60–The Sermon

Urbana Grace UMC, July 13, 2014

Sometime while sleeping last night, I completed my sixtieth loop around the sun. Being sixty is simply a matter of going in circles: big circles…60 of them. Like everyone else, I’ve been just a planetary passenger, riding the earth as it twirls and spins its way through space. And now, once again, I’m simply right back where I started (relative to the sun.)

Several weeks ago I got this inexplicable itch to say something profound about being 60. People generally humor the elderly, allowing them (…um…us…) a short comment or two encapsulating our accumulated wisdom. So please indulge me a short pontification, then a bit of Bible study.

First, a pontification: I must confess, now that I’m in my sixties, I don’t feel any different than I did yesterday…when I was in my fifties. I’ve long suspected that once we reach a certain age, we never stop being that age. There is a part of me that is still 20, a part that is still 30, a part that is still 10. We simply accumulate complexity and contradictions as the years go by. The older we get, the more comprehensive and complete we become…as human beings. An example: I’ve seen more than one 70 year old, in the presence of a grandchild, suddenly recover what it means to be a child again. Only the foolish completely surrender all the attributes of earlier decades. Sometimes we say that an old person is “young at heart.” And what we mean is that here is a person who has still retained qualities and evidences from each of the prior decades.

Okay…enough of my philosophy: it’s time to preach. And for that, we ask the question: what does the Bible have to say about being 60?

I’m sorry to say: not much. But there are a couple places for us to look. First, we go to the Old Testament.

Leviticus 27: 2-3: “…concerning the equivalent for a human being, the equivalent for a man shall be…50 shekels of silver…..”

This needs a little background explanation. Let’s say I’ve gotten myself in a fix, and I need God’s help. So…I make a deal with God. I say, “Lord, if you’ll help me out here, I’m all yours…do whatever you want with me.” That occasionally happens. Sometimes people would even offer a son or a daughter in exchange for some help. 

There was a woman named Hannah who asked for God’s help because she couldn’t have any children. She promised that if the Lord helped her out, she’d give her first son to the Lord. And sure enough, the Lord helped her out. And sure enough, she gave her first son, Samuel, to become a priest in the house of the Lord.

But as we all know, sometimes life gets complicated. We may realize that it’s time to “buy” ourselves back from a long future of cultic service to God. And so the book of Leviticus has a provision for redeeming one’s life. Chapter 27 states the terms: for 50 shekels of silver, a man can be released from ceremonial duties and can get on with his own life again.

I never thought much about Leviticus 27 before, until this year, when I suddenly noticed verse 7.

Leviticus 27:7 “…if the man is 60 years old or over, then the equivalent is 15 shekels…”

In other words, overnight,  I just lost 60% of my value. I already had trouble keeping people awake during my sermons…before I was 60. And I was already pretty slow on the bases on the church softball team. And I already wasn’t much help when it came to fixing something mechanical. But now…the book of Leviticus tells me that I’m even more useless.

So I’ll do what we do so often—skip over the Old Testament and go right to the New, where the messages are more palatable.

So, here we are in First Timothy: chapter 5. “Do not speak harshly to an older man… I like that…moving on to verse 3: …honor widows who are really widows…”

Once again we need to pause here for a little background. The early church took care of its widows: making sure that they had food, meaningful work to do, companionship, and respect. But you had to do more than just lose a husband to be a real widow. Verse 9: “…let a widow be put on the list if she is at least sixty years old…” In other words, in a church that treated the old with respect and deference, 60 was the qualifying age.

So far, Paul’s note to Timothy seems to be more to my liking than Leviticus. But then I read deeper. I’m not going to go into all the details here, but Paul insinuates that once you hit 60 you are dried up and no longer a sensual lure to anybody. In other words, from 60 on, your looks are gone, your plumbing’s broken, and everybody should pity you. Well…so much for finding what we want in the New Testament. Let’s go back to the front of the Bible…

This brings us to the 25th chapter of Genesis and the story of Isaac. Old Isaac becomes the father of twins…at the age of 60. (This is just a personal opinion, but does anyone else think that he presents a poor example for those of us who are 60? Is this really the optimal age for beginning parenthood?)

Isaac presents us sixty-year-olds with several other problems. When we read of his youthful limitations, our hearts are full of affection and sympathy for him.  But once he turns 60, the man becomes a social hemorrhoid.  He takes on all the unpleasant characteristics of his father—but none of the better ones, gets tricked by his son Jacob, outwitted by his wife Rebecca, and abuses his son Esau. He goes blind, making it even harder for him to keep track of which son is which. Deciding that frailty suits him, he takes to his bed and talks about his impending death—for 120 years.  Isaac lived to be 180, making us think the Lord wasn’t all that eager to have him around heaven.  So some people, 60 is taken as a license to freeload off everyone else, to get on everyone’s nerves—even those who only read about them 4,000 years later.

