Life after Life after Death

1 Corinthians 15:35-50
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The New Testament is pretty clear with respect to what happens to us after we die.  It is that our ultimate end is bodily Resurrection into a Creation made new with the glory of God.  Yet, we don’t hear much talk of that.  I expect that if we were to start talking resurrection with people particularly those under the age of forty most would start imagining a Zombie Apocalypse – ashen corpses with near superhuman strength suddenly pushing their way out of graves to stumble about the streets groaning and growling in pursuit of our brains.

For people in the church, we seem to regard Resurrection as something that happened to Jesus but we rather talk about our souls going to Heaven when we die.  Southern gospel singers sing about God having a room for me in that heavenly mansion in that city of gold.  Joke after joke tells us we have to make it past St. Peter at the pearly gates and if so, we will spend our days wearing white robes and halos, sitting on clouds, strumming harps.  Or, we walk off into that bright light at the end of the tunnel and meet Jesus who reunites us with our loved ones.  And of course, going to Heaven is conditional upon whether we have believed in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and lived good lives.  If not, then there’s Hell – eternal torment, flames, worms, demons, weeping and wailing, and that slimy, pitchfork wielding, red dude who looks like a slicked up Wayne Newton who’s so looking forward to torturing us for eternity.

Then there’s what we tell our children when people die.  Grandma’s gone to be one of the stars now.  Or, God needed another angel in heaven so he took Aunt Sally to be his special helper.  Grandpa’s gone but he’s watching over us or Grandpa’s gone but he still lives on in the love in our hearts.  Then we sit them down to watch Disney’s The Lion King where they learn about the circle of life.  …and we’ll stop there with the analogies before the sarcasm starts dripping. 

Little do we realize it but all of what I just said about what we believe happens to us when we die with the exception of bodily Resurrection are ancient Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and even Nordic Pagan beliefs which the Medieval Church dressed up with Biblical imagery.  Those very vocal atheists that are writing prolifically these days with a real hatred for Christians have a field with us on the simple fact that we don’t have our endgame sorted out, that we prefer to believe what ancient Pagans believed rather than the Bible, and, and most troubling, we lie to our children about it.  Moreover, for more than three-quarters of the time span that Christian Religion has dominated Western Culture we have used the threat of Hell to coerce conversions and to control the general population.  We have finally realized how immoral that is, but nobody has taken up the challenge of trying to sort out the Bible on the meaning of its Hell-like imagery.  Hell is a proverbial skeleton in our closet that we’d rather not deal with. 

When we sort Paul out on what happens when we die we find that he taught what New Testament scholar and former Anglican Bishop of Durham N. T. Wright calls “life after life after death.”  Of course, he’s having a little of fun with that question that shows up in news headlines when the topic of Near Death Experiences comes up – Is there life after death?  Ever since the invention of CPR and with medical science developing some pretty remarkable resuscitation methods people saying they have experienced life after death have increased.  Wright says that the Bible does teach that there is life after death and more specifically that there is a life after life after death.  Let’s look at Paul on this.

Paul and the Christians to whom he wrote had a very strong belief that Jesus would return to establish his Kingdom on earth.  This belief was so strong that it seems they talked very little about what happened to believers who died before Jesus returned.  Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, his earliest letter, deals with that question.  Paul says that those who have “fallen asleep” in Christ will be resurrected first and those who are alive will be changed to have a body like Jesus’ resurrection body.  So, early Christians referred to death as “falling asleep” with the expectation that those who have fallen asleep will also be awakened, resurrected.

The image of falling asleep begs the question of what happens to us while we are sleeping.  Do we die and suddenly wake up resurrected with a new body or is there something else to expect?  In the first chapter of Philippians Paul, writing from prison, gives the impression that he believes his death, death by execution, was immanent.  Verses 19-26 show us that Paul believed that his death was nothing to be feared, but was actually a good thing because he would get to go and be with Christ Jesus.  This reminds us of what Jesus told the thief who died beside him on the cross, the thief who believed Jesus was innocent and defended him.  Jesus said to him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  

So, it seems that in the early church they believed that when we died, when we fell asleep, somehow in a disembodied state we went to be “with Christ” until the Day came when God the Father said it was time to bring everything to its fulfillment.  When that trumpet blows, everything will be made new, the dead will be bodily raised, and there will be judgement even of the faithful.  Everyone will have to give account for their lives.  Then, sin, death, and the corrupted powers will be finally destroyed and as Isaiah said, “The earth will be full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the see” (11:9). 

