“I’d rather burn out than rust out.”
“I’ve just accepted another interim pastorate. I’m flunking retirement.”
“There’s no such thing as retiring from the service of the Lord.”
“Where do you find retirement in the Bible?”
Church leaders — pastors, elders, educators, and others — blurt such lines often. Some of their comments reflect a genuine love of ministry and the physical constitution to sustain it. Other times their words reveal a restless soul adrift on what, from their vantage point, looks like dead calm waters. The final questioning quote bespeaks the need to use a Bible concordance.
Look it up. Retire is in there. It’s in the most unread book in the whole Bible — the one that drones on like a national census report (no offense to my friend, Barbara Everitt Bryant, who directed the 1990 US census and whose daughter presently directs the General Assembly Council.) Yes, the word retire is there to be found, right in Numbers 8:23-26:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: This applies to the Levites: from twenty-five years old and upwards 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 the 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 (emphasis added).
Who would have thought?
Then again …
Who would have thought that the God who created for six days would have added a seventh for rest?
Who would have thought that the God who invented the Judeo-Christian work ethic would have commanded the humans to take a 12-month vacation every seven years?
Who would have thought that God would direct those humans to take off a second year after seven such seven-year cycles, “the year of jubilee”?
Who would have thought that the God who created a jubilee year every 50 years for the nation would also direct those serving the temple to retire at age 50 after — you got it — years of training, serving, teaching, worship-leading, and preaching?
And who would resist such a thing? It sure looks inviting to me. In fact, as a 52-year-old, I figure I’m running a couple years late. Memo to Board of Pensions: “Sign me up!”
But many 65-, 70-, and even 75-year-olds grind their gears at every retiring turn.
One reason for that struggle, suggests Jack Stotts (in the booklet, Aging Well: Theological Reflections on the Call and Retirement, published by the BOP) is the way we confuse particular calls with our high calling. The high calling to share in God’s redemptive, reconciling mission is extended to all the baptized. It’s that calling to which committed disciples respond, “Here am I. Send me.”
That high calling leads to particular callings — vocational tasks — like parenting, homemaking, teaching, engineering, accounting, and for some, preaching, counseling, visiting, evangelizing, and shepherding a flock of believers. Somewhere along the way, many come to confuse the particular, specialized callings with the general, high calling, and when the task assignments stand completed, the high calling seems to disappear.
Retirement offers a gift for those who will take it — a chance to get back to the essential calling, the high calling, one that does not depend upon particular calls and specific tasks for validation. Rather, says Stotts, in retirement:
We move from glorifying God to enjoying God forever, from usefulness to enjoyment. Such a move represents technically a shift from an instrumental measure of our lives to the intrinsic measure, or from a focus on achievement to a focus on delight and beauty. We have been told to stop and smell the flowers, but found little occasion to do so. Now we can. And that can be a gift that need not be measured by its contribution to some particular goal (p. 22).
Whenever persons of faith live into retirement with an eye toward experiencing their being as more essential than their doing, they thereby invite others to enter into God’s delight and joy. They give witness to a kind of Sabbath that is not measured simply in days and years but in spiritual fullness and wholeness, a life of shalom. That may be the best kind of ministry any one of us at any age could possibly offer.
–JHH
