Transcript

Remember now your creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the ears draw an eye when you will say, I have no pleasure in them before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are dark, and then the clouds return after the rain and the grasshopper drags itself along. And desire fail Come next spring to be exact, the last Sunday night in May, 1982, I will commemorate the 35th anniversary of, of a ceaseless attempt to rid myself of this text. It attached itself to my soul at High School Baccalaureate service, you usually don't pay attention to what is said on those occasions, but I was especially vulnerable because I had, in the months proceeding, become more intentional and serious about the Christian faith. And had with scripture and prayer been wrestling with the decision about ministry, and so I was ripe for the reading of the text, and this is the text that was read. I think I would have been free of it if the minister on that occasion had taken some time to explain it. Because I have, as you know, you have two on certain occasions been punctured by a biblical text. Then to have the explanations of the preacher diffuse it and scatter its power and you go away feeling okay, but he didn't explain it. He emphasized being confronted with a small cadre of. 18, 17-year-old gave attention only to the first part of the verse. Remember, now you're creator in the days of your youth made no comment about the evil days that come. And so it just lay there like a threatening cloud on the horizon of all his comments. And it moved around in the caverns of my soul. Like some tune that lingers with you after a concert. And you don't know why that tune, but it just hangs there and you whistle it, you hum it, and you try to scatter it and get rid of it, and it comes back. And on the way home, I said to myself, well, it's just a preacher trick. He wants us to remember God in the days of our youth, and he scares us into such recollections with all that frightening business before the evil days come. I had grown accustomed to those tricks in my own church. The ministers tried to frighten us into the arms of God, and with some success, I've had many a night spoiled by a minister's penetrating questions like. When Jesus comes again, do you want him to find you in a drive-in movie? And I put this in the same category thinking that I would when I got home, having saved the bulletin of the service, find that text and read it. 'cause you know, sometimes when something bothers you and irritates you, disturbs you. The best way to rid yourself of it is not to try to get away, but to draw closer so that it may be seen for what it really is, and in the light of understanding it's over. So I thought I'll draw near the text myself and read it, and I did. It did not go away. And then began through the years, a long series of efforts, none successful, really to shake myself free of this. Passage logically, that was the way to go. It's illogical. Remember, you're creator when you're young because when you get older, all the factors that work against religion will weigh you down and turn you from God. That doesn't make any sense. The point is you're not religious when you're young and when you get old in life as a burden, you begin to open the good book and think of Heaven and Hall. The passage is backwards, I said, and it came back like a boomerang. Still there. Philosophically it's foreign to me. It makes no sense. In Western culture, this thing is built on a cyclical view of life. We believe life is linear, has beginning, has in, has meaning, progression, purpose, conclusion. And this is built on that. Oh, depressing. In melancholy cycle clouds returning after the rain and there's a time for everything under heaven. And the rain comes down and goes in on the land and runs into the river into the sea, and the sun draws it up and down. It comes and on and on. Just ceaseless and dull and depressing. I said that's cyclical view. Nobody believes that. If you do believe that, the passage makes sense. You remember your creator when you're young because you see when you're young, your soul has just fresh from come from God. In the great cycle, you just come from God. That's why small children can talk of God in Jesus. So naturally they just came from there. They were friends. But after you've been here a while and mowed the grass and made some debts and bought a car and got married and taken a few courses and made a few bad grades, you forget when you come. And so before the evil days come, the child is father of the man. Of course, our life's beginning comes from elsewhere. Of course, it's that old cyclical business. Wordsworth again, I got rid of it here. It came. Oh, in the course of those years, I sandbagged this thing, protected myself against this passage by those that were read a moment ago. The honor man is decaying, the inner man's being renewed day by day, said, Paul, this light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory while we look to the things that are not seen. The earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved. We have an eternal habitation with God. I sandbag myself against Ecclesiastes 12 with all the beautiful affirmations of