Meg Peery McLaughlin
“Marking Time”
August 18, 2024
Psalm 90
O God, may my words speak your truth.
And where they are lacking,
may your Spirit intercede that your good news would be known. Amen.
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.
The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger?
Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
So teach us to number our days that we may gain a wise heart.
Turn, O LORD! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us,
and as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Psalm 90 puts in our mouths a curious prayer. Teach us to number of days.
I’ll tell you, I didn’t exactly know how to mark time summer.
All of a sudden, no longer was Tuesday staff meeting,
or Wednesday worship meeting,
or Thursday morning at 10am the last possible moment to change my mind about a sermon title before the bulletin was printed.
This congregation gifted our family with a different kind of time.
Time to rest. Time to remember. Time to rejoice in being together.
I do not have adequate words for my gratitude.
Because our time was so different from our normal rhythms and routines,
I confess that sometimes the only way I knew what day it was—
was because of my daily pill organizer.
Teach us to number our days.
Now it’s late August, when some of you are in a count down —
UNC students, only one more sleep until classes start tomorrow.
My younger school friends, you have 8 more days.
You’ve got this!
Some of you parents have just driven away from dorm drop off
and – this is me projecting – but I’m guessing you thought of time—-
of how quickly the days pass.
That young adult waving their goodbye, ready to navigate life without you
was just a second ago the one who needed help tying their shoes.
Teach us to number our days.
And still for others, time doesn’t race, but crawls.
Days are on slo-mo as you wait for medical answers,
or as you answer the same question from a muddled mind for the 7th time in an hour, or as you dread the hours stretched out before you when there is so much grief to bear in every minute therein.
Teach us to number our days.
Our relationship with time is complex.
We can read all manner of books on time management,
be coached or guilted on how to savor it, save it, spend it.
But today we turn to God’s word on time.
To the song book of our mothers and fathers in faith,
Words they clung to and gifted to us.
Psalm 90 is so beloved that Isaac Watt’s hymn is one of the church classics.
I will say it got knocked out in round one of our UPC hymn bracket,
but only because it was up against Here I am Lord.
Watts paraphrases it so beautifully:
Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.
Church, this is indeed the truth of our faith.
God is our home.
Our constant.
Faithful in our yesterday.
Steadfast today.
Reliable tomorrow.
God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.
This is the truth. And it feels good to be able to say it.
Psalm 90 begins
Lord, you are our dwelling place in all generations.
From everlasting to everlasting you are, you are God.
Then immediately the whole vibe shifts, did you notice?
It’s like a Walter Brueggemann prayer I once heard. The scholar prays,
Holy God, Our first glimpse of reality this day – everyday – is your fidelity.
We are dazzled by the ways you remain constant among us
in season, out of season, for better, for worse, in sickness, in health.
You are there in watchfulness as we fall asleep.
You are there in alertness when we awaken, and we are glad.
But before the day ends,
We will have occasion to flag your absence in indifference.
Before the day ends,
We will think more than once that we need a better deal from you.
It’s almost as if Brueggeman had been reading this Word.
Almost as soon as Psalm 90 gets out its beautiful truth about God’s faithfulness.
It spits out another truth about our fragility, with barely a beat between.
It says right out loud that
our time here is fleeting,
our bodies, fragile
our world, fractured.
We are dust. Things all around us crumble.
This Psalm says right out loud that
whether by ignorance or intention
we’re consistently walking away from the way of God.
And who among us likes to live with the natural consequences of that?
And once more for the people in the back it says
Our years are full of toil and trouble, then they’re done.
Yea, that’s a truth that is not as fun to say out loud as the first one.
In fact, Naomi asked what I was preaching on and I told her a recap of the Psalm.
And she said, your first Sunday back and you’re going to stand up there
and tell them they’re all going to die?!?!
Twenty years ago this summer,
Jarrett and I were living the Blythe cottage across the street as your seminary interns.
Bob Dunham asked me to lead a session devotion on this Psalm.
I remember feeling a lot like Naomi.
I liked the first part, but wanted to cut out the whole middle of the Psalm.
Seemed like it would be nicer without all that.
I don’t remember what I said at all.
I likely resorted to singing that song from Rent, the musical —
which wouldn’t have been all that bad.
Perhaps I chickened out completely and picked a different text.
I refuse to go back to check the session minutes.
I just know the truth about human frailty and frustration
wasn’t something I was wise enough to name then.
Somehow it seemed okay to say God is our home.
But not okay to say we live within limits
and we’re actually not that good at accepting those.
I didn’t know how important it was to say both.
I didn’t know I could let one truth, sit right there next to another one.
Lord, you are our dwelling place in all generations.
Our years come to an end like a sigh.
You are home.
We are dust.
You hold all of time.
Our time is fleeting and precious.
But church, it is only after both of these truths are spoken together
that we ease into the final part that is our prayer:
Teach us to number our days.
Teach us to fully live the life you give, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Perhaps wisdom is knowing two things can be true at the same time.
Perhaps wisdom is living in that exquisite tension.
Teach us to number our days.
This summer I found a mentor in prayer, this prayer, not the form of the daily pill organizer, but in the form of a tree.
UPC’s mission partner in Costa Rica, Karla Koll, has a friend named Ken Miller,
who helped our family set up our amazing adventure.
Ken set us up with wonderful guides to teach us about Costa Rica’s different forests.
In the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, we were hiking around to a chorus of
bird songs, rain drops, and McLaughlin questions.
You can guess some of them, I’m sure.
Will there be a sloth?
Where will the sloth be?
How long will this take?
Are we there yet?
In an old growth section of the forest we stopped to take a picture in front of a giant tree and I asked, how old is this tree?
Well, our guide said, I can guess but I can’t exactly tell you.
Seemed an odd sentence for a biologist to say.
But here’s the thing.
If you cut down a tree here in North Carolina
You can count the rings in the trunks- in order to number that tree’s days.
The trees have growth spurts in the spring and summer,
then go dormant in the winter,
which correspond to the light and dark contrasting circles.
You can mark when all was going well and when growth stopped,
season after season.
But Costa Rica is in the tropics, close to the Equator, so there are no seasons.
If you cut down a tree there, no rings at all.
The tree is just alive.
It just grows.
It sends its roots wide, it’s trunk tall, it’s branches out.
That tree makes me wonder if instead of marking our time with clear rings:
this day I showed that fleeting time who was boss,
that one I sure was definitely like withering grass
this year I was aware of God’s faithfulness,
this other one I was pretty sure God had fled the scene.
What if we just lived with every ring blurred?
What if we integrated into every fiber of our beings
the faithfulness of God
and the fragility of life—both together, always—
and we rooted down and sprouted up and reached out?
God is our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
So, church, with these fragile days of ours, let us fully fully live!.