So, there is life after life after death.  When we die, we go to be with Christ in Paradise until the Resurrection.  To say anymore than that is speculation and obviously I’ve said nothing about “nonbelievers” or “the wicked”.  That’s a topic for another day.

Looking closer at what Paul has to say here in 1 Corinthians 15.  He’s answering the question of what our bodies will be like when we are raised.  Paul’s answer is really quite poetic.  He says God gives everything bodies that he has purposed them to have.  The body we have now is like a seed that falls into the ground and by dying it gives life to a plant that gives more life.  The sun, moon, and stars are all different kinds of bodies with different kinds of glory, which means brightness or shininess.  The body we know have simply houses who we are.  It is perishable, has no glory, and is weak.  Our new body will be made alive by the Spirit of God and will be imperishable and will have glory and power.  It will be a body like Christ’s heavenly body, made alive by the Spirit of God, and life-giving.  In short, it’s a bit beyond imagination, but it will be imperishable and immortal.

To close, it is time we get our endgame straight.  God created this Creation and called it very good not just to let it be destroyed by sin and death just so we can blip off and live on clouds in heaven.  God’s purpose for his Creation is that his Creation bears his glory.  This is why bodily Resurrection into a Creation made new is our endgame.  Therefore, there is nothing wrong with telling people that God loves his Creation and intends to save and renew it with his own glory.  For now, this Creation is an awesome gift from God, so be kind to it and care for it.  Exploiting it only cause everything, all creatures great and small, and us to suffer needlessly.  There is also nothing wrong with telling people God loves us each and that we are unique and wonderful persons whom God intends to save and renew with his own glory.  The body we have now indeed dies, but it is a gift from God to us that we would do well to care for otherwise we suffer needlessly.  There is nothing wrong with telling our children that when we die we go to be with Jesus in a wonderful place until that Day when God makes us alive again.  So, let’s just look forward to that day and love everybody on the way because that makes life now all the better.  Amen.

Well-Placed Hope

1 Corinthians 15:12-20
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False hopes.  I have this hope that one day I will be a “winner” especially this time of year.  It’s February.  It’s cold.  It’s always cloudy.  There’s dirty, dingy snow everywhere.  There are no signs of life.  There are no leaves on the trees except for those stalwart, dead Klingons that have managed to hold on through those brutal 80k+ wind gusts that come up every time another winter storm blows through.  There’s no green grass.  The birds don’t sing.  There’s as much of a chance of seeing the sun as there is of seeing a squirrel or a groundhog. Everywhere you look its just death, death, and more death. 

And so, it is in this most depressing time of year that Tim Horton’s has decided to unleash that bastion of false hope – the Roll Up The Rim cup.  Daily we shovel out to make the pilgrimage to the nearest Tim’s drive-thru to take a chance at being a “winner”.  Whether it’s a car, a trip, a microwave, a donut, or just a second cup of coffee, we don’t care.  In the middle of February, we just want to be winners.  We drink our coffee’s a little too fast and java-jived up we follow the arrow to the rim of the cup and start the arduous task of rolling back the rim, but with winter-cracked thumbs we resort to using our teeth.  We see our first glimmer of lettering and sooo typically its in French and it makes no sense.  It seems we have to write an essay (reessayez) and we wonder if SVP is some sort of insult.  Rolling up a little further to the left, it’s “Please try again” and we all know what that means – “Loser!”  It’s our daily reminder that we are “losers” and it is so ironic that we paid a Loonie to find that out.  What fools we are.

Well, enough of the light-hearted humour.  Taking a look at our passage from 1 Corinthians Paul is rhetorically slamming the Corinthians over the topic of the resurrection of the dead.  The event of the resurrection of the dead at the end of this age evidenced by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (a fact witnessed by more than 500 people) was at the heart of what was called hope in the early church.  Paul was arguing against a faction among the Corinthian Christians who said there was no resurrection of the dead.  We don’t know exactly who these people were or what exactly they believed, but it was entirely likely that they just couldn’t let go of the Greco-Roman belief that the dead don’t raise and, moreover, why would anybody want to hope for that.  A major philosophical idea that affected religious belief back then and even now was that spirit is good and physical matter is bad.  And so, they believed that humans are just spirits or souls, whiffs of eternal energy trapped inside of mortal bodies, bodies that feel pain and get diseased; bodies that suffer.  Death, then, was good because it freed us from these smelly, diseased mortal bodies so that we can go on to a higher plain of existence that is better where we don’t suffer.  So, why anybody want to have a body again?  That’s just foolishness.

