For the last several weeks we have been exploring spiritual practices that can help us deepen our relationship with God. We have been looking at things that we inherited from our Jewish ancestors and exploring how we might still learn from those practices. We have talked about difficult things – keeping Sabbath in a 24/7 world, fasting, hospitality, caring for the body. Most of those we’re not particularly good at. So today the topic is aging and you might be tempted to say – Alex, I’ve got that down pat. Wish I didn’t, but, yeah, I’ve got that aging thing down.
I’m here today to suggest that maybe you don’t.
As you might have guessed, we’re talking about something more than chronology here when we talk about aging. We’re talking about how, as people of faith, we think about aging. Because I hope we have something more and different to say than what the culture says.
The culture says that you have to be young to be valued. You have to be young to be useful. Think how often you see mature characters on television or in the movies. Most of the people you see in the media, and in advertisements that aren’t about Snuggies and Depends, are young.
Unfortunately, the church reinforces this message sometimes. What do we call churches with no young people? We call them dying churches, and as an institution they may very well be dying, but we perpetuate a connection in our heads that says aging equals dying.
More importantly, we reinforce the culture’s message about aging by separating young and old, believing that the best way to do discipleship and to grow in faith is to just hang out with people our own age. There is a place for that and value in it, but if we just have a youth class and a children’s class and ladies’ fellowship class and a Hamilton men’s class and never any interaction between the generations we are missing the great potential of the church. Look around this room. How many other places do you go in a week where there is this diversity of ages in the same place? How many other opportunities do we have for the kinds of interactions that can take place here?
One of the reasons I look forward to our confirmation process each year is the new relationships across generation boundaries that are formed. This year we have twelve young people exploring church membership through confirmation. We had our kickoff luncheon last Sunday at the Hatch’s house. Each of those young people will be meeting weekly with an elder – someone who has been walking in the faith for awhile. Who knows what’s going to happen? It’s going to be awkward and the mentors may not know from time to time if what they are doing is right and youth from time to time may be confused, but there will be important, life-changing things coming from these interactions. And it’s happening right now in our congregation.
So what do we learn from our Jewish heritage on aging? The parts of the Bible that we share tell us quite clearly that respect for elders is an expected practice. The fourth commandment of the famous ten says, “Honor your father and your mother.” I know we’ve all got complicated feelings about our parents. Some of us have had experiences with them that make it difficult to know how to honor them. But in the practice of recognizing a responsibility and a respect for our parents, we learn something about God.
Lauren Winner says, (and by the way, if her book sales don’t go up after all the mention we’ve made of her over these last few week, it will be no fault of Peter or myself!), in her book Mudhouse Sabbath, that “perhaps the most essential insight of the Jewish approach to caring for one’s elderly is that this care is, indeed, an obligation. What Judaism understands is that obligations are good things.”[i] The obligations of the Jewish community and the Christian community are built around the connections that bind young and old together. Deuteronomy talks about the special obligation that the older generation has to teach the young the story of their faith. The letters of Paul and the story of the early church in Acts talk about how the new Christians set up systems of care for widows. Jesus, from the cross, tells one of his disciples to care for his own grieving mother as if she were his own. And he tells his mother to care for him.
My father tells the story, (and there were remnants of this practice even when I was young), of how on Sundays the whole extended family would gather at his grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner. There would be three tables – or three sittings. Who do you think got to sit first? It wasn’t the children, who we often rush to feed first now because we know how fidgety they can get. It was the adults – first the men and then the women and at the third table the children. It was a pretty patriarchal system, I admit. My dad talked about how much the children looked forward to reaching an age when they could sit at the adult table. We’re probably not going back to this system, but it showed the different way that age was viewed.
So there is a particular obligation that we have to honor our elders, but there is also a real beauty to this season of life. Our passage from Proverbs this morning says, “The glory of youths is their strength, but the beauty of the aged is their gray hair.” Oil of Olay and L’Oreal hair coloring will not tell you that your beauty is your gray hair, but God does! As someone with very little hair, I’ll tell you that it’s beautiful no matter what color it is!
There is a beauty to this season. I have talked before about the lesson in the autumn leaves. As deciduous trees prepare for the winter, they very often turn brilliant colors. We say they turn these colors, but in reality what is happening is that all the green chlorophyll is draining out of the leaves and exposing the true color that was underneath all along. That’s good aging – to discover who we truly are underneath the work that we do or the roles that we play and to let that true self shine through. It is one of the great possibilities of aging.
As we let that true self be exposed and let the glory of the unique light God has given to us show through, we have the opportunity to find a new life – to celebrate a life that doesn’t end. In our Gospel story this morning we find Simeon and Anna, an elderly man and woman who are there at the very beginning of Jesus’ story to give a witness. They have been waiting for the promised Messiah and when Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus in to the Temple, they both give a word of prophecy. Simeon takes the child in his arms and praises God. “Master, you are now dismissing your servant in peace…for my eyes have seen your salvation.” He was able to see in this child and in his journey, the promise of God.
Every stage of life is one that God can bless and use. But we don’t often talk about the blessings of aging. It is too often seen as withering or failing rather than a time of vitality. We have to fight the temptation to turn inward and away from the world.
In the movie Up, which came out from Disney and Pixar last year, we saw this story played out in a very powerful way. It is an animated story about a 78-year-old man named Carl Frederickson. In the first ten minutes of the movie we get a montage of his whole life – how he is befriended by a tomboyish girl named Ellie who has a great spirit of adventure. How he grows up to marry her and they both go off to work in a zoo – she works with birds, he sell balloons. How they dream of travelling to Paradise Falls in South America. How they get a small house and go through the joys and trials of making a life together – not being able to have children, never quite having the money to go to Paradise Falls, but fixing up the place together and sharing life. Until one day Ellie dies and Carl is left alone.
The world I changing around him. The city has grown around their house and a developer wants to get Carl to sell out, but he won’t. He has become lonely and grumpy and he spends his days watching TV in the room where Ellie’s painting of Paradise Falls is on the wall and her picture is on the hearth.
Then one day a knock comes on the door. It’s Russell, a 9-year-old boy in the Wilderness Adventure scouts who comes by looking for an old person to do a good deed for. Carl doesn’t know it, but by opening the door to Russell he is going to be walking back into life.
Eventually Carl devises a plan to escape the developer and the nursing home that wants him to come retire there. He attaches a million balloons to his house and floats away, finally going to Paradise Falls. What he doesn’t know is that Russell is on the porch when the house takes off and he is going on this adventure, too.
Russell needs Carl as much as Carl needs Russell. Russell has never really had a father figure but he has some of Ellie’s bright-eyed enthusiasm about the world. Carl needs to be reawakened to what he still has to offer.
Through the course of their adventures together, they eventually lose the house, which Carl has been dragging around like a ball and chain, just a little ways off the ground and held down by a garden hose. When it floats away into the clouds, Carl is finally free to move on and begin a new relationship with Russell that is life-giving for both of them.
The saddest thing that can happen to us as human beings is when we neglect the wonder of the place that we are and the people who are right in front of us. Because it’s way too easy to be overcome by the darkness and the desolation. At every stage of life, there is beauty, given by God to be expressed in the world. And in every person, there is worth and value. Arthritic hands and thinning hair can’t rob us of that beauty. Even terminal cancer can’t take away that worth. Our responsibility is to age well and we have the grace to do it. God will bear us up when every other home we have known is just a memory. Even when our memories falter, God does not forget. Thanks be to God.
Proverbs 20:29 (NRSV)
The glory of youths is their strength, but the beauty of the aged is their gray hair.
[i] Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to Spiritual Discipline, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003], e-book location 764.
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