Okay: there’s just got to be a 60 year old somewhere in the Bible I can emulate! But alas…all we have left is Hezron (1^stChronicles 2:21.) Scripture informs us that he got married when he was 60 years old. Then we never hear from him again.  Not helpful.

Lord, have mercy. After reading of the disappearing Hezron of Chronicles, the feeble Isaac of Genesis, the devalued seniors of Leviticus, and the juiceless elderly of I Timothy, the Bible takes the “Happy” right out of “Happy Birthday.” All we have left is a taunting: ♫ ‘Birthday to you, birthday to you, birthday to you….birthday to you.’

Without some sort of biblical interpretation of these bleak passages, one might as well just become a drunkard (like Noah) and just check out until you die.  Fortunately, my scholarship of the Bible helps me understand that Paul did not know very much about old women when he wrote to Timothy, and that the scribe who penned Leviticus was trying to be kind to the elderly, but his one-size-fits-all rule simply doesn’t fit all, and doesn’t take into account God’s plan for human lives. And I think Isaac was traumatized when he was younger, when he thought his father was going to butcher him, and that he never really got around to living his life, and that someone should have given him counseling.

But there is one more character, one who gives me hope:  Moses. He lived until he was 120, which equals 60+60.  He also found a way to bring together the best characteristics of those who went before him, not the worst.  

The first 60 years of Moses’ life were pretty interesting. There are some great stories:  his survival during a genocide, nurturing by his Hebrew mother and sister, educational opportunities in the palace of the Pharaoh, a fiery temper, and a narrow escape from authorities after killing a man.  But the best stories about Moses all occur during the second half of his life—after he was 60.

In his first 60 years, Moses did what most of us do in the first half of life. He got born, saved, and educated. He established some relationships and broke others. He learned about history and nature and religion and politics and psychology and sociology. He sometimes took matters into his own hands. He discovered his limitations. He did what he had to do to establish his security. 

Richard Rohr, in his book, Falling Upward, writes evocatively about the two halves of life. In the first half of life, we establish our identity, accumulate our stuff, and gain our security…however long that takes. In the second half of life, we actually do something with what we’ve built. The two halves of life are not mathematical precise. In actual years, the two halves of life are almost never identical.  The two halves of life are inward, not chronological.

The most important part of Moses’ life was not what happened before 60…it was what happened after 60. In the second half of life, everything Moses had learned, accumulated, and felt caught fire…divine fire. Once he reached 60, he no longer tried to build himself up for himself. Instead he bequeathed it all to a vision of how God wanted the world to change.

I’m mindful today of the difference between Moses and Isaac. At age 60, Isaac simply rolled over and played dead, even though he continued to breathe until he was 180. But Moses: after Moses turned 60, he stopped obsessing over what he had and who he was, and whether he was okay. Instead, he became focused on a fire that would not be quenched, a fire that not only lived in a shrub, but inside his own heart and soul as well. 

At first, when coming across the burning bush, Moses tried to argue that God had no claim on his life, that his life was his own. But Moses’ arguments soon fell silent as he yielded his personality, his belongings, his relationships, his know-how, his plans, and his security…to God.

Life is lived in two halves. Sixty is the symbolic number separating the first half from the second. But it is only a symbolic number. We can actually start being sixty, in a spiritual sense, at any time…20, 30, 40, 50. And some are 80 and still haven’t gotten around to starting the second half yet.

“Sixty” is when we finally stop building our lives and start living our lives for the sake of something grand and far greater than ourselves. The more we try to build our lives, fortify our securities, and dig into our identities, the more stuck we get inside ourselves. For Moses, the burning bush burned away the last vestiges of living his life for himself alone.

Jesus lived to 33, meaning I’ve almost doubled his years. He lived a whole second half of life in just three years.  We love to read the stories about him in the gospels—because they are at the heart of what it means to live past 60, past the years we are only concerned about self. Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth…do not worry about tomorrow…do not worry about what you will eat or what your will drink…do not worry about your body…strive first for the Kingdom of God. When others devalue us, when others pity us, when others give us bad examples for how to age…Jesus points out that we are free at last to discover the wisdom that comes from losing our lives in order to find our salvation.

And so today, I’m eager to share my 60^th birthday with you. Not so that you will treat me as though I am now feeble and infirm; not so much to eat cake I don’t need, or be the center of song and revelry (which isn’t all that helpful for my efforts toward humility.) But I’m excited for this: to say to all of you: come and be sixty along with me. March with me toward 120, however many years God gives us the grace to move or mosey along. 

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