PARENTS OF US ALL
May 10, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 21:15-19
Genesis 12:1-4

"I will bless you, and make your name great,...
Abram was seventy-five years old..."

-~Genesis 12:2, 4 (NRSV)

Robert Browning surely had Abraham in mind when he wrote a
poem many preachers will haul out and quote some Sunday in May,
it being Older Adults Month:

"Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be.
The last of life for which the first was made..."

For Abraham that was true. Rabbi Kushner says somewhere
that life begins when the mortgage is paid, the last child moves
out of your home and the dog dies. We don't know much about
Abraham and Sarah beforehand, but we do know that at the age of
seventy-five life becomes very interesting. In fact, there is a
sense in which Abraham's life really begins at seventy-five. And
unlike the Kushner formula about an empty nest and no dog to
worry about, it doesn't mean a lessening of responsibility and
activity and excitement. On the contrary at.seventy-five Abra-
ham's life begins to pick up pace. The real meaning and purpose
of his life begins to appear. God confronts him, calls him to
pick up and move, and of all things, promises that Abraham and
Sarah will be parents of a great nation. And in case you miss

the point, Genesis 12:4 reads "Abraham was seventy-five years old
when he left Haran."

God repeats the promise along the way but Abraham keeps
getting older until at the age of ninety-nine God reappears,
repeats the promise. Sarah laughs - but becomes pregnant. Isaac
is born. They are, what we would call "older adults." We can't
be sure how the Genesis writer is measuring time, but the con-
sistent references to Abraham's and Sarah's age, their aging, is
an important motif. Something different and critical is being

affirmed in the remarkable saga of these two wonderful older
adults.

Aging is a time of promise and continuing blessing in the
Bible, a time of wisdom and completion and ripeness. The Bible
looks forward to old age. The Hebrew word for "Elder" is the
same word for "leader." The old are respected, honored, venerat-—
ed. For Abraham, essentially the.first. historical character to
appear in the Bible, life at seventy-five accelerates in pace and
productivity and takes on new intensity and vigor. It certainly
doesn't decline and diminish. [See Homiletics, January-March
1992, p. 43]

Hebrew culture developed a unique view of aging and the
place of older persons. The Fifth Commandment, “Honor your
father and your mother, that your days may be long..." is not
exclusively focused on parents and children in one nuclear fami-
ly. Rather, that commandment focuses on the whole culture and
seeks to establish a social order which respects age, values,
uses, assigns responsibility to and for its elders. Some schol-
ars conclude that the Fifth Commandment was an alternative to the
pagan practice among the other tribes and nations of abandoning
the elderly when they were incapable of taking care of them-
selves. The elders in Israel were regarded as the parents of the
nation - whether or not they were actual parents was not the

point. It's an important understanding, I think... Older adults
are "Parents of Us All."

It is a topic relevant for all..of us in.the. most existential
of ways. It is not at all an abstraction. We have aging parents ©
or we know someone who does. We live near someone who is an
older adult. And, most important of all, we are aging. It is
not immediately apparent to the young, but getting old is what we
do if we are fortunate. Adlai Stevenson was not the only person
to observe in the middle of those birthday laments about getting
older that having another birthday is vastly better than the
alternative!

There is a wonderful chapter on "normal aging" in Lewis
Thomas's new book The Fragile Species. Thomas, who is a distin-
guished scientist, observes that in the larger world of
mammals, aging is a human phenomenon and a fairly recent one.
Most animals, he observes, de not age in the wild. When they
slow down a step, the end is near. Only our house pets and zoo
animals mirror this anthropologically unique and wonderfully
human phenomenon of getting old.

Thomas, who is also a physician, says that our cultural
problem is in viewing aging as a disease with a resultant revul-
sion and, at times, mean belittling of our elders in trivial
television and Hollywood attempts at-humor; and there are wide-
spread and very lucrative industries dedicated to the avoidance
and denial of aging.

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It's time to think in new ways about aging. Thomas and
others are saying today, or perhaps from our Judeo-Christian per-
spective, it's time to look back and recover an older way of
thinking; all the way back to Abraham.

