Sermon from June 30, 2002
I have always been comfortable with old people, because I grew up with an old person. My maternal grandmother, Mollie Caroline Parker Freeman, was 70 when I was born, and she lived in our familly everyday until she died in her 93rd year. I learned my first lessons in the book of Revelation from her Bible. She bought me my first car out of her meager savings. She frightened me with her nightmares, and she made me laugh to see her bare feet sticking out from under the covers, even on a cold winter's night.

Perhaps most powerfully, her daily presence in my life made being old seem unexceptional. I never thought of her as old; I simply thought of her as there. I assumed every household had a resident octogenarian the way every household had a water heater, and every household has a pet.

She served, subconsciously, as my role model of what it meant to be old. She never to my knowledge went to a doctor. At 93 her mind seemed to work as well as ever. I remember her complaining about arthritis and bursitis, but she seldom used a cane, and she was still vain enough to tear up what she considered unflattering, old photographs of herself - a fact that annoyed my mother to no end.

Of course, through all those growing up years, I never thought of myself as becoming an octogenarian. In the earthly years of my immortality, I pictured myself as perpetually young, my grandmother as perpetually there, and my parents as perpetually going in and out and doing those mysterious things that parents do. It was a shock and surprise, when my mother called me at Dallas Seminary to tell me that my grandmother had risen one morning and had a stroke as her foot touched the floor. For the first time in her life she was in a hospital. She died there five weeks later.

Still, I was only 22, and the fit of immortality was upon me. It was in my late twenties that the idea of being old myself made its emotional presence felt, when Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel wrote and sang their remarkably sensitive song, Old Friends.

LInes from that song still come back as if it were yesterday. "Old friends sat on their park bench like bookends." "I have a photograph." and one line in combination with other events in my life at the time had the power to brig home to me my own mortality. "How terribly strange to be seventy."

It did seem strange, but now it seemed inevitable. It did seem inevitable, but it still seemed far away, something that happened to other people. Then, seven years ago, the unthinkable began to happen to my mother. My mother had run her own business until she was 75, and she lived alone, drove her own car, owned and maintained her own house until she was almost 90.

She began to make mistakes with her checkbook. She got lost driving in the city where she lived for 70 years. I went to visit her, and she seemed surprised, when I arrived from the airport. Then, one Labor Day weekend, her next door neighbor called to tell me that she had found my mother in the kitchen, smoke rising from a pan that she had left too long on the stove, and my mother bewildered as to what to do.

My mother agreed to sell her house and car and moved here to Wilmington to a retirement home to be close to Carole and me. Then, for three and a half years she kept telling me she was going home. I would often visit her and find all her belongings laid out on the bed, ready to pack. I became very adept at getting her things back into drawers and closet, but I never got used to it. Her dementia worsened. She would ask the same questions several times within a few minutes. Carrying on a meaningful conversation even about the past, became laborious and finally impossible.

I began to ask myself, "Am I going to be like this some day? Or will I be like my grandmother?" There is no sure answer to that question that will calm the sheer panic that occasionally stabs at my being with the possibility of some day being less than what I am today. Is there any biblical wisdom that will help us face those possibilities, and at the same time guide the young on how to face those possibilities in their parents? I would like to share with you some of the biblical wisdom that helps me. We begin in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6.

Verses 33-34 capture something strategic to every stage of life, including the prospects of growing old. Jesus said, But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. This profound wisdom contains a refusal and an affirmation.

The refusal (in verse 34) is a refusal to worry about tomorrow. All I have is today, this very moment, with its opportunities and obligations. It is the only time I have to act. Worry hinders action. Jesus teaches us to refuse an anxious preoccupation with what may happen tomorrow. Specifically, He teaches us to refuse an anxious preoccupation with what may happen to our minds and bodies, when we grow old.

The affirmation (in verse 33) is a quest to live all of the life that God has given us under God's authority and protection. That in a nutshell is what it means to seek first God's kingdom and authority. Jesus teaches us to get our priorities for living straight, and that will equip us to face whatever life throws at us. Specifically, He teaches us to get our priorities for living straight, and that will equip us to face whatever may happen to our minds and bodies, when we grow old.

Now, this wisdom has plenty of practical applications. For example, it may mean that we or our parents need to buy insurance for care in our old age. It may also mean being wise with investments so that you can live on your own for as long as health permits. It may also mean that you take care of your body now, so that you don't have the piper to pay in old age for poor eating habits and lack of exercise now. These are responsible actions that we can take now to prepare us for being old.

The wisdom Christ means learning to be a patient and caring person now, so that you won't grow to be an irascible curmudgeon when you are old. It means learning to trust God in your present trials, so that you will have a store of experiences with God that will sustain you in the uncertainties of old age.

In short the practice of worship, love and detachment done for the sake of Christ now is the best training ground for the uncertainties of old age. Renew today and often your commitment to the priorities of God. There is no better preparation for old age.

Here is a second piece of biblical wisdom that speaks to the possibilities of old age. It is the Fifth Commandment, as recorded in Exodus 20:12. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. This has several parts to it. Let me start us out with one part that bears especially on the tough part of growing old.

