Hilton Head Island, SC – August 4, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Ecclesiastes 12:1-14; Psalm 71:7-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent. – Psalm 71:9 (RSV)
A few weeks ago The New Yorker had a cartoon which is an appropriate way to start this sermon. It was the drawing of a tee shirt, with a large caption that said, “Undiagnosed Middle-Age-Onset Discomfort,” with the sub-caption, “Summer Tour.” Then it listed five ailments which had afflicted the wearer of the tee shirt: “Left Shoulder – July 5; Abdomen – July 12; Lower Back – July 17,18,19; An Inch or So Above the Groin – July 22; Right Shoulder – July 25.”
From this we may deduce that the owner of that shirt wanted to chronicle for everyone to see that he had presumably engaged in more physical activity than he should have, and he was paying the price for it. People who attend The Chapel Without Walls may further deduce that if all those aches and pains struck a mere middle-aged whippersnapper, think what is happening to us who are sexagenarians, septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians? And he’s complaining?
I have always thought that I have been blessed with extraordinarily good health, and it’s true. I also want to insist that I am still in excellent health. But since I turned eighty a few months ago, I have noticed several physical fallibilities which heretofore seemed infallible. For instance, twenty years ago, when skiing, I think I semi-wrecked the rotator cuff in my right shoulder. I never had it checked though, and after a couple of years, the pain went away. Then, a year or so ago, it returned. I decided it was just the rotator cuff refusing to rotate as it should. Then, after I turned eighty, my left shoulder similarly began to hurt. This happens on both sides, but only at night, when I am either trying to get to sleep or am actually sleeping, in which case these defective mergers of bones may wake me up. Both of my parents had arthritis, and I think it has caught up with me. Leg cramps also awaken me, and I have to struggle out of bed quickly and try to stand on my resisting, stiff limbs to overcome these nocturnal assaults.
When the rotator cuff first stopped rotating properly, my doctor told me to take a pain pill before I went to bed. After the pain permanently stopped, I stopped taking the pill. But now, with both shoulders acting up, I am back to being a pill popper again. Thus far my hips and knees are fine, but every now and again my right knee acts like it wants to go into a vertical lock or else collapse into an unceremonious heap. My health is good, don’t you see, but my arthritic (I surmise) shoulders are awful, and it is possible my knees may be starting to act up as well.
Twenty years ago Lois told me I needed hearing aids. As a minister I told her I had heard so many parishioners complain about both the cost and the ineffectiveness of their hearing aids that I decided not to get hearing aids until my hearing had deteriorated much more. When I finally got hearing aids about ten years ago, I realized I was probably ten years too late in doing what she said I should have done long ere that. Since then, my hearing has declined geometrically, which perhaps was to be expected, but I certainly didn’t expect it. I didn’t expect it in the first place. We all have a multitude of very fine, short hairs in our ears which are a main mechanism for enabling us to hear. I think by now my auditory canals are almost completely bald. That’s what the top of my head is trying to become as well. My health is good, but my hearing is horrible.
My eyes were always considerably better than average. I could read signs along the highway more quickly than nearly anybody. In the last few years, however, my distance vision has gone fuzzy on me in its own leisurely fashion. A while back I got a pair of glasses with progressive lenses. My new glasses wouldn’t stay put on the top of my nose, which, for all I know, is slowly slipping down toward my upper lip. This morning I am trying a new experiment. I want to see if I can see you clearly looking through the top part of my glasses, but also see my sermon manuscript clearly while looking through the bottom part. My health is good, but my eyes are not doing nearly as well they did for almost eighty years. Old age is not for sissies.
As they get older, some people acquire plumbing problems. Whether you shall plumbing issues depends. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
It is a bit disheartening to be so healthy and to have certain joints, my ears, and my eyes in such disreputable condition. This didn’t really happen suddenly, but to me it seems quite sudden.
For years I have become increasingly less able to pull up names at a moment’s notice. For example, I may see some of you coming into or going out of church, and suddenly I draw a blank on your name. I know who you are, but for the life of me I can’t pull up your name. That may be a harbinger of a really nasty issue, but I shall not address that in this sermon. Months or years down the line, maybe, but not now. But I’m telling you, my health is fine.
It is claimed that King Solomon wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes. I don’t think so, but on the other hand, I have no idea who did, so we shall put the authorship of this book on hold. Whoever wrote it was an old guy who had been around the block many times, if they had had blocks to go around back then. Being (presumably) an old guy, in his great gem of a book he saved his specific thoughts about old age till last.
“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth” he wrote in the first verse of his last chapter (12:1) He seems to imply that when you get old it will be harder to remember God’s blessings, especially since many of them will have ceased to be blessings and may have turned into what feel like burdens. “The sun and the moon and stars are darkened, and the clouds return after the rain” (12:2). Over three thousand years ago there were no ophthalmologists or optometrists, and if vision got blurry, it just stayed blurry. Old age is not for sissies. “The keepers of the house” (the bones and ligaments) “tremble, and the strong men” (the vertebrae of the back) “are bent” (12:3) What marvelous and descriptive poetic language! And it is so correct. Hardly anyone at ninety is as straight as she was forty.
“The grinders cease because they are few” (12:3). You can’t chew anything except scrambled eggs or chicken noodle soup, but without the chicken. What a chronological comedown that is! “Vanity of vanity, says the Preacher,” (Ecclesiastes ? Koheleth? Solomon?) “all is vanity.” If you think you are in as good shape at eighty as you were when you were thirty, you have engaged in an enormous exercise of vanity, and it is pure vanity to try to convince yourself of that.
