I’ve always been glad that in this church we wear pulpit robes. I’m glad of that because pulpit robes keep you from noticing what the preacher is wearing. I don’t want you to think about what I am wearing. I don’t want you to think about my clothes because you are likely to discover that my taste is not very good. You might decide you dislike me over something as petty as that. My father-in-law used to come home from revival services, complaining loudly about visiting evangelists wearing Argyle plaid socks and sex-appeal ties. I don’t want you to think about that kind of thing.
More than that, I don’t want you to notice how the clothes fit, because that will inevitably lead to comments about my waistline. I do not care to hear admonitions from the slim and trim whose metabolisms burn up everything in sight!
But most of all, I do not want you to pay attention to my clothes because you may notice that most of them are old. Most of my suits you saw last year and the year before that and the year before that. Most of my clothes are old and out of style; some are shiny in the wrong places and frayed around the cuffs and the collars.
Now before you weep over my rundown condition and pass the offering plate for the poor preacher, let me hurry on to suggest that there might be more than one reason why I wear old clothes. There might be more than one explanation for snugly fitting slacks, coats that won’t close, shirts with missing buttons, and socks that don’t quite match. It might be more than money. And it certainly isn’t that my wife cannot take care of me. In fact she hounds me about my appearance more than anyone else. No, there might be another explanation.
It might be that I’m just not interested in clothes. It might be that I’ve chosen to invest my time and my interests in other things. Vital things, like books. I had a pastor once who kept saying things like, “You need this book. Sell your shoes and get this book.” Things like computer software. Classical music tapes. Maybe I’m just plain not interested in how I look.
Or again, maybe it is that I’m not aware that fashions have changed. Maybe I haven’t noticed that what once was right on target is now just outmoded. Could be that the reason my clothes look old is that they are holdovers from another era. If you’re wearing something six months old, why, that’s an eternity in the fashion world! Well, I want you to know that my clothes were the latest thing in that good year 1969. About 1969, when I was a young man, is when my tastes were formed, and I’ve never quite caught up. Do you remember when pleats went out on men’s slacks and everybody was wearing flat fronts? Well, I hated the flat fronts; I even resorted to ordering pleated pants from some factory that still made them. After a while I got more or less used to flat fronts, but now here we are with the pleats back in style, and I can’t find flat fronts. I’m always one step out! Because I get stuck in one style, one pattern, in something that was fashionable when I was a certain age, and it’s hard to give it up.
In fact, I have this little fantasy about that. You know how today we expect deacons and ushers and pastors to stand around in dark suits, white shirts, and ties? Well, that’s because that was the fashion when most of these guys were young men. Today what’s the fashion among young men? Baggy jeans and backwards baseball caps. I hope I’m still around in about twenty-five years so that I can be ushered into church by some deacon wearing the traditional deacon uniform of baggy jeans and a backwards baseball cap! I really want to see that! People get stuck in the fashions of their day, and when they get a little older, they just don’t keep up with change.
Well, whatever the reasons I may have for not upgrading my wardrobe, the day inevitably comes when I wake up to the fact that I have to change. I have to get some new clothes. It usually happens just about the time the seasons change, and I go to the closet to get out the tried and true from last year, only to discover that it looks terrible. It sags, it droops, it’s stained, it’s ripped, it has to go. It’s time for new clothes. Right in the middle of doing everything else, right in the middle of keeping on keeping on, it hits me and hits me hard: it’s time for new clothes. I’m not really ready to do this, but here it is. Time for new clothes.
I
I wonder if the Psalmist had anything like that in mind when he said about himself and his generation,
they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away.
I wonder if the Psalmist was feeling a little like a well-worn piece of clothing when he wrote that. I wonder if his life had just bumped into some kind of harsh reality when these words tumbled out of his mouth. Do you think he was feeling a little tired? Do you imagine he was just on the edge of realizing that it was time for something in his life to change? Like me at my closet in the spring, had something made him feel that in the rhythms of his own life, it was time for new clothes?
Lord, the things and the people you have made:
they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away;
Well, the Psalmist gives us a great big clue as to what has happened in his life. I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. This fellow had just bumped into that reality we call midlife. He was having a midlife crisis. Neither a young adult any more nor a senior. Neither on the cutting edge of life, nor in its decline. Just in the middle. Middle age. Midlife. And it scared him! It jarred him to the teeth. Listen to the anxiety pouring out from this:
He has broken my strength in midcourse; he has shortened my days. "O my God," I say, "do not take me away at the mid-point of my life, you whose years endure throughout all generations."