A few weeks before my mom died, she was in the hospital for about two weeks. While there, she pretty much stopped eating. She said she just was not hungry. I tried daily to be with her during at least one meal to encourage her to eat. It was very like trying to feed a reluctant child, except that my mother did not become unpleasant in any way. She politely said day after day that she was not hungry, and she did not eat. She also found it more difficult to drink, because she would aspirate the fluid.

I remember once, when she aspirated water, the nurse inserted tubes through her nose to suction fluid out of her breathing passages. During that process, I had to hold my mom's hands, because she tried to pull the tubes out. I did not hold her hands so much as I put my open hands out to prevent her hands from reaching the tubes, all the time speaking gently and reassuringly to her until the procedure ended. That day, like many other days, I took the long way home, just driving through different parts of New Castle Country, trying to put some distance between the personal distress of those moments and the next responsibility I had to address.

The distress increased, as we were given the option of using tubes to feed her. From my previous experience with the tubes, I knew that use of naso-gastric feeding tubes would be difficult, if not impossible. The other alternative was a peg tube, inserted through the abdominal wall into the stomach, through which food could be given.

That is a trickier proposition. It is the nature of medicine that attaching a peg tube or other instrument of life support to a person may be easier than removing it. Emotional, moral and legal considerations can make that decision difficult.

We decided to do nothing. That meant that nurses and I continued to try to get my mom to eat. Getting her to eat two or three spoonfuls of ice cream one day was a great victory. The dangers of aspirating liquids meant that I would give thickened liquids to her a spoonful at a time to keep her somewhat hydrated.

Carole and I often talked about this process, and every time we came to the same conclusion. We would not always be sure of what was right, but we would do the best we knew for my mom, whatever it might cost us, because that was the right thing to do. That is how I tried to obey the Fifth Commandment in those last weeks of my mom's life.

I believe there is another way of honoring father and mother, and it is best to do this before some irreversible reality of old age makes it impossible. We honor our parents by trying to unerstand them in their adult experience. There are powerful forces that may cause parents and their children always to relate to each other as parent to child and child to parent long after childhood and adolescence have passed.

To break away from the way of seeing parents and to see them as their peers see them opens up a whole new appreciation of them as human beings. I remember eight or nine years ago having dinner with one of my childhood Sunday School teachers. He told me a story about my father that I had never heard before. Suddenly, I saw my father as other men his age had known him, and I was startled at the reality.

After my mom's death, I went through a lot of personal documents that shed light on my parents' adult experience. I read carbon copies of applications for work that my mother had submitted as a young woman. From them I could sense her eagerness to work and her disciplined way of going about the business of living. I came across a tax return from the early 1940s, and it was easy to imagine what that sas like to my dad. I was just surprised at how small the numbers were. Best of all were the letters and postcards from family and friends.

Of course, it is quite possible that parents do not want their children to know them in that way. They prefer the emotional security of having a parent-child relationship. In that case children honor their wishes and become psychological detectives, looking for clues to the meaning of their parents' adult experience apart from them.

Here is a third piece of biblical wwisdom that speaks to a certainty of old age. 1 Corinthians 15:53-54 says this: For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

Several years ago, a routine exam suggested that I might have cancer. A biopsy and subsequent testing over a substantial period of time concluded that it had been a false alarm. Before I knew that it was a false alarm, I had the most curious sensations as I lay awake in the night and thought about the possibilities before me. The most curious was that my body had betrayed me. I had done nothing to cause cancer. My body had given me absolutely no warning that it might be hosting a life-threatening disease. Judas-like, it had sprung the surprise on me on a most ordinary day, when nothing seemed amiss.

The cold, winter winde never felt so good, when that sweet nurse went out of her way to call me to say the biopsy was negative. But some day, the warning will be real. Swift of slow, the heralds of death will announce my final act. The thing I have seen hundreds of times will become most personal. The perishable and the mortal will have their ineluctable way with me, but they will not have the last word with me. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. The Christian story does not flinch in the face of death, because in the story of Jesus Christ "death has been swallowed up in victory."

Death of the body is only one kind of death that has been swallowed up in victory. Back in April, Pastor Bill Heider did the call to worship at an 8:30 service. He told how he occasionally asks teenagers their fathers' names. The question catches them by surprise, but they remember their fathers' given names. Then, he asks them their grandfathers' names. That is harder, but they do remarkably well. Then, he asks them their great grandfathers' names, and the game is over.

And they were only talking names, never mind jobs, interests, hobbies, achievements, academic degrees - all the things that give a person identity. Bill's call to worship was a catalyst for me. I have done some genealogical work on my father's side of the family, and I can trace the line back to North Carolina for sure and, less certainly, to a settlement along the James River in Viginia prior to the Revolution.

But I could not remember my great grandfather Matthews' name. Why should my great grandchildren remember my name or what mattered to me or my achievements? And my mortality hit me like a ton of bricks. Not now the death of my body, but the fragile nature of all my earthly efforts. And peace came over me that I did not expect. I can account for it only by saying that in a profound way I no longer took myself seriously. I take life seriously, which means that I take love and faith and hope seriously. I take you seriously, but not myself or my achievements. That pice of me is in extremis.

A power by the Scottish author and preacher, George Macdonald captures something of the emotion of this last biblical wisdom about growing old.

          Our old age is the scorching of the bush
          By life's indwelling, incorruptible blaze.
          O life, burn at this feeble shell of me,
          Till I the sore singed garment off shall push,
          Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.