In any event, it's necessary to think in new ways because
there are so many older Americans, approaching a now third of the
population. In 1840 life expectancy in the country was 40. In
1930, it was 60, 1970 - 70. If you are 65 now, some statisti-
cians are suggesting that actual life expectancy may be approach-
ing 90. The gerontologists know that the body apparently is
prepared to go on functioning to the age of 120 or 140, apart

from disease. We don't actually wear out, they are telling us.
We get sick.

And so, it is time to think in new ways. The traditional
formula was to divide human life into three neat stages: youth -
adulthood — old age; preparation ~ real life - decline; birth -
maturity - death.

Today social scientists are suggesting that the old formula
is totally wrong, and the latest pattern is four stages, or ages.

The first age - birth to twenty-one is for learning.

The second age - is the time of maturity and responsibility,
career, child rearing, mortgages, stress.

The third age - is the new wrinkle (no pun intended). The
third age, what we used to call the onset of old age - and where
a lot of us are - is now called the "age of fulfillment." It is,
because of the amazing increase in life expectancy, often the
longest stage of our lives. At this age the questions used to be
"Have you made peace with God?" or "Are you ready to go?" Today
the question for the third age is "What are you going to do with
the next 25 years of your life?"

The fourth age - when we are frail, and dependent, is coming
later and lasting briefly, a radical and by-and-large hopeful

evolution which has occurred in our lifetime. [op. cit.Homilet-
ics]

The culture is lagging behind badly. The Biblical view that
old age is a time of promise and productivity is in line with
what is happening to us physically but not culturally.

What happens in the third age in our culture is not always
pretty.

Lewis Thomas suggests that young physicians be required to
read, in addition to textbooks on gerontology and geriatrics, the

literature of aging. He proposes for instance Wallace Stegner,

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distinguished American author. In one of Stegner's novels, The
Spectator Bird, an elderly man receives a research questionnaire
in the mail about self-esteem and reflects:

"The self-esteem of the elderly declines in this
society which indicates in every way that it does

not value the old in the slightest, finds them an
expense and an embarrassment, laughs at then,

evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals

and sunshine cities, and generally ignores/them,
except when soliciting their votes or adppif) oft rm
their handbags and social security c {The
Spectator Bird, in The Fragile Species, p. 74]

The realities of aging in our culture are not always pleas-
ant. Only five percent of older Americans are living in institu-
tions or retirement facilities. Ninety-five percent are either
living alone or with families, often doing just fine, but fre-
quentiy not: living with fear, for instance, fear of isolation
and abandonment, fear of falling alone and not being discovered,
fear that the rent will go up, or the buses won't run, fear of
street crime. And sometimes the demonic convergence of a strong
body, and the onset of Alzheimer's disease and the in-
adequacy of the health care system creates a virtual nightmare,
and otherwise decent people have literaily no alternative left to
exercise. They tie an elderly father in a wheelchair and abandon
him at a racetrack.

So we must all begin to think of new ways to catch up to
reality, or more accurately, to recover the older and wiser view
of aging. And the reasons are not altogether altruistic; not
only, that is to say, because we ought to be more compassionate
and kind, but because our current way of thinking about aging is
so wasteful. Thomas says most Americans would opt for eternal
youth, tennis court to death bed with no stops between, but at
tremendous loss to the heart and soul of the culture. We need
parents - "Parents of Us Alii."

There is a breadth of discernment which is available only to
older persons. Erik Erikson knew about it when he said that "old
age is a time of integrity, of absolute honesty." James Hilton
who wrote the classic Goodbye, Mr. Chips observed, "One of the
joys of growing older is you bother less about a lot of little
things and care more about a few big things.”

There is a breadth of discernment, a sense of what is really
important and what is not actually very important at all, which
simply doesn't show up in the human psyche for six: or seven
decades. Some cultures value it as wisdom. The Hebrew culture
did. Some eastern cultures do. There is an ancient African
saying that when an elderly person dies a library burns down.

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And there is passion and intensity. Martin Marty reported
sometime ago on a survey which revealed that the person most
likely to be working for peace and justice in the world is your
grandmother. The most politically active segment of the popula-
tion is not college students, but the elderly.

