And Cast a Wishful Eye
I have let you see it with your eyes,
but you shall not cross over there.
(Deuteronomy 34:4b)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 22, 2006
(Volume 1 Number 18)
First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653
“I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not possess it.” Had God spoken these words to Frenchman Andre-Francois Raffray, they would have been full of painful irony. Forty-one years ago, in 1965, Andre-Francois acted on a dream, setting his eyes on the apartment he wanted to possess. Andre set out jubilant, filled with hope and promise. But, like Moses, Andre only saw his dream with his eyes, never possessing it.
I should explain. In 1965, Andre happened upon an extraordinary real estate bargain. It’s not uncommon in France for elderly people without heirs to enter into a contract called an en viager (for life) agreement. It’s simple. The elderly owner continues to occupy their own house while receiving a monthly payment from a buyer. In this way, the owner supplements their income without having to give up their house. The buyer has seen what they want eventually to possess, and has begun paying the price for it, but can’t possess it just yet. The interesting thing about an en viager agreement is that the contract is open-ended. The termination of the contract is not a total figure to be paid, but the death of the owner. In this legal agreement, the deed is transferred to the buyer at the owner’s death, even if death occurs after only a few payments. Theoretically it’s possible to buy a property for a tiny, tiny fraction of its market value.
In 1965, Andre-Francois was a forty-six year old French lawyer who found just such a deal. He saw with his eyes the apartment he wanted to possess, and gambled its elderly occupant wouldn’t live much longer. After all, in 1965 when the contract was drawn up the old woman was already ninety years old, born in 1875. As a child she had worked with her father in the downstairs shop, even remembered selling colored pencils to their famous neighbor, Vincent Van Gogh. She was fourteen when the Eiffel Tower was completed. “How much longer could she have?” Andre reasoned, in1965. “She is close to the Promised Land, and that means I am close to my Promised Land. It’s a deal that’s good for both of us, a win-win situation, a safe bet.”
So with confidence that the decision was a good one, the contract was drawn up. The woman was to receive $500 per month for the rest of her life and, whether making a few payments or a hundred payments, Andre-Francois would receive the property upon her death. Andre’s reasoning was sound. Surely he would be moving into his new apartment within the next few years. Why, even in the unlikely event the woman lived ten years, all the way to 100, he would have paid only $60,000, still less than the market value of the property. What a deal!
Well, as Yogi Berra said, “It’s not easy to make predictions, especially about the future.” The woman I’ve been talking about was Jeanne Calment, listed in Guiness Book of Records in 1997 as the oldest person in the world able to authenticate their age. She died at 122, causing genetic scientists to label her “the Michael Jordan of aging.” At 100 Jeanne was still riding her bicycle through her home town of Arles. What of Andre? Instead of moving into the apartment he had longed for and been working for these many years, he moved into a nursing home. On February 25, 1995, he opened a rather unusual 77th birthday card. It was from Jeanne Calment, then 120 years old. On the card she wrote, “Happy Birthday, Andre. I’m sorry I’m still alive.”
Andre died later in that, his 77th year. On the day Andre-Francois died, Jeanne, 120 years old, dined on foie gras, duck thighs, cheese, and chocolate cake. Andre had made 368 monthly payments ($184,000) on an apartment not worth half that amount, an apartment he was never able to live in. For all those years he could see the Promised Land with his eyes, but he was never able to take possession of it.
This week, as we feel the cool air and observe the brilliant coloring of the leaves, and as we prepare to turn our clocks back an hour this Saturday night, I’ve been thinking about Time, and how we seek to control Time. I thought of Psalm 90, a psalm of Moses which urges us to consider time. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it past, like a watch in the night. You sweep them away, they are like a dream.” Moses also reminds me of Jeanne Calment. At 120 Moses ascended Mt. Nebo for a panoramic view of the Holy Land – a place which, though promised, he would never possess. In the biblical story, Moses’ 120 years are divided neatly for us into thirds – 40 years in Egypt, 40 years in the obscurity of the wilderness, and 40 years as the deliverer of the Hebrews, wandering in the Sinai and the Trans-Jordan. So neatly into thirds, it is as if time itself were as much at Moses’ command as had been the waters of the Red Sea. At 120, he ascends Mt. Nebo with eyes unimpaired and vigor not dissipated. Time appears to be at his mercy.
Mt. Nebo rises majestically from the Transjordanian Plateau, just across the Jordan River from the ancient Canaanite city of Jericho. After forty years of wandering, the time had arrived for the Hebrews to possess the Promised Land. But they would do so without Moses, under the leadership of Joshua. Moses would indeed enter from that mountain a land of promise, but it would not be a land entered with feet dripping from Jordan’s waters. From Mt. Nebo Moses would hear a different trumpet call, and enter a better Promised Land.
