Back to Basics: Aging

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.

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[i] Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to Spiritual Discipline, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003], e-book location 764.

Back to Basics: The Body

In the 12^th century, in the region that is now Belgium and northern France, something extraordinary was happening among the women of the region. Laywomen were forming new communities that sought to live a Jesus lifestyle. They continued to do simple work, but they also held meetings together, followed common spiritual exercises and rejected the paths that would have been chosen for them had they remained in the world they had come from.

We don’t often think about women religious leaders of the 12^th century, but there were some charismatic leaders who began to attract followers into big movements. Jacques de Vitry was unique in that he was a man who became a disciple of these women whom he felt had the potential to reform the Church of his day. He left his position at the University of Paris to go and write the life of Marie of Oignie.[i]

There are wild and wonderful tales to tell about Marie of Oignie and about other women of the time. Ask me sometime to tell you about Christina the Amazing. But one thing that is disturbing about these women is how they treated their bodies. Jacques writes of Marie that “when her sainted little body was washed after death, it was found to be so frail and shriveled from illness and fasting that her spine touched her belly and the bones in her back seemed to be lying under her stomach as if under a thin linen cloth.”[ii] Something went horribly wrong with the Christian theology of the body here if this was seen as good!

We have come a long way in our understanding of the relationship between body and soul since the Middle Ages. Or have we? Lauren Winner, in the book Mudhouse Sabbath, which we are reading in some of our small groups during Lent, talks about going into a boutique to try on dresses and the self-loathing she felt when the store didn’t carry her size because it was the sort of store that did not carry large sizes. She burst into tears as she left, saying to her friend, “I’ll never be thin again.”

What her friend helped her realize, though, was that the store had just fed into her anxieties about what a healthy body looks like. Medieval mystics and Kate Moss-size models might get into those dresses, but they are not our best models for what healthy looks like. Winner goes on to say:

“The shopping expedition was good proof that, though I believe God has something to say about bodies, I generally tune God out and listen to Cosmopolitan instead. I’m pretty sure, if God called me to chat about my body would say things like, ‘I like your body. I created your body and if you read the first chapter of Genesis lately, you might recall that I called Creation good.’ Still, when I’m staring in the dress-shop mirror, I generally wish my body – or at least a few pounds of it – would vanish.”[iii]

Men have a different relationship to their bodies. We can be just as concerned about appearance, but most of us have been socialized to think about our bodies like pick-up trucks. And not just little pint-size pick-ups that you just use to help your neighbor take a few things to the landfill – I’m talking tough, working trucks that they show on TV going through mud holes and having tons of bricks dropped in the back of them. That’s us. Our bodies are made to be Ford tough – like a rock. Most of the time we ignore them and we downplay anything that damages them. Lose an arm? We’re like the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “It’s just a flesh wound.” And that’s why it’s such a huge transition for men when our bodies really do start to break down and we have to learn to live with limitations.

The great preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor says:

“I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body…Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”[iv]

Taylor says she scandalizes people sometimes when she says this. Maybe that sounded scandalous to you – like maybe confronting our naked bodies is not spiritual enough. But maybe we’re not spiritual enough because we’re not confronting our bodies. We’re neglecting the very thing that Paul tells us is the temple of the Holy Spirit. “You were bought with a price,” Paul tells us. “So glorify God in your body.”

All of my highest and holiest moments have come though this body. I imagine that most of yours have come through your body, too. I remember getting off the bus on a warm afternoon and running to get my bike and riding at top speed up hills and down. The feel of the sun and the wind and the smell of the air. It would be several miles before I realized I was even tired. It was like flying.

The awkwardness and yet thrill of dancing with a girl at those ballroom dance classes my mom made me take. The feel of her hand in mine and the feel of the strong muscles in her back.

The good exhaustion after a game of half-court basketball on the driveway of someone’s house. We played to a hundred so the game could go on for hours. Then we’d just collapse and it felt great.

The thrill of a kiss. The warmth of a hug. The smell of the church and the scratchy burlap of Christmas pageant costumes. Kneeling at the altar to receive bread and juice.

The messy wonder of birth, watching Suzanne’s body do this amazing thing, and then holding Joel and then Rachel in my arms. The mundane messiness of feeding and changing and rocking and hoisting a child on my shoulders.

Feeling the holy weight of hands upon me at my ordination as I knelt at an altar rail. Knowing the bishop was just a man, but knowing as well that something happened in that moment – some claim had been made on me that I would only come to understand over many years.

Standing at the bedside of my grandmother following her stroke and holding her hand. Sharing silence because she couldn’t speak, but knowing that those hands had shaped me in ways that spoke of God’s love more powerfully than any words she might have said. Watching her as she took her last breaths and went peacefully on.

Clogging. Hiking to the top of Ben Lui in Scotland and throwing up. It couldn’t get more physical than that. Singing in the choir. Kayaking through the marsh cathedrals of the seaside. And yes, that thing you’re thinking of…all of these high, holy moments are in my memory because of this body.