Can you sense what he is feeling? Haven’t you felt that way sometimes? Here you are in your peak years, your productivity years, midlife. And all of a sudden you felt kind of tired and worn out. You had never really reckoned with aging. You always thought of yourself as young and vital, strong and vigorous. No, you knew you weren’t a brash green student any more, and yes, you had settled down into a career and a mortgage and a family. But you still thought of yourself as having plenty of time, plenty of energy, full of life, full of plans. You didn’t think of yourself as over the hill or down the tubes. Oh, it’s birthday time. But you didn’t call it being forty. You called it the tenth anniversary of your thirtieth birthday. Not forty. Forty-ish, maybe, but not exactly forty.
Your birth certificate might claim that you had reached the big five-oh, but you told yourself you didn’t feel it, you were beating the odds. Your driver’s license might be twenty pounds off your actual weight, but, hey, you are very confident you don’t look .. si .. si .. si .. can’t seem to say it …sixty. So what’s this midlife crisis thing all about? It’s not real, is it!
And then it hit you, all of a sudden. That locked up back; iron man Cal Ripken might be too old to play baseball at age 39. Those stiffening knees; you squat down to tie your shoelace and start saying to yourself, “Is there anything else I need to do while I’m down here?” That fuzzy image out in front of your nose, the doctor said to me, “You have presbyopia.” I said, “No, I’m a Baptist.” He said, “Look it up. Presbyopia means ‘old eyes.’” And then he went on, “At your age [don’t you just love it when people use that phrase, ‘at your age’?] you need bifocals.” Suddenly something startles you and tells you you are in midlife and that you’re not quite what you used to be. That’s midlife crisis.
Midlife is that broad period between about forty and sixty, very roughly speaking, when on the one hand we feel the maturing of our powers, we feel at our peak, we think we have everything coming together .. and yet, on the other hand, when the first hints of our mortality show up. It is that time of life in which we first pay attention to the fact that what we have and who we are right now will not and cannot last forever. In midlife we get those awesome warning signals that tell us that our time is limited and our energies are not boundless. In midlife we hear, muffled and yet distinct, the sound of a distant drummer.
He has broken my strength in midcourse; he has shortened my days. "O my God," I say, "do not take me away at the mid-point of my life..”
II
Do you know what we need? We need some new clothes. Midlife is a time for new clothes. Midlife is a time to discard some old patterns and do something new. Time for new clothes. I think the psalmist hints at some of these new garments right here in this passage. So come on with me, let’s get dressed.
A
Let’s get a new pair of shoes. Let’s get some sturdy climbing shoes, because in our midlife years, we need to climb up to God’s perspective and see the world as God sees it. Let’s get a pair of climbing boots, so that we can lift ourselves up out of the self-centeredness of our younger years and mark out a world for the next generation. Let’s get a new pair of hiking shoes, so that we can blaze a trail for those who will come after us.
The Psalmist had arrived at that midlife point, and he knew that now as never before he had to think about his children and his children’s children and what kind of world he would leave them:
Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet unborn may praise the LORD: that he looked down from his holy height, from heaven the LORD looked at the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die
Oh, let’s get some new clothes. Let’s put on some new shoes and climb up to see what God sees. And when we do, we’ll see that we are needed in the great causes of our time. Justice needs us. Freedom needs us. The struggles around racism are not over. The issue of peacemaking is very much with us. If we put on a new pair of hiking boots and see the world as God sees it, we’ll see that somebody needs to stay with the justice thing, so that the next generation, and the generation yet unborn, will not have to live under oppression or the threat of destruction. Men and women in their middle years, with professional skills well developed, their minds alert; their capacities for growth not yet dimmed .. you are the generation which can work for change. You are those who hold the power in our world. I look out here and I see attorneys, physicians, social workers, nurses, personnel officers, business people, secretaries, government administrators, teachers, and I know that you’ve been doing your thing long time to get tired of it. I know you do your work every day, you’ve developed a style, a pattern. It’s comfortable, but a little boring. It’s okay, but a little bland by now. Maybe it’s time for new clothes. Maybe it’s time to put on those hiking boots and climb up to see what God sees, and get involved in the pursuit of justice.
That dissatisfaction you feel; that nagging feeling that life ought to be more than this. When you go to work and put in another day before that computer screen and in all those endless meetings, do you feel as though it isn’t making the difference you thought it should make? If you feel that, then you are in the midlife crisis, and it’s time for new clothes. It’s time for a new pair of climbing shoes so that you can come up a little higher and see what needs to be done for the children coming after you.