The view from Mt. Nebo is stunning. Last year, in April 2005, about a dozen of our Holy Land group went on to Jordan, and there we ascended Mt. Nebo and shared the view that Moses saw nearly 3500 years ago. The ancient city of Jericho was there, had been there, in fact, for thousands of years prior to Moses (archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered in the ruins of ancient Jericho a tower fortification dating back 10,000 years!). Jericho lies to the west of Mt. Nebo, the West Bank, just across the Jordan River. From the heights of Mt. Nebo we could see the Jordan snaking its way to where it empties into the Dead Sea slightly to the south of Jericho. My sense was, as I stood on that peak where Moses stood. Looking down upon the Jordan River’s path to the Dead Sea, that I was standing over a map of the Holy Land, an etched drawing that is nothing if not surreal.
With such a view in his mind’s eye, it would not be long now. The Hebrews would cross the Jordan. Moses would not be among them. From Mt. Nebo, his eyes were treated once more to the sight of the land which he would never possess. Joshua and the Israelites would soon blow the shofar, the ram’s horn, signaling the conquest of Jericho, the Hebrew’s first penetration into Canaan. Moses would hear a different trumpet sound. “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more.” This is the shofar Moses would hear, signaling that time itself would now truly be conquered. Time shall be no more.
We all march toward that time when we, too, shall hear the trumpet of the Lord. In that journey, our scientifically oriented Western Civilization has made amazing advances in postponing the appointed time, as evidenced by our expanding life expectancies. We have adjusted the speed of our demise, the quest for the Fountain of Youth not without its successes, squeezing as much as possible out of these clay shells. Still, the fact remains, no matter how cleverly we learn to manipulate DNA, that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. If science can help us hold these particles of dust together longer, wonderful! Still, we must all one day enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Our reading of Psalm 90 addresses the issue of time in relation to our march toward the Promised Land. “For all our days pass away, our years come to an end like a sigh. The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong. Even then . . . they are soon gone and we fly away.” Our psalter confronts us with time’s relentless march – an entirely appropriate subject to explore as Autumn brings changing and falling leaves, and as we prepare to set the clocks back this Saturday night. What a delicious opportunity to “turn back the hands of time,” which gives us the illusion of gaining an hour, of controlling time.
Psalm 90 urges us to contemplate Time in relation to our lives and our journey toward dust. In our clock-studded society, contemplating Time shouldn’t be difficult. Time is never more than a glance away. It flashes on our bedside tables in the neon reds and greens by which we both begin and end our day. We hang it in elegant circumference on the walls of our homes. We strap it on our wrists and display it on our dashboards. We wedge it into the side bar of our computer screens. We set it into our TiVo so that even our technology can mark the time and entertain us upon command. We add it to our microwaves with a beeper, so as not to burn our hastily prepared meals. We program it into our cell phones so we can record the precise time of every missed call.
Yes, Time is ever with us. The psalmist segmented time into large chunks — days and years. We’ve become ever more adept at the task of partitioning time, dividing our days into ever smaller increments for more tightly scheduled tasks. More than the psalmist could have imagined, we will always know precisely what time it is. The Roman philosopher Titus Plautus, nearly 200 years before Jesus, cursed the technology that segmented time into a unit so brief as hours. “(May) the gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours. Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small portions!” Oh, dear Titus, how much more eloquent your complaint might have been could you have envisioned the atomic instruments which have now spliced and diced time into smaller portions than you might ever have believed possible.
An hour is sixty minutes. Light from our sun reaches earth in about eight of those. A minute is composed of sixty seconds. In a second you have a healthy person’s heartbeat, the time it takes Americans to eat 350 slices of pizza, and for the earth to zip thirty kilometers in its path around the sun. Nor are we nearly done slicing and dicing. One tenth of a second is the duration of the fabled “blink of an eye.” In a tenth of a second a hummingbird beats its wings seven times, and a tuning fork pitched to A above middle C vibrates four times.
We’ve hardly begun cutting and hacking the second. One millisecond divides the second into 1,000 parts. A millisecond is the shortest exposure time in a typical camera. A housefly flaps its wings once every three milliseconds. The moon travels around the earth two milliseconds slower each year as its orbit ever so gradually widens. And have you ever wondered what a jiffy is? Well, in the terminology of modern computer science, ten milliseconds equals a jiffy.
Nor are we yet done. A microsecond is one millioneth of a second. In a microsecond light travels the length of three football fields. Then the nanosecond, the billionth part of a second. In a nanosecond, light travels not quite a foot. The microprocessor inside your PC typically takes two to four nanoseconds to process a single instruction such as adding two numbers.
And finally (drum roll, please), the smallest unit of time yet measured with precision is the attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second! The most fleeting events scientists can clock are measured in attoseconds, researchers having created pulses of light lasting just 250 attoseconds using high-speed lasers.
