This past February I received a diagnosis, and, I’m sorry to
say, it’s serious. I have a disease, commonly fatal. If it is not
treated, it will destroy me, and I will gradually lose my
abilities. I’m telling you about it, because, if we do not take
some protective efforts, it will become contagious, and you
might get it too. I have a serious disease, and I think you
should be among the first to know about it.
Let me describe its symptoms, and then I’ll tell you its name.
First, it makes me very tired. Just worn out. When this
disease kicks in, I become too weary to work, too pooped to
play, and too bushed to bother. Just extremely tired.
Next, I am beginning to decline. I am looking like death
warmed over. I become moody and depressed and start
looking over my shoulder to see who’s coming to get me.
Something is coming to carry me home. I am declining.
And then there are the memory lapses. Not only will I be
tired out, and not only will everything bleed away, but in
addition I forget things. I forget some very important items.
Now I won’t forget everything; some things I remember very
well, and in fact, won’t be able to let go of. But other things I
forget, or, more likely, remember selectively. I remember
them, but not necessarily as they really are; I remember
enough to be frustrated and upset, but not enough to know
what I really ought to be doing. When this disease takes
over, there are whole days when I cannot recall the things
that matter the most, but I remember other things that I could
just as easily do without. I am able to tell you every phone
number of every place I’ve ever lived; but I won’t be able to
tell you who I am. Yes, it’s that bad.
By now you are beginning to think that you know what my
disease is. You’ve developed your own little amateur
diagnosis. I know I did last February when it hit me. I
developed a few pet theories.
I thought maybe I was experiencing senile dementia. You
know what that is; that’s just hifalutin’ language for “crazy old
man.” But no, I figured that wasn’t it; anybody who’s crazy
enough to have preached for forty years is already
demented. Nothing new. That wasn’t it.
And then I wondered about Alzheimer’s disease. That’s
making its way around these days. I’ve heard a lot about
Alzheimer’s. They say that if you have Alzheimer’s, you get
irritable and hard to live with. Well, no, that can’t be the
problem; again, that’s nothing new. I’ve been irritable ever
since I was ten years old and they made me practice the
piano instead of playing softball. And as for being hard to
live with, well, this coming Tuesday Margaret gets her 42nd
annual Purple Heart. Nothing new. That can’t be it.
If it isn’t dementia, and it isn’t Alzheimer’s, could it be
anemia? Tired blood? Not enough juice in the plumbing?
Not likely; I don’t really hemorrhage anything but money! No,
I’ll tell you exactly what I have. I know its name. I have its
number. I have a galloping, rollicking, chronic case of
nostalgia! Not neuralgia, not nausea, but nostalgia! I want
to go back to the way things used to be. I want somebody to
carry me back to old days, old times. That’s what I have!
Nostalgia, with a capital N and a deep desire for old ways,
old ideas, and old habits. Nostalgia – that insatiable and
wistful desire to get back to the way we were.
You know what that’s like. Brothers, we want cars with
running boards and spark plugs you can take out and set the
gap. Ladies, we want those old Sundays when we went to
church first thing in the morning, stayed until the afternoon,
ate gospel bird on the grounds, sat through more preaching
and singing in the evening, and did it all in our best bib and
tucker, hotter than firecrackers. We have a bad case of
nostalgia; we want the old ways. Carry me back to old!
The danger of being a senior – and that’s really what hit me
on the third of February – that mythical age 65 marker – the
danger of being a senior is that we struggle with change.
We fight against the changes in our own bodies, and we start
to resist everything. Something in us shouts, “Stop the
world, I want to get off!” Something says, “Carry me back to
old”, the place where I was born and the things I used to do.
But there is danger in that. Profound danger.
The prophet of the Exile, a disciple of the great Isaiah, so
that the Bible scholars call him Deutero-Isaiah, or the Second
Isaiah -- the prophet spoke to the people of Judah in a time
of tremendous transition. They had had to get used to the
notion that their homeland was no more; Judah had been
taken, Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Temple had been
pulled down, and they were going to have to live in exile in
Babylon. It was not a happy time. They were tempted to sit
down and bathe themselves in a nostalgic frenzy – how good
it was back in the day. But the prophet insisted that that was
a luxury they could ill afford, and that, in fact, they were
showing the symptoms of our disease called nostalgia.
Carry me back to old – what will that really get us?
I
The Bible tells us that if we carry around our old stuff too
long, it will become an idol and it will be nothing but a
burden. Isaiah tells Judah that, attracted as they were to the
false gods of Canaan, they are going to wear themselves out
carrying around burdensome stuff they should have gotten
rid of a long time ago. Stuff that makes us feel like pack
animals hauling bricks up the hillside.
