we know it in our current economic circumstances, and we cannot tell who will gather them.  I always remember my first burial at York Hill Cemetery in Spennymoor. I was a new Curate and my training incumbent came with me.  After the interment, he showed me a fairly recent grave, and he said, ‘You see that grave there; he's the richest man in this cemetery'!

So, the Psalmist appeals to God as the ground of his hope: ‘What is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee'.  He acknowledges that he is a sinner, and he asks for forgiveness; he asks for deliverance from the easy orthodoxy of the foolish, with their facile and self-righteous false theology about easy equations between prosperity and outward circumstances. He asks God to remove the plague from him; to see and respond to his tears, to spare him.  He returns to his theme of the brevity of life: I am a stranger and a sojourner; merely a resident alien upon the earth.

And finally, he asks God to give him some time of reprieve.

O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.

Some short reflections. At daily Matins we are reading through the Book of Job. This Psalm is reminiscent of Job's message, a strident protest against the theology that suffering is merely about unconfessed sin, provoking divine retribution. Job was righteous, and yet he suffered.  It blows out of the window an ‘insurance policy' approach to faith, as if faith in God meant immunity from the hard facts of life.  But like Job, this Psalm also reminds us of the resources of faith, that in all the changing scenes of life, in trouble and in joy, what is entirely legitimate is a dialogue with God, including expression of our puzzlement, hurts, anger, sheer incomprehension. What moves me is the Psalmist's humility; as a person of faith, he meets his circumstances with prayer.

Second, this Psalm also finds a liturgical setting in the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. It is read as the procession enters Church or proceeds to the grave-side. Of course, an important aspect of funeral liturgy is to remind us of our mortality.  This is not an invitation to be morbid, but to remind us how precious the gift of life is, and therefore our responsibility to use it well, not selfishly like the hedonistic and self-seeking aspects of our contemporary culture, but creatively, and generously.  When I used to visit bereaved families, it was always moving to hear stories of a life well lived, a giving life; the saddest part was when I would sense that here was a life that was entirely selfish, taking rather than giving, and giving nothing back.  We cannot know our end or the number of our days; therefore while we have life on earth, let us use it to the glory of God and for the common good.

And third, the Psalmist lived at a time when as yet, there was no doctrine of the resurrection. Life did not entirely end at death; but the dead went down to Sheol, a shadowy, nothingness type of existence, a place of dust and darkness removed from the light of God's presence.  But towards the end of the Old Testament period, as reflection on the nature of God and the philosophy of human existence developed, so the conviction grew that we, as those made in God's image, might come to share his eternity, a development that we see preparing the way for the heart of the Christian message, the dying and rising of Jesus, the Second Adam, the true human Being. This is why we worship on Sundays as a witness to the resurrection.

But more than that, this is why we can proclaim that life is more than mere vanity, nothingness, a passing breath, and why, the consecrated, generous, giving and godly life is the proper prelude to life that is eternal, and that in eternity, the pains, illnesses and injustices of this short span, are taken up into eternal joy.  And so, to Christ our Lord, we say:

And now Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee.

And we remember Jesus' own words:

Do not worry about tomorrow: life is more than food, the body more than clothes.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

But seek first the Kingdom of God.

Yes, seek first the Kingdom of God.