Sermon:
August 2, 1998

Scripture:
II Corinthians 4:16 - 5:10
John 2:13-22

It is my continuing campaign to make the rich resources of the Christian faith accessible and useful to you in everyday life. My last sermon to you was on the Trinity and its usefulness as a description of a relationship that works and as a model for Christianity in dialogue with other world religions.

Today I want to lift before you the idea of the "Imago Dei." Imago Dei is Latin for the image of God. The image of God planted in us from the very beginning that is told to us in the book of Genesis. "And he (God) put his image on them male and female." And that is a reality about ourselves, that God brings substantial insight into who we really are through this idea of Imago Dei, who we really are in God's eyes, what God sees when God looks at us and particularly today as it bears on the process of aging.

What, or is there, a Christian view of aging? Paul refers to this earthly tent being destroyed, St. Augustine referred to his aging body as 'this perishing rag.' Sometimes I feel that way too. I talked with one of our own saints yesterday, Dick Sneed, who has achieved great age and asked his wise words on the subject. His reply..."I don't recommend it."

The hymn we sang on your insert was one of my great-grandmother's favorites. "A land where we'll never grow old." In her day when the ravages of time were even more devastating, and healthcare not being as wonderful as it is today, people really needed a theological perspective on growing older. It's not for sissies, as Bette Davis said. Today the challenge is a little different, in our youth obsessive culture; perhaps we need God's view of Imago Dei in us even more. The great heroes of the Old Testament, Moses and David, lived to be very old and the scriptures tell us even at great age Moses' natural force was not abated. Which means he didn't need any of these modern day drugs that we've heard far too much about today for men. Jesus cleans out the temple and turns around and talks of his body being God's temple. Even he speaks of his body as being God's temple. Our bodies are God's temples. Did not your mother tell you that? 'Don't drink and smoke because your body is God's temple.' Augustine will also say that God's love for us makes us the habitations of God, specifically he says, "What did he in loving us, love, but God in us? Not who was in us, but so that he might be. Wherefore let each of us so love the other as that by this working of love, we make each other the habitations of God." That together we make habitation for God. It's a lovely idea.

What is it that God loves about us? Especially what is it that he loves about us as we age? God's own image? God's in our hearts? What does it mean when we get older? How does God see us?

I searched and researched further the archives the resources available for this discussion and found another hymn of sorts that addresses the question of the Christian view of aging. With a little help from my friends and our vast musical archives, we'll share it with you in song. (Kate Wilcox, Russ Ives, Matt Hook and Linda Farmer-Lewis sing "When I'm Sixty Four.")

I have a belt I bought almost twenty years ago. When I first bought it, I wore it on this (the smallest) setting. Over the years the rings of my expansion look like the rings of Saturn, moving ever outward. It takes a lot of courage to grow older. William Butler Yeats wrote a poem "Sailing to Byzantium" (Byzantium being the name of the city before Constantine made it his capital and renamed it Constantinople, declaring Christianity finally be a legal religion).

In his poem Yeats talks about both his perishable and imperishable nature. The gold that passes through fire and the nature that is consumed. He writes this about sailing to Byzantium and aging:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
Unless soul clap its hands and sing,
And louder sing for every tatter his mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but
studying monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and
come to the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire as
the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away;
Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal
it knows not what it is,
And gather me to the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form
from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian oldsmiths make
of hammered gold
and gold enameling to keep a drowsy Emperor awake.
Or set upon a gold bough to sing to lord and ladies
of Byzantium
of what is past, or passing, or to come.

