This is the day that the Lord has made, and it is a day on which the Lord has called us to remember His goodness and to count on His continued blessing.
Sometimes the fullness of life and all that comes our way overwhelms us. We experience times when we focus very narrowly on our own little range of problems or challenges rotating around us and wonder why the walls are so close and confining. At other times we look up, and the vastness of the universe, the extent of our own planet, and the passage of billions of people designed with roughly the same bodies and somewhat similar minds through recorded history engulfs us with feelings of insignificance. What the Hubble telescope could not see, James Webb is beginning to show us. His new telescope opens fresh possibilities for human speculation and perhaps, someday, exploration.
One of the best views before our own time of the universe on the scale we can now view it was given to Job by his Creator. As Job learned on his tour of God’s universe, there is indeed more out there than meets our eyes. We can only wonder what kind of past these star systems may have had and what sort of future will materialize for them and us.
North Americans tend not to think a whole lot about the past. Schoolchildren often find history boring if they get to study it in the classroom much at all. Our personal histories interest us far more. We too often dwell on our past with regrets by saying things like, “If I had only...” Or we long for better days gone by and wish or dream ourselves back to special times fading in our memories. Yet, without our memories we lose our orientation, and we throw our very identities up for grabs. Remembering what we were and did earlier can be valuable.
Most of us also try to plot and plan the future. In the years leading up to the new millennium, “futuristic” planners and teachers commanded a great deal of attention in North American academe. Peering into the future took forms of science fiction as well as sociological studies and even mathematical projections. We hear less of “the future” as a field for formal study today because the future turned out to be less and more than we had expected. Prudence is always wise, and planning is normally a good idea, but the vagueness of plague and war easily throw plans out the window and cast us into doubt and even despair.
In fact, we are (present tense). The past lies outside our grip, as valuable and essential as memories are, and the future should be contemplated with prudence but not so much that it preoccupies us to dwell on it or in it. This is the day that the Lord has made, and it is a day on which the Lord has called us to remember His goodness and to count on His continued blessing while we comprehend our lives of trust in Him and fill them with service and love for all those within our reach.
Christians know that our inability to change the past leaves our sins as an unalterable part of our own history and the histories of those around. Christians also know Christ’s tomb enveloped those sins in the flood of our baptisms and we have no claim on them any longer. God has banished them from His memory and wants to free us from our memories of them as well. Christians know as well that the future lies in God’s hands and the best laid plans of mice and men often wander into the waste basket of deficient imaginations and unforeseen circumstances. Christians understand how we are called to the here and now, to praise and serve in the places where God has placed us at precisely the juncture of human history we are experiencing as today. This does not mean we do not have curiosity about the worlds beyond our immediate proximity, but it does mean that we recognize what God has given to us here... and now.
Christians also know Christ’s tomb enveloped those sins in the flood of our baptisms and we have no claim on them any longer.
Martin Luther did not worry about the past. He knew much about human history and God’s own history as he interacted with his world. He knew his own past lay swallowed up in Christ’s tomb, and his sins and regrets had been sealed up and locked away. So, he did not dwell on or in the past. Nor did he speculate much about the future apart from the confidence that Christ was coming soon. He recognized how little control he had over the future. He focused on what God had called him to do with and for those whom he could reach, personally or through his medium of print.
Luther had the gift of seeing the world through Job’s eyes. He had wrestled with his own inability to master or even explain what was happening in his life. He came to see the wisdom of the solution God had suggested to Job, “Why don’t you let me be God, and you be Job?” It worked for Job, and it worked for Martin.
The stars beyond the stars have been secure in their Creator’s control long before human beings dreamed they were there. They will get along without me. That does not mean we should dampen our curiosity about God’s creation or cease to explore new ways to use its elements as his gifts for us and others. But the Creator, not one of His creatures, remains the center of our future. My beat is within the confines of that which God has placed within my reach. Of course, my reach extends further than ever, with new media and new possibilities for travel, as God calls me to touch the lives of others with my ability to aid and support, to touch and perhaps even to heal. Those to whom God gives us access are enough to fill our time with the joys of sharing God’s love.
Therefore, the focus falls not only on the occasional grand opportunity but also, above all, on the little moments of service and kindness. Our lives take place in the right temporal and spatial occasions for living as God’s children, messengers, and servants. Our little acts of generosity and thoughtfulness (simply a smile, a warm glance, one “may I help?”) can change two lives. We taste a bit of the fullness of our humanity as God designed it, and the other person experiences one little form of the love of God. In a world in which simple civility and decency seem no longer to be proper behavior, showing the respect every other human being deserves as a creature of our Creator counteracts the contemptuous scorn and defensively angry put-downs spewed about by increasing numbers of people around us.
The Preacher of the book of Ecclesiastes demonstrates in so many ways what folly it is to worry about the past or the future. After asking what the sense of it all is, he concludes we should simply hearken to the sum of all learning: Fear God and keep His commands. For God will be the final judge. Buddhists seek to rise above the past and disappear into the future by absenting themselves from the blessings of God’s gifts in the world and life, but Christians follow Ecclesiastes into the toil and trouble of daily existence, knowing God is there already and accompanies us as we venture into the world He designed for mutual human support.
So, we trundle on through. As sinners as well as saints, we know the regrets and sorrow over our pasts all too well, but we reflect in joy and praise over the blessings of God as He has accompanied to this day. At the same time, we are soberly realistic about the temptations and struggles which may lie ahead, but we face the future with the confidence that whatever else may fail that we think we need, the presence of the ascended Lord will be with us, to the end of this age and beyond. This makes the past an inspiration, based on the Lord who has always shown up at our side even when we were not conscious of His being there. It also makes the future an enlivening hope that frees us to risk and surrender what God has given us for the sake and the aid of those around us. For Jesus our Savior has accompanied us in the past, and He will accompany us in the future. We rest assured He is with us, Immanuel, today.