There are plenty of good things to do, plenty of organizations and charities that might need you. But I want to speak a word for the church and its redemptive directions. I want to challenge our midlife people, with all their skills and their insights, to put on some marching boots and get involved with us as we set out in redemptive directions. We’re trying to redeem some children and some teenagers in this community. We’re doing scouting and an after-school program. We’re running Love Alive for teenagers. We intend to revive the Takoma Alliance Supporting Kids, which reaches youngsters on the verge of trouble. We intend to redeem the children and the youth of this community. But it cannot be done without the vigorous, skilled, knowledgeable people of this church. It cannot be done just with staff; you can never pay enough people to get involved, one-on-one, with young people. Nor can it be done with retirees alone, although they make a tremendous contribution. It can only be done with midlife people, with all their gifts, making the sacrifice of time and energy necessary to reach our children. I say it’s time for new clothes, time to put on some climbing shoes to get up and see our youth.
We intend to do a healing ministry in this community. Already about twenty of you have gotten on board. Doctors, nurses, social workers, medical administrators; some active, some retired. I have a vision that we will create out of this church a holistic health ministry that will bring to this community not only good medical information, but also an awareness of the God who wants the best for His children. We intend to create a healing ministry. To do it we will need the skills and the insights of midlife people, people who can bring both maturity and energy to the task. We intend as a church to be redemptive. We will need you. And if like many midlifers you feel something nagging at your spirit, you need new clothes. You will need to put on climbing shoes to get up and see hurting humanity as God sees it:
Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet unborn may praise the LORD: that he looked down from his holy height, from heaven the LORD looked at the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die
Time for new clothes; time for a new pair of climbing shoes.
B
And then I believe we will also need a new coat. We will need to a new coat, suitable for travel. I believe that midlife people who feel that nagging thing inside that says that life ought to be more satisfying than this .. midlife people need is a sturdy coat designed for travel.
The psalmist had a vision of a world. Not just a little world, but a very large world. A world in which the peoples and nations gathered to worship God. He was not content with his little private world. He saw a broad vision, a larger picture.
so that the name of the LORD may be declared in Zion, and his praise in Jerusalem, when peoples gather together, and kingdoms, to worship the LORD.
A traveling coat. You know, midlife is a time of moving on up. Do you remember the old TV character, George Jefferson, who finally got enough dollars together that he could move up in the world? Moving on up. Lots of midlife people find that the little world of old habits, old jobs, old relationships, old patterns, just doesn’t satisfy anymore. We want something new. Some folks go out and buy a newer and larger house. It’s not so much that they really have to have the space; it’s just that their vision is expanding, and they want something new. Others go out and find a new job, not because there was anything wrong with the old job, but because it feels like time for a new challenge, time for new worlds to conquer, time for the yeasty vitality of learning something new. People in midlife want to put on that traveling coat and go somewhere and do something special.
Men and women, if you’re feeling that at all, I want to challenge you to put on that traveling coat and see in the Christian missionary enterprise something new that God wants to give you. I want to challenge you to pray and think and work and dream toward the day when numbers of us will get outside our little cubicles and our little habits and carry the good news to some other community, some other city, yes, even some other country. I want to see the day when some of us put on those traveling coats and we take a team of our finest and most capable people, most likely midlife people, and we go to some place that needs us and declare the name of the Lord and gather people together to worship Him. The psalmist, in his midlife crisis, caught a glimpse of a world gathered to worship our God; I want you to hear that nothing else will be more satisfying.
I have a friend who went through a classic midlife crisis. At age 42 he just walked in to the boss and said, “I quit.” He didn’t know what he was going to do, he didn’t have a clue how he would support himself, he just knew that he wasn’t satisfied any longer. He just knew that the old garment was worn out. Well, some of us worried about him. We worried not only about his income, but about his life. What would he turn to? What would he do with himself? The next we heard he was in Thailand, serving as a volunteer missionary, teaching and building and serving people, and having the time of his life. My friend had put on new clothes; he had put on a traveling coat and was working to gather the nations to worship our God. And he has never again felt useless. He has never again felt out of date. He has never again felt restless. He put on a traveling coat.
If you feel restless in what you are doing, consider missions as the cure for your restlessness. If you feel unfulfilled and bored by your everyday work, look at missions as the battery to charge up your excitement. If you feel as though it’s all over at age 40 or 50 or 60, then get on board with the missions task. Take the gospel to some place of need, and I guarantee you you will never lack for challenge again.
It’s time for new clothes. Let’s put on a traveling suit.
In fact, I can round out your ensemble. I can complete your new wardrobe. If you feel the crunch of midlife; if at any age you feel a restless spirit; it’s time for new clothes. Here:
Fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
There’s no need to hide in old clothes. It’s time for new clothes. Can I invite you to the fitting room right now?
