Psalm 90:1-6,10, 12-17: Numbering Our Days – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 7

“Teach us to number our days,” prays the psalmist, “that we may gain a wise heart.”

But what does it mean “to number our days”?

A good friend of mine has recently been reading the New York Times bestselling book called Being Mortal. The author of this book is a surgeon and a professor at Harvard Medical School by the name of Dr. Atul Gawande. And the book is a very frank physician’s description of what it is like for us, as human beings, to come to the end of life. It is a book about what it means to grow old, what it means for our bodies to wear down and to fail, and especially what it means to encounter the inevitable truth that we will all die. When my friend got about halfway through the book, he confessed to me, “You know, this book scares the heck out of me!”

I understand. What frightens my friend, what would frighten most of us, I suppose, about this book is right there in the book’s title Being Mortal. We are all mortal. We know that, of course, but we know it in the abstract. There is an old Jewish saying, “Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.” What can be frightening about this book is that the author makes us believe it, by forcing us to face the practical reality of being mortal, to face facts that we usually try to keep out of our minds: to face the truth that we are all aging, there’s no way around it, no way to stop it; that despite all the vitamins and exercise and healthy diets and strong medicines in the world, our minds and our bodies will ultimately decline and fail; that we will all eventually come to the end of our days, that, as the psalmist says, we will “fade and wither” like a flower, our frail hands will lose their grip on life, and we will slip into the darkness of death.

When we are young, most of us don’t think much about the end of life. It seems so far away that it doesn’t even seem real. It’s something that happens to other people—to old people–but it’s not a part of our experience, not our concern. But, of course, our youth eventually fades, and we do grow older. Even so, we may still try to pretend that we are somehow immune to the aging process, exempt from mortality, that it’s not happening to us. Beautiful young people on television and in the movies joke about old people, and the message is clear: to be “old” is an embarrassment, an insult, an outrage. So we make believe that we can somehow avoid it. “Seventy is the new fifty,” we say, lying to ourselves. Or as the commercials on TV reassure us, just a touch of color to take out the grey hair, and we’re “still in the game,” or just a dab of miracle facial cream to smooth out the wrinkles, and we can be as ageless as supermodel Cindy Crawford.

In one of Wallace Stegner’s novels, there is an elderly man who writes in his Christmas letter that when anybody asks him if he feels like an old man, he says, “No, no. I feel like a young man with something the matter with him.”[i] As we age and move inexorably toward life’s end, we can’t shake the feeling that there’s something the matter with us, something wrong about our mortal journey. To be old, we fear, is to be nearing the end, the end of our attractiveness, the end of our usefulness, the end of our strength, the end of our health, the end of our life.

“Teach us to number our days,” says the psalmist, “that we may gain a wise heart.” But what does it mean “to number our days”?

One answer to that question comes to us from modern medicine. For scientific medicine, what it means to number our days is essentially to count them…and then to make that number as large as possible–to postpone aging and death and to extend the length of life as far as we can. Historians tell us that the average citizen of the Roman Empire could expect to live a little less than 30 years. But today, medical science–through antibiotics and surgical breakthroughs, improved hygiene and nutrition–has made it possible for the average North American to live almost three times that long. And there is no reason to think, as we move into the future, that modern medicine will not be able to “number our days” with higher and higher numbers, longer and longer lives.

We should be grateful, of course, for these advances in medicine. Children who a century ago would have died from smallpox or been paralyzed by polio now do not have to fear these diseases. Men and women who would have had their lives cut short by tuberculosis now may live long and productive lives. And we can pray that someday the ravages of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases will also be a thing of the past.

So one way to “number our days” is to count them and to try to make the number larger and larger. But notice that the psalmist prays to God to “teach us to number our days that we may gain a wise heart,” not simply that the number will get bigger, but rather “that we may gain a wise heart.” In other words, the psalmist reminds us that when we look at life through the eyes of faith, the goal is not simply the quantity of life, but the quality of life–the depth and breadth and height of life, not just its length. What makes life good is not just longevity, not just living more and more days, but becoming a certain kind of person, a person whose heart is wise before God.

And it is right at this point that our faith must raise a provocative challenge to modern medicine. While people of faith join with all others in giving thanks for the many ways that medicine gives us strength and health and freedom from unrelenting pain, what must be challenged is the false idea that the only way to seek a good life is the never-ending quest for more of it, for more and more days, for longer and longer lives. And lying just beneath the surface of this medical quest for unending life is the false promise, the science fiction dream, even the idolatrous claim, that science and medicine will one day give us immortality, that someday medicine will genetically engineer death out of the human equation–the dream that human beings on biological grounds can live forever and that living forever would be a good thing.

Our quest for immortality, for a life that just goes on and on forever, is actually based on fear, a fear of running out of time. A thirty-year-old man who was dying of leukemia was having an urgent conversation with his doctor: “I don’t think I am afraid of death,” he said. “What I am really afraid of is the incompleteness of my life.” When the essayist Anatole Broyard was dying, he wrote, “I want to be a good story [for my doctor].” Down deep, that is what all of us fear, that we are incomplete, that the story of who we are supposed to be is never finished. Indeed, fear comes from believing that there is not enough to go around, not enough to finish the story. Not enough time, not enough joy, not enough strength, not enough love, not enough nourishment, not enough me, not enough grace. We are afraid that we are running out of time; and when the end comes, there will only be nothingness–darkness, an empty hall, a bare table, and an unfinished story. And so we turn in desperation to medicine, pleading, “Give me more time. Give me endless days. Don’t let me die. Don’t let my life be incomplete.” “What I am really afraid of,” said the dying man, “is the incompleteness of my life.”

But medicine cannot give us immortality, and it cannot even give us a sense of the completeness of life. It can only, at best, postpone the inevitable, prolong life a few more days, a few more months, a few more years. Only God can give us a sense of completeness; and because God is one who gives us completeness, from the point of view of faith, it is actually good news that we are not immortal. When we acknowledge that we are mortal–temporary, provisional, unfinished, incomplete–when we gain the deep knowledge that we are limited in days and incomplete in ourselves, this can draw us ever closer to the God who is immortal and who brings our life to completion. That is what the psalmist means when he prays, “Teach us to number our days that we gain a wise heart.” Teach us to number our days so that we will gain the wisdom of knowing that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

That is also why the first word of Easter, the first word from the risen Christ, is “Do not be afraid.” The risen Christ is saying to us, “You are so anxious and fearful about how your life will end. But do not be afraid. This is how it ends…in resurrection. To belong to me is to be given the gift of an ending to life that you could never achieve in your own power, that no earthly physician can provide, no medicine can produce–the gift of being gathered in glory and joy into the eternal life of God. That is how it ends. So, do not be afraid.”

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney died two years ago at age 74. After collapsing on a Dublin street, he was rushed to a hospital and then taken into the operating suite, where unfortunately he died before surgery could take place. Minutes before he died, Heaney, the poet who loved and mastered language, communicated his very last words on this earth in a text message sent to his wife, Marie. Two words in Latin: “Noli timere,” which means, “Do not be afraid.” Heney learned these words from Jesus, learned them from the story of Easter, “Do not be afraid.” Heaney was raised in the Catholic Church, but he had his quarrels with the church and even with the faith. Nevertheless, there at the end of his life, these old words came back to him. His mortality drew him toward God, toward the promise that our restless lives find their rest in God and that we are surrounded by the promise of God’s grace. So, “noli timere do not be afraid.”

The choir in the church where my family worships has a wonderful and unusual custom. Whenever a member of the congregation is admitted to hospice care and is facing the last few days of life, the choir will go to the hospice to sing to them, to sing the great anthems of faith. This singing is a comfort, yes, but it is more than that. It is a confession of faith that we are surrounded in life and in death by the gospel story, that we do not bear the burden of making our own lives complete. We can be content, even comforted, in our mortality, in our incompleteness, because the completion we desire in life has been provided as a gift from God, the God who was there at the beginning and will be there at the end.

Years ago, a friend of mine was in the hospital dying of cancer. Near the end, she called her pastor and said, “I have been reading the Bible, the place in the Book of James where it says if you are sick, you should call the elders of the church for prayer and anointing with oil. I’d like you to come to the hospital and do that for me.” Her pastor seemed to hesitate, and my friend asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems a little like magic, anointing you with oil. I practice ministry, not magic.”

My friend became angry. “Look,” she said to her pastor, “I am dying. I know I am dying. I will probably die in the next few days.”

“Then why do you want to be anointed with oil?” he asked.

“Because it will remind me of my baptism,” she said. “It will let me know that the Christ who was there for me in the beginning will be standing with me at the end. The Christ who is my alpha will also be the Christ who is my omega.” And so it was, that a few days before she died, her pastor and some others from the church came to the hospital to anoint her and to remind her of her baptism and to assure her that in life and in death she was complete and made whole in the grace and mercy of God.

When the well-known Jewish author and neurologist Oliver Sacks turned 80 years old, he wrote an essay in the New York Times about his life and what he saw ahead of him. At 80, Sacks was still strong and productive, and he wrote, “I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever ‘completing a life’ means.”[ii] Sacks had no way of knowing that only two years later, he would have received a diagnosis of terminal cancer and that his body would be weakening and failing by the day. But Sacks had been given, I would say by God’s grace, a heart of wisdom; and just a few months before his death, he wrote another essay in the New York Times. This time, though, he knew he was dying, knew he was mortal, and he was not talking about completing his life, but about the Sabbath. “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath,” he wrote, “the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”[iii]

The Sabbath, of course, is God’s gift to us—not our achievement, but God’s gift. Six days shall we labor and do all our work, but the Sabbath, the seventh day, the completion of all things, the end of all things, is pure grace, pure gift.

So whether you are in the springtime of your life or the winter, the first day of your life’s week or the sixth day, whether you are young or old, whether you are in full strength or your body is failing, whether you are at the beginning or nearing the end, noli timere, do not be afraid. Grace is infinite. God is love. The Sabbath banquet is set and waiting. So number your days, confident that when you come to the end, the risen Christ will be there to receive you, to say to you, “You are home now. You have a place at the table. There is plenty to go around.”

Note: The Rev.  Dr. Tom Long’s sermon is part 7 of 8 in a series on Faith & Science from Day1. For more information about the series and a transcription of a conversation between Rev. Long and Peter Wallace of Day1, see this link.