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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Rev. Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "Methuselah." Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Book of Genesis, chapter 5, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 18.

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When Jared had lived a hundred and sixty-two years, he became the father of Enoch. He had lived after the birth of Enoch eight hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years, and he died. When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah.

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Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

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When Methuselah had lived a hundred and eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech. Methuselah lived after the birth of Lamech seven hundred and eighty-two years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and he died.

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When Lamech had lived a hundred and eighty-two years, he became the father of a son, and called his name Noah, saying, "Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands." Lamech lived after the birth of Noah five hundred and ninety-five years, and had other

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sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy-seven years, and he died. And may God bless to us this reading from his word written. May God bless to us this reading from his word written.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. In just a little over four months now I shall be retiring. And when I mentioned that to someone the other day, they said, "You look too young to retire." And I felt very pleased when they said that, because I know some people who when they retired

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had faces so wrinkled they looked like they screwed their hats on. I am aware of the fact that I do look very young. I only became aware of it two weeks ago when one of the youngsters of one of our staff members here at the Church said to her father, "Daddy, what's the name of that minister down

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at the Church?" And he said, "Which one? The one with the black hair?" She said, "No."

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"Well, the one with the sandy hair?" "No." "I mean the one whose hair hasn't come in yet." So it's obvious that I look very young to some people.

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In spite of that fact, I'd like to think with you this morning about the senior years. William Cowley, the noted American author and critic, has commented that the unfortunate thing about the books that have been written about the elderly is that none of them have been read, or none of them have been written by the elderly.

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They have all been written by those much younger than those about whom they are writing. And that is absolutely the truth. And he could level that charge at me this morning, and he would be justified in doing so.

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While I have spent enough time in ministry to older people, I have developed a sufficient sensitivity to their needs. But I have been able to prepare some of them for the joy that they now know in Jesus Christ. And I do not hesitate to speak about the elderly since none of them.

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And what led me to do this was meditating upon Methuselah. Now, Methuselah, as you remember, is the oldest man known in all of the scriptures. In Genesis 5, verse 27, we read, "And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and he died."

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And notice, please, that he did not die a natural death. I think that is a significant detail to be observed. How do we know that? Well, in this way.

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Noah was 187 years old when his son Lamech was born. Lamech was 182 years old when his son Noah was born. And Noah was 600 years old when the flood came. Now, if you add those three numbers together, 187, 182, and 600, you come to a total of

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969 years, which was precisely the age of Methuselah. In other words, Methuselah died in the great flood. He was not one of those that God chose to save. And I think I know why.

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I think it is principally because he was a one-dimensional man. His life did have length, but there is no reference to it having anything else. If you go back and look at those before him, you find that his father Enoch was such a noble soul that he is the only one in the Old Testament who has no obituary.

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It says there, "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." What kind of an epitaph would you like? An epitaph with a lot of high numbers on it, like Methuselah? Or like Methuselah's father?

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That epitaph would read, "He walked with God." Or go after Methuselah, look at his grandson. His grandson was Noah. And the Bible says of Noah, "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord."

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Can I ask you, what kind of epitaph would you like? One with a high number on it? Or an epitaph that read, "He found grace in the eyes of the Lord." You see, length is not really the mark, necessarily, of a good life.

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And what I'd like to think with you about this morning is the other key dimensions of such a life. For example, it seems to me that the well-lived life has a great deal of depth. And by depth, I mean shrewd management.

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Now we all know that we live in a time when everyone wants to look like a teenager. At least it seems so. Both men and women are putting tea bags on their eyeballs and potato peels on their eyeballs. I read about a very expensive Italian mud the other day that you can smear on your face

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and it is supposed to make you look younger. And of course we hear more and more about plastic surgery all the time. And this applies, of course, to men just as much as it does to women. I always have to chuckle when I see people who have had plastic surgery.

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They do look younger. The only trouble is, most of the time I don't recognize them. And not only that, but they look like they've been put together with parts that do not match. And I think that a more sorry state of affairs than the one they were seeking to avoid.

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But there are, besides these things that I've talked about, some necessary infirmities that come with age. No matter how much you might want to look like a teenager, you do find the years creeping up on you.