This resurrection denying faction in Corinth likely believed that the Jesus Way – the Holy Spirit-filled community of believers in which the rule of self-denying love was the manner of living – that this was a superior way to live in the present, in this life.  They liked the idea that the Spirit of God had made human beings his temple, the place on earth where the one true God resides.  They could accept this hyper spiritualized existence because spirit is good and matter is bad.  Yet, they still clung to the idea death frees us from matter and delivers us to the glorious realm where all is spirit. 

To these folks Paul says, “If it is only for the time span of this life that we are hopers in Christ, then we are the most pitiable of all people.”  Paul suffered greatly for being a Christian.  He was often beaten, jailed, stoned, ridiculed.  For Christians all over the Roman Empire there was always the constant threat of being called treasonous because they worshipped and served Jesus as Son God and Lord and Saviour rather than Caesar.  Being a follower of Jesus was not a hyper-spiritual, superior existence in the present.  It was the way of the cross and meant suffering.  You’re a fool, if being faithful to Jesus is only for this life.  Why choose more suffering than what you would already experience by simply being human.

The way of the Christian was and still is the way of cross-shaped discipleship.  As followers of Jesus we are not glorified, super-spiritual beings.  Rather, we strive to embody the life of the crucified one.  Instead of living a life of vainglorious falsehood and lying, we speak and live the truth in love.  We don’t say hurtful things to others, rather we strive to build others up and empower them to be all that God created them to be. Instead of running around in a rage at injustice and especially the injustices done to poor, pitiful me, we rather don’t let the sun go down on our anger so that we don’t develop grudges.  We don’t grow rich by growing wealthy off of gambling on the sweat and blood of others (checked your investments lately), rather we work hard and honest, not in order to be wealthy, but that we might be able to share with others.  We abstain from being contentious, slandering, and doing malice, and rather make every effort to be kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving. 

The Jesus Way of cross-shaped discipleship is indeed a superior way of life in this corrupted and broken world, but it is problematically counter-cultural.  Those involved in counter-cultural movements suffer mainly because they are a threat to the status quo.  Such was Paul, such was the Christian Church in his day.  So, ought the church be today, but we’re not.

Go in to what’s left of any big steeple (Mainline) church today in North America and start talking about culture and you will find yourself in the midst of a group of people who can’t understand why people don’t come to church anymore, why the Lord’s Prayer isn’t recited daily in public schools, why the Ten Commandments aren’t courthouses, and why people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”.  It is because for so long Christian religion was status quo and by Christian religion I do not mean the Jesus Way, the way of cross-shaped discipleship.  Christian religion was the duty of giving a nod to God who is sovereign and being a good person so that God will bless you and that you will go to heaven when you die.  Christian religion made for a good moral compass and that’s about it.

Christian religion is a false hope.  It is false hope to simply live a good life in the hopes that God will bless you and you’ll go to heaven when you die.  Hard times come on good people too. In Christian religion the resurrection of Jesus was simply the guarantee that good people went to heaven when they died.  Yet, in the early church, the resurrection of Jesus meant that a New Creation had begun; that God in, through, and as Jesus the Messiah of the Jews has defeated sin, the corrupted powers, and ultimately death.  To live the cross-shaped way of discipleship was to strive to live life now according to the way things will be when Jesus returns and all things are made new.  It means live prayerfully, striving for justice and equity first of all by being indiscriminately hospitable to all people, and by sharing what we ourselves have and not waiting on government to solve the worlds problems.  It means actually loving our neighbours and building them up rather than building privacy fences around our back yards.  It’s inviting people to come sit on our front porches so that you can discuss how to make our neighbourhoods or sideroads a fountainhead of the love of God.

Well-placed hope is to live now the way things will be when Jesus brings the kingdom of God from heaven to earth in full force, when Creation is made new and we are raised from the dead.  Biblical hope is not simply wishing that what God has promised will come true.  It is actually living according to those promises.  Paul said that until Jesus comes we have three things: faith, hope, and love and the greatest of the three is love.  Well-placed hope in Christ is love lived in the present until he comes.  Live hopefully.  Amen.

