In 1978 the United States Congress and the President declared the first Sunday after Labor Day as “National Grandparents Day.” I checked out the official website the other day and discovered all sorts of interesting information, including poems written by grandkids about their grandparents. My favorite poem included this line: “What would you do, with a Papa so true, who loved searching for golf balls, as much as you?”i In our Sunday sermon time this year we are focusing on what our faith has to say to us about some of the very real things in our lives, and this fall we are focusing for the most part on different parts of our families. All of us have grandparents, of course. I didn’t check the math, but one fact I came across recently noted that if you go back a mere 20 generations in your family, you will find that you have 2,097,152 grandparents. Thank heaven you don’t have to send all of them grandparent’s day cards!

The Bible has quite a lot to say about grandparents but you won’t find the information listed under a general chapter called, “How to be a Grandparent.” The actual nuts and bolts of being a grandparent—or playing any other role in the family, for that matter—is something that the Lord has left pretty much to you and me to figure out. But God has given us the most important information we need, which is the theological and moral information. Generally speaking, scripture assumes the primary importance of the family and of all the different roles in the family, and grandparents are very much involved in that mix. Much of the story of God’s interaction with his people is traced through the generations of families and through particular people in those families. We trace all human lineage, theologically speaking, back to the original grandparents, Adam and Eve, and we trace our particular theological heritage back, in a sense, to the original grandfather of Israel, Abraham.

More specifically, we can go to certain passages of the Bible that provide crucial insight about the nature and role of grandparents. Psalm 71 is one such place. The psalm itself is actually a prayer that asks God for continued help and support through the very real struggles and tribulations of life, as well as a prayer that thanks God for the help that he actually gives. In the midst of this prayer we discover some magnificent truths about the reality of being a senior citizen, and by extension then, about being a grandparent. As we look at these truths, it strikes me that we are talking not just about those people who actually have grandchildren, but about everyone who finds themselves in the autumn years of life and who therefore can play a grandparental role regardless of whether or not they have grandchildren. So, this sermon is not just for those folks whose wallets bulge with pictures of their grandkids that they are willing to show you even when you are unwilling to look! This sermon is for everyone who is a bit older, and for everyone who knows someone who is a bit older, and for everyone who plans and hopes one day to actually join the ranks of the aged among us.

We begin our look in the psalm with this phrase, “O God, from my youth you have taught me.” We don’t know for sure, but it very much seems that the Psalmist is getting on in years and looking back at life. He realizes that God has been with him at every step of the way, and that in the process of living with God he has learned some very valuable lessons. A grandmother told the story about a time when her granddaughter came to visit. She wrote, “I decided to teach her to sew. After I had gone through a lengthy explanation of how to thread the machine, she stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and said in disbelief, ‘You mean you can do all that, but you can’t operate my Game Boy?’” Grandmothers and grandfathers have lived long enough to have learned many, many valuable things, Game Boy operation notwithstanding, and scripture affirms the value of this wisdom gained from experience. I once heard someone say that the old know what it means to be young as well as to be old, but the young only know what it means to be young. The older I get the more I forget what it meant to be young, but the truth of that saying stands. Our culture tries to teach us that the only things worth knowing are the new things, but scripture teaches us that grandparents have great wisdom earned through years of experience. The most important experience that grandparents have is experience with God, and that kind of experience, that kind of wisdom, is never made obsolete by the introduction of new technology. To be a grandparent, then, is to be a person who shares their wealth of wisdom, especially spiritual wisdom.

The Psalmist continues, “And I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.” Gene Perret commented that, “My grandkids believe I’m the oldest thing in the world. After two or three hours with them, I believe it, too.” Our culture generally believes that there is an inverse proportion between the age of an object and its usefulness. Five year old computers are more or less just useless metal. Ten year old cars are pretty much used up. Twenty-five year old houses have to be significantly remodeled or scrapped. Culture often thinks the same way about people. New is useful, old is not. Our faith teaches otherwise. Especially when it comes to matters of faith, matters of wisdom about life, matters of the heart and soul, grandparents still have a very useful role to play, and perhaps they have more to offer than anyone else. If we put our false modesty aside for a moment, most of us believe that we do indeed grow wiser with the years, don’t we? And wisdom is useful stuff. Now, it is also true that grandparents can still perform many useful tasks in the world, and not just with the tasks of parenting, but certainly including those kinds of tasks. Dave Barry noted that, “The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.” No matter what a grandparent does, everything they do can serve the purpose of, in the words of the psalm, proclaiming the might of God to future generations. To be a grandparent is to be a person who does productive work in the world, especially the work of telling about the Lord.

There is one word in that last phrase from the psalm that I think deserves particular attention, and it is the word “generations.” There are many lessons we can draw out from that one word, but the lesson that speaks loudest to me today is this: that the Bible recognizes and affirms the amazing value of the extended family, of multiple generations, of the larger community that extends both horizontally and vertically. A grandmother was telling her granddaughter what her own childhood had been like. “We used to skate outside on the pond. We had a swing made from a tire that hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode ponies and picked wild raspberries in the woods.” The little girl listened wide-eyed, and finally said, “I sure wish I’d gotten to know you sooner!” There is a part of our culture that preaches the values of individualism, that the highest good is to be found as the solitary self pursues his or her own pathway with little regard to anyone else. But that is not the way God designed the human family to operate. Individuals cannot find their way in life without other people. We need to get to know each other, and some of the primary relationships we need are between grandchildren and grandparents, between one generation and the next, or the next. Sam Levenson said, “The reason grandchildren and grandparents get along so well is that they have a common enemy.” I think there are other reasons, too! To be a grandparent is to be a person who provides invaluable connections between the generations and who teaches the power of the larger community of the family.

The psalm continues, “You who have done great things, O God, who is like you? You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again, from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.” The psalmist clearly has suffered some form of great distress in his life, or many forms. But he has learned that, time and again, God has been faithful to deliver him and strengthen him and therefore to give him hope. That spiritual knowledge forms the basis for a great tradition of faithfulness and religious practice to which the psalmist has been a witness and also a participant. The psalmist has learned from the past. Our culture, though, often tries to tell us that there is nothing to learn from the past and that the only worthwhile things are the new things, the innovative things, the things that break with the past and look only to the future. There is much, of course, that is not good from the past. But the past has much to teach us as well. Tradition and history have a strong and vital role to play by informing the present, and nowhere is that dynamic more important than in our family relationships. Grandparents represent the past, and with wisdom, can teach the best from the past. To be a grandparent is to be a person who grounds the hopes and dreams of the future with a healthy respect and understanding of the past, especially the traditions of our faith.

A little boy was talking to his grandfather and asked, “Grandpa, when were you born?” Grandpa answered, “I was born in 1937.” And the grandson said, “Wow. If you were a baseball card you’d be worth a lot of money!” Psalm 92 says this, “The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God. In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap….” There are countless things that all the grandparents among us can do to give us the benefit of their wisdom, to be useful in the world, to connect us to our larger community of faith and family, and to ground us in the strength of the past. Grandparents are worth a lot, especially when they have spent their lifetimes being nourished by a loving God. Grandparents of the world, hear this: you can still be fruitful, after all these years.

Amen.