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Like that old soul who said that she spent every day with four different men. She got up with willpower. She spent all day wrestling with Charlie Horse. She was visited continually by arthritis.

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And she went to bed at night with Ben Gay. Now, beside these physical infirmities, you often find amongst the elderly attitudes of guilt or of uselessness or of bitterness and sometimes of fear. I have discovered in my experience that the fear that I most often find is related to

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the person's anxiety that he or she might lose their mental capacities. Now the fact is that science has demonstrated to us that our IQs do not decline as we get older. But more significant than that is this.

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We need to remember that when most older people think that they are not as bright as they once were, that is not because they are losing their faculties. It is because they are not using their faculties. In other words, one needs to exercise, the medical field tells us, to exercise the brain

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cells just as one exercises the remainder of the body to keep the brain in tip-top condition. The Bible says, "As we think, so we are in our hearts." Now there are two imperatives in that. First, as we think, we are to be thinking.

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This is a positive command given to us in Scripture. And medical science has demonstrated to us that exercising those tiny gray cells, thinking, does keep us more mentally alert. It also says that as we think in our hearts, so we shall be.

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In other words, a positive attitude in the mind will have a positive effect upon the body, and the medical evidence for that is too great to be overwhelmed. When I encounter an older person who is suffering not from fear, but from bitterness or guilt, I try to remind that older saint that they should be thinking not so much of themselves,

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but rather of that one who holds the patent on life, that one who alone will assess the value of a life as it has been lived, that one who sent his only begotten Son that we might know the joys of the kingdom of heaven, that one whom we call God, but spell his name with four letters, L-O-V-E.

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We must not hold on to the things that God has already forgotten. We must not punish ourselves for things that God does not intend to punish us for. And still, we must acknowledge that there is considerable change that comes with advancing age.

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You may remember that song which was quite popular some years ago, "You say tomato, and I say tomato, and you say potato, and I say potatoe, tomato, tomato, potato, potatoe, let's call the whole thing off." That's the way it goes, or something close to that.

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A young lady was auditioning for a show on Broadway, and that was the song she was asked to sing in her audition. And she began, "You say tomato, and I say tomato, you say potato, and I say potato." And they said, "Just a minute, miss.

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Would you start again, please?" She said, "Certainly." "You say tomato, and I say tomato, and you say potato, and I say potato." They said, "That's all right, miss.

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We've heard enough now. You can go. And don't you call us. If we want you, we'll call you, Miss Levine."

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She said, "It's Levine, not Levine." Well, there are differences, even though they may not be exactly in the places we expect them to be. And here is where shrewd management comes in.

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For we need, as we get older, to focus on those things in our lives at which we are the best. We need to ruthlessly cut away those things that we do not do well, or do not do as well as those things for which we have been particularly gifted by God.

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I know it is hard to be called to evacuate some part of the field of battle in the Lord's name. But he sometimes calls us from one field in order that we might focus our particular gifts given to us by him in another field.

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They're raising our flag higher than it had ever been before. You know as well as I do that there are many areas in which his age is far superior to youth. And so go to those places and use the best that's in you, not worrying about the other

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things, the best that's in you, to help those to whom you are ministering or whom you are serving in God's name. Red Auerbach, who was the distinguished coach of the Boston Celtics for many years, had a particular reputation for getting excellent play out of his older team members.

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And his secret was this. He would call in the older players and he would say to each one of them, "You cannot do all of the things that you once did very well. But there are some things that you can still do with a skill beyond most anyone else.

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If you will keep on doing those things, then you will have a place on the team." Now that is shrewd management. In spite of change in life, whether it be physical or mental or emotional, this kind of management gives depth.

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Now the well-lived life also has breadth. That is, it faces forward. When I was ministering out in California, I had five seminarians who lived in my home with me.

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They were all students at the Fuller Theological Seminary. And one of the members of the Church said to me on one occasion, "My, those boys should count themselves as very fortunate, because they get all of this theoretical training during the day, and then they get the benefits of all of your experience shared with them

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in the evenings." Well, I said, "Perhaps some things I have said have been of value to them. They have indicated that is so. But believe me, I have gotten a great deal more than I have been able to give."