Lois and I have lived in a retirement home for four and a half years. Many of you also live in a retirement home. When you live in such a setting, and see many old people on a daily basis, sometimes you notice big changes in very short spans of time. Some literally are here today and gone tomorrow. Others do very well, and then with astonishing rapidity they become almost totally incapacitated. But that is not the pattern for everyone by any means. We have a centenarian who looks and walks live a seventy-year-old. But then, we also have septuagenarians who look like centenarians. There is no explanation for those realities. That’s the way it is because that’s the way it is. But I want you to know this: Old age is not for sissies.
A few weeks ago there was a story in the paper about the United States Senior Games. A woman who is 103, identified as Julia (Hurricane) Hawkins, won both the fifty meter and the hundred meter dashes. She won the Fifty in 21.06 seconds and the Hundred in just over 46 seconds. Her eyes are starting to bother her though, and she wonders whether she will able to stay within the white lines. Other than that, she is fine.
When I was in the Twin Cities a few weeks ago, a friend gave me an article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a 97-year-old man from Duluth, Minnesota, who is still playing hockey. His teammates gave him a lifetime achievement award when he turned 80, and agreed to pay his ice time for the rest of his life. However, they didn’t expect him to live another seventeen years. Still, a promise is a promise, and Mark Sertich continues takes to the ice regularly, winter and summer. He does admit, “It’s kind of nice to be in shape, though when I was young I did a lot more.” No doubt. Old age is not for sissies, but anyone who is 97 and is still playing hockey is not a sissy. A highly eccentric male of our species, probably, but no sissy.
Some old people do their best to try to kid themselves that they’re not old. I don’t know if that applies to Julia or Mark, because I don’t know them. But I do know that it is a vain, false, and wasted effort to act like we are not old when we’re old. The wisdom which should accompany old age should also accept the reality of old age.
For some oldsters, a problem may be that the mental filter is either completely or nearly gone. Some old folks are far more likely to let it all hang out and say whatever is on their mind. They no longer remember how to keep most of it in. That is an issue with which they and everyone around them must deal. Advanced age often leads to problems which sometimes accompany advanced age, and all of us of whatever age need to learn to deal with that. Not to do so is unworthy of us as the only truly sentient species on earth.
In over fifty-five years of ministry, I have had countless conversations with old people or with younger people who were dying. Then everyone might let it all hang out, and they express their doubts as well as their convictions far more forthrightly. However, facing death for the elderly is different from facing it for those who are young, or at least not old. With our ever-increasing lifespan, too many old people long for death, and simply endure what they think they must. Many wonder why they keep living. In total objectivity, it is because they are not old enough or sick enough to die, and it seems like a genuine tragedy to hear people say they want to die when they are probably not going to die anytime soon. But few are willing to take up arms against their sea of troubles, as Hamlet observed, and so their lonely struggle continues. That is one of the saddest stories I regularly hear as a pastor.
The Book of Psalms is part of the five-book section of the Bible called the Wisdom Literature. The writer of Psalm 71 is not identified by name, unlike most of the other Psalms. Whoever wrote Psalm 71 probably was someone who was old for his time, which for his time would suggest that he was maybe in his fifties or sixties.
Psalm 71 makes two specific references to old age. In verses 17 and 18, he seems to be trying to curry favor with God. “O God, from my youth thou hast taught me, and I still proclaim thy wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, till I proclaim thy might to all the generations to come.” Let us give him the benefit of the doubt. He was a grand old man who had been loyal to God for his entire life, and he was grateful to God for the long life God had given him. Therefore he proclaimed that in his psalm.
The text for today’s sermon is Psalm 71:4: “Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my youth is spent.” I have known many old people who felt forsaken by God, because their old age was physically and mentally so very hard for them. It behooves all of us while we are still relatively strong spiritually, physically, and mentally to thank God for all His blessings to us, because the time may come when we do not feel blessed but rather cursed by greatly advanced age. God will never cast any of us off in our time of old age, but we might then cast off God, because we do not understand why we continue to live so long, when living so long feels like such a heavy burden.
Greatly advanced age has never been determined by God, any more than what we call “an untimely death” is determined by God. We live as long as we live because that is exactly how long we live. Once we are born, our lives are primarily in the hands of others and in our own hands, but the actual length of our lives is not set by God. If that were true, how could God justify the death of babies or young children, or young parents, or those who are killed in accidents or warfare, or even the deaths of those who die painfully from cancer or strokes or other infirmities?
I wanted to preach this sermon now, because I might someday die suddenly, and it would never have been preached, and I thought it was important for me to preach it. However, I suspect nature knows that I am too ornery to be allowed to die swiftly.
Everything I have said in this sermon notwithstanding, I intend to keep preaching in The Chapel Without Walls as long as I, but especially you, think I am still capable of serving as your pastor. One of the primary problems of really old preachers, of which there are many (problems, not preachers), is that they many never know when it is time to quit. Therefore I am asking you, I am pleading with you, to tell me if you think I’m too old to cut the homiletical or pastoral mustard any more. I really mean it; please tell me.
I certainly hope that I have not continued to preach into my eighties because psychologically I needed it. Needing to be needed is probably not a healthy need. But I will admit that it is financially helpful for me to stay on as a preacher and pastor, and for that I am very grateful.
“Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent.” God never casts off anyone at any stage of life, no matter how loyal or how sinful that life may have been. As I look around this room, I am led to believe that the youth and strength of those in this congregation were expended for most of us more than a few years ago. For us, the aging of the aged shall go on for as long as it goes on.
Old age is not for sissies, but God is committed to everyone, regardless of age. He will be with us for the rest of our lives, closer than we are to ourselves, and He will be with us in a new life beyond, which shall never end.
God of our life, through all the circling years, we trust in Thee.