10/26/2026
Here Daniel’s sermon from Sunday, ‘Love that Outlasts Mountains.’
Do you ever get the sense that we in Gibsons are sheltered by the mountains around us? We live nestled beneath Mount Elphinstone and the North Shore Mountains; they give our dwelling place a sense of solidity. No matter what happens, they will endure.
And yet, that sense of permanence is actually an illusion. To us humans, it feels like the mountains will endure forever, but that’s merely from our perspective on time. When you view mountains from the perspective of what scientists call “deep time”—the earth measured in “epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years”—they become remarkably fluid.
Imagine if we could take a time-lapse video of the mountains around us, on that recorded twenty thousand years. Speed that video up, and you would see seemingly permanent mountains “ebb and flow” like the tide, as sheets of ice push them up into place and millennia of erosion wear them down. The English nature writer Robert Macfarlane says, “Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant…When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert.“
The psalm we sang today is all about the impermanence of our “human instant” when compared to deep time: not the deep time of our ancient earth, but the even deeper time of God’s eternity. The psalmist looks up at the mountains which give a sense of stability, and sees the God who birthed them, the God who will endure long after they fade away.
Before Mount Elphinstone and the North Shore Mountains were created, God was here. God’s presence sustains these mountains. God’s presence is our true dwelling place. God’s presence gives us shelter and solidity.
Yet the psalmist doesn’t stop there, but goes on to contemplate the nature of God’s “deep time,” God’s eternity. What seems like an eternity to us humans—a thousand years— is to God “like yesterday gone” (4) like a dream swept away by morning. Compared to God’s endurance, our lives are like the wild grass, sprouting fresh and green in the morning but reduced by the desert heat to a withered brown by evening.
This leads the psalmist to ponder our own lives in comparison to the mind-boggling vastness of God’s eternity, and this comparison summons some rather dark emotions.
First, the psalmist expresses a sense of God’s anger and wrath. Did you notice those repeated words, and did they make you feel uncomfortable? Perhaps this an example of an angry Old Testament God compared to the New Testament God of love?
Not quite. It’s worth noting that in the original Hebrew, “the words for both ‘wrath’ and ‘fury’… suggest hotly burning breath.” God’s immensity is like the heat of a hot oven, or the intensity of the noonday desert sun. Compared to God’s timelessness, we are “overwhelmed” and “consumed” (7), like grass that “fades and withers” (6). That immensity can feel like anger or wrath.
Another response to God’s immensity is to feel a sense of shame: to realize that nothing is secret from “the light of God’s face” (8). That includes those “hidden faults” which we try to keep from others yet turn over again and again in the darkness of our own hearts when we are alone. I wonder if you’ve ever felt “consumed” or “overwhelmed” by that sense of shame.
And finally, the psalmist considers the futility of a human life. Just when we feel we are finally established, our lives begin to fade away like a sigh. Just when we finally have enough wisdom to thrive, our life is “swiftly cut down” (10). Just when we are ready to enjoy the good gifts we’ve worked for, “our days slip away” (9) and “we fly off” (10). Such is our seeming insignificance in light of God’s timelessness.
What “fearsome” turn this psalm has taken! Did you expect to be confronted by such dark questions this morning? Anyone who says that the Bible is full of false comforts has not spent time with this psalm, which confronts the human condition with such honesty!
If the psalm were to end here, it would truly be a troubling text. But the psalmist’s response is not to withdraw in fear from this immense God, but rather to long for God’s nearness. The psalmist asks God to “turn” to us, to “have compassion” because we are so frail and small (13). The psalmist knows that our God is not a God of anger, shame, or wrath, but a God who will draw near and “satisfy us in the morning with his steadfast love” (14).
When God’s draws near to us, we will not wither away. We will be renewed like the fresh grass of the morning. When God’s love draws near to us, our days will be marked by “rejoicing and gladness” (14). Yes, there will be days in which we see evil, but there will be just as many days when we “sing and rejoice” with “joy” (14).
And friends, the fundamental conviction of our faith is that God has drawn near. God has turned towards us in compassion. God has satisfied us with steadfast love, a love revealed in Jesus Christ.
Jesus was a man who knew the futility of a human life, whose days were marked by “trouble and grief” (10), who was cut down not at seventy or eighty, but at thirty-three, who experienced on the cross the full weight of human sin and shame in the face of God’s immensity.
Because Christ defeated our shame and guilt and death, we know that our days will be defined by gladness, that no matter how much evil we see in our world today, there will one day “be a great rejoicing.”
Isn’t it interesting that the psalmist ends by asking the Lord to “prosper work of our hands?” (17). The psalmist turns to our vocation, the ways we choose to spend our brief days on earth. That word “prosper” is better translated as “firmly found.” It’s a word which suggests the enduring stability of our mountains, which endure for so many generations.
What kind of work will endure like those mountains which shelter us? The work that Jesus names in our Gospel: “love the Lord our God with all your hearts, and souls, and minds, and love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:27).
This is the work of love which Jesus perfectly embodied in his terribly short life. This is the work of love which will endure longer than even the mountains we are nestled beneath. This is the work of love that God is “manifesting” among us at St Bart’s, and among our children whom we will baptize next week (16).
Because Jesus is with us, the favour of the Lord rests upon us, and all our works of love will endure longer than the mountains themselves, ”from everlasting to everlasting” (2). Amen.
Art: Anneke Kaai, Psalm 62, oil and acrylic on plexiglass, 1995.