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I would sit there at the table at dinner with these fellows who had just come from class. They were up on the newest biblical studies. They were reading the very freshest Old and New Testament theology. They were on top of things, the pile from which I had slipped a long time before.

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And I find myself beginning to read the books that they are reading in order to be able to keep up with them in their conversation. And I found, as I did this, a new vibrancy, a new life in my living. Now what was happening here?

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I was facing forward, not facing backward, but forward. And these young people were helping me to do that. I read about an 88-year-old man who announced that he was, after 60 years as a widower, going to marry an 18-year-old girl.

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And someone said to him, "That's completely out of order. You as an 88-year-old man should not be marrying an 18-year-old girl." And he said, "Why not? My first wife was 18 years old when we married."

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Of course, things had changed a great deal in the interim. When he was 18, when she was 18 for that first marriage, he was 28. But now the young girl was 18 and he was 88. Seventy years separated them.

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And yet, in spite of that, I must say I admire this old fellow, because he was seeking to stay close to youth. And in doing that, he was facing forward. We live in a kind of world where the old almost invariably battles against the new.

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You remember how when railroad trains reached the speed of 25 miles an hour, some people said they would never ride on such things because they would hopelessly disorient their passengers. There were many individuals who would not buy telephones when they were first available,

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because they believed that putting such an instrument to their ear might lead them to be electrocuted. And just a few years ago, you remember when the microwave came out, there were many who would not have one in their home because of the dangerous rays with which it filled their

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place of living. Or look at the world of corporate finance. Look at business. This record here is exactly the same.

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Take a company like the National Cash Register Company, which was at the top of its field until it suffered, across the course of three years, horrendous losses and slipped from number one to a position farther down the totem pole. And why?

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Because the National Cash Register Company was not interested in a new idea called electronics. Or take the B.F. Goodrich Company that makes the tires. They invested a great deal of money in developing what is called the bias-ply tire, and they

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were at that time the number one tire-selling company in the world. But within three years they had slipped from being number one to being number four. Michelin, a French company, had moved into the first position because they had taken up an idea that B.F.

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Goodrich thought too new to be worth anything. It was the idea of the radial tire. Or take the RCA Corporation, which was at one time one of the top ten companies in America. They dominated the field in the production of vacuum tubes.

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But ten years after they dominated the field, they left that area of production altogether. And why? Because when they had the opportunity, they had turned away, they had looked backwards instead of forward, at a new idea called solid-state electronics.

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We must be aware of the temptation which surrounds us and constantly seeks to push us into the defense of the status quo. I'm not saying that everything about young people is good. I heard about two dogs that were watching some young people dance, and the one dog said

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to the other, "If we moved around like that, they'd have us wormed." So I'm not saying everything about young people is absolutely perfect, but everything about age is not perfection either. And that's the reason we must keep looking ahead, and the stimulus of younger generations

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helps us to do that. Somerset Maugham and Wodehouse, Sandberg and Frost, the poets, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, the great painters, Armand Hammer, when he was 80 years old, he founded the Occidental Oil Company, now one of the biggest oil companies in the world.

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All of these men were doing these things in their 80s and their 90s. Take Alfred North Whitehead, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, taught at Oxford University and the University of London until he was forced to retire because of his age.

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He came to the United States, joined the faculty of Harvard University, taught for 20 more years, and students of Whitehead are quick to say that what he produced in his last 20 years surpassed everything that he had done before. Now the secret of each and every one of these individuals was they had friendship with younger

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people. They listened to what the young had to say, pushed those things through the categories of age and experience that were part of their way of thinking, and out of this came a healthy and vigorous newness.

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They were not afraid to face forward. What I'm saying is that a well-lived life has breadth. It is broad enough to include generations other than its own. And finally, may I suggest to you that a well-lived life prepares for the heights of glory and

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for the beauty of the sunset. While it is true that older people are not dead, it is also true that they soon will be. And this, I think, is why God ordains a time of weakness which comes to much older people

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as they approach the end of their lives. Have you ever thought of the fact that our first years on this planet, when we come here, we are very small and very weak? And you know why?