Such splicing of time has something to say about our human desire to control time. Yet, we remain confused by time’s paradoxes. Time heals all wounds, we say, but time is also the great destroyer. Time flies and times crawls. Time races and time drags. It is our most precious, irreplaceable commodity, yet we confess we don’t know where it goes. We are always running out of time, always pressed for time. Time is as personal as the pace of your heartbeat, but as public as the clock tower in town square. If the sermon this morning intrigues you, time moves fast. But if the sermon bores you, time crawls on swollen knees toward the benediction.
The feature article in the December 2000 issue of Discover caught my eye. “Does time really exist? Why physicists secretly hope the passage of time is just an illusion.” Were you aware that one of the hottest topics of debate among theoretical physicists today is Time, some suggesting that the passing of time is illusory? I find it intriguing that the bible enticingly suggests the same, that (from a divine perspective, at least), time is an illusion. “I am God and there is no other, I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, my purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill my intention” (Isaiah 46:9 -10). Seems God observes time as one standing outside of time, one looking in from the outside as we looked over the Promised Land from Pisgah’s lofty height, telling all its dimensions and features.
“From everlasting to everlasting, you are God,” said the psalmist. We, on the other hand, experience time as a mere mortal sliver of a sojourn until we are turned back to dust. Perhaps this is why we speak of measuring time, squeezing time, making the most out of time, managing time, creating more time. Do such phrases reflect our quest to share, with God our Creator, an “Otherness” with respect to time itself, watching it’s flow from beginning to end as on Mt. Nebo we traced out the flow of the Jordan River to its destination in the Dead Sea?
And shall we one day, upon entering the Promised Land, share God’s view of time? “For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. You sweep them away, they are like a dream.” How shall a thousand years be swept away like a dream? Physicists are, in a sense, imagining that now, conjecturing that Time may be illusory, swept away like a dream. The poet covered that ground long ago.
Perhaps this is why to live for even a few days without clock-consciousness is the stuff of which spiritual retreats are made. Being free of the clock possesses the potential to be a profoundly ecstatic religious experience. When I lead people on such a retreat, asking them to put away watches and cell-phones, what they experience is at first uncanny and most uncomfortable. We are extremely fond of our imagined control of the clock. It’s agony for us to consider living even a few days without our constant companion, the clock. Gradually, though, the experience of clocklessness becomes liberating. I experience this on private retreats to a monastery – an opportunity to respond to the bells which call us to the divine hours of prayer. To be clock free is to taste a tiny morsel of heaven, a pre-cursor of the Eternal Now when “time shall be no more,” when we experience a time beyond time in which space/time dimensions no longer possess relevancy.
Time may package our existence on earth, but the Promised Land for us is life after life, life after time. “When we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun!” Really? 10,000 years? No yardstick is adequate to express timelessness. We may as well sing of 10 million years or 10 billion years. The fundamental truth here is that death ushers us into a dimension in which time is no more, an Eternal Now in which Time is seen to be an illusion.
Perhaps such talk makes you uncomfortable. To us, living day by day, time seems hardly an illusion. A glance in the mirror reminds us that we live in a world of Grecian Formula and Botox, of sit-ups at the gym and walks around the track, of blood pressure medicine and Races for the Cure – all in order to better control time, our time.
This, an experience of space and time, is the world in which we live and move and have our being. But, in closing, let the Apostle Paul remind you that we look for another, truer reality. Let the Apostle’s words be for us a Mt. Nebo experience of looking down on Time. “Listen and I will tell you a mystery. We will . . . all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet . . . For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled, Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O grave, is your sting? Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”
Sources:
“Apartment Deal Backfires,” by Pierre-Yves Glass of the Associated Press, The Pine Bluff Commercial, December 29, 1995.
Three magazines devoted to the subject of Time have been fundamental to my preparation for this sermon. They are:
Scientific American, September 2002 (Special Issue, The Matter of Time). Essays I’ve used include: “SA Perspectives: The Chronic Complaint,” by the editors; “Real Time: The pace of living quickens continuously, yet a full understanding of things temporal still eludes us,” by Gary Stix; “That Mysterious Flow,” by Paul Davies; “A Hole at the Heart of Physics: Physicists can’t seem to find time — literally. Can philosophers help?” by George Musser; “From Instantaneous to Eternal,” by David Labrador; and “Times of Our Lives,” by Karen Wright
The Salt Journal, Fall 2001 (Whatever Happened to Time?, Volume 3, Number 4). Essays I’ve used include: “The Editor’s Desk,” by David Barton; “The Need for Time,” by Frederick Turner; “On the Mind, in the Flesh,” by Jack Butler; and “Clocks Beyond Themselves,” by J. T. Fraser.
Discover, December 2000, “Does Time Really Exist? (Why Physicists Secretly Hope the Passage of Time Is Just an Illusion).” The article, written by Tim Folger, is titled, “From Here to Eternity.”