British actress, Florida Scott Maxwell, said,

"Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time.
My seventies were interesting and serene, but my
eighties were passionate. I grow more intense
with age. To my own surprise, I burst out in hot
conviction. I have to calm down. I am too frail
to indulge in moral fervor." (Thomas, p. 75)

There are, of course, limits... about which it seems best to
maintain a sense of humor.

One of my favorite authors, John Updike, wrote a volume of
poems, Facing Nature, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday a

few years ago. Here is one which describes a dilemma many of us
have:

Typical Optical

"In the days of my youth
'Mid many a caper

I drew with my nose

A mere inch from the paper;
But now that I'm older

And of the elite

I find I can't focus
Inside of two feet.

"First pill-bottle labels
And telephone books

Began to go under

To my dirty looks;

Then want ads and box scores
Succumbed to the plague

Of the baffling quite
Unresolvably vague.

"Now novels and poems

By Proust and John Donne
Recede from my ken in
Their eight-point Granjon;
Long, long in the lens

My old eyeballs enfold

No print any finer

than sans-serif bold."

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No one does it better, of course, than George Burns, who a
few years ago, in his 80s, booked himself at the Palladium for a
performance on his one-hundredth birthday, and who said recently:

"You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie
your shoes and wonder what else you can do while
you're down there." (Homiletics, op. cit.]

And Bruce Bliven, former editor of the New Republic: some-
one asked him what it felt like to be an old man. In his 70s,
he said, "I don't feel like an old man. I feel like a young man
with something the matter with him." Or the distinguished essay-
ist Malcom Cowley in an essay "The View from Eighty": "We live
by new rules. If you are wearing one brown shoe and one black
shoe, quite possibly there is a similar pair in your closet."
(op. cit. L. Thomas)

And, of course, Satchel Paige, who among many wise things
asked, "How old you'd be if you didn't know how old you was?"

There are limits and it is best to smile at them and ac-
knowledge and celebrate the fact that there are capacities which,
in fact, continue to improve over the years.

Some are suggesting that memory increases with age. There
are studies to prove that the ability..to.memorize..increases.
Other research suggests that IQ improves. Short-term recall may
decline or be crowded out by increased long-term memory. There's
a lot to remember and the longer we live the better we get at it.

And creativity - the list is stunning. Pablo Casals,
practicing daily into his 90s and when someone asked him why,
saying, "I think I'm beginning to see some improvement":

Grandma Moses
Bertrand Russell
Picasso

Albert Schweitzer
Winston Churchill

And is there a better actress working today than Jessica
Tandy?

And freedom. Someone told Artur Rubenstein that in his 80s
he was playing better than ever. He responded:

"ZT think so. Now I take chances I never. took
before. You see, the stakes are not so high. I
can afford it. I used to be so much more careful.
No wrong notes. Not too bold ideas. Now I let go
and enjoy myself and to hell with everything
except the music."

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Our religion has an important word for us to hear and to
speak. It is a new word but in a sense it is one of our oldest
ideas. And, it is a word enhanced magnificently by the Gospel of
Jesus Christ.

It is this;

Age knows some things which youth is only in the process of
learning. Among them are these:

~ that aging is and can be a process of growing, and

- that life is even more precious and beautiful and intense
and therefore creative and productive and purposeful from the
perspective of years, and

- that with an accumulation of decades comes some lovely
surprises: discernment, wisdom and freedom.

And mysteriously, with age comes a trust in God's good
providence, a confidence that nothing separates us from God's

love in Jesus Christ and that the last enemy turns out not to be
an enemy at all.

We need that. We need people who know those things. Older
adults may need younger people, but when the final tally is in,

not nearly as much as young people need their elders... "Parents
of Us All."

Browning was right.

"The best is yet to be.
The last of life for which the
first was made...."

And then he continued -

"Our times are in his hand

Who saith, 'A whole I planned:

youth shows but half;

trust God; see all; nor be afraid.'"

+ + + + + +

God of all the years, we thank you for the majesty and mystery of
human life; for its growing, aging and becoming, in your good
providence, what you intended it to be. Bless the parents of us
all, our wise elders; and bless us each on our way: through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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