Old, Older, Oldest

Barzillai the Gileadite also came down from Rogelim to cross the Jordan with the king and to send him on his way from there. Now Barzillai was very old, eighty years.

2 Samuel 19:31-32

How old is very old?  If you asked the Bible, the psalms would answer that the span of a man's life is threescore or, by reason of strength, fourscore.  Most folks run out of steam when they hit eighty, in other words.

Eighty seems to be one of those developmental pivot points, where a profound change occurs.  Life swings on a hinge, rather as it does in early adolescence.

When our daughter was in middle school, my wife and I tried to prepare ourselves by reading a book titled How To Talk So Teenagers Listen and Listen So Teenagers Talk.  The author hedged that there is no magic moment when kids become teens.  But for most girls, he explained, the transformation from playing with dolls to thinking about getting a tattoo arrives in the second semester of seventh grade.  For our family, that was right on the button.  And it was helpful to pinpoint the precise age of the transition. What a difference a semester, or a birthday, can make.

In my experience as a parish minister, caring for an aging congregation, I saw eighty as another threshold, not the passage from childhood to adolescence but the portal from old to very old   For many seniors it's the age when the option of moving to an independent living community is out of the picture, because one can no longer pass the required physical.  For elders who may have heard that retirement consists of three phases, go go, go slow, and no go, eighty marks the last stage, when your giddy-up has got up and went.

In the go go years that I volunteered as an emergency responder with the fire department (when I was in my sixties), we were frequently summoned to help when someone had fallen in their home. After eighty, many people who take a tumble won't be able to get back up without assistance.

Now that I am seventy and retired from the force, it's hard for me to imagine answering the pager for midnight calls any longer and harder still to imagine a man a decade older serving as President of the United States. It's past the demarcation line.  And perhaps the fourscore mark sheds light on the difference between Biden and Trump.  There is only four years difference between the two but during that interval from seventy-seven to eighty-one something shifts, physically and mentally.  It explains why one man, although a narcissist and a bully, appears energetic (even frenzied at times), while the other, although fundamentally decent, seems geriatric.

 

How old is too old?  Washington was 57 when he was inaugurated, while Lincoln was 52.  FDR was 51 when he ascended to the presidency and Teddy Roosevelt just 42 when he was sworn in. An argument can be made that our greatest leaders have tended to take office in mid-life.

So yes, Biden should withdraw from the race and so should Donald Trump.  Both political parties should nominate younger women and men now and in the future.  And yes, there should be mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices, just as there are for career officers in the U.S. military.

How old is too old?  I could hedge and qualify my answer but the next man who puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office shouldn't be any older than Barzillai the Gileadite. Eighty.

Does Religion Belong In Schools?

 Should the Bible be taught in public schools?  A new law in Louisiana requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom.  Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that teachers include the Bible in their instruction because, he claims, the book is foundational to America’s laws and Constitution.  There is a growing chorus that educational systems already struggling to teach grammar and math add prayer and theology to the curriculum.  

But which Bible should be taught?  Jews honor the Pentateuch or Torah but reject the New Testament.  Catholic scriptures contain seven books not recognized by Protestants.  The Latter Day Saints consider the Book of Mormon an essential text that completes the revelation other Christians consider canonical.  Of course, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have their own holy books. Who decides? 

Government has no business adjudicating these types of disputes, which is the reason the founders of our country provided for freedom of religion in the private sphere, leaving matters of faith to the individual conscience.  At the same time, they established a wholly secular constitution that makes no mention of God and whose sole reference to faith occurs in the stipulation of Article Six that no religious tests shall be required for public office.  The First Amendment to that document specifies that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, meaning that no sectarian viewpoint gets preferred treatment from the state.  As John Adams (second president of the United States and co-editor of the Declaration of Independence) affirmed in signing the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Weren’t Adams and the other framers godly men?  They were characters of high principle and solid morals but not always orthodox in their personal beliefs.  Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospels, omitting any mention of the miracles recorded there. Never a communicant, Washington was lambasted from the pulpit of the Anglican church he sometimes attended for absenting himself from the eucharist.  As to Jesus, an aging Benjamin Franklin quipped, “I have some doubts as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize on, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”  Are these the kinds of facts that  Superintendent Walters wants taught to the young?  

Outwardly, George Washington was careful to show respect toward believers and non-believers alike, at Mount Vernon willing to hire “Mohametans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists” so long as they were honest workmen, while James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution,  saw religious variety as the very linchpin of liberty: with a multiplicity of churches, synagogues, temples and tabernacles in the land, no one sect could dominate or oppress the others.  

Consequently, America is now the most religiously diverse nation on earth.  And thanks to the genius of its founders, who fashioned a separation between church and state, the United States has been mercifully free of the kind of violent strife that has plagued Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, and Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  Christian Nationalists in Louisiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere want to change that by rewriting history and enshrining their own narrow beliefs as law.  

To do so would be an invitation to chaos and a  betrayal of our nation’s best ideals