Hilton Head Island, SC – August 14, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 39:1-13; Ecclesiastes 12:1-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is! – Psalm 39:4 (RSV)
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could know exactly when and where you were going to die? Wouldn’t it be keen if you could be certain of the specific cause of your inevitable demise? Wouldn’t it somehow be reassuring to know whether your death would be peaceful or painful, a quiet termination or a tumultuous denouement?
Psalm 39, like almost half of the 150 Psalms, is ascribed to David. As is characteristic of many of the other purported Davidic Psalms, in this one David writes very personally of what was motivating him at the time he composed this Psalm. In the opening three verses, he tells us obliquely about some sort of moral or spiritual crisis he had. Whatever it was, he says he held his tongue and was silent. That was unlike David. Whenever something was bothering him, he usually responded by, as we say, “letting it all hang out.” But this time he kept quiet.
By taking that tack, however, David was led to an entirely different emotional inquiry. He suddenly wondered how long he was going to live. If he was going to have to endure whatever was upsetting him, would his death come soon, or later, or after a very long time? We can’t know how old David was when he wrote these words, but we may assume he was not a young man. “Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is!”
Very rarely do children or youth or young adults think their lives are short. They think they are long, even interminable. The pre-school child waits for school to begin, and it seems to take forever. The grade schooler waits for high school, the high school student waits for college, the young adult waits for a career to begin or for marriage or for a family. Only in middle age, which used to be the 40s or 50s and now is perhaps the 60s or 70s, do people start to contemplate the brevity of their lives. Even if 70 is the new 50 (which is very debatable), nonetheless it is 70. And after the 70s come the 80s and 90s, and somewhere by then, for most people, comes death. If you value realism, you can count on it. If you prefer not to face the inevitability of your own demise, you may not think about this at all. Many people don’t. But I’m sorry to be the one to have to inform you; you are going to die. And so am I.
My favorite musical requiem is the Brahms Requiem. Most requiems were written in Latin, since the composers utilized the words of the Roman Catholic requiem mass. (I suppose that in the plural I should say requia rather than “requiems,” but it was over 60 years ago that Miss Kleinheinz taught me Latin, and she has long since passed into Hamlet’s undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, so I can’t contact her to verify my guess.) Brahms called his requiem Ein Deutsches Requiem, A German Requiem, because all his biblical texts were taken from the German Bible instead of the Latin Vulgate.
The third movement of the Brahms Requiem begins with a baritone solo. In English, the German is translated as follows: “Lord, make me to know the measure of my days on earth, to consider my frailty, that I must perish.” Later, the soloist sings, “Surely, all my days here are as an handbreadth to Thee, and my lifetime is as naught to Thee.” It is a direct paraphrase of Psalm 39:3-7. “Verily mankind walketh in a vain show, and their best state is vanity. Man passeth away like a shadow, he is disquieted in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. Now, Lord, O what do I wait for?” At that point the chorus comes in mezzo-forte, repeating the baritone’s haunting question, “Now, Lord, what do I wait for?”
Indeed, for what? We are 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or 90, or something in between, and for what are we waiting? “Lord, make me to know the measure of my days on earth, to consider my frailty, that I must perish.” It is so - - - sobering. We are all going to die.
Do you remember Waiting for Godot? Theater of the Absurd? You were in high school or college, and you were assigned this classic play by the French playwright Samuel Beckett (who doesn’t sound like he should be French, which in itself is kind of absurd.) The play was first performed in English in 1953. There are two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, and nothing much happens, except that it takes two darkly humorous and painful acts for it not to happen. The two men argue with one another about this and that, and they wonder if suicide might not be the solution to their dilemmas. They even wonder if they have already died. You could Google it.
Or do you remember, from PBS, Waiting for God? It was a long-running BBC comedy about two old folks in the Bayview Retirement Village. The character Tom Ballard meets the character Diana Trent, and they are both really characters in a uniquely funny way. They are waiting for God to “call them home,” as we euphemistically say, and Bayview is where they are waiting for Him. It is a hoot. You could Netflix or Amazon or YouTube it. And if you can’t do that, if you wait long enough, PBS will probably bring it back again on Sunday nights sometime. They don’t have much money to work with, and therefore they recycle all the best stuff.
Or there is that classic poem by my favorite poet, Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts. Years ago Julie Harris did a spectacular one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst, playing Emily for nearly two hours. If you look hard enough, you can find that as well. (All of this is additional homework for a sermon called A Leery Look at Longevity.)
Because I could not stop for Death,/ He kindly stopped for me;/ The carriage held but just ourselves/ And immortality./// We slowly drove, he knew not haste,/ And I had put away/ My labor, and my leisure too,/ For his civility./// We passed the school where children played/ At wrestling in a ring;/ We passed the fields of gazing grain,/ We passed the setting sun./// We paused before a house that seemed/ A swelling of the ground;/ The roof was scarcely visible,/ The Cornice but a mound./// Since then ‘tis centuries, but each/ Feels shorter than the day/ I first surmised the horses’ heads/ Were toward eternity.
Psalm 90 was set to poetic verse by Isaac Watts as the hymn, “Our God, our help in ages past.” It is one of the best known and most triumphant of all Christian hymns, even though it is from an Old Testament Psalm. The Psalm says, “The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. So teach us to number our days.” (90:10). The hymn says, “Time, like and ever-rolling stream/ Bears all its sons away;/ they fly forgotten as a dream/ Dies at the opening day.”
Longevity can be a real kick in the pants, because no matter how long it lasts, it ends. We don’t keep going forever, not in this life we don’t. Some people refuse to acknowledge that, some people always attempt to avoid it, never coming to grips with its melancholy truth.