Jesus vs. Caesar: Who's the True God

I Corinthians 15:1-11
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I grew up on the Billy Graham Gospel.  Years ago, if you were to ask me what the Gospel is, I would have said: God loves us and has a plan for our lives.  Yet, we are sinful and separated from God.  That’s why we die.  Yet, God in his great love sent his Son to live a sinless life and die the death we deserve for us.  If we in turn believe that Jesus died for our sins and from henceforth strive to live a faithful life, God’s plan for our lives will come to pass and we will go to heaven when we die. 

Let me tell you something interesting.  That’s not the Gospel your going to find proclaimed in the Bible.  You can find a snippet of the Billy Graham Gospel here and a snippet of it there and construct a very persuasive tool to get people to make a decision.  That’s exactly what was done in the 1930-50’s by a group of American Evangelicals who were all associated with the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, CA who created the message Billy Graham proclaimed all over the world to great success.  (Yes, Hollywood. I’m not making this up.)

The Billy Graham Gospel is not the Gospel the early church proclaimed. What we read from 1 Corinthians this morning is the closest thing we’re going to find that looks like a short form version of the Gospel preached in the Bible.  So, the Gospel as we find it in the Bible is: Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; Jesus was buried and then was raised on the third day in accordance with Scriptures.  He physically appeared to, was physically seen by not only Peter and James and the rest of the Twelve, but to more than 500 people, and then finally by Paul who didn’t deserve it because he was an enemy of Jesus persecuted Jesus’ followers.  There are more than 500 material witnesses to Jesus being bodily raised from the dead.

The Gospel carries on further.  In verse 22 Paul begins to talk about a general resurrection for everybody.  Verse 22 reads, “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”  There is debate out there as to the extent of the word “all”; whether “all” is everybody who has ever lived or if “all” is limited to all those who have been faithful to Jesus.  That debate aside, the one thing for certain we can say is that if you are a faithful follower of Jesus, you are indeed being saved/healed in the present and when Jesus comes back you will be raised to partake of his glorious inheritance living a new life in a new body in a new creation in which sin, corrupted powers, and death no longer exist.  Then verses 24-28 say that when the end comes and all the corrupted powers including death are defeated Jesus will hand his kingdom over to the God the Father and God will be all in all.  The prophet Isaiah sums it up saying: “The earth will be full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).

Well, this Gospel that Paul reminds us of is a statement telling us what God has done for humanity and indeed for the whole creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ to save it from sin, from corrupt powers, and ultimately from death.  Its being this kind of a “God done it” statement is what makes it a Gospel.  The Greek word for Gospel is euangelion – eu means good in a blessed kind of way and angelion means message (like the kind that an angel of God would deliver).  In Paul’s day the word euangelion had a specific purpose.  A euangelion was not simply good news.  It was a message pertaining to the Roman Emperor that imperial heralds spread throughout the Roman Empire.  A euangelion would have been something like the blessed news that the Emperor has had a son and the divine patriarchal line of Caesar will continue.  Or, the armies of Caesar have won a great battle in Britain and now his reign extends to the ends of the earth.  Or, Caesar Augustus, Son of God, Lord and Saviour of us all, who gave us Pax Romana has died and Simplicus the High Priest has witnessed his divinization and ascension to his rightful place in the Pantheon.  His chosen heir to the throne is his adopted son, the beloved Tiberius.

 Now, if you are on your game this morning, haven’t fallen asleep yet, and are filling in some blanks that I haven’t yet filled in, then you’ve probably noticed that that last possible euangelion about the death of Caesar Augustus and his succession by his adopted son Tiberius sounds somewhat like the Gospel the early church proclaimed about Jesus.  Let me fill in the blanks.

Caesars went by the titles of Son of God, Lord, and Saviour.  Part of the reason early Christians were persecuted was that they applied these titles to Jesus and refused to honour Caesar with them.  They were suspect of treason.

Romans claimed their Emperors to be gods not because they were divine but because they wielded power like gods.  In the case of Augustus, he established Pax Romana.  Jesus actually was God become human and did things only God could do: healed people, cast out demons, forgave sins, calmed the sea, and raised the dead.  In everything Jesus said and did the Kingdom of God was manifest on earth as it is in heaven.  Caesar was powerless in comparison to Jesus.

