Avoiding Retirement

           I’ve retired four times.  That may sound silly or ridiculous, but it is certainly true.  In 1972, I retired from the television station that I had been working for because they ran out of money and they couldn’t pay me anymore.  I then went to seminary, became an Episcopal priest and started another career entirely.  I was the rector of two churches in Pittsburgh and loved every minute of it.  When I reached the age of 65 in 1999, I retired from my parish and went to live at a little resort community in West Virginia with my beautiful wife.  After two years of playing golf and reading, I got bored, called the West Virginia bishop and asked him if he had any work.  He told me that there were some parishes that were in need of an interim rector, but they were all in the southern part of the state.  I was eager to get back to work, so I agreed to consider these places.  Over the next several years, I served three parishes near Charleston as their interim rector, having a good time at each one and paving the way for each of them to do something with their future. 

After recovering from a menengioma while I continued to work, in 2010, our kids called and said that it was a four-hour trip to Charleston and they wondered when we were going to think about coming home.  We heard that plea from them, I again retired from the parish that I was working at, we sold our Charleston house and moved back to Pittsburgh. 

I still wasn’t done.  The bishop of Pittsburgh told me that there was a parish in need of someone to be a permanent supply priest for them.  I agreed to do this and spent the next year and a half serving that parish each Sunday and getting to know a parish full of excellent people.  The time came when I finally decided that retirement from this work was the thing for me to do, so for the fourth time, I retired.  I am probably still not done.  There is a shortage of clergy in this diocese and I am sure that there will be times that I will be asked to take a Sunday or two somewhere.  I will be happy to do that, and I will continue to write my blog every week.

Retirement is something that many people look forward to; they sometimes go to Florida or someplace else with a warm climate and they relax, do some of the things that they never had time for while they were working.  Pensions and Social Security help them pay the bills.  I tried this when we went to the West Virginia resort community.  We enjoyed it, but it still left a hole in my life, a hole that I needed to fill with the work that I had been doing.  Retiring is also something that has emerged in this generation as a stage of life that we can aspire to.  I think that if that is so, we need to discover some things that we can do that benefit those around us in our time to ourselves. 

When I look at the biblical people who speak to us in the lessons that we hear each week in church, retirement doesn’t seem to be a condition that many of them take up.  I think of Isaiah, who offered his prophecy to the people of Israel as a statement of life. His intention was to warn and to comfort his people as they lived lives that sometimes included a lot of misery. I have always loved the words that begin the second part of the book of the prophet Isaiah, the words that also make up one of the most moving arias in the Messiah.  Isaiah is getting us ready for the coming of God into the world.  He speaks to the people of Israel to give them comfort and hope:

                                      Comfort, O comfort my people,
                                                              says your God.

                                                          Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
                                                              and cry to her

                                                          that she has served her term,
                                                              that her penalty is paid,

                                                          that she has received from                                                                                                                   the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

        What beautiful words the prophet has for all of the people who are listening to him.
  These words come from a deep faith and a commitment to the work that Isaiah has been given

 to do.  His work offered promise and the blessing of God to all of the people and are the 

foundation of our season of Advent where we wait for the coming of our Lord Jesus into the 

world.

       I’m glad that I am still working and managing to avoid complete retirement.  I know that 

theLord still has work for me to do in this world and I am eager to do it.  I thank God for all of 

the things that I have been able to do and thepeople whom I have worked with.  This has been

 a blessing to me beyond any expectation.