It seems that everywhere you look these days the old is passing away. For some of us, it undoubtedly has to do with having entered the middle years of life — years they say are characterized by the three M’s: mortgage, menopause, mortality. Certainly, there is something about the middle years that stirs the pot of the soul.
The first time it hit me I was still in my 30s, out walking one night with three colleagues. We had gathered from our various seminaries across the country for a week of teaching — three world famous homileticians and a lesser light from the West Coast. The others were a little older than I, but only by a few years. As we walked we reviewed the week, going on about how wonderful it had been, enthusing over the fellowship, joking about being on a kind of “high.” We felt transformed by the time we’d had. It was hard to think of leaving. “Yeah, yeah,” said the dry wit of the group, “let us build three booths.” We laughed at ourselves then and the talk turned to the question of the future. Someone mentioned schools he might consider teaching at someday. Another speculated about which of the young ones might succeed her in her current job. It was a dreamy conversation until someone mentioned how many people were looking for jobs that year. “You know,” he said, “they’re knocking at our door.”
The old is indeed passing away and the new is knocking. If you’re in your middle years, your late-middle years or your very-late-middle years, no one has to tell you. But it is not just about the peculiar way some of us are seeing the world through our coke-bottle-bottom glasses. It’s everywhere.
The old is passing away. People are not raising children the way they used to. Grade schoolers no longer call anybody “Mrs.,” much less “Ma’am.” And my younger relatives tell me that tiny tots with their eyes all aglow no longer go to bed at 8. We don’t eat bacon and eggs for breakfast anymore or work in the fields in the heat of the day or call the evening meal “supper.” People are not judged by their ability to keep their plow clean and their basement dry, but by the way they manage their portfolio. The old is passing away. In the middle of profound and deep change it’s human instinct to look around for a leader, an example, someone whose life can provide a bit of guidance. Who can show us how to live between the ages?
I wonder in these last few days that run up to Christmas if we want to take a page from Mary’s book.
There she stands, heavy with child, straddling the greatest shift of the ages that ever was or will be until Christ returns, one swollen foot planted in B.C. and one in A.D. She is perhaps the first human being to experience in her own body the dying of the Old and the quickening of the New. And what does she tell us? It’s about what God is doing. “Be it unto me according to your word,” she says. Fix your heart on what God is doing and give yourself to that. The shifting of the ages, the redeeming of the world, the establishment of peace, the bringing in of the kingdom is something God is doing. God is working in the world the same miraculous way that God works in pregnancy, unfolding invisibly … and inevitably.
JANA CHILDERS is dean, vice president for academic affairs and professor of homiletics and speech communication at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California.