Furthermore, Romans believed that after an emperor died, he was made actual god, divinized, and ascended to become one of the Roman Pantheon.  This divinization and ascension was always attested to by the high priest of Jupiter who alone sat with the body of the emperor until he says he saw him divinized and then ascend.  That testimony was of course made up.  Jesus died, was buried, and was raised and ascended. More than 500 witnesses not just one shady high priest could attest to the fact that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead.  Moreover, Jesus is coming back to establish the Kingdom of God here on earth and bring corrupted power, sin, and death to an end. Caesar, once dead, ain’t coming back. 

The Gospel of the early church proclaimed throughout the Roman Empire by heralds such as the Apostle Paul compelled a person to make decision.  The decision was not whether or not to believe that Jesus died the death I deserve for me so that I can go to heaven when I die.  The decision concerned who you were going to pledge allegiance to and serve at the cost of your own life: Jesus, the true Son of God, the true Lord of all Creation, who saves you from sin and self-destruction and makes you godly, who will share his inheritance with you when he returns, who will raise you from the dead to live life in a body healed and glorified by God, and who has poured his Spirit into you as a promissory deposit of that inheritance and glorification; or, are you, in fear, going to pledge your allegiance to Caesars who are immoral, paranoid and power mongering, and who don’t care about you.

The early church proclaimed the Gospel of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Son of the Living God during the days of some terrible Roman Emperors.  Augustus, who was Caesar when Jesus was born, was okay.  Yet, those who followed him – Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian – were some sick puppies.  In fact, Tiberius, who was Emperor when Jesus died, was not attested to being divinized.  One could say, Jesus got the “divinization” that Tiberius was supposed to get.  The early church invited people to come and be a part of the community of believers among whom there was a living foretaste of the Kingdom of God, where there was no distinctions between persons, where all are loved as members of the royal family of Jesus Christ, where all are beloved children of God, where there is true human community in which the love of God heals you

I’ll end with this question: Is Jesus for us just a way to get our sinfulness taken care of so that we can go to heaven when we die or is he the true Son of God, the Lord and Saviour of all creation whom we will serve at the cost of our dying to our selves to find the resurrected life now in him by the power of the Holy Spirit?  Amen.

Carefully Crafted

Jeremiah1:4-10; Psalm 71
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Being a High School Guidance Counsellor would likely be a rewarding job.  Helping young people identify their giftedness and strengths and even their weaknesses and then assisting them to sort out a direction for their future, these seem like satisfying and worthwhile tasks.  Guidance Counselling, or Student Success as its now called, involves dealing with the question of “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I have to think that this question is harder to answer now than it was twenty years.  There’s a wealth of opportunity today due to the Internet and technology that we old fogies can’t begin to imagine.  Yet, finding people willing to work necessary trades is difficult; things like wiring homes, welding, plumbing and heating, or even butchering a cow – things we call skilled labour.  These are the days of the Internet but the Internet has only made it so that people can quickly know a lot of information but at the end of the day not really know how to do anything.  It’s the difference between using a calculator and actually knowing multiplication tables.  On top of it all social media with its addictive false sense of relationship has distracted our young people from being able to focus on anything that entails purpose and has rather ingeniously robbed them of the privilege of being alone with their thoughts.

A particular problem that people in the Guidance profession have these days is they are trying to help young people figure out what to do with their lives when these young people have been well groomed to have no sense of a higher purpose in life than themselves.  We have encultured our young people to be “me centered” and it is proving to be self-destructive to them as individuals and to us as a society.  Guidance counsellors tend to ask questions like “What do you feel you’re skilled at?”  “What interests you?”  “What are your goals in life?”  Rarely, does the question come up of “Do you feel there is a higher purpose in life that you could devote yourself too?” and certainly not the question, “What do you sense God wants you to do with your life?” 

