We Lift Our Lives Series

October 13, 2024

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

Psalm 90:1-12; Philippians 1:21-26; Matthew 6:25-34

We Lift Our Lives

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

We lift our lives.

Imagine there’s a bank that credits your personal account each morning with $86,400. However, it carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course!

Each of us has such a bank. Its name is time. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a loss, whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against “tomorrow.” You can only live in the present on today’s deposits. *

Each day comes as a gift. Our life is a precious gift. This life comes to us from the creator who imagined us into being, who foresaw the number of our days.

At night we go to bed and close our eyes. We fall asleep. Luther called sleep “the little death.” And then in the morning, we open our eyes, and it’s a miracle, another day of this beautiful life! If sleeping is a little death, then awakening is a little resurrection. Each day is a miracle, given to us from above. The gift of our lives back to God is, perhaps, the most fundamental offering we can make.

Our readings today all focus on the gift of time: our lives and our days.

Psalm 90 is the one psalm attributed to Moses. It’s a meditation on time. Moses draws a distinction between our limited, earthly time and God’s unlimited, eternal time. Before there was a world, there was God. Moses put it this way, “From everlasting to everlasting you are God.” This means that, if we were to look back in time, everlasting in the past tense means that God’s yesterdays are without end. There is no “Day One.” And looking to the future, it’s everlasting in that direction, too. There will always be a new day, a new tomorrow.

Because of that, God’s take on time is quite different than ours. Moses supposes that a thousand of our years are like no more than a day from God’s point of view.

It’s like that old joke: A man once asked God “God, what’s a million years to you?” And God said, “To me, a million years is like a second.”

Then the man asked God, “So, what’s a million dollars to you?" God replied, “Oh, it’s like a penny to me.”

The man considered that, and then he asked, “God?” “Yes, my child.” “Would you give me a penny?” And God answered, “Sure, just a second.”

But our perspective on time changes, too. Like, for instance, it blows my mind to think that 1984 was 40 years ago! How did that happen? It sure doesn’t seem like 40 years.

As the number of our remaining days grows shorter, our perspective on time and its value changes. People with serious health conditions, especially if they have something terminal, they come to value the gift of time like never before. Time is the most precious commodity we’re given.

Moses prays, “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart.”

“We lift our lives up to you, we are an offering.” All the days of our lives become a way we manifest our love and gratitude for God.

Linda Ellis wrote a poem called “The Dash.” It’s about the dash between the date of birth and date of death on our gravestones:

I read of a man who stood to speak at a funeral of a friend.

He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning… to the end.

He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears,

but said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth

and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not, how much we own, the cars… the house… the cash.

What matters is how we lived and loved and how we spend our dash.

So think about this long and hard; are there things you’d like to change?

For you never know how much time is left that still can be rearranged.