So how are we as Christians to thing of this relationship between the soul, or the self, and the body? Some people neglect their bodies and don't care for themselves and see them as irrelevant except for forms of transportation. Others in our youth oriented culture obsess about appearance and, to the point of self-destruction with eating disorders, keep themselves unnaturally thin. How is it that we view then the body as it ages? Erik Eriksen in his groundbreaking work, "The Eight Stages of Man" predicts the crises of life, that there are eight basic crises you have to survive if you are going to do adulthood well. The first crisis happens in infancy. It's the crisis of trust versus mistrust. We all know a child must have a certain amount of trust in his environment in order to thrive and literally to live. The second stage of childhood is autonomy verses shame and doubt. That's why two-year olds must say no when you tell them to do something because they are defining themselves as opposed to you. It's not very comfortable but it is necessary. They go through the same thing again in the teens and twenties. And so on through the stages of life.

And the last stage of life is integrity versus despair and disgust. I was fortunate I got to do my generativity work at Albion College with 1550 students so I had a natural place to give back to the next generation. And now I feel I am moving over to the next phase of integrity versus despair and disgust. Oh this perishing rag.

Did you see the movie Babe? In the movie the pig wants to be something other than what it is. The barnyard creatures are all kind of confused about their roles and there is a duck who wants to be a rooster because he knows if he is a rooster then he will have a job. But the farmer's wife brings in a clock that now takes over the rooster's job of waking everybody up in the morning so he is panicking because now he knows he will be Christmas dinner if he can't take over this job. So he enlists the pig to help him steal the clock. So the duck is having a conversation with the pig and he says to the pig, "I suppose the life of an anorexic duck doesn't amount to much in the broad scheme of things, but, Pig, I'm all I've got!" We're all we' ve got, and the choices of despair because we'll never be twenty again or to love yourself where you are in the life cycle I think is fundamental to happiness. When you slather on that Lubriderm into those cracked heels and chubby thighs and cellulite, do you see defects or do you see a body that has lived?

Louisa May Alcott in her book Little Women which I read over and over and over as a child describes a scene when father comes home from the Civil War to greet his four daughters and he inspects each of them to see how they have been in his absence. His oldest daughter, Meg, when she takes his hand he feels the calluses on them and she pulls back because she is embarrassed by how they have been hardened by the hard work she has been doing. He takes her hand back and says, "These hands are so much more infinitely beautiful to me than the pampered hands of a lazy girl." How beautiful are callused hands.

I think that's how God sees us. God loves us in spite, maybe because, of the changes we go through. Because in that our image of God in us is growing. God cherishes us in our mortal bodies but as Paul says, when our bodies and flesh and heart can no longer sustain our lives, God gives us new life, a new life to live with him.

John Adams one of the early presidents of this country, when he was very, very old went walking the streets of Washington and he was greeted by someone who recognized him and said, "Mr. Adams, Mr. Adams how are you?" And John Adams said, "Well the house that Mr. Adams lives in is growing weak, the foundations are crumbling, the shutters are falling off the windows, the roof is caving in, but Mr. Adams is just fine."

What does God love about us when we get old? On the back of your hymn insert is a song, When I Grow to Old to Dream. You probably remember it. We will sing that as our benediction because that is where God loves us. God loves that self that is standing when nothing else of us is left. Juan Jimanez writes this poem, I Am Not I. I think he's talking about the image of God. He's talking about Christ's life in us.

I am not I.
I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit and at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate.
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

So to answer the question, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm sixty-four?" is yes, and yes, and yes, and yes. God loves even this perishing rag. Loves it enough to share it with us, loves it enough to restore it in this world and in the world to come. And if God so loves us, shouldn't we love ourselves, value, care for and maintain this temple until we leave its rooms for a heavenly and more perfect palace not made with hands but eternal in the heavens.

Let us pray. Gracious God, your image planted in us, you love us through all the changes of life. Indeed, your image grows sharper, more pure, and shinier with every Godly step we take with you. And so we give you thanks, Oh God, for your image in us that sustains us and holds us to a true course with ourselves and with you. Help us to have the confidence of those who live in a house that cannot be destroyed, that is eternal in the heavens, to accept gracefully the changes as they come, praising you in all things. In Jesus name. Amen.