Simeon and Anne – Being Old in an Old Church

St Cuthbert’s, Shadforth 31st January 2010 

I don’t know if at 51 I am young or old. I feel young some of the time ! (Some of the time I feel ancient…but that’s another story about busy vicars !)

But I am not alone. Our society is in a real puzzle about age. Is it ok to be a grey-haired rock and roller? Well it appears to be ! Helen and I went to a Status Quo concert a year or two ago and we were amongst the youngest there – apart from the grandchildren brought by their grandparents !

And the idea, common only a few years ago, that at 60 or 65 we were on the scrapheap - or “free”, depending on your point of view – is rapidly fading. I will have to work till 67 or 68 to get my full pension and my children are being told at school to expect to work till they are 70. Indeed, as we live longer and stay healthier longer, it is not surprising that we might want to or have to work longer. And it is intriguing how a little cluster of employers have spotted that having older employees is good for business…

I wanted to get some hard figures behind all this and logged on to the Government web site. Did you know that in 2008, Children aged under 16 represented around one in five of the total population, around the same proportion as those of retirement age – that is down from a quarter a few years ago. In mid-2008 the average age of the population was 39 years, up from 37 in 1998. We are an ageing population.

But you would not always know that. Apart from day time tv – which of course I never watch – the media seems to be dominated by the interests of the young. The power of the “grey pound”, as we call it, has still not quite broken through. Perhaps older people are more careful with their money – or poorer, as pensions fail to keep up with the cost of living…

But this is not surprising. Given the speed of change in society in our lifetimes, no wonder we feel out of date. I can still remember waking up to frost on the windows – on the inside of the windows ! Central heating was for the very posh. Now, we almost take it for granted. I can still remember the first computer arriving at school – and only the brightest mathematicians were allowed into the same room, let alone allowed to touch it. Now, children grow up with computers in nursery class.

We stayed in a holiday cottage this summer which had an old round dial phone. I went mad with frustration, having to wait whilst it came back round again before I could dial the next number. But I grew up with that sort of phone, and there was only one in the house. And I knew how it worked. I still can’t use my mobile phone properly.

I feel out of date, and I am only 51.

So our society is giving us very mixed messages. You are valuable – you are out of date.

And so is the Church. You are valuable – because you come to church to worship, because you help shoulder the responsibilities of keeping the Church alive, because you give money to keep the Church going. But you are not valuable because I keep going on about changing the way you have done Church. And so much of the Church’s anxiety is about the absence of young people. What about the needs of our older people ?

It is a fair question and that is why we have set up a lunchtime meeting in February to talk together about how we pray when we get older; that is why we are thinking carefully about how we might arrange a rota of lifts to church, or special services for older folk, or a better sustained home communion ministry.

BUT. And it is the crucial BUT. We will not be here in 10, or 20 or 30 years time. But our younger church members will be. And so of course we must give a priority to their needs. Above all, we must grow the Church, so that there will be people to take forward its ministry in the future.

But where does that leave us, you, now, as older people in the Church ?

It is a very profound question and one of the gifts of the Feast of Candlemas is that we have the example of Simeon and Anna to help us to think about being an older person in the community of faith.

Notice that they are both older people. Simeon is perhaps close to death and Anna was 84 – a remarkable age in that period. And they are both deeply faithful. Both are at public worship every day. Both pray deeply. Both are close to God. Both are longing for God’s work to be made visible. They are faithful.

Faithfulness is one of the great Anglican virtues. I don’t think a week passes without me hearing this word: “Our greatest duty is faithfulness.” “The main responsibility of the clergy is to be faithful, not successful.” And you may remember me teasing you last year about this word “faithfulness”. Does the Church of England need the good old ship “Faithfulness”, or does she need the new modern ship “Change”, if she is to navigate the current stormy waters. Because the word “faithful”, has in our heads, come to mean, unchanging, gritted teeth, limpet-like, hanging on. Not nimble confident movement. And I wonder if that is real faithfulness ?

