Aging in History and Scripture

There's a peculiar dissonance between aging in the world of human history and aging in the narratives of Torah.

We know, because we do, that in both the ancient world and in prehistory aging wasn't something most of us did.  What most of us did was die young.  Get a childhood illness?  You died.  Have a complicated birth?  You died.  Get an infected wound?  You died.  By the time most human beings were in their mid-thirties, they weren't finally getting established in their career.  They were dead.  

As a species, we got around this the way that all other animals get around that basic existential challenge: we reproduced in large numbers, spamming ourselves into the world.

Age wasn't something that most people did.  The idea that most human beings would make it into their seventies would have seemed impossible.

Yet the tales of Torah lay out an entirely different spin on aging.  The farther back you go, the longer people live.  In Genesis, we hear that Adam, literally "the creature of earth?"  Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years.  Nine hundred and thirty.  Methuselah, whose name was once synonymous with "very old dude?"  He lived the longest, at nine hundred and sixty nine years. 

Noah had his kids at five hundred, which sounds...exhausting.   

All of the antediluvian...meaning "before the flood"...folks in Genesis lived preposterously long lives.  If one was a literalist, which I am not, there'd be all sorts of reasons one could present.

For instance, one might argue that so close to the exile from the Garden, the first humans were closer to immortality and agelessness, a lingering echo of the deathless perfection of unmediated connection with YHWH.  That works theologically and within the text, but it's a little hard to jibe with the way the human body actually functions.  If you have any engagement with Creation as it actually and observably exists, that sort of argument isn't particularly satisfying.  

When I was a kid reading the Bible for the first time on my own, I just kinda assumed the authors of that section were using a lunar calendar, and where they said "years," they meant "months."  That breaks down when you get further in, but hey, I was nine.

Or perhaps it's a factor of the peculiar subjectivity of time, in which days seem longer when you're younger.  

Or perhaps, as historical critical scholarship suggests, the great age of the antediluvian patriarchs is a conceit of the storytelling of the Ancient Near East, where the archetypal heroes lived in a time beyond time.  In Mesopotamian literature, for instance, the legendary figures in their pre-flood narratives typically lived for thousands of years.  This directly parallels ancient Hebrew storytelling, because of course it does.  

No matter what your interpretive framework, what is clear is that age in the ancient world was viewed as a thing of great worth, something fundamentally positive.  Aging was a rarity, and those who did reach their seventies or eighties were viewed with reverence and honor.  Their lives would have spanned the equivalent of several normal lifetimes, and they would be valuable repositories of collective memory, living relationships, and experience.

In the ancient world, the old were rare and precious and valued, because so few human beings attained great age.  

What a strange and different world that must have been.

Church Growth, Presbyterian Style

The goal of every pastor, pretty much without exception these days, is to "grow your congregation."  We train and attend seminars and pray earnestly that the Good Lord will see to bless our efforts with an abundant harvest of eager new pledge uni...I mean, disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.   We talk about new buildings, and salivate over that great plump bunch of unchurched bipeds that seems to dangle ever beyond our reach, like we're Tantalus in Church Planting Hell.

Well, that's the case for pastors outside of the oldline churches, at least.  Y'all either have nice new buildings radiant with big screens and parking and a great honking mortgage, or you're renting and dreaming about it, or you're still flailing away with the same dozen folks in that Bible study/praise circle that was supposed to be a megachurch already, dagflabbit.  

In older churches, there is yearning for more folks, but less earnest entrepreneurial evangelism.  

And we Presbyterians, we're, well, older.  We've been around longer.  We move at our own pace, sonny.

Yesterday, I gave a group of local pastors a brief tour through my rumpled, comfortable, and well-worn church.  I showed them our warm little sanctuary, built in 1847, which is easily the smallest church building in our small town.  I walked them through the building containing my office and the classrooms.  That aging structure was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years. 

One of the pastors, the Baptist, noticed the glassed-in bookcase in my office.  "Wow," he said, perusing the ancient tomes.  "Look at this!  These are really, really old catechisms!"   I told him I'd been meaning to look at them, but the case appeared to be locked.

After they left, I decided to explore the case further.  I fiddled with the lock for a moment, then realized the bookshelf wasn't locked at all, but held closed with an interior clasp.  I gave it a bit of a tug, and the door opened.  The smell of dust and must was strong, but I began to peruse the objects within. 

They were, almost without exception, ancient.  There was a silver bell, undoubtedly used to bring a classroom or meeting to order, that still sounded a tone so bright and clear and sustained that I half expected to look around and find myself in Narnia.   Many were old hymnals from the first decade of the 20th century.  Many more were books that had once been part of a Sunday School, readers and stories and collections of lessons that little groups of children would have had to memorize and recite.

There was, as seen above, a neatly maintained roll book for the Poolesville Presbyterian Sunday School.  Lists showed the names of every child who'd attended school, and whether they'd completed their assignments, and whether or not they'd checked a book out of the library.  It covered the years 1883 through 1885.

At the top of the case, I found a book of Session minutes.  The Session, for if you're blissfully unaware of Presbyterianese, is the group of Elders who are charged with gettin' the work of the church done.   Our board, basically.  As I had a Session meeting coming up in the evening, what better time to peruse Session minutes?   I wiped the dust off off the cover, dust that had gathered over what had clearly been many years, and cracked open the book.

Inside, the minutes began with a record of a meeting of the Session of Poolesville Presbyterian Church on July 12, 1885.   It was written in ink, possibly with a quill, and was in a neatly angled handwritten cursive, precise and meticulous.  This clerk of session---that's the person charged with maintaining the records---really cared about his work.  

He chronicled the decisions of the church, the folks who were seeking to join, and the activities of the pastor, who barely missed a day, except when the weather was most severe or he was called to preach the Gospel elsewhere.   He noted, in a reflection section, that Poolesville Presbyterian Church was not prone to outbursts of the Spirit, as were so many others, or prone to manifesting charismatic gifts.  But they were nonetheless, he mused, doing just fine.  Sounds oddly familiar.

As I read, my curiosity was piqued.  If this was a Session book...of a Presbyterian Church...then it would have the statistical records and accounting.  It would tell me just how big my church was back then.  I flipped through to where that would be in a current book, and lo and behold, there it was.

Total membership of Poolesville Presbyterian Church, one hundred and twenty six years ago?  

Seventy One.

Our current membership lies at around eighty-four.

I guess that means we're growing, by, hmm, what is that, almost 20% every one hundred years.   

So we're on track to be a thousand member church by, hold on, let's do the extrapolation, the Year of Our Lord Thirty Four Hundred and Two.

All part of the plan, my friends.  All part of the plan.