At the beginning of this year we started on a quest of sorts to consider the real lives you and I live in the real world from the perspective of our faith. We have looked at things like the relationship between faith and science, politics, sexuality, material goods, education, and work. We have done so out of the conviction that God has something to say about every aspect of life, because he in fact is the creator of life. For instance, even though Memorial Day is not a specifically religious holiday, there are certainly religious sources and overtones inherent in the day. Today also happens to be Pentecost, the celebration of that wonderful story in Acts that tells of God giving the Holy Spirit to the early church, empowering them with his power to go into the world to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Though Pentecost is not a major theme for us today, it certainly is there underneath all we have been doing and all we’re doing today, because we believe that the Holy Spirit is operating and influencing every area of our lives, leading us to live our lives by the power of and in relationship to God.

Today we will continue our quest to relate faith to life as we look at the topic of retirement. A couple of you have asked me over the years what the Bible says about retirement, and since it is a fact of modern American life, it seems logical to consider it along with other aspects of our real lives. Retirement as you and I know it is a fairly recent social invention, coming into play in modern life only in the 19th and 20th centuries. I won’t bore you with an overview of social science theory of retirement, but will only note that, as a stage of human life and a fact of human social construction, it is rather fluid and flexible and means different things to different people. Generally we think of retirement as that time in life when we quit working for a paycheck. Like everyone else, I have considered my own retirement. Often times ministers never completely retire, but we keep on doing a little teaching or occasional preaching or pastoral visitation. I have often thought that in my golden years I would take advantage of my many decades of experience shaking hands with people after worship and leverage that skill into a job at WalMart as a greeter!

In preparation for this sermon I got to thinking about what the Bible says about retirement, and at first, all I could come up with was not from the Bible per se, but a saying on the side of a coffee mug someone gave me a long time ago: “Old ministers never die; they just go out to pastor.” But that didn’t seem terribly helpful. So in my further research I discovered that there really is only one passage that speaks explicitly about retirement, and it is in the 8th chapter of Numbers, verses 23-26. Here it is: “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: This applies to the Levites [the priests in the temple]: from twenty-five years old and upward they shall begin to do duty in the service of the tent of meeting; and from the age of fifty years they shall retire from the duty of service and serve no more. They may assist their brothers in the tent of meeting in carrying out their duties, but they shall perform no service. Thus you shall do with the Levites in assigning their duties.”

It is very hard to build an entire theology of something on the basis of one single scripture passage, especially one that is quite specific in its application to professional clergy. So, what are we to do? Is retirement only for preachers? When a non-preacher retires, is that outside God’s plan and therefore punishable by eternal damnation and hellfire? We know that some of the biblical figures like Moses and John did some of their most important life work in the very late years of life. Is that the model for everyone? It seems to me that we have to look at a broad array of other biblical principles in order to get a handle on the idea that a person can and often does stop working long before the end of life.

The first thing I think we need to say is that God has made human life to have purpose and meaning, no matter what our age or stage of life. David and Timothy were both very young when they first began to serve the Lord in a big way. As mentioned earlier, Moses and John were very advanced in years but still going strong in serving God. Age is simply not a determining factor for God in deciding who can provide useful service to the community and who cannot. One of the great failings of any generation is to fail to appreciate both the potential and the value in other generations. I read a story not long ago about a very self-important college freshman who was sitting next to an older gentleman at a USC football game. The freshman was trying to explain why the older generation could not understand his own. He said, “You old folks grew up in a different, almost primitive, world. We young people grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon…we even have nuclear energy and electric cars and computers with amazing power.” The old man stopped the youngster in his tracks, “You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young so we invented them. Now, what are you going to do for the next generation?” We need to remember that God placed no age limits on usefulness, and we need to keep that in mind especially when we’re talking about retirement.

