Flint New Funding
United Methodists in Flint, Mich., have been providing bottled water to residents fearful of the city's contaminated public water system. The Rev. Bill Steward advocates we pursue helping others like this as the best way to "number our days."
Psalm 90: 12-17 Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Oct. 14, 2018
So teach us to number our days that we might get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90: 12)
This week this preacher has chosen to take a reprieve from the Gospel of Mark's relentless run-up to the cross by mulling over a Common Lectionary alternative text: Psalm 90:12-17.
My motivation came from Bari Weiss's Sept. 17 New York Times article, "A Dress Rehearsal for Our Deaths."
Therein Ms. Weiss reports that she and millions of Jews around the world will observe Yom Kippur. (Sept. 18-19)
They "will abstain from eating and drinking and making love, since corpses can do none of these things. They will utter a variation of the confessional that they will say on their death beds. And many of them will wear white, like the shrouds they will be buried in.
"Most people, including many Jews, think of Yom Kippur as a 25-hour caffeine headache capped off by a lox-and-bagels binge. It's undeniably that.
"But it is also, at its deepest level, a dry run..the one day of the year when we Jews are asked to look our mortality in the face" – and so number our days."
Ms. Weiss then announced the availability of the app WE CROAK which pings 5 times/day with the message: "Don't forget, you're going to die."
I'm sure John Wesley was aware of his mortality without this app. He lived among the poor, the burdened, the exploited workers, none of whom had to be digitally reminded that the grimmest reaper could make an unannounced visit at any time. He and his people had more pressing things on which to dwell.
John Wesley suggested as much in his Historic Questions that are still asked of all UM ordinands. This last one is the most fearsome:
Will you observe the following directions? a) Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be trifingly employed. Never trifle away time...
Don't you think John would have thought that obsessing about our deaths 5 times/day was a way of trifling away time?
No trifler was John. To the end he lived to relieve the suffering around him.
Methodist lore records that John walked around London in winter snow and slush begging door-to-door for coats for poor children when in his 80s and wrote on his death bed the last of a voluminous lifetime of letters to British abolitionist Wilbur Wilberforce: "Go on. In the name of God...till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it."
I believe John would tell us: Go to an Ash Wednesday or Yom Kippur service (one such service/year is enough), number your days – then get on with our real work of justice, mercy and love.
In this way, too, we gain hearts of wisdom.
"O God, let your favor be upon us and establish the work of our hands – O establish the work of our hands! (Psalm 90: 17)
The Rev. Bill Steward is a retired clergy member of the Iowa Annual Conference.