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Because we're not yet ready to cope with the turmoil and the tension of life. We need someone to take care of us while we build up our physical strength and our moral strength and our psychological strength and all of the other dimensions of life which are necessary if you're going to live through the tough times that life can constitute.

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Well just so, at the end of life, God allows for a gradual weakening. Once again we are taken away from the tension and the turmoil of life. And why? In order that we might prepare ourselves for the kingdom of heaven without distraction,

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in order that we might think about the heights. I think it's very beautiful to think of life in terms of this analogy. Age resembles childhood as the sunset does the sunrise. And what I mean by that is this.

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Jesus warned those who would not examine themselves and review and improve their own spiritual condition. What he said essentially was this. "It is a sad thing to be blind, but it is a much sadder thing to be able to see everything

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else but be blind to the truth. It is a sad thing to be unable to hear, but it is a sadder thing to be able to hear everything else but to not hear the word of truth." In the Talmud there's an interesting phrase, "An unexamined life is like an unopened letter."

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Life begins for us when we come here as little babies as a great adventure. We arrive here as emigrants, and we're rather worthless emigrants at that. We can't do a single thing to provide for ourselves, and we're not able to produce a single penny of capital.

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We're even too ignorant to know what a drain on the society we are. But we were not unexpected, and our parents have prepared for us. With infinite pains, they have readied things for our arrival. And when they pick us up out of our cradles, they look at us and see angels, and they think

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of us only in terms of good and not in terms of bad. And somehow in the crazy, crazy logic of love, they come to believe that they need us more than we need them. Well in just such the same way, we prepare ourselves for heaven.

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We look forward to that time when we will see our loved ones gathered together on the shore ready to give us welcome home. We will not be seen by them as angels, because we will see the angels and the archangels and all the heavenly hosts that praise us God.

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And there will be great joy on our arrival, for Jesus said there is great joy in heaven over any single sinner who comes home. That's the reason we are given this opportunity to prepare, to cleanse ourselves, and to learn the language of heaven, which interestingly enough is the only language that is spoken

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there but which one must learn to speak here, and that's the language of love and of forgiveness. You know, the American Indians believed that when a flower faded in the forest, somehow the most beautiful hues were lifted up and they made the sunset. Well just so the future absorbs the sweetness of our yesterdays.

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Let me say that again. Our future absorbs the sweetness of our yesterdays. And especially in our latter years as we prepare to go home, those sweet things make that light brighter and brighter, so that the course is easier and easier for us to follow to the

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very feet of Jesus. Have you ever sat by the sea in an afternoon and seen it gray and cold before you, and then the sun starts to set, and as it appears to go down to the water, suddenly the water is all crimson and gold?

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And we say, "The water is not really crimson and gold. The water is really gray. I saw it an hour ago, and that's its true color." But let me ask you a question.

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Is it not possible that what the daylight says is not true? Why do we believe the declaration of the day, "The water is gray," and turn so quickly away from the whisper of the sunset, which says, "The water is red and gold"? Maybe daylight reveals nothing but a world of illusion, while sunset reveals reality

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itself. It has been my privilege to know some older saints who have scaled the heights in preparing themselves for the kingdom of heaven, and some of them have climbed so high that I believe with all my heart, from what they said and from the way in which they said it, that they

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had some vision of God and saw that his beauty surpasses all other beauty, and that he and he alone is forever true and forever to be depended upon. And so as our older saints face the West, the glinting tints of the setting sun, it should not surprise us that they smile with an ecstasy which younger people do not begin

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to understand. They do it, you see, because they are ready to greet the unseen with a smile and with a cheer. Pray with me.

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O God, I offer to you these stumbling words in the hope that they might be, by thy grace, some strength to those who are weakened by years, or to those who are at that place in life where they still are building that which they will look back upon when they have reached their greatest maturity.

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We would not be satisfied to be Methuselahs, for in the end, length means only that we are longer away from you. We want lives that are as high as heaven, as broad as the newest ideas, and as deep with the shrewd management of our gifts as they possibly can be.

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These things can come alone from thee, and it is my prayer that something said this day might be used in your hands to have it be so. In Jesus' name, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]