People Who Are Standing Need to Watch Lest They Fall

People Who Are Standing Need to Watch Lest They Fall
Psalm 78: 38-72

A few months ago one of the members of our church, a lively lady in her nineties who always had something to contribute, suddenly became less consistent in coming to church, and then didn’t appear for two or three successive weeks. We then heard that she had died. The odd thing about it was that it was a shock. Last night we went to take Communion to two other ladies in our church, also in their nineties; both have been unable to come to church for the last two Sundays. One is unsteady on her legs; the other has sores on her leg that refuse to heal. We agreed that it looked as if they too were ailing. They have already talked about the kind of funeral they want. (And by the time I am finalizing the editing of this book, one of them has passed, and I will be conducting her funeral this week.) Spending time with such people and watching them become frailer is a solemn experience. Among other things, it makes us think about our own frailty. One piece of good news in Psalm 78 is that God thinks about our frailty and makes allowance for it; God is mindful that we are flesh, “a passing wind that does not return.” When Paul talks about our being flesh, he has in mind that we are morally weak. While this psalm makes clear the Old Testament’s recognition that we are morally weak, when it talks about our being flesh, it has in mind the more ordinary physical frailty that is expressed in our mortality. We are like the wind, not in the sense of a genuinely powerful wind but in the sense of a wind that makes a lot of noise but then is gone...