“Out of Time”
One of the classic lines from the movie “Gone With the Wind” is Scarlett O’Hara’s closing line after Rhett Butler walks out of her life. As the fog closes behind him, she says, “Home. I’ll go home. And I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” Scarlett obviously believes that she will have one more day… and one more chance… on top of all the other chances that she has had… to win him back. She obviously believes that she has more time.
Yet, how many times do we remember… in our own lives… running out of time? There always seem to be deadlines that we cannot avoid…that come upon us too quickly… to pay our taxes… to turn in our homework… to apply for a loan… to take an exam. This sense that time is running out seems to pervade all of life. In sports, how many times have we watched the final seconds tick by in games when the score was not quite what we wanted? How many movies, murder mysteries or spy novels have a plot that hinges upon a last-minute discovery for a positive outcome to the story? Do you remember “Mission Impossible 2” where the hero Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, had to race the clock to save his lady love, Nyah, from the biomedical monster, Chimera, which she had injected into her arm? Even in ”Ratatouille,” an animated feature film that was released this summer, the restaurant could not be saved unless a wonderful gourmet dinner was set before the food critic, Antono Ego, in the nick of time. My favorite movie, “Dangerous Liaisons,” has an ending that is very poignant precisely because time does run out… for everyone.
And then, there are those times in our lives when the clock is ticking and we can’t hear it… or, perhaps, only some of us can. For teenagers who are waiting for their sixteenth birthday, time seems to drag. But for those in their twenties who are approaching the big 3-0, time races by much too swiftly. Women say that they can hear their biological clock ticking, even when the rest of us don’t hear anything at all. For those who are older, that ticking clock reveals itself in impaired mobility… a loss of hearing… and those memory lapses that we jokingly refer to as our “senior moments.” Other silently ticking clocks… like osteoporosis… heart disease… cancer… or diabetes creep up on us unaware. As a hospice chaplain, I dealt with many such situations as I worked with the terminally ill every day. Terminally ill or not, most of my patients were not ready to die. They all thought they had more time.
Certainly, the man in Jesus’ parable had no thought of death or dying as he talked about his dreams… of what he would do with the plentiful harvest he had garnered…new barns… more storage space… a bigger house… and the opportunity to relax and enjoy life… to “eat, drink, and be merry.” He had no idea that he was almost out of time… at least on this earth. His focus was on himself… and his possessions… and so it is with us… most of the time. What do you think that this man might have thought about if he had known that his time on this earth was limited to hours… or days… and not weeks… or years?
Well, I can give you a hint of what those thoughts might have been by sharing what I have learned from my hospice patients. Usually, when my hospice patients first learned that they had a terminal diagnosis, all they could think about were the relationships that were important to them… the spouse who had shared their life… the children who lived too far away… the grandchild they would never see… the friendships they did not want to lose… and their relationship with God. In fact, it was often the unfinished business in those relationships … the unsaid words… the unresolved conflicts… the festering wounds… within those relationships that created a desire to live that was so strong that my patients often survived beyond the expectations of others in order to resolve them. In fact, my hospice patients often become so focused upon completing their unfinished business that they pushed themselves to do things that they had not done for weeks… or months, such as taking a trip …going to a restaurant… going to church. And they used each of these opportunities to see a family member… a friend… or take communion… all in an effort to make sure that they were in a right relationship… not just with family… or friends… but also with God. Material possessions and even their own comfort become secondary… almost unimportant... to them. Their focus was on their relationships with others.
So what, then, is the focus of those of us who may die suddenly… in a traffic accident … or from a heart attack… or as a result of some unpredictable event like the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis? What happens to those of us who do not have the luxury of knowing that our days on this earth are numbered… or that we are almost out of time? Do you remember the World Trade Center tragedy in New York City? One deep regret that the family members and survivors had was the need to tell their dead loved ones… just once more… how much they loved them. Together, we watched interviews with children who cried because they had not kissed their fathers that morning as they went off to work. And, we heard taped messages from the cell phones of the victims in the airplanes and those in the World Trade Center towers which revealed that the most predominant message they conveyed in those desperate final moments was a simple, “I love you.” They didn’t talk about their bank accounts… or their houses… or their cars. They simply said, “Remember, I love you.”
How many times have we been in situations where we wished we could have said those words to someone… to a parent… or a child… or a friend… who died unexpectedly? How many times have we regretted not saying those words in a relationship… when we, too, ran out of time? How many relationships do we take for granted each day? How many days do we take for granted… not knowing, as this man did not know, when we, too, might run out of time?
And what of our relationship with God? Is there unfinished business in that relationship that we have been putting off as well… just as this man did… thinking that we have more time? Have we gone our own way… so involved in our own activities that we can barely squeeze in an hour for church in on Sunday mornings? Have days turned into weeks… and weeks into months… and months into years of making empty promises to God… promises that we will one day take that closer walk with God? Is it like that diet… or exercise program that will always start tomorrow? What if we… like this man… run out of time before we manage to get around to it?
The message in the scripture to all of us this morning has two key points: The first is that it is later than you think. All of us will die one day… and, for some of us, that day will come sooner, rather than later. One of my hospice patients, a man barely fifty years old who had never been ill in his life, became ill over Memorial Day weekend many years ago now. He went to his own physician who could not find anything significantly wrong with him and prescribed some pills to ease his pain. Barely two weeks later, as this man was shaving, his legs collapsed beneath him and he found that he was unable to walk. This time, a doctor in Austin discovered a large mass in his lungs and a tumor on his spine that had wrapped completely around it and could not be removed. He became a hospice patient on a Thursday afternoon in June and I met him on Friday. We had a wonderful conversation about his family… his faith… and his tiny, little church in a rural Texas town. When I left him that afternoon, I told him that I would see him again on Monday, but he died in the early hours before dawn on Monday… less than one month after that fateful Memorial Day weekend. Fortunately his son, who was serving in our Armed Forces in Iraq, made it home in time to talk to him before he died.
There are countless other stories that I could share with you… but they all underscore the same message: It is later than you think… not only for the relationships that you have with friends… with family… with co-workers… with your pastor… but also for the relationship that you have with God. What are the things that you have forgotten to say… that you have put off doing… in the key relationships in your life? When was the last time that you stopped to give a hug to your son or daughter... to make a telephone call to your mother or father… to whisper a gentle word of love to your spouse… to give words of encouragement to a co-worker or a friend? When was the last time that you spent time alone with God... in prayer… or in the study of God’s word? Why are you putting these things off? Is it because you think there will be plenty of time to do it later? Would your priorities change if you knew that you only had a few days left… instead of weeks… or years? What would you do differently if this day… this week were your last on this earth?
I cannot talk about the human relationships that you have in this life, but I can tell you that we are truly fortunate to have a God who loves us beyond anything we can comprehend. And that is the second point in our scripture for today. Listen again as I share with you the words that Billy read from the prophet Hosea… words which talk not only of God’s love for us, but also of knowledge of our waywardness: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me… Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms… I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them…Yet my people are bent on turning away from me…How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? Just as a parent loves a child, so our God loves us… and continues to love us despite our wayward ways. In fact, the Apostle Paul was so convinced of this that he wrote in his letter to the Romans that nothing… nothing would ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So, come to the table today, knowing that your time on this earth is short… knowing that you are invited… for you are loved beyond comprehension. Return to arms of the One who longs to hold us close. Rededicate yourselves to a life worth living… a life centered in God… a life focused on your relationship with God… and all the relationships that God has given to you. Don’t wait any longer… for not one of us knows when we will be out of time. Amen.