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols are on beasts and cattle;
these things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals.
In the ancient world, quite often people had household gods,
statues and images of the gods they worshiped. And if they
had go somewhere, they took their gods along with them.
Earlier in the Old Testament there is that wonderful story of
Rachel going off to be Jacob’s wife, and she hid the
household gods under her skirts. Now these things were
idols; you and I know that. You and I know, and the Bible
knows, and, to tell the truth, these people knew it too – that
God cannot be transported like so much luggage. God is a
spirit and not a little chunk of stone or metal. You won’t get
charged an overweight penalty for carrying the true God with
you when you travel!
But the picture here is of a people who are afraid to jettison
old habits and old ways. They have had to pick up and move
to a new place they don’t like very much. They are not sure
what the future holds. But they think they might hold on to
the past. So they pick up their little statuettes and load them
on their pack animals and set off on their long and lonely
journey to an uncharted destination. Their idols are burdens
loaded on weary animals.
Brothers and sisters, seniors, is it really any different with
us? We have made ourselves into tired out, weary pack
animals, beasts of burden, because we carry around with us
too much stuff, and it is wearing us out.
Some of us carry around the burden of shame. We’ve done
things we don’t want anybody to know about. We have
stored up in our senior years so many secrets that we can’t
count them all. We’ve lied to ourselves and to others about
who we are so much and so long that we’re not even sure
ourselves who we are. Some of us carry around the burden
of shame, and it’s killing us.
I know one person who carries around the burden of putting
up a child for adoption – a child she was too young to take
care of, an infant that was too profoundly impaired to be
cared for at home. She takes with her into her senior years
the burden of a thousand “what if” questions – what if I had
kept my baby, what if I had tried a little harder, what if I had
gotten some help. It’s too late to do anything about this now,
but the shame hangs around like a storm cloud. Old burdens
wear us out.
I know another person who carries around the burden of
disappointment and disillusionment. He was going to set the
world on fire. A career in the diplomatic corps, maybe; or an
engineer with the space program; or medical research on
cancer. But he got into a destructive drinking pattern; too
much alcohol, too many classes skipped, too many exams
missed, and the grades went down. The dream of diplomacy
or science or medicine faded away. And now, forty or fifty
years later, there is nothing but the sad words of tongue and
pen, the saddest of which are, “It might have been”. A
burden of disillusionment, and it is wearing him out.
I’ll wager not one senior in this room is without burdens that
we are carrying, burdens from to the past. You cannot live
sixty, seventy, eighty years without accumulating some
regrets. But here is the point: the Bible says that these
burdens are idols and that they are loaded on weary animals.
The burdens of guilt and shame and disappointment and
anger and frustration and helplessness – these are idols,
because we are using these things as excuses to keep us
from having to face who we are. All these burdens from the
past are idols, because we use them to make excuses for
not doing what God wants us to do right now. And the
longer we carry these burdens, the more they will make us
into weary animals.
Carry me back to old? But if we have nothing to look forward
to and only the burdens of the past to occupy us, “these
things [will be] loaded as burdens on weary animals.
II
But now the problem is that we think these things we are
holding on to so tightly will somehow help us. No matter how
much garbage from the past we carry around, we keep it, we
treasure it, even though we know it’s garbage, because we
think it will save us. The truth is that all of our spiritual mess,
if we hang on to it, will not save us. It will sink us. It will not
help us. It will condemn us.
During my vacation I tackled all sorts of long-overdue
household tasks. I built bookcases, I rewired a lamp, I
repaired a broken door, I weeded the garden, I even cleaned
out some of the attic. Greater love has no man than this,
that he spend his vacation cleaning out the attic! If anybody
wants to hire a handyman, I have Mondays free! Well, in
that attic I found my old stamp collection. Some of us of a
certain age got inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt to
collect stamps, and I did that from about age nine on and off
until about twenty-five years ago, and then I quit. Now I
have all these boxes and albums full of postage stamps from
around the world. They were meant for my education and
entertainment; but now they are just gathering dust.
Why didn’t I sell or trade my childhood stamp collection,
which was of no use or interest to me any more? Because I
lived with the hope that maybe, somehow, some way, it
would be valuable. I thought I might sell it for a lot of money.
But I neglected it, I stored it away, and it is now deteriorating
and will not be of any good to me if I don’t do something
about it.
It’s just like what Isaiah of the Exile said to the people of
Judah:
“They cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity.”