life, eternal, even a little poetry come grow old along with me. The best is yet to be the end of life for which the first was made. It didn't work. Oh, there was a time, of course, I was like everyone else, when the juices of life are full and the sap is rising, you don't pay a lot attention to passages like this. And there were long periods of time, years in which I just drove this underground and made it live under the fresh free flow of all my natural appetites. Who's concerned about, it's impossible that evil days come. I could not imagine. I could not imagine in the vigor of my youth. That anybody would ever reach a point in life when they would say, I have no pleasure, desire is gone. It seemed absolutely impossible that that moment could ever come. Or temporarily, yeah, temporarily. People who grieve the loss of husband, the loss of wife, there will never be anyone else I will never love again. There is an emptiness there never to be filled. My life will never be anything. Again, but with the passing of time, the dull ache sinks into boredom, and then the boredom is stirred and there's a twitch and a twinkle, and possibly someone else temporarily. Of course, if you've ever surfed from just enjoying too much for too long something. You're just worn out with the enjoyment of it. Then there is momentarily a loss of desire when the magnificence of life's promise is lost in the poverty of its achievement and you think, well, I've, I've just had too much chocolate pie. I'll stale flat and taste this, seem all the uses of this present world after you have used it too much, but the desire comes back. The desire comes back. Life is too tenacious. Life is of the very quality, so strong, so tenacious, so unrelenting. Then it refuses to let appetite die. Life can squeeze from the simplest, most barren moment, just a little bit of juice. You remember reading about the Jewish women? In those compounds and places like Auschwitz going out to work every morning, these old Jewish women on cardboard shoes, frozen ground with no tools but fingernails, digging the dirt, carrying it in their aprons, out to build roads for the Nazis, every day worse than dead. And yet one of them wrote what kept me alive during those long and frozen days. Was passing a house on the way to work and on the way in for in the evening, passing a house that had a window box with a tulip blooming could survive on that. Yeah. She said, when I learned that that house and that tulip belonged to one of the storm troopers. I prayed, God, please kill in me everything that's tender, everything sensitive to beauty and love, and make me one callous so I can survive without pain kept alive by tulip. I read some time ago, I guess you did in the Atlanta Sunday Magazine thing about Jack Abbott, who had spent some time in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, released through the efforts of Norman Mailer because of his, his skills as a writer, but released too soon. Apparently, Jack Abbott there he was many times over a killer. Who bragged of his artistry with a long knife, but said in Atlanta, strolling in the compound. Sometimes over the tall gray walls of the penitentiary I would get in certain late afternoons, the smell of peach blossom and magnolia and it all may almost made me someone else. It just seemed to me for a long time, it's impossible that anybody could say, autobiographically desire is gone. I have no pleasure in life. Never, finally, never. Finally, temporarily. Maybe. Never. Finally, if it were to be true, finally. It would come very close to what our fathers in the church called One of the seven deadly sins. It was translated years ago. Sloth. Terrible translation. Sloth. What's a sloth? A three toothed animal that moves along. What's a sloth? Lying too long in the bath Water. What's slot bad Translation. The word all for. It means I don't care apathy. I don't care to say that I have no pleasure, no zest, no appetite in life is to say I can look out upon the world and say it means nothing to me. A snow flake falls upon a little freckled nose and I say, Hmm. A white face calf stands on wobbly legs for the first time beside its mother. Huh? A little boy laughing. Rolling in the straw with a frisky puppy who cares. Grapes and dripped clusters hanging heavy from the arbor. So what shocks of grain standing like sentinels keeping Watch over sleeping pumpkins below. When you've seen them once you've seen it all. I have no pleasure in life at all. Now, you know, and I know that a little bit of this does happen, a little bit of the darling of the edge of desire and appetite and zest one spto does kind of fade at times. Part of it is natural. You find it in the educational process. The bright-eyed, exciting moment is the moment of discovery, but you discover and you discover and you discover, and then you master it. You master it, and you master it. And somehow when you replace discovery with mastery, there is a loss. Have you noticed those of you who've mastered all your subjects? Have you noticed the laws? Some people discover that when they master something, their interest in it fades. That may be true. Part of it. I think this loss of appetite, part of it I think is providential. How else could we