Several weeks ago I called on a man who is receiving a number of treatments for a medical condition which has afflicted him. If he doesn’t get the treatments, he will almost certainly have consequences. But by getting the treatments, he has other consequences. So which is it: to be, or not to be? To get zapped by this and get less zapped by that, or to skip the zapping altogether, and to get another, perhaps more predictable, kind of zapping? Each of us has a choice. We can die on our own terms, or we can die on death’s terms. With unwavering determination, we can stop eating or drinking altogether, and we’ll be gone within ten to thirty days.
Last Wednesday evening Lois and I had dinner at the home of one of her professors from college. He used to have lunch with three friends, during which they would discuss things which interested four intellectuals. Now two of them have died, and John is missing his old Gang of Four. One of the deceased was a retired surgeon. He was diagnosed with cancer. In two months he was gone. For the last month he ate no food and drank no liquids. If his mouth was dry, which it was frequently, John said he moistened a washcloth and sucked on it. That was the end.
Three weeks ago I happened to ask an admirable nonagenarian lady how she was feeling. “Okay,” she said, meaning, “Okay, but not okay.” She isn’t in pain, but she has no energy. She said that three months ago she was diagnosed with a blood disease with a long name. It has knocked the starch out of her, and she has concluded it is going to kill her. She hopes it is soon, and she asked me to pray for a speedy demise. “Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days.” What’s the point of living longer if we live longer in misery? Why wait, when we might check out on our own terms? Or is longevity the name of the game, no matter what? Are we consigned to more longevity, like it or not?
Does God want long life for everyone? In the third decade of the 21st century, many of us live for 70 or 80 or more years. But not everyone does. Accidents shorten the lives of many people, and terminal illnesses end life prematurely, as we glibly say, for many others.
The older I get, the more I like the Book of Ecclesiastes. Whoever wrote it was a straight-shooter who didn’t beat around the bush. He calls himself Koheleth, which means “The Preacher.” The third chapter is the best-known part (“For everything there is a season --- a time to be born and a time to die”), but the last chapter is also quintessential Ecclesiastesian. “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’” (12:1). In other words, make optimistic hay while the sun shines, because pessimism will set in soon enough, and likely you won’t see things through such rose-tinted glasses once several decades are tucked under your belt.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the Preacher. “Verily mankind walketh in a vain show, and their best state is vanity,” says Johannes Brahms.
What I’m talking about in all this is a feeling, a mood, a realization which almost never comes to young people but which sweeps over many older people because of the very process of getting older. It isn’t depression, exactly, nor is it melancholy, which was the most common word to express depression up until a century or so ago. It is a constellation of thoughts and emotions which William Wordsworth so magnificently captured in his greatest poem Intimations of Immortality. We need a certain amount of longevity even to enter into the Wordsworthian “sadder but wiser” state. The benefits of this state of mind can be both profoundly threatening and profoundly comforting. We know as we have never known before that the end is coming, and for perhaps the first time, in the deepest part of our being, we happily discover that it no longer terrifies us. Much to our great surprise, we find ourselves able to make our peace with our longevity. Whatever it is, it is. Whatever it will be, it will be. As Johann Sebastian Bach said in one of his cantatas, “Come, Sweet Death.”
Is death sweet? Is it? Could it ever be?
Please listen carefully, Christian people. There are two possibilities regarding death, and only two. Either death is the end, or it isn’t. “Out, out, brief candle!” as Macbeth said. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Either longevity stops, or it doesn’t. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
So which is it? We may have intimations of immortality, but we have no proof of it, no guarantee. Those who insist without any reservations that we shall transcend death may be whistling in the dark. It is a piercing whistle, a strong whistle, but it is a whistle nonetheless. Without question it must be a philosophical and physiological possibility that death is exactly what it appears to be: The End.
However, that isn’t the conclusion the Bible draws. After having entered into the growing awareness of his own mortality, David ended Psalm 39 with a plaintive plea: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears!” (Psalm 39:12) The superscription says that Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses. In its last verse, the Psalm states, “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands” (90:17). In the penultimate statement of his last chapter, Koheleth declares, “The end of the matter; it has all been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (12:13).
Nor would Brahms allow death to have the last word. After the baritone soloist and the chorus have voiced the leery look at longevity by asking, “Now, Lord, O what do I wait for?”, the basses, and then the tenors, and then the altos, and then the sopranos begin the glorious fugue, “My hope is in Thee. But the righteous souls are in the hand of God, nor pain nor grief shall nigh them come.” The triumphant words catapult from one section of the choir to another, leading to the final big crescendo when every voice is at the greatest and most glorious limit of its volume.
Brahms composed his Requiem as his response to the death of his mother. In so doing he was working through the intimations of his own mortality as well as that of his mother. For many, the conclusion is that there is no immortality, that death is simply the final cessation of life. A few of you believe that, I know, because you have told me so. I certainly do not fault you or scold you for holding fast to such a belief. After all, it is one of only two possible conclusions.
However, the Bible, especially the Greek Bible, the New Testament, goes with the second conclusion. Death is not the end. It does not have the last word. God has a longevity for us beyond our earthly longevity. What it is or where it is or how it is is pure speculation, and I have long since given up even trying to imagine it. Nevertheless, that it is is one of the central points of Christian faith.
Eternal longevity could be nothing other than wishful thinking. Or it could be the very essence of biblical faith and the Good News of Jesus Christ. If and when you are about to enter into your own Psalm 39 or Psalm 90 or Book of Ecclesiastes, think hard about the two possibilities. There are, and always have been, only two. God will be with you whichever choice you make. But I think you’ll face whatever is coming with greater peace of mind if you opt for longevity beyond longevity. Or, as Johannes Brahms said in the next movement of his Requiem, Section IV, “How lovely is Thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts!”