Earlier this month I had the amazing opportunity to go on vacation in Italy, and specifically to Rome and Florence. Rome is known as ‘the Eternal City’; it’s been one of the most important cities in the Western World, if not the whole world, for about 2,500 years, and both the wonderful monuments and the scars of that history are visible wherever you go. It’s hard not to be touched in an environment like that by a sense of the long passage of time, the fleeting nature of human life, and questions about what lasts. This was particularly true for me on the Saturday, as word of the horrific attacks in Israel arrived at the same time as a massive demonstration protesting Italy’s controversial right-wing, populist government, rather effectively blocked our path no matter where we were trying to go. As I watched protesters stream through gates in the city’s ancient walls and past the looming magnificence of the Colosseum, I couldn’t help but think that, no matter how anxious and fraught the present moment seemed, this city had seen and come through far worse times than our own.
But, of course, it has not come through them unscathed. You don’t need to be an expert in history and know of the city’s great tragedies, bloody politics, or horrors undertaken in the guise of entertainment to know this. The very monuments that speak to the city’s resilience also bear the wounds of that history, stripped of their marble facades, looted for masonry, and fallen into ruin. An ancient city’s survival may provide helpful perspective about today’s anxieties, but it too is human; it too will fade away.
I couldn’t help but think of all this when, struggling over the assigned readings for today, I read the wonderful words of Psalm 90. It shares this perspective of finding solace in the fleeting nature of human life, but finds it not in monumental architecture but in the faithfulness of God shown throughout the generations:
Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to another,
Before the mountains were brought forth, or the land and the earth were born, from age to age you are God.”
You turn us back to the dust and say, “Go back, O child of earth.”
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night.
You sweep us away like a dream; we fade away suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green and flourishes; in the evening it is dried up and withered. […]
Return, O Lord; how long will you tarry? be gracious to your servants.
Satisfy us by your loving-kindness in the morning; so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life.
Make us glad by the measure of the days that you afflicted us and the years in which we suffered adversity.
Show your servants your works and your splendour to their children.
May the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork. (Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17)
Time comes for everyone. The world’s ups and downs come for us all, in every time and place, in every culture and civilization across history. And yet, it is the firm conviction of our traditions that God remains faithful in the midst of all of them. We saw this last year in the ‘Theology from under the Rubble Series’, how people’s faith in God’s faithfulness shaped their understandings, attitudes, and actions at times of personal and national catastrophe, whether from foreign armies as in ancient Jerusalem or Rome, from illness, or from one’s own government — when evil commands the halls of power or in its aftermath when the full scale of its evils comes to light, when it is oppressing minority groups, or religious expression itself. No matter what the world may throw at us in the relatively brief spans of our lives, we know that God is faithful in the midst of it.
And so, with our ancestors of faith, even in the midst of our cries of “How long will you tarry?” we can join in the confident refrain “Lord, you have been our refuge from generation to generation.”
May the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us.
Amen.
Matthew Root 