As some of you already know,
my birthday is this week. I’ll be
turning fifty, which is one of those nice round numbers that lends itself to being
thought of as a milestone. It also makes
for some easy computations. For example,
because I was ordained to the priesthood on my fortieth birthday, I will soon
be able to say that I have spent one-fifth of my life as an Episcopal
priest. Or, since I came to Petaluma
five years ago in August, I can already say that I have spent one-tenth of it
in the service of St. John’s Church.
But, of course, the calculation that carries the most weight on an
anniversary like this is the one that is impossible to make—the one that asks
what proportion of my span of life remains to be spent. I can’t know, but the odds are low, and
diminishing quickly, that the answer is greater than one half.
When I was a child, or a young
man, the time I have left seemed endless, because I couldn’t imagine it. But now I know how long thirty years, or
forty, or even fifty years is, because I’ve already lived it—and I know it’s not
long. So during this past year, as I
have contemplated turning fifty, I have sometimes felt afraid: afraid of losing
my social cachet, and my hair, and my mental and physical faculties; afraid of
dying, certainly; but most of all afraid of running out of time, afraid that
what remains of my life will run through my fingers as quickly and heedlessly
as the life I have already spent. My
time is getting short, and at moments I am afraid I will come to the end of it with
regret that I did not use it well.
But as my birthday’s gotten
closer I’ve come to see that hidden in that fear there is a gift. The
fear itself is a gift, because it motivates me to ask some very important
questions. When I face the truth of my
mortality, and do not look away, I cannot help but question the way I am living,
the work that I’m doing, and the quality of my relationships, in the light of their
ultimate significance. How well am I
lining up with my highest values? What unfinished
work can I still realistically hope to accomplish in the time that remains to
me? Am I creating the legacy I want to
leave behind me when I’m gone?
And within the fear of failing
to live in a manner worthy of the best I hope to be, is the recognition that my
time in this body, in this world, is a precious gift. I did not create this life, I did not earn
it, no one asked I deserved it, it just came to me, and along with it came all
the other gifts, of love, nourishment, companionship, protection, teaching,
solace, and support that have enabled me to carry it thus far. When I appreciate the miracle of having had
these fifty years to live the life that I’ve been blessed to have, I’m not so
afraid anymore. I’m grateful. I am deeply thankful, and I aspire to make
each day that’s added to the blessing I’ve received, my own modest way of saying
“yes” to such unmerited abundance.
The Bible encourages us to
think about the whole world in much the same way I’ve been thinking about my own
fiftieth birthday. We tend to assume
that the world is going to go on and on pretty much the same as it is now for
such a long time, it might as well be forever.
But one of the recurring themes in the Bible is that we need to keep in
mind that it is going to end, maybe sooner than we think. Maybe immediately.
And if you take seriously
passages like the one in Luke about how "There will be signs in the sun,
the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations” it is only
natural to be afraid. But making us
afraid is not the intent behind these words.
The passage goes on to say “people will faint from fear and foreboding
of what is coming upon the world;” so it does acknowledge that what it is
talking about is frightening. But its
purpose in warning us about these things ahead of time is so that we will not cower in fear, ducking for cover,
but so we will confidently raise our heads and look for what is coming after.
There was a brief time in the
history of our own civilization when some of us, at least, could imagine we
were building a world that would last forever.
The continuous advancement of science and technology, capitalism and
industry, liberal democracy, and the so-called Rights of Man, would just go on and
on and on until we arrived at an earthly paradise. And yet, the fear of the sudden end, the
abrupt and unexpected crash, has continued to haunt our civilization, even in
circles where its religious basis is denied.
Nuclear war, asteroid collision, bird flu, global warming, fanatics with
dirty bombs populate our nightmares, even as we continue to praise the
magnificence of our dreams.
But I think it is ridiculous
to think that first-century followers of Jesus envisioned our moment in
history, and issued warnings about our specific circumstances, but their timing
was just two thousand years off. There
were signs enough in their own century that the world they lived in could not
last. Falsehood, injustice and violence
so riddled its social, religious, and political order that it could not help
but fall. They saw that this was not
simply true of the institutions that they knew--the Judean temple-state and the
Greco-Roman Empire--but that any new power that might rise to take their place
would share the same spirit and so meet the same fate.
What the authors of the Bible
understood is that we human beings keep trying to create an order in the world
that will last forever, because this is how we cope with our fear of death. We think that if we can be part of something
greater than ourselves, a set of norms and symbols, of customs, laws, and
institutions with their monuments and histories, if we can improve a little on this
legacy and pass it down intact to succeeding generations at least we can feel
like our lives meant something. And if we have to cut some corners, and turn a
blind eye to certain uncomfortable truths, and sacrifice some victims to
maintain the present order of the world, we consider the price worth paying. But the hard message of the Bible is that this
effort is still futile, because the world you and I live in, and any other we could
make, is coming to end.
Because we cannot take the
anxieties and aspirations of our mortal lives and make from them our own ultimate
meaning. It lies beyond them. We cannot derive the transcendent values by
which to steer an eternal course from the conventional wisdom of a world that
is passing away—they come from somewhere else.
But here is what the Bible says that is heartening and liberating,
beyond what we have any reason to expect—that help has come, and more is on the
way. We may already have one foot in the
grave, but Christ has emptied the tomb of its power. The world may be coming to an end, but at
that end we’ll find the world’s true beginning.
Because God wants greater things for us than we know how to want for
ourselves.
Which means that through all
the troubles we encounter, in the face of all the things that cast a pall of
fear and helplessness over our lives, we hold an unbreakable lifeline of hope. And I don’t mean a passive, “well, maybe
someday” kind of hope. The hope that the
writers of the New Testament urged on their communities was an active readiness,
a way of living in expectation that God’s inconceivable deliverance is close at
hand. It is very close, closer than we
think, liable to break into the world and transform everything we thought was
impervious to change, or wouldn’t change for a long, long time. The grace to know what, out of all the things
the world has conditioned us to want, we really need, has come to us, is coming
to us, will come to us, even as we hope for its coming. And the true desire of the nations, which
spells their doom and their deliverance, is God’s desire too.
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