September 27, 2026
Time Flies… Until it Doesn’t
Rev. Shannon Jordan
Psalm 90
Lord, you have been our dwelling-place in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
3 You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’
4 For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.
5 You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;
6 in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.
7 For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed.
8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
9 For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.
10 The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
11 Who considers the power of your anger?
Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due to you.
12 So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.
13 Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
16 Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands—
O prosper the work of our hands!
Time is a strange thing. Sometimes it flies. Sometimes it barely moves.
For some of you, this fall is going by ridiculously fast. I can’t quite believe that October starts this week, that the retreat is next weekend.
For others of you, time is moving painfully slowly. You are waiting for test results, waiting for a relationship to heal, waiting for grief to ease, waiting for someone you love to come home.
The clock may move at the same speed for all of us, but life certainly does not.
Psalm 90 understands that. It looks at the short span of a human life and places it beside the eternity of God. And rather than asking us to become anxious about how little time we have, it asks a much more important question: How do we live these days well?
That question fits right into this year’s theme of being alive in God. Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Over these months we are asking what that kind of life actually looks like, especially when life is not easy, predictable, or painless.
Psalm 90 is remarkably honest about that. Life is brief. Life can be hard. We cannot control nearly as much as we would like. And yet the psalm insists that God can and does meet us even there, shaping our limited days toward wisdom, gratitude, compassion, and work that matters.
Life in many ways is on one hand determined by time. Our time here on earth and at the same time determined by God’s perspective. Psalm 90 compares the perspective of the Creator God where God has been our refuge for generations, from before even the mountains were created. On the other hand, for humans, time is fleeting as we return to dust at the end of our allotted time. Our time here IS limited…so how do we live in a way that makes the most of it?
A few things to note when reading this psalm, the psalmist is writing during a time where what happens after death is a little bit foggy and unclear. We have the benefit and promise as Christians where Jesus answers those questions for us. We can look at death through the lens of the resurrection, which certainly offers more hope than at the time of the writing of this psalm.
This is also a communal psalm of lament, and one of the things being lamented, is sin and its impact on their society. The writers were writing in a time that was rife with war and corruption and disorientation.
This Psalm has so much to say about life and our world and our context.
It was interesting to work on this sermon in parallel to working on yesterday’s funeral. As I reflected on this psalm’s words on mortality at the same time we were aching for the family and the friends who are in the deep waters of grief. As I continued to mull over mortality, and Psalm 90, I realized I have literally spent half of my life in caregiving ministry. That is a lot of funerals and illness and struggles and walking with people in the shadows. The scriptures that have been the most helpful for me in keeping strong in my own faith in the midst of pain are the psalms of lament.
About a third of the 150 psalms are laments. In most of them, but not all, there is a turning to God, a complaint, a reminder of who God is and what God has done in the past, and then words of praise or thanksgiving. These psalms have allowed me and generations going back before Christ to take our rawest, truest feelings to God. These laments have shown me I don’t need to make my situation pretty or holy or religious—they can be 100% human, 100% Shannon, and God can handle where I am right now in the mist of the yuck.
On the cross Jesus quoted the first line of the 22nd Psalm—my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. God hadn’t forsaken Jesus, Jesus prayed Israel’s language of lament from the Cross and proclaimed that God is bigger than what is happening, and brokenness doesn’t get the final word—God wins in the end.
As a matter of fact, this lament ends with:
Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.
Going to God with our real feelings is a powerful and cleansing practice. And let’s be real, trying to hide our feelings of anger, unfairness, or even hope for vengeance from God is kind of a joke. Go ahead and share with God so that God can help you process your pain and gain a heart of wisdom.
Second, the superscript attributes the Psalm to Moses—commentators guess from some of the language that it was possibly written or edited after the Babylonia exile because of some pesky Persian words interspersed…but by saying these are words of Moses it would have been an incredible reminder of God’s promises to, and power in, bringing the Israelites into the Promised Land to begin with—and a beautiful reminder that God does have the power and control to bring them back from exile and help them resettle in Israel. The opening words that God has been their refuge for generations is so much more resonant and powerful when we think about it that way. These words can help us to remember in our brief lives in a sinful world, that regardless of what is going on, God is our everlasting refuge.