The next thing I think we need to say is that our concept of “work” has to be broadened to include more than just the idea of making money. Making money is only one kind of useful work. God’s design for us is that there are all kinds of ways that we express our image of him and use our gifts from him in contributing to our own survival and the greater good of those around us. Every retired person I know is still working in some way or other, some perhaps harder than when they were working for money! There is a healthy movement afoot, I believe, that is helping people see that the end of the season of working for a paycheck is only the beginning of doing all kinds of other things that have value and worth to both ourselves and to others. I see nothing in scripture that indicates that God ever expects that we will cease to be contributing members of society. The nature and form and pace and focus of our work will necessarily change, but it will never totally cease. The very nature of life itself is a creative process of activity on the part of the human creature to influence and be involved in the created world around it. Even the most aged and infirm person can still contribute to the world, even with just kind words or simple caring deeds. When we stop working for pay we simply open a whole new world of possibilities for doing other kinds of work that we simply give away to the world.

The other side of the coin, however, is that God also built rest and relaxation into the fabric of his design for human life. In the brief passages we read from Genesis and Matthew, we see that God rested on the seventh day of creation, and that Jesus rested from his ministry among the people. In the ancient practice of Israel, the old priests were excused from major responsibility for the temple services (remember, 50 was old back then!), so that they could begin a season of relative rest. Some people think that the reason we rest is because we get tired, and that definitely is one of the reasons. But there are others. God rested from the work of making the universe, but do we think that God actually got tired and needed a break? No. God was demonstrating a spiritual principle that Jesus then embodied in his human life: that the existence and life of the creation is dependent on no single person and not even on all persons together. The only indispensable element of the creation is the Creator, and even he stepped back now and then from the work of creating. When we stop work in order to rest or to play, we are recognizing that God intends for us to enjoy life and that the world is not dependent on us. The great sin of workaholism is about believing in our indispensability and irreplaceability, but that is a role reserved only for God. To rest, in brief seasons throughout life, and in a longer season toward the end of life, is to express our faith that God will continue to provide for us and for his creation.

And so, it seems to me, when we think about retirement from a Christian perspective, we need to hold two things in tension: our calling to contribute to human life throughout our life as an expression of our created nature, and the gracious gift of a loving God who allows and expects us to rest and relax and enjoy the fruit of our labor and the goodness of his blessing. Faithful life is all about balance. It is all about the balance of both taking from and giving to life. It is about working hard and playing hard. It is about striving with all our might and resting in the knowledge and grace of a good God. It is about giving up what we can no longer do and still doing what we can do.

Finally, it seems to me that the happiest people I know in the later years of their lives are people who do not make idle their idol. I think of Jim Hine, a retired associate pastor of my former church in Tucson and family life professor at the University of Arizona, who never stopped writing and studying the elements of happy marriages, who never stopped helping folks as a pastor, and who lived productively until his death at the age of 95. I think of Boyd Shaw, a retired physician from Alabama who spends his money and time now going on medical missions around the world. I think of Betty Moore, who served the church in many capacities, both in her home congregation and in national positions, who long ago gave up working for money, but still contributes and ministers by telephone conversation and letter to a parish that includes people all around the nation. I think of Jim Hartman, a retired executive for Procter and Gamble, who lends his business expertise to several nation-wide ministries on a near-daily basis. And I could go on and on with that list, and include many people from this congregation, too. God did not make us to sit still and do nothing. To be idle should never be our goal, our idol. Even when all we can do is sit still, we can still pray, still speak encouraging words, still be a faithful and positive presence in the world and an example to others.

Years ago, my Aunt Mary, who never fully retired from her work as a missionary in Africa, gave me a little plaque she had cross-stitched, that said, “Work for the Lord: the pay isn’t much, but the retirement plan is out of this world.” Whether we work for pay or not, the real question in which God is most interested in is whether or not we are working for his Kingdom. That kind of work is something we all can do, even as we take our last breath on earth, if we do all for the glory of his Kingdom.

Amen.

ⁱ April 9, 2007.