“They cannot save the burden, but themselves go into
captivity.” Most of the stuff we try to hang on to we cannot
keep. And if we are not careful, it will bring us down with it. I
know people who are trying to hang on to their positions and
powers, but their grasping will only bring them down. I won’t
mention any names, but I suspect that most of us have heard
of members of congress who stayed on and on, well past
their ability to perform, and who literally had to be hauled
back and forth from a certain nearby Army hospital in order
just to vote. What does the Bible say? “They cannot save
the burden, but themselves go into captivity.”
I once knew a pastor who became so threatened as he
entered his senior years that he would not permit anybody
else in his pulpit, lest the people like the new guy better than
the old guy. In the end, that grasping for position destroyed
the old man’s health and cost him his pulpit altogether. The
church got fed up and let him go. “They cannot save the
burden, but themselves go into captivity.”
I once knew a teacher who became so difficult that she
would not submit to any sort of discipline, and so they took
her class away. So she went every day to an empty room in
the school and lectured to an imaginary class until they
physically removed her. “They cannot save the burden, but
themselves go into captivity.”
Seniors, when we are out of our depth, when we have lost
our usefulness in doing what we’ve always done, we need to
admit it and move on. It’s not going to be the end of the
world if we have to retire from our jobs. It’s not going to be
fatal if we have to move to a simpler lifestyle. It’s not going
to destroy civilization as we know it if we teach somebody
younger to take on the things we do, even in the church. For
if we hang on to things just because we are afraid, we are
like the dog who runs out to chase cars, day by day -- until
he finally catches one, and then he doesn’t know what to do
with it! We “... cannot save the burden, but [our]selves go
into captivity.” Sometimes you just have to let go!
III
But that does not mean that life is over. That does not mean
the nostalgia is incurable. I am here today to proclaim that
there is a cure for nostalgia. There is a medicine that will
handle this dreadful illness. And that is to remember – to
remember who God is, to remember who we are, to
remember what God has done for us over the years, and,
most of all, to remember what God’s purpose is. The cure
for nostalgia is to remember the right things.
The prophet tells us that God says,
“Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no
other; I am God, and there is no one like me .. saying ‘My purpose
shall stand, and I will fulfil my intention.’”
If I am to survive senior nostalgia, I must remember the right
things. I must remember who God is and what God has
done. I must remember that if I have lived these years, it has
not been because I earned them, but because God gave
them. I must remember that if I have accomplished anything,
it was not I alone who did it, but God’s Spirit working in me
for God’s purposes. I must remember what God has done,
and that will tell me what God will do. He is a God of
purpose, and He will fulfill His intention. I must discern my
place in God’s purpose.
If I am to survive senior nostalgia, I must remember the right
things. I must remember that God set before me the outline
of His purpose, and asked me to spend myself for it. It is
not too late to get on course. In my senior years, I very
much doubt that I will say, “I wish I could spent more time at
the office.” In my senior years, I very much doubt that I will
whimper, “I don’t watch enough TV”. In my senior years, I
cannot imagine that I will want to eat more sumptuous meals
or amass a larger bank account or build a more spacious
home. In my senior years, I must remember that God has a
purpose that will stand, and I have a place in it.
Brothers and sisters, the cure for nostalgia is to remember
what God has done in the past, to perceive where God is at
work right now, and to get busy with God. Then I can trust
God for the future, knowing that He will work out His
purpose. I want to be joined to that purpose.
Carry me back to old? Ah, it feels as though it would be nice
to go back to old ways and to live with old habits. But most
of those are burdens that are going to wear us out. Time to
throw out the old idolatrous burdens and turn to things that
matter!
Carry me back to old? Old roles, old positions, old places of
authority. Ah, it feels as though it would be nice to hang on
for dear life to things that once meant something. But when
we try to hold on to power, it ends up taking us down. Time
to move in a new direction.
Carry me back to old> Yes, carry me back to the ancient of
Days, who sits throned in glory, and who is like no other.
Carry me back to the old, old story of Jesus and His love,
and empower me to tell it. Carry me back to a relationship
with the living God who, though stony the road we trod,
brought us thus far on the way, and who intends to
accomplish His purpose. Carry me back to an old path
through the storm, well worn by many a pilgrim who has
passed this way before, for God knows the very hairs of my
old gray head, and loves me. And you. And you. And you.
The only cure for the nostalgia sickness is this one great
truth: “I am God, and there is no other .. my purpose shall
stand, and I will fulfill my intention.”
Carry me back to old, oh Lord. Carry me back to the old
rugged cross, where my trophies at last I lay down. I will
cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a
crown.
