Hilton Head Island, SC – September 18, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Proverbs3:13-18; Joel 2:28-29
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” – Joel 2:28 (RSV)
From the moment we are born, we begin to age. Until we are in our sixties or seventies, though, most of us don’t think very much about aging. It is only when we start to notice that we are physically or mentally less able to do certain things that we could once do with ease that we realize, at last, we too are getting older.
The prophecy of Joel is one of the most minor of the so-called Minor Prophets. There are only three chapters in his short book. Not much is known about him, and not much happens in his book. He says almost nothing about the time in which he lived, except to note that a plague of locusts descended upon Judah. That still happens often in Africa and the Middle East. As did nearly all the prophets, Joel attributed this natural disaster to the sins of his contemporaries as the judgment of God against them. That is a very debatable theological point, but since it has nothing to do with the theme of this sermon, it won’t be debated here.
Joel begins his prophecy referring to the locusts, which came and ate all the crops and much of the vegetation of the land. “Hear this, you aged men. Give ear all inhabitants of the land!”(1:2) Later Joel wrote, as though he is God doing the speaking (which is what all the prophets did, and that a topic for another sermon), “And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (2:28).
Was Joel young, or old, when he wrote down his thoughts? We don’t know. But his mind fastened onto aged and old men a couple of times in his brief prophecy. When I decided to preach a sermon about aging, I recalled the phrase from the sermon text about old men dreaming dreams, and thus it serves as today’s sermon text, which is really a pretext (but you’d have to be a preacher to know what that even means, and that also is for another sermon).
I never felt especially old until I had my eightieth birthday nearly four years ago. Then I felt as though old age had suddenly seized me in its elderly grasp. Referring to our text (which is also something of a pretext),I dream more frequently now than I did formerly, and my dreams are much more vivid that they used to be. In them, I am engaged in spirited political conversations about current politics, for example, or I struggle with something in sleep that I have also battled when awake. In former years, my dreams made no sense at all, but now they are as real as if I were awake. In addition, my dreams often wake me, and I can’t get back to sleep. Old people need their sleep, for heaven’s sake, and this feature of old age, at least my old age, exasperates me. I have enough “insomnia of the aging” anyway, and I never had it until I was eighty. I find that in my aged status my mind seems to run faster, not slower, even as my body runs slower, not faster. My mind still perks along fairly well, but it’s my memory that needs a transplant.
I never used to take any pills, but now, every day, I take eleven of them: two prescription medications, and nine over-the-counter ones. That seems like a lot of pills, but I suspect there are some of you who consume that many or more. Pills! Pills are among the primary ingestions of old folks! Without question, they are one of several factors which have consigned us to a longer life span than any generation before us, and that is not necessarily a blessing. But it is a great blessing to the pharmaceutical companies, who just keep charging more money for them.
John Leland spent a year talking with and listening to six New Yorkers who were above the age of eighty-five. He wrote a book about it called Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a year among the oldest old. He said, “More people are past age eighty-five than at any time in human history (nearly six million in America, up from under a million in 1960), and they are living longer once they get there” (p. 12). His thesis evolved from his six subjects, who chose to be happy in old age, rather than to bemoan their aged state. Those oldsters are very wise.
Living in a retirement community, one observes how other oldsters face their advancing years. Some attack it, some try to remain oblivious to it, and some accept it as yet another stage in a long and eventful life. Some at seventy are immobilized, and some in their nineties seem as spry as many in their forties. Every old person is an individual, with individual challenges, attitudes, and degrees of acceptance. YOU are an individual, and not a statistic, and don’t forget it.
Unquestionably, aging has many undesired outcomes and side-effects, as those who get there discover. My eyes aren’t as good as they once were. My ears have perversely moved the voice of someone standing next to me to the other side of the room, and this person appears incapable of clearly enunciating such words “now, cow, how, or bow.” Only the context of what is said helps me to decipher what is being said, but sometimes the context is also too garbled to figure it out. When I rise from a chair, especially a low, soft chair, I may need to rock back and forth to accomplish the task, and sometimes I have to stand there for a few moments to decide whether I am ready to begin steadily walking or to fall flat on my face. In his very enlightening and entertaining book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson says, “It takes one hundred muscles just to get us to stand up” (p. 167) No wonder I’m a bit wobbly when I get up from a chair that is determined to keep me down. I have not yet fallen flat on my face, but I can foresee it happening, and it is not a pleasant prospect. When my old-man dreams waken me, I have to take steps of about nine inches per when I go to where old men go when they waken in the middle of the night. These reminders of reality come with increasing frequency, and I am left in a mini-maelstrom, trying to sort them out.
The poet Mary Oliver wrote a poem called I Worried. I worried a lot./ Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction,/ Will the earth turn as it was taught,/ And if not how shall I correct it?/ …Is my eyesight failing, or am I just imagining it,/ Am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?”
These are oldster issues, oldsters. Young people don’t think about such things, but older people do. Mary Oliver did find comfort for herself. “Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing,/ And I gave it up./ And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.” Mary Oliver is a very wise woman, and wisdom is what old folks are supposed to seek. The Bible says so.
The Book of Proverbs is a compendium on how to seek wisdom. Much of it is a father speaking to his son, urging him to acquire this elusive quality. “Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gets understanding” (3:13). In both the Hebrew and Greek languages, wisdom was always perceived as a feminine trait. Ladies, take note. Therefore Proverbs says, “She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her” (13:15).