We are sometimes guilty as Christians of believing what the Gnostics did. Gnosticism was one of the earliest heresies in the Church and it had many forms, but at its heart it was the belief that the only part of us that God is really concerned with is our immaterial souls. The body, they felt, was a hindrance – maybe even evil.

After all, the pleasures of the body can lead us into trouble. We follow those pleasures into all sorts of trouble. We sleep with people we shouldn’t sleep with. We take substances – like drugs or deep-fried Twinkies – that we shouldn’t take. We drink to excess. We smoke. We eat too much. And it gets us into trouble. So the body must be evil, right?

The Christian Gnostics believed that Jesus came to liberate our eternal soul – the inner light – from its fleshly cage. They looked to passages like the one where Jesus says not to fear those who can kill the body but only the one who can cast your soul into hell [Luke 12:4-5] and they saw there a justification for their beliefs. They also saw how Paul often talked about the struggle between the spirit and the flesh.

Christianity rejected Gnosticism, though, because it fundamentally ignored the fact that God has loved and used bodies since the beginning of beginning. Men and women were created in the image of God and that means more than just we have a soul that is in God’s image and, O, yes, we also have this body. No, the body bears some of that image, too.

Fundamentally, Christianity rejected Gnosticism because of that great Christian word we use far too little – incarnation. God became human to show us that matter matters. God came to save us in this world, in this flesh by becoming a fully human human being. And Jesus, who was fully human and fully divine, enjoyed this world. Enjoyed being embodied. He went to wedding feasts. He ate at the table with friends, sinners and Pharisees. He healed hurt and broken bodies – like the bent-over woman in the gospel story for the day. He wept at the death of friends and he washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus loved the bodies of this world and who he is for us is inseparable from the body through which we knew him. It is through Jesus’ body on the cross that the way to salvation was opened for all people.

This is why we say, when we say the Apostle’s Creed, that we believe in “the communion of saints, the resurrection of the…body.” Because even when these worn-out bodies of ours have drawn their last breath, God promises us an embodied future. What those resurrection bodies will be like, we don’t know, but we don’t lose the body.

So what’s a body to do with the bodies we have? It’s obvious that God loves all kinds of bodies. Big bodies, small bodies, tall bodies, short bodies, disabled bodies, suffering bodies – they are all alike made by God so we should love what we’ve got. Bodies can do amazing things. They are incredibly resilient. I look at some pieces of machinery or appliances that were made in 1963 – same year I was made – and I think – “Man, I’m in a lot better shape than that!” Think of how amazing that is that these bodies can endure so much and still keep going.

Yes, love what we’ve got and realize that the world often gives us unrealistic images for what our bodies should look like. But then take care of what we’ve got. It has only been in the last five years that I have started to atone for all the years of Tex-Mex food that I ate in Texas. That wasn’t the only culprit, but it was a major contributor to my getting up to almost 275 pounds a few years ago. It has been a slow process, but I have been trying to do better by what God gave me. I will say that it is a major benefit to have someone to be accountable to in doing this. For the last eight months you’ve heard me mention several times that I have been working with a trainer – Matthew Henry – and it makes a huge difference. Care for your body is not a nice option for Christians – it is a spiritual practice like prayer – a training for offering your body to the glory of God.

What, then, do we do when our bodies don’t work like they used to? What do we do when cancer strikes or we lose abilities that we used to have? Ironically, it may be in those times that we are most aware of our bodies. Instead of taking our bodies for granted, when we are ill or sore or wounded we know that we are really more dependent than we think. And ultimately it is our limitations that bring us to others who must do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves. We hate this. We hate to be dependent on others – to feel that we are weak or needy. But it is in these times that we may discover the necessity of the other body that I want to end with – the body of Christ.

The poet Scott Cairns, in a book titled The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, talks about friends of his who have left church because, they say, they are still spiritual, just not religious. In its own way, this is a kind of Gnosticism, too. Cairns says:

“I comprehend the unfortunate distinction being made by their parsing of terms and that distinction continues to strike me as the result of an insidious and ongoing failure – theirs, ours and mine…These beloved friends must find their way home. They must find a way to reconnect their faith to their communities and their communities to their faith. They must find a way to reconnect, as it were, the spirit with the body. Satan, our tradition tells us, looks for any vessel sailing without a fleet, and it seems to me that an individualized, isolated ‘spirituality’ is almost by definition satanic.”[v]

Who are we? Are we individuals set out on our own to navigate the world under our own strength and power? That’s surely a recipe for disaster. Aren’t we a body – the body of Christ? And it is in this body, sharing frequently of the body and blood in bread and cup, that we learn the things that will take us to the kingdom – body and soul. Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 [NRSV]

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

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[i] Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 173. Referred to hereafter as Petroff.

[ii] Jacques de Vitry, “The Life of Marie d’Oignies,” in Petroff, p. 183.

[iii] Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003], pp. 66-67.

[iv] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in This World: A Geography of Faith, [HarperCollins ebook, 2009] location 621-630.

[v] Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009], p. 77.