Transcript

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth before the evil days come. The years draw nigh when you will say, I have no pleasure in them, before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain. The grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails. Come next spring, to be exact, the last Sunday night in May 1982, I will commemorate the 35th anniversary 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 preceding 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 right 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, then punctured by a biblical text, then to have the explanations of the preacher defuse it and scatter its power and you go away feeling okay. But he didn't explain it. He emphasized being confronted with a small category of 18, 17-year -olds, gave attention only to the first part of the verse. Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth. May 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 ministers 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 because, 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 your 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 and life is a burden, you begin to open the good book and think of heaven and all. 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. It has beginning, has end, has meaning, progression, purpose, conclusion, and this is built on that depressing and melancholy cycle, clouds returning after the rain, and there's a town for everything under heaven, and the rain comes down and goes on the land and runs into the river into the sea, and the sun draws it up and down, and it comes on and on, just ceaseless and dull and depressing. I said that 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 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 gotten 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, and of course, it's that old cyclical business worth again. I got rid of it. Here it came. All in the course of those years, I sandbagged this thing, protected myself against this passage by those that were read a moment ago. The outer 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 sandbagged 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 were full and the sap is rising. You don't pay a lot of 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? It's impossible that evil days come. I could not imagine, I could not imagine in the figure 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. Oh, temporarily, yeah, temporarily. People who agree, 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 surfaced it 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 just had too much chocolate pie. I'll stay you 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 that it refuses to let appetite die. Life can squeeze from the simplest, most bare 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 the evening, passing a house that had a window box with a tulip blooming. Could survive on that? 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 callus so I can survive without pain. Kept alive by a 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 skills as a writer but released too soon, apparently. Jack Abbott, there he was many times over a killer who brightened up 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 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 bathwater, what's a sloth, bad translation, the word Arcadia, Arcadia 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 snowflake falls upon a little freckled nose and I say hmm. A white-faced calf stands on wobbly legs for the first time beside its mother, hmm, a little boy laughing, rolling in the straw with a frisky puppy, who cares, grapes and dew-dripped clusters hanging heavy from the arbor, so what, sharks of grain standing like sentinels keeping watch over sleeping pumpkins below, hmm, 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 dulling of the edge of desire and appetite and zest. One spiserinctum 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, 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 loss? Some people discover that when they master something they're interested 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 heartbeat. It was soft and the heart was beating in the head. What would happen if there were not skulls and scalp could not survive? You have to have that. Otherwise we would be driven absolutely insane sitting around listening to squirrel heart beats and listening to the grass growl. 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 in 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 1-3. I thank God for all your 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 and the heat. What difference does it make? What difference does all these little things you do? I remember in Wichita all 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 shocked. I looked at my lecture like a child's bank, nothing but pennies and nickels. Now I was sick of it. So sometimes just matters of such importance cause of all 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 can 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, you know, 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 isn't 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 stays. 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. 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 to 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're 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 tactic we're taking is to prove from the history of the Jews there is no God. They had a lot of evidence having their gabardine spat upon chased out of country after country stomped six million guild. 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 approach the conclusion one of the rabbis interrupted the session by saying gentlemen we'll have to finish this later. It's time for our prayers.