When I was boy growing up in Wisconsin, the Germans of the Badger State had a saying: “Ve grow too soon old, und too late schmart.” Thus, as I grow older and older, I think to myself, “If only I knew back then what I know now!” Wisdom may never come to us, but if it does, it may come much later than we would have liked. Why didn’t I do then what I can no longer do now? I never was grateful for all my faculties until some of them started to rust out. Nevertheless, there is no wisdom at all if we allow ourselves to be consumed in old age by regret. That isn’t smart. What is done is done, and what lies ahead is the only thing we can change --- if we can even change that.
Memory loss is an unavoidable factor for most people who get old. Names fly out of my head like frightened crows out of trees. I look up a phone number in the phone book, repeat it three times, then close the phone book - - - and forget the number. Bill Bryson writes, “A single fleeting thought or recollection can fire up a million or more neurons scattered across the brain. Moreover these fragments of memory move around over time, migrating from one part of the cortex to another” (p. 58). He further states, “Short-term memory is really short - no more than half a minute or so for things like addresses or phone numbers. (If you can remember something after half a minute, it’s no longer technically a short term memory. It’s long term)” he says (p.59).
Bill Bryson is both reassuring and alarming. He says there are so many things that go wrong with our carcasses that it’s amazing we are alive at all, let alone that so many of us live as long as we do. Still, Bryson, the magnificent and humorous researcher, elucidates so many factors that can do us in that, if we incorporated everything he says into our ever-shrinking mental hardware, we might catapult into a permanent elderly funk. So we must not succumb to that sober knowledge.
Both my parents had arthritis, and I also have it, but only in my shoulders. Therefore each morning when I am almost finished with my shower, I turn up the hot water dial and put each shoulder under the shower head for about ten seconds. Fifteen seconds would probably par-boil the joints between my arms and my neck, but ten seconds is enough hydrotherapy to take care of me for the rest of the day, until I take my pain pill in the evening to see me through the night --- if I can make it unencumbered through the night, which, as I earlier explained, I often can’t and don’t.
Several years ago I acquired a bunion, and as a result of that, a hammertoe. My shoes used to be 12 A’s, but now they are 11 1/2 C’s or D’s, in order to be wide enough to accommodate my bothersome bunion and hammertoe. It is a perpetual pain in the foot.
There are physical things I used to be able to do that I can’t do, and there are things I don’t want to do that I do. As I have said in previous sermons, old age is not for sissies. I occasionally feel dizzy for no discernible reason. Go figure.
On Monday morning Lois and I watched the service in the St. Giles Cathedral of Edinburgh in memory of Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland and Queen Elizabeth II to everyone else in the UK and British Commonwealth. (I won’t explain that, but if you think of it, you can ask me afterward.) Listening to a Grrreat Aggrrregate of Scots ecclesiastical luminaries, one of whom I once met, I was overcome by memories of what, in many respects, was the happiest year of my life, when I attended Trinity College of Glasgow University during my second year of seminary. It reminded me, as I am increasingly reminded by many other things, that there are aspects of my past life that shall never be duplicated again, and it makes me a wee bit sad. Tears well up in my eyes much more often than in bygone years. That’s what aging does to males who are keenly aware of their aging. The first three stories in last week’s New Yorker about the Queen: excellent writing; exceedingly faulty tear ducts; couldn’t get them to stop.
What is the most menacing factor that courses through my failing mind as I contemplate getting older than I already am? It is not cancer or a heart attack or a stroke. I have always been blessed by exceptional health, and I know there is absolutely nothing I did to deserve it. With increasing frequency, though, I ponder dementia, wondering if already I am faced with it or shall be faced with it if it has not already enveloped the crevices of my gray matter in its dispassionate grip. Fifty years ago I rarely encountered parishoners with dementia, because fifty years ago there were not nearly so many old people. By for the past thirty years now I have been with countless scores of parishioners in their last days on earth, and in my opinion, based on that pastoral experience, I have concluded that dementia is the most difficult form of death with which anyone can be afflicted, both for the individual and for those who live with and care for that person There is almost nothing, and perhaps literally nothing, that we can do to stave off dementia.
From the time I was a teenager, I have been captivated by death - - - not fearful of it, or terrified, or angry because of its inevitable visitation on everyone and every living thing on earth - - - but captivated by it. It is absolutely the only thing in life that all of us can count on. As I draw closer to death, I ponder it even more often. We are born to die, all of us.
Nevertheless, many of us may live to be older than were any of our four grandparents when they died, and others perhaps also older than either of their parents. It is wise for old people to act their age rather than to try to delude themselves into thinking they are much younger than they are. I doubt that God has anything to do with how long anyone lives. However long it is, God is with us to provide continuing meaning to the lives we have, whether they are vibrant or sedentary.
Do remember this: Nobody dies from poor eyesight or hearing loss or hammertoes or arthritic shoulders or insomnia. However --- and this really important --- people do die from dementia, but they can take measures to hasten their own deaths before Dr. Alzheimer’s discovery takes them in its merciless grip. If you give me your email address, I’ll send you an essay I wrote a few years ago called The Altruistic Death, which addresses this Big-Reality Topic.
Old age may do its worst to upend us, but those who are wise will do their best to choose to be as happy as possible with whatever limitations it thrusts upon them. Accept your longevity as an unanticipated gift, not from God, but from life itself, and then trust that God’s presence with you will guide you through whatever lies ahead.