THE TASK FOR THIRD AGERS
Jubilee/Shalom

Milo D. Stahl

Jubilee/Shalom

Jubilee/Shalom, needed for well-being and peace on our small blue planet earth, is available in the twenty-first century. The human race has mostly refused to accept this gift offered several thousand years ago (see the blessings God’s people refuse in Deut. 28). Might it now be accepted and shared by Third Agers (and others) with hearts, commitment, and the spirit of shalom through which to fulfill the task?

In the Old Testament, the prescribed Jubilee or Sabbath year (see for instance Lev. 25) includes (1) leaving the soil fallow; (2) the remission of debts; (3) the liberation of slaves; (4) the return to each individual of his family’s property.

Interestingly, Jesus does not emphasize leaving the soil fallow—only this of the Jubilee prescriptions had become common usage in his day. Yet Jesus does emphasize forgiving debts and freeing slaves. And for Jesus, as John Howard Yoder views it, "‘The quantity of money that one gives is of little importance. What is important is what one gives. If it is a part of one’s income, then that is not righteousness, goodness, and good faith. If it is capital that one gives, then everything is in order" (The Politics of Jesus, Eerdmans, 1972, 76).

Meanwhile shalom can be described as "rightness between people and God: peace, safety, holistic health, welfare, tranquility, and unselfish prosperity!" (Milo D. Stahl, Shalom, Beyond Retirement and Death, unpublished manuscript, 2005, 50).

Qualified Third Agers?

Then who are the Third Agers? Here I refer to those in the final third of life. Social security checks and Third Agers seem to go together. However, not only may such income not contine, but also, and more importantly, organizing one’s life around it does not qualify recipients as participants in Jubilee/Shalom. Jubilee and shalom are given only by God to those willing and ready for the task.

Age that has learned wisdom can certainly qualify, but "compassionate as their Father" is their primary qualification for such service. Some of us in the church have enough money to make us want to save some for our security (capital), but few of us have enough to become willing to give it for Jubilee.

However, faith to welcome participation in Jubilee/Shalom may be growing. For example, Jacob A. Shenk of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, already in the mid-twentieth century had Jubilee faith. He negotiated with the Internal Revenue Service to give away 90 percent of his profits and live on 10 percent. I have not known others willing to go that far. It should not be surprising that he was also chair of the Virginia Mennonite Mission Board. (He was piloting his plane on a mission for that board with fellow mission worker Melvin Weaver as passenger when they died in a thundercloud.)

Two women have shown me shalom faith: Annie Brubaker and, Viola, my dear wife of 50 years. Aunt Annie had rheumatoid arthritis in many of her body’s joints and was confined to a wheelchair and bed for 30 or more years. She was dependent on her daughters, Ruth and Esther, for most of her care.

Yet many who came to visit her, hoping to bring comfort and solace, went away as the ones blessed. She knew how to minister shalom to them. As I worked in their household for my cousin Norman, her son, for a couple of years when I was eight and nine, I was able to see this close up. It taught me the meaning of shalom even before I knew the word! Aunt Annie radiated the shalom God had given her. I saw how others were able to accept this gift.

I also learned shalom in a very intimate way from Viola, who was paralyzed from her mid-chest down in a March 2000 car accident. Appalled by the constant care and experiencing for a while extreme nerve-end pain from the damage to her spinal column, she would have been glad to leave this world. But finally she became willing to live as God prepared the way.

Thankfully, Viola’s pain subsided. She continues to radiate shalom through her positive outlook and faith. Today she is finding time and energy to help others to hope and renewal. She was a psychiatric nurse before her accident; she now continues to help others with the shalom she lives in community each day. She is grateful for her many volunteers, whom she accepts amid lacking ability to remunerate them. She has learned both to rest in and to give shalom—and thus be a mentor to many, including myself.

Severe pain was common for both these dear women. Nevertheless, adjusting to their disabilities, they exuded the strength and trust that come from that gift of heaven, shalom.

The Church’s
Offering to World Need

The church is not an agency of earthly kingdoms, which rise and fall. Rather, the church is the mission source of those who have accepted the call from the Father, God of love and mercy.

"Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, denotes the well-being of the total person. God’s shalom is the reconciling, healing, enriching work of his grace. God has acted, and acts, first to reconcile us to himself through Christ and then to one another in Christ. Second, God’s peace, God’s shalom, is expressed by creating a community with others, a community with a ‘covenant of peace’." (Myron S. Augsburger, The Peacemaker, Abingdon, 1987, 18).

This community is thus controlled and created by God and his Spirit—the church is its origin and life! It cannot be controlled by human governments. Thus the failure of social security as the foundational reality around which to organize our lives in our Third-Age years. Jubilee/Shalom is a divine possibility and as such is the church’s offering to world need!

Lynn A. Miller, a Bluffton, Ohio, minister who has been pushing many of us about having enough as Third Agers, has also been calling us to a life of service. That sounds like Jubilee/Shalom.

It is heartwarming to read in Lynn’s booklet pushing Shalom/Jubilee, The Power of Enough: Finding Contentment by Putting Stuff in Its Place (Evangel Press, 2003), "If there’s any truth to God’s statement that not only will he meet your needs but that you’ll also have more for good works, then you’ll always come out a winner" (53).

Lynn fights materialism with his call for us to join him in living Jubilee/Shalom: "God has something in mind for us other than a ‘comfortable retirement at the end of the American Dream.’" He finally says, "Ask, Listen, and say Yes! And God will bless you as you go in the contentment you find by living in his presence" (97). Here is how Jesus put it:

"God’s Spirit is on me;

he’s chosen me to preach the message of good news to the poor;

Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind,

To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, ‘This is God’s year to act!’ (Eugene Peterson, The Message/Remix, Navpress, 2003, 1872).

A Way Where There Is No Way

To live sanely in our world, we must do what may at times be unthinkable or untenable but supremely humane and godly: Jubilee/Shalom.

We follow the joy of service to others whether that be simple or difficult, even when it leads us possibly to death—though that will be only to walk through death to real life! We can do that and take the way that will save people even though it’s considered "No Way" by many contemporaries. Thus Jubilee/Shalom are lifegiving no matter the results.

Third Agers or any who are willing to help find the Way to God and to God’s kingdom (not of this world!): Jubilee/Shalom!

—For over 76 years, Milo D. Stahl, Harrisonburg, Virginia, has been learning, studying, consulting, teaching, and serving in such settings as Eastern Mennonute University, Case Western Reserve University, and Michigan State University as well as with wife Viola in Jamaica under Mennonite Central Committee. In 2003 he published Learning to Love People and Use Things.