survive if we did not develop just a little hardness? You remember holding the baby? You remember that soft spot in the head? And you could put that soft spot to your cheek, just a little smooth place of fuzz and hear the heart beat. It was soft and the heart was beating in the head. What would happen if there were not s skull and scalp could not survive. You have to have that. Otherwise we would be driven absolutely insane. Sitting around listening to squirrel heartbeats and listening to the grass grow. We have to be insensitive to a certain extent to survive. It's the providence of God and sometimes there is this loss of appetite gradual, just partial because of the way things happen. It happens to you. It happens to me that things in which we have great interest and regard them as enterprises of great pith and moment, great importance, and then something extraordinarily significant happens and all of our best endeavors just pale into insignificance. It happened the other morning. I had gotten excited about an alternate translation of Philippians one, three. I thank God for all your LEC recollection of me, or is it? I thank God for all my recollection of you. I was working with that very, very big important matter and was excited about it, and the phone rang, I suppose you haven't heard that Anwar Sadat is dead, and I looked at that little Greek expression and said, who cares? Walk around the room. See all my books just blow in their ashes in the heap. What difference does it make? What difference does all the little things you do? I remember in Wichita the night they said, stand up and lecture on the Bible, but first there is an announcement. What's the announcement we've just received? Word? Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I looked at my lecture. Like a child's bank, nothing but pennies and nickels, and I was sick of it. So sometimes just matters of such importance cause a pall, of insignificance to cover our work. Remember your creator while you're young, before the evil days come. It's not talking about death. Guess you know it's talking about death. It's not talking about death. If it were just a matter of talking about death, we could handle that. Even young people deal with that could handle that. I suppose every one of us here could sit in a small group and discuss death and handle the mist in the face, the fog in the throat, the pounding of the surf against the rocks as you curl your toes over the edge. We can handle that. I can handle the flap of the condor wing. Yeah, it's not death. It's dying. It's dying. The doors on the windows, the windows are shut on the street, the doors are closed. It's a description and a beautiful metaphor. A description of getting old, getting old, the loss of sight, the loss of hearing. The loss of speech, the loss of one's ability to control the functions of the creature, the loss of dignity, and this once vibrant frame that stood facing the wind and said, come on now, just bones wrapped in blue veins gasping once more when the family sits. Helplessly helpful. It's the dying. Why is it in the Bible you, Jews? Why? Of all the beautiful things I've read that you wrote, you wrote some beautiful things and you put this in the Bible and the Jews said it states, okay, Christians, here's your chance. Throw it out. You don't have to keep all that Jewish business. Throw it out. Okay. Church, what do you say? And the church said with one voice, it stays. Why? I don't know. I don't know. I, I, sometimes I think this stays in there because the Bible is so brutally honest that it built in its own self-critical faculties. And does not allow cheap and simple answers to stand without objection. This passage stands in the Bible, perhaps as one hand raised, saying one more question, just when the group is all ready to agree. I think this passage may sit there in the corner grumbling while the rest of us are reciting little Jesus jingles and grumbling in the corner. I think it may be in there just a heckle. The preacher who keeps feeding the saints the same old porridge , I think it may be in there to caution those who think by grinning, they're going to make it Easter. And take a diet of small dishes of soft grace and then complain that they're hungry. I think maybe, I think it may be in there just to remind us that if you are going to confess faith in God, remember, it may be in your setting a minority opinion and there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. Do you have the courage of your confession? Maybe. I remember reading about the rabbis who got together with one sober assignment to prove that there is no God they'd had it. The tact that we're taking is to prove from the history of the Jews there is no God. They had a lot of evidence. Having their gines spat upon, chased out of country after country stomped 6 million killed. There is no God. The history proves it. There's no God. The history proves it, and they move through argument, light and great and greater and greatest. And moving to swift conclusion, there is no God proven by our own history. And as they approached the conclusion, one of the rabbis interrupted the session by saying, gentlemen, we'll have to finish this later. It is time for our prayers.