Sermon:  "You Turn Us Back to Dust, O God"
Date:   October 23, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson: Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

On the front page of the local section of last Monday’s L.A. Times, there was an article about how three churches in Seal Beach addressed the Salon Meritage massacre that occurred on October 12:  First United Methodist, St. Anne’s Roman Catholic, and Grace Community Church.  At the latter, Pastor Don Shoemaker, also the chaplain for the Seal Beach Police Department and an early-responder, scrapped his planned liturgy and had the congregation read responsively from Psalm 90:  “You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning…”  Imagine my surprise, that same Monday afternoon when I sat down to do my homework planning this service, to discover that the appointed psalm for this Sunday was Psalm 90.

How often I have read that at funerals or memorial services, especially for those who have lived a rich, long life.  Verse 10 affirms:  “The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong…”  Or, in the poetic cadence of the King James Version, “threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength fourscore years…”  I’ve officiated at 358 funerals, memorials and graveside services, and that is a meaningful verse to read for those who outlived the biblically allotted years.  Looking back over my records, I see people from this church who lived to be 100, 92, 99, 93, 98, 95, and many more.  There are lots of things to say about people who have lived through so many changes in nine or ten centuries, left a legacy, had children, grandchildren, great grandchildren.

But what of those who do not?  What about those whose lives are cut off in their prime, or even before?  I’ve done a service for a stillborn infant and the three-day-old son of our dearest friends.  I was here a year when I did the service for a 17-year-old, who was offroading in the desert in his BMW convertible, without seatbelts.  A 15 year-old suicide; another 17 year-old—again, a tragic car accident.  My first brush with early death as a minister came 36 years ago, when I was called on to officiate at a dual funeral for 23 and 26-year-old brothers, who were killed driving drunk on a curvy rural road.  Think that was bad?  I also had to acknowledge that they had had two other brothers similarly killed.  It was a very somber occasion for that family—four sons dead.  And then there was the 56 year-old-woman in my last church who fell to her death at midnight one New Year’s Eve from a ravine in a closed state park.  The family was adamant that I not mention or even suggest suicide.

More recently, we are faced with a host of tragic and unexpected deaths, many of them from shootings.  Innocent children killed on the streets of Long Beach, caught in gang crossfire.  Melody Ross at Wilson High School.  Gabrielle Giffords was one of nineteen shot, six of them killed by a deranged gunman in Tucson in January.  And just eleven days ago, eight killed and one wounded by another mentally unbalanced man in nearby Seal Beach.

There is something monumentally upsetting about lives that are so quickly, thoughtlessly, needlessly snuffed out.  It makes one realize that there is a frailty to human life.  Whenever I hear of a fatal Sig-alert in the morning, I think to myself, ‘That person set out for work or school today, fully expecting to return home tonight.  But it is not to be.’  So too was it with the patrons in the Seal Beach hair salon on October 12. 

The ancient psalmist realized that our human life is a fleeting moment in the greater scope of God’s timelessness.  As the hymn-writer Isaac Watts centuries later wrote:  “A thousand ages, in thy sight, are like an evening gone; short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”  For God, a thousand years are like three hours!  The verses I quoted after the sermon title in the worship bulletin—“You turn us back to dust…  You sweep [our days] away…like grass that is renewed in the morning…”—these words emphasize human frailty and finitude.  Yet to make sense of our brief time on earth, be it a few decades or ten, our days and years are not simply moments to be endured on the way to oblivion; our efforts are not simply fleeting and futile.  Because God is eternal and faithful and eternally faithful in turning toward humanity, our allotted time becomes something meaningful, purposeful, joyful, enduring.

As tragic at the deaths at Salon Meritage were, the obituaries, the media coverage, the newspaper articles quoting family and friends, all affirm what those persons contributed to life.  They were loving daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, grandmothers, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, grandfathers.  We read of the ways they spent time with their families, what they accomplished in life in their educations, their careers, their travels.  Each and every one of their lives made a difference to all of those with whom they came into contact.

To be sure, the opening verses of Psalm 90 confront us starkly with the shortness of our life span here upon the earth.  Yet it calls us to entrust ourselves and our allotted time to God with the assurance that, grounded in God’s work and God’s time, our lives and labors participate in the eternal.  The gospel-writer John quotes Jesus as saying, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (3:16-17)  Trusting in God’s forgiving love results in “eternal life.”  Psalm 90 is an act of hope.  Without having to see it happen, the psalmist trusts that God can and will satisfy and make glad the works done in God’s name:  “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.” (v. 14-15)  Psalm 90 is also an act of love.  Just as we look back upon our ancestors, both those we have known and those whom we’ve only heard about, the psalmist’s trust puts him in communion with past generations who have found a dwelling place in God and with future generations, the children, to whom the work of God will be manifest. 

To the psalmist, sin and death are inevitable realities.  Today, evil and revenge lurk in the hearts of gang members who mete out retaliation on our streets.  Deranged and confused thoughts cloud the minds of those who shoot and kill innocent people to satisfy their grudge and anger.  Sad to say, we will never understand, solve nor eliminate such things.  Yet if sin and death are certain, so is forgiveness and life!  Psalm 90 is a profession of faith that invites us and instructs us to live the only way it makes any sense whatsoever to live—in faith and in hope and in love.  The words of the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr provide an excellent summary of the good news of Psalm 90:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;

therefore we must be saved by hope. 

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense

in any immediate context of history;

therefore we must be saved by faith. 

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;

therefore we are saved by love. 

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe

as it is from our standpoint. 

Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

                               --Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History,

(New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952) 63.

The funeral or memorial service is not a witness to human mortality, though our loved one has died, to be sure.  Rather, it is a witness to the redemptive power of God.  The psalmist was empowered to entrust life and future to God, which is what the power of the resurrection invites Christian believers to do.  The psalmist trusted that God’s redeeming love was greater than human sinfulness and the transitory nature of life—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust” we say as we return to God what we have used in this life.  The resurrection assures us, in the words of the apostle Paul, that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Romans 8:8)  Or, as they hymn writer Henry F. Lyte penned a century-and-a-half ago, “in life, in death, O God, abide with me.”