ICCM; January 5, 2020; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; Epiphany
I’ve been thinking about two of Mary Oliver’s poems. The first is called The Summer Day, it’s closing lines go like this:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
What am I, what are you going to do with this one wild precious life? At first it seems like a question for a young person setting out in life—choosing a career, establishing an identity, achieving goals. After all, we here have all done something with our life already. We are a bunch of retired people living the dream. We get to spend our winters in Mazatlan, savoring the sights and sounds of life here, the waves, the sunsets, the flowers, birds, and geckos and the colors and the music. Most of us know how to be idle and blessed to stroll on the beach if not the fields. But the question remains, What is it that each of us plans to do with the rest of this our one wild, precious life?
It is the first Sunday of a new year, and of a new decade. It’s a good time for a sort of assessment. One of my extended family members just retired. She has always been highly organized and goal oriented. For years now she’s lived by the ideas outlined in the book Younger Next Year. Throughout her very successful career she utilized the principles of Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, where he encourages leaders to figure out their Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Now in retirement she’s using the Blue Zone principles to make her annual goals.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Blue Zones—researchers have found 5 places where people regularly live into their 100’s with good health. The Mountainous highlands of inner Sardinia, A Greek Island that also has one of the world’s lowest rates of dementia, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, a Seventh Day Adventist community in Loma Linda, California, and Okinawa Japan. I’ve looked at the 9 principles the researchers discovered that are common to these varied groups.
1.They move naturally instead of joining gyms or running races. 2. They have a life plan. They know their purpose. This alone can add 7 years to your life. 3. They have routines that shed stress including prayer, rituals, happy hour, or napping. 4. They stop eating when they are 80% full and eat their bigger meal mid-day or in early evening and do not eat after that. 5. Their diets are mostly plant based. 6. Those who consume alcohol do so in small amounts, drinking with friends or family and with food. 7.They belong to a faith-based community. Attending services can add 4-14 years to your life. 8. They put their families first. 9 Finally they live in social circles that support healthy behaviors.
That sounds like a great recipe for living the dream. Participating here in this worshiping community, knowing our purpose, prayer patterns, that’s 3 out of 9 blue zone practices right off the bat. Many of us move more naturally here than we do at home too—walking instead of driving. Many of us are involved in some kind of service—at the Salvation Army Children’s Home, at the Quilting Shop, making sandwiches for the residents of the Dump, organizing Christmas hampers, giving rides to church, caring for our friends and neighbors, giving to the work of this Blue Church.
I took a little test online related to the Blue Zones after hearing about her annual review and planning. According to the test, I’ve got about 35 more years of this wild precious life to fill with purpose and meaning. Wow! That’s a lot of time. Many of you have less time than that. But, as long as our hearts are beating, God has a purpose for our lives. We are not here to Live The Dream in the usual sense of that phrase. Retirement, as seen through faith, is not just about strolling on the beach, improving our golf score, or learning to paint—those are some of my favorite things to do, by the way, I’m not suggesting we quit those things. The answer to the question of what we’re going to do with what remains of this one wild precious life will differ for each of us.
I recently heard the inspiring life story of a centenarian named Dr. Leila Denmark. She was born in 1898 in Portal Georgia. She originally trained to be a teacher and only decided to attend medical school when her fiancé was posted overseas by the US State Department and no wives were allowed to accompany their spouses to that post. She was the only woman in her medical school graduating class in 1928. She started treating children that year, evidently inviting each next patient to the examining room by saying, “Who’s the next little angel in my waiting room?”
Denmark devoted a substantial amount of her professional time to charity and was an active member of a Baptist church, even while working at a hospital, baby clinic and in her own private practice. So many of her patients were dying of Whooping Cough that she conducted research in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease, eventually creating the vaccine that protects us all. She was an author, finishing her last book in the year 2002 at the age of 103, the same year she retired, because her eyesight was getting too weak for more involved tasks, such as examining children’s throats. Dr. Leila Denmark was one of the first doctors to suggest not smoking around children, and the importance of a healthy diet. She died in 2012 at the age of 114 and 2 months. In think she exemplified all 9 of the Blue Zone Principles.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we all need to be like Dr. Denmark. The story is told of Zusha, the great Chassidic master, who lay crying on his deathbed. His students asked him, “Rebbe, why are you so sad? After all the mitzvahs and good deeds you have done, you will surely get a great reward in heaven!”
“I’m afraid!” said Zusha. “Because when I get to heaven, I know God’s not going to ask me ‘Why weren’t you more like Moses?’ or ‘Why weren’t you more like King David?’ But I’m afraid that God will ask ‘Zusha, why weren’t you more like Zusha?’ And then what will I say?!”
Living God’s dream for us means identifying our individual life’s purpose, sharing in healthy community, and service to others. Jeremiah 29: 11 says, For surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
In a minute we’ll be singing the words of a 1960’s folk song based on a Christmas poem by Howard Thurman, “I am the light of the world, you people come and follow me, if you follow and love you’ll learn the mystery of what you were meant to do and be.” John 20: 21 gives us the same message in Jesus’ words—As the Father has sent me, so I send you.
We are not meant to retire to idleness. Psalm 71: 17-21 explains it perfectly:
God you taught me when I was a child, and I am still proclaiming your marvels.
I am old, and now my hair is gray. O God, do not forsake me; let me live to tell the next generation about your greatness and power, about your heavenly justice, O God. You have done great things. Who, O God is like you? I have felt misery and hardship, but you will give me life again. You will pull me up again from the depths of the earth, prolong my old age, and once more comfort me.
I grew up with excellent role models. About 10 years ago, my mother was voted into the City of Moorhead’s Hall of Fame. In her acceptance speech she said, “I learned that all of us want to do well, but if we do not also do good in our community or in the world, then doing well will never be enough. I’ve learned how important it is to give back, especially for those of us who have been so richly blessed.”
I started with a part of a poem by Mary Oliver. I want to close with another, in When Death Comes she wrote:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Amen.