Notice Simeon’s reaction to seeing the Christ Child. Yes, there is the relief that comes with an answer to prayer in old age. You can feel Simeon saying: “That’s it. I’ve done my bit. I have stayed faithful. Now I can let go and let God.”

But what God is about to do, and Simeon knows this, is a new thing, a revolutionary thing, which will stretch the people of Israel to breaking point because the change will be so radical. In Luke’s beautiful poem, Simeon sees Christ as being not just for the Jews, but to reveal God to the whole world; a ‘revelation to the Gentiles’. And Luke knows that this will mean the Gospel travelling far beyond Israel, geographically and ethnically. Simeon’s faithfulness meant embracing the most profound change.

We often caricature older people as being nice (or nasty). But in either respect, they are a “bit out of it”. They don’t really know. But Simeon did know. He could see what was coming. Simeon, as an older person, still saw and spoke the truth. So he warns Mary, in a heart-breaking phrase, that this child will break her heart – when he dies in front of her. Faithfulness as truth-telling.

And then there is Anna. 84. And she let’s rip. In public. Praising God. And telling everyone around her that this child is God’s way of setting Jerusalem free. Radical words in the midst of the Jewish establishment in a Roman occupied city. Faithfulness as excitement. Faithfulness as daring action.

So is this how we ought to be thinking of faithfulness: embracing change; speaking the truth; excited daring action. This is not how we normally imagine faithfulness in the C of E !

I want to relate all this back to ourselves, here in Shadforth and Sherburn and on into Gilesgate. We have been faithful. We have kept out churches going, at great cost of time and energy and money. But it has not solved our problems. I was talking to a colleague recently, and she was reflecting that some of the churches with which she works have known nothing but 40 years of decline: loss of members; loss of clergy; shortage of money; the choir has gone; the Sunday school has shrunk . And all of this had left a deep legacy of defeat, of despair. And in the face of that, all that was left is “faithfulness”. But for her people, it means a grim clinging on. That is not a good basis on which to build anything.

And we have to say to each other that that is not so far from our experience. There is sometimes a whiff of despair, or desperation, about how we do church together. And in these circumstances, what else can we do than try to eke out what we have, survive for another few years, hope that the Church will at least be here to bury us…

And this defensive mood can result in two very negative actions. The first is the instinct to blame. “If only they  did it differently…” Whether the “they” is the Diocese or the clergy or the PCC. This is just unrealistic – not because these folk may not make mistakes but because the problem is bigger than any individual set of mistakes. And it is poisonous, because it dispirits those trying to make a difference and it stops us getting involved because we are caught up in grumbling.  Blaming others for our problems is not faithfulness.

And a second response can be to say: “Well it was good enough for me. I like it. I still come to church so it better stay the way I like it.” And this can sound very like “faithfulness” – staying faithful to the old ways…

But, to take us back to the beginning of this sermon, the world is changing rapidly. Not all changes are for the good but some are, and some we just have to get used to. Most young people now find their information not in books but on the internet. So we have to have a church web site. We would no more think of using pen and ink parchments rather than books in church, than we should be afraid of using the internet, computers, photocopiers, CD players in church. Old-fashioned is not faithfulness. If we only sing the tunes of the 1950s we will only attract the people of the 1950s, whatever the words of our songs !

And family life has changed. Sunday morning is not the Sunday morning even I grew up with.  As Bishop Mark said to the PCCs in September: we can get young families to come and worship with us, but it may not be on a Sunday morning. If that is the case, then when will we have our church service ? Where should we invest our clergy time ? Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, or even a weekday afternoon ?

Change. Change is inevitable. The issue for us is not the faithfulness that opposes change but the faithfulness that asks the right questions, so we can make the best changes.

We have already begun to change things. There is much much more change to come. This does not mean that older people are not valued in our churches. All are precious. But it does mean that faithfulness, and especially the faithfulness of our older people, will not be opposed to change But just like Simeon and Anna, it will be a faithfulness that embraces change; that speaks the truth; that is ready to take excited daring action. That way we keep up with the new thing that God is doing now.

Amen.