Is It a Sin to Look Your Age?

One of my pastors was preaching from Genesis 12, and he came to the part of the story where Abram and his wife Sarai head to Egypt during a time of famine. The account highlights the cowardly moment when the patriarch asks his attractive wife to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister, which was technically true, but to keep their marriage on the Q.T.

In an attempt to help the congregation imagine Sarai's arresting beauty, the pastor said, "Sarah is about 65 years old here, and most of us don't think about 65-year-olds as objects of beauty." He paused for a moment, giving us time to think about the Medicare recipients in our midst, then offered his thoughts about the phenomenon. "It could be that in the ancient world, they had different standards."

On behalf of older women everywhere: ouch.

Is it really so difficult for most of us to think of older women as desirable? Or are we simply so used to seeing the distorted cultural images of mature "hotness" that we simply don't know how to look past them to see true beauty?

The older icons of physical beauty in pop culture are frequently portrayed one of three ways: sexually assertive cougars, physically obsessed fitness instructors, and plastic surgery devotees. The message of these images? Simply, it is is a sin to look your age. If hotness is something to which we should all aspire, old is c-c-cold.

It takes time, money, and commitment, along with a socially acceptable measure of narcissism, to maintain that desirable young appearance. Even so, keeping up (read: competing) with women a generation younger is the our culture's ongoing real time reality show. Actress Demi Moore's recent mental breakdown in the wake of her divorce to younger dude Ashton Kutcher was widely attributed to her fear that she was starting to look her age. (So is her first post-divorce ad campaign that shows the 49-year-old's face heavily airbrushed.) In response, Forbes contributor Anushay Hossein had this critique of the "old is cold" phenomenon:

Moore is a product of our youth-obsessed culture which teaches women from when they are girls that we are valued by our beauty. We are taught to stay young and thin at any cost, and there is no other industry that consistently reinforces that message more than Hollywood. It is clear that we are all buying and believing this message.

The fact of the matter is the film industry, in the U.S. and around the world, have pitted women against Mother Nature. It's an impossible battle to win and we all know it. But when women remind other women of that fact, like Demi Moore has, we blame and label them as unsuccessful, shower them with pity and disgust. We think they are "pathetic."

Moore's public battle against the face in the mirror is not a new one. Over 100 years ago, playwright George Bernard Shaw said, "Why should a woman allow Nature to put a false mask of age on her when she knows that she's as young as ever? Why should she look in the glass and see a wrinkled lie when a touch of fine art will shew her a glorious truth?" I suspect Shaw would have loved plastic surgery aficianado Joan Rivers.

When I look in the glass, I see my grandmother's under-eye bags, jowls, and wrinkles staring back at me. It doesn't matter that I've slathered high-end face cream on my face every morning for at least two decades. My genes have trumped the cosmetics industry's glossy promises that I'll find the fountain of youth in a jar.

The same grandmother who gave me some of the DNA responsible for my 50-something appearance also used to tell me that it's what's inside that counts. When I was younger