Isaiah 38:16-19; John 12:27-32

Today we see encounter two conflicting emotions in our texts today: In Isaiah King Hezekiah praises God because his life and has been extended. “Oh restore me to health and make me live” he yells to God. Then comes the relief: ”You have held back my life from the pit of destruction. The living, the living thank you!” Hezekiah ‘s shrinking life is suddenly expanding before his eyes and his joy is almost beyond expression.   Then there is Jesus, who is in this Lenten journey now approaching a crucial moment on the road to Jerusalem. He knows his time is coming. He knows He faces death and He is, as Chelsea said, beginning to talk about it. Jesus does not want the end to come: Abba, save me from this hour,” he pleads. Together these texts perfectly sum up the human experience: the chunk of time that lies between our birth and our end. For Jesus the life was short, only 33 years, probably 10 years less than the life expectancy of his days and his ministry was just a tiny sliver of three years. Think of that friends, think of how short a time this was. How minute a sliver of time in the vast expanse of human history which in itself is not even a breath in the history of the universe. So little time for the Creator of the universe to be revealed as a most vulnerable, powerless human in a back province of the brutal Roman Empire. Yet the story of this Jesus is the most persistent story in human history. It is because this story that we believe we get a glimpse of not just the mind, but the heart of God.

Stephen Hawking said that we humans want to know the mind of God. Hawking died last week. He was the author of “A Brief History of Time.” Hawking was a theoretical physicist who once wrote of human beings that:” we are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. And that makes us something very special.” It is people like Hawking who showed us how vast our universe is, so vast that we can see things happening now that happened long ago in some far off place.   In his theory of black holes, which turned out not to be black at all, Hawking began to bring together the knowledge of the vast with the knowledge of the tiniest, something that had only been attempted before.

So friends, Hezekiah gets a bit more time, but Jesus doesn’t.   This is one of the great injustices we witness everyday. A young man in Ghouta Syria starting a movement a week or so ago where young people and children presented themselves on social media with the words: ”I am still alive.” It went viral. Unfortunately a few days ago his time ran out as the bombs found him. A young promising creative developer in Sacramento named Ali Youssefi died at 35 of cancer last week. Others live beyond the time they want. During my years at this church I have talked to people who desperately wanted to live but didn’t get to and others who lamented why they had to go on for apparently no reason. It is an age old question not even Stephen Hawking got to answer. By the way, he did for some reason outwit ALS by living 50 years past the date of his medically predicted death. An interviewer on NPR asked his friend: ”so in the end even he was mortal.” The friend answered:” I must disagree with you about his mortality.” That made me sit up. It made me aware of the fact that here was a man who was as closely as any fully functioning human being ever was to have a non-functioning body and he lived his life more fully than 95% percent of us ever do. He probed the mystery of the universe, he knew love, had children, appeared on the Simpsons, was a global celebrity. Yes, chances are he will never be forgotten. Hawking has a permanent place in the history books.

Friends, in terms of the world most of us live average lives at best. We cannot aspire to the immortality of Stephen Hawking, neither would we want to pay the price. We are grateful Jesus was willing to pay the price for his immortality I am sure. But what this mean to us? How do we live in our sliver of time? How do we live it out the fullest way possible? In the movie Fried Green Tomatoes about people in a dying southern town Jessica Tandy says to Kathy Bates: ”No one is dead as long as there is someone remembers them.” So you and I must remember the ones that are gone and hold up what made them memorable and we must in return serve God and people in ways that will make us worth remembering. May God give us a good mind and a big heart.