Keeping all of that in our awareness, we get to verse 12: So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. Living wise lives in this context is not about head knowledge, but about living well before God. Living in God’s best for us. Making choices in line with the values lifted in scripture, in line with our faith, in line with what God wants us to do.
We can be reminded of these through a variety of practices and I encourage you to find ways to learn and know and remember who God is and how God wants you to live in our world. And one way is certainly remembering that our lives are limited.
In prepping for this sermon I watched a TED Talk by Oliver Burkeman who wrote 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals—and apparently in his prep for writing the book he interviewed someone who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and asked them how it feels to know they are going to die. The response was “I am always surprised to be asked that since we are all going to die. The fact that I am going to die isn’t news.” That said, I think we can all agree that we need to learn to live as if we do value time the way that Patrick talked in previous weeks.
So how do we use our time and our experiences to develop a wise heart as lifted up in Psalm 90?
After a great deal of study, reflection, and discernment, I am pretty sure for me it isn’t spending as much time as I do scrolling social media and playing video games on my phone! On vacation a couple of weeks ago, in order to make the most of the time I had with my family, I deleted social media and my video games from my phone to be more present. I tried a few days this past week having them, but have yet again deleted them. My time scrolling and playing games is not adding to the wisdom of my heart. I am not saying you need to do this and I am not saying I won’t put them back on my phone, I am saying I am trying to learn to be intentional on what I do with my time and energy.
The wisdom lifted in this psalm is to learn about the character of God through scripture, prayer, and study. Reflecting on and learning from lived experience. Then we can better discern how God wants us to live in our world.
The psalm then continues with some other attributes of a life lived wisely.
In verse 14 we are encouraged to be satisfied with God’s steadfast love so that we can truly rejoice. For those at the service yesterday, this is the hesed that Patrick was talking about. God’s steadfast love is never changing. It never ends. It is something in which we can learn to live and find peace and joy regardless of what is going on around us. It is the seatbelt that keeps us grounded as we go through life.
Then in verse 15 the psalmist boldly asks for joy proportionate to the suffering they have endured. We are invited to learn to notice God’s work and power in our world. “They” say that our brains are really good at finding what we are looking for. When we look for something bad to happen, we will find it. If we are looking for good things, we will find good things even in hard times. It can be as fleeting as a hummingbird sighting on a plant on your deck, or a conversation with someone with whom at one point you had a strained relationship. There are glimpses of joy all around us, sometimes I, personally, forget to look.
As I finish this sermon I want to give a practical example of what it might look like to have a challenging time in our lives help us to develop some of the qualities and values from this psalm.
As many of you know/remember, today is the two year anniversary of Helene. For John and myself, it was two weeks without power and over three weeks without running water. It was over seven weeks of being on a boil notice. That was some seriously slow time. I remember reflecting as we went through the tasks of the day of collecting water and boiling water and doing normal daily tasks without water or electricity and remembering this was normal for literally billions of people worldwide. They are not waiting for their services to be repaired, they don’t have the services. Who was I to complain? Learning that was a seed of wisdom. I remember the joy I had at being able to flush a toilet without needing a bucket. That was gratitude. Recognizing that many of our downtown unhoused neighbors routinely have to find a place with running water, restrooms and power, that is compassion. How can we as a church meet some of those needs? That can be with work of God as a response to the hard times.
I want to invite you as you go through life, let God to redeem your hard times. To let God use the hard times—not necessarily in the midst of the hard times, but as you make your way out of them—and let God use that to build compassion in you. Generosity. Gratitude. Let God shape and change the work of your hands. I love these lament psalms because they are God’s promises in hard times that God’s power doesn’t fail. God’s love is steadfast. That no matter how hard our lives are that God is with us and loves us.
Amen.
Afterword: I took the image on the bulletin cover this summer on the Mountains to the Sea Trail. These Turks Cap Lillies were largely visible and growing lavishly because of the opening of the tree canopy with the tree damage in Helene. The lilies were over my head and butterflies danced all around. It was a visual reminder that God can and does redeem the hard times.