Just taking a moment for a humorous aside, image what it would be like to be a guidance counsellor to the prophet Jeremiah. (Jeremiah was just a teenager when God called him.)  Counsellor: “Jeremiah, what do you want to do with your life?” Jeremiah: “God is calling me to be his prophet to the nations?”  Counsellor: “Hmm. I see.  How did you come to this conclusion?”  Jeremiah: “Well, my Dad’s a priest and I’ve always thought I’d be carrying on the family tradition, but then out of the blue God spoke to me and said he knew me before I was born and being a prophet is what he’s crafted me for and appointed me to.”  Counsellor: “God spoke to you?  I mean like you heard his voice?”  Jeremiah: “Yeah.  He said he was going to put his words into to my mouth and what I will say will be for the tearing down and building up of the nations.”  Counsellor: “How do you think that’s going to work for you, Jeremiah?”  Jeremiah: “Well, it won’t be an easy row to hoe.  God said not to be afraid and that he would be with me to deliver me.  I assume that means trouble ahead.”  Counsellor: “Jeremiah, maybe we should go talk to the school psychologist.  This is a little above my pay grade.”

Speaking frankly, people in the public education system would not know what to do with a young person who said they felt like God was calling them to something.  In the church, I’m not sure we would do much better.  Back in the 90’s Frederick Buechner (pronounced Beekner), a popular Christian writer and a Presbyterian minister to boot, did some writing in the area of how to determine what God is calling you to do and his thoughts took the pastoral world by storm.  He concluded that our calling is that place where our greatest passion and the world’s greatest need meet up.  That sounds wonderful to ears well steeped in narcissism, bit in truth it’s really just an altruistic version of “Follow your heart.”   

Moreover, Buechner’s definition of calling is just a ramped up Christian invitation to entrepreneurship and it only works if you are a person of privilege.  It works like this. One can see the need for humanity to be more environmentally responsible.  One could be a passionate cyclist and posses the knowledge of how to fix a bike.  One could determine that God is calling you to open a bike shop somewhere in the GTA that specializes in commuter biking and bike sharing.  One discovers that the start-up cost of such a venture of passion is between 500k and one million dollars.  Better find some sugar, honey…or, get a normal job, promote cycling to your neighbours, and fix their bikes for free.

So, anyway determining what God has called us to…it’s not that difficult.  God has summonsed us all to follow Jesus, to be his disciples with the end result that we grow more and more in Christlikeness.  This will involve Christian community, prayer, Bible Study, proactive and indeed prophetic engagement with our neighbours, neighbourhoods, and communities.  What happens along the way is that we will discover new talents and new passions and we will find ourselves being invited to do things inside the church and out in our neighbourhoods and surrounding communities, things which God has set aside for us to do.  There will be times, rare times, when we have Jeremiah moments and God speaks directly to us about a specific task.  Most of the time, we will just be keeping on at keeping on.  But over time we will find that along the way what we find ourselves doing now for the Lord is what he has carefully crafted us for all along the way.  That’s seems how calling works.

You may by now be asking why I am wasting my breath talking to you folks about calling when nearly all of you are well into retirement.  Yeah well, we are never too old to continue to respond to the call to grow in Christlikeness; so the subject is relevant.  But to speak more specifically to the elder generation about calling, Psalm 71 was likely written by someone up in years.  A close reading of it leaves one wondering whether its author might actually have been Jeremiah himself.  It certainly fits the bill of someone who has lived a faithful life and was persecuted for their faithfulness and yet along the way discovered just how faithful and present God is.  Through thick and thin God was there working things to the best of the Psalmist before the eyes of his adversaries.

The greatest asset of most North American churches, ours included, is our wealth in Seniors who like the Psalmist know just how faithful and steadfastly loving God is; who know that God does indeed answer prayer, does indeed heal, does indeed deliver his beloved children from harm, and when we have deserved condemnation God has always found a way to bring about forgiveness and strengthen our relationships.  Looking at the Psalm, it seems the Psalmist is making the argument that God has carefully crafted him so that in old age he is able to praise God for God’s faithfulness, to proclaim God’s mighty deeds to the next generation, and to be a witness to there being reason to hope.  The elder church, that’s you folks, knows God’s faithfulness better than anybody.  That being said, it may be that God is calling you to be more vocal about your faith and God’s faithfulness than you presently are.  

We’ve a culture that deeply hungers to be “Touched by an Angel”.  Though you may not be a young red-head who speaks with an Irish accent, God has carefully crafted you to be that angel of hope.  To your amazement, you will often find that God even gives you the words to say.  Praise God, proclaim his goodness, and give people hope.  This is our calling.  Amen.