Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Fourth Sunday of Lent, Psalm Series, "Prophets of a future not our own," March 22, 2020.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Psalm Series, "Prophets of a future not our own," March 22, 2020.

A Lent 4 Psalm 90 BFC 2020

Psalm 90

March 22, 2020

Several years ago, you may remember seeing the “Pass It On” billboards about Randy Pausch. They read, “Wrote book on living while dying. Motivation. Pass it on.” I had no knowledge of Pausch before I saw those billboards. Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University who contracted pancreatic cancer that then spread into his liver. In August of 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis with three to six months to live.

He became most well-known for a lecture, after that terminal diagnosis, traditionally given at Carnegie-Mellon, hypothetically titled, “The Last Lecture.” “The Last Lecture” was so named because professors were asked to speak at the university as if it were the last lecture before they died. In a stirring speech titled, “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams,” that lasted well over an hour, Pausch’s last lecture was not so hypothetical.

In “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams,” he spoke of walls being put in our way not to prevent us from getting something but to determine how much we want whatever that something is. Pausch referenced his parents and the great childhood he had had because they were people who believed in fun and wonder no matter what their age. He showed slides of his dad on a roller coaster in his 80s and his mother lapping him on a go-cart track.

He spoke of how his mother and father carried with them a sense of humility. After his father’s death, Pausch’s mother discovered, in going through his father’s things, that he had earned the bronze star for valor in the Battle of the Bulge. She discovered this after 50 years of marriage. His mom encouraged that kind of humility every time Randy Pausch would remark how hard his Ph.D. work was, “Yes, honey, we know how you feel. At your age, your dad was fighting the Nazis.”

Here are the other lessons Pausch shared: Care more about your child’s creativity rather than proper place and fastidious cleanliness.

His parents also taught him to value people over things.

How to achieve your childhood dreams. Work and play well with others and have integrity. Help others. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. Loyalty is a two-way street.

You can’t get there alone.

In order to get others to help you, you must carry these things with you. Tell the truth. Be earnest. Apologize well. Show gratitude. Focus on others. Get a feedback loop and listen to it.

Work hard. Be good at something--it makes you valuable. Be prepared.

What he repeated throughout his lecture was to have fun. Have fun even while you are dying.

If you are going to do anything that is pioneering, Pausch said, you will take arrows in the back. Expect it. Act like it doesn’t matter. He owned a vest with arrows in the back of it to remind him of that truth.

You have to decide whether you will be a Tigger or an Eeyore, he said. You can spend time complaining or playing the game hard.[1]

Pausch died less than a year later in July 2008.

Psalm 90 begins with an attribution to Moses. Not that the psalm is authored by Moses, but implied within it is an encouragement to see the world from Moses’s point of view. Within the psalm are those overtures which make it clear why the name of Moses would have been invoked. Moses was the intercessor before God, who, when God’s anger and wrath were kindled against the people, stepped in, told God to take the long view, to take a step back, and remember that if these people are killed in the wilderness, the Egyptians will laugh. “Look,” they will say, Moses entreated the Almighty, “their God took them out to a hard and bitter land and then offed them. Who really wants to worship a God like that?” And so, the story goes, God relented.

In Psalm 90, the psalmnist recognizes the anger and wrath of God and how this leads to the transience of life. We are turned back to the adamah, the dust, the fertile topsoil. God’s anger and wrath undoes creation. We only have so many days.

Recognizing that reality, the plea is not to avoid the human condition. Rather, we are to count the days. It is to know that even Moses runs out of time. He never gets to the promised land. For what is the stretch of human life, like grass that will soon be swept away? We have 70 years, the psalmnist says, 80 if we are strong and hardy. Human time is not God’s time. So because your days are counted in trust with the everlasting purposes of God, they have meaning.

Verse 12, according to the New Revised Standard Version translation, reads, “So teach us to count our days so that we may have a wise heart.” Probably a better paraphrase of the Hebrew would be, “God, teach us to make each day count, to reflect on the fact that we must die, and so become wise.” Or another paraphrase, “Teach us to live day by day” or “one day at a time.” “In short, to receive our allotted time as a gift from God and to live our lives to the fullest every single day is what a ‘wise heart’ is all about.”[2]

Clearly, from the deep resonance people experienced with Randy Pausch’s last lecture, he had developed a wise heart. During his lecture, he even referred to the educational work he had done and said that he was much like Moses, the fruition of his work in virtual worlds as something he would not see in his lifetime. He would never get to see the completion of the work he had started.

That, in the end, is the major point of Psalm 90. In recognizing the transience of life, we gain a wisdom that allows us to make each day count. We invest in everlasting things, the things that God values, the things that cannot be accomplished in one lifetime. In so doing, we pray as Psalm 90 ends, that God would prosper, make last, the work of our hands. There is that word again from Psalm 1, “prosper”, to be about shalom—wholeness, connectedness, and peace.

Randy Pausch ends his lecture by saying the lecture was not really about how to achieve your dreams. That was a head fake. The lecture was about how to lead your life. It really wasn’t for his students. It was for his three children. His “last lecture” was about investing in something that was beyond the span of his short life.

My hope and prayer is that here and in your homes and in your community that is the church called Billings First Congregational Church, you have heard me saying again and again, “What’s your five year plan?” as a way of encouraging all of us to invest in a wider vision, an everlasting vision, that we might not just limp along surviving but thrive for years to come. In keeping with Randy Pausch, I share a prayer written by Ken Untener written to commemorate the life of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, one of my heroes in faith:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us . . .

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future that is not our own.[3]

May we plant ourselves, like a tree, by streams of God’s goodness, kindness, and justice. May God prosper the work of Billings First Congregational Church, even beyond each of our lives, from everlasting to everlasting. May we take the long view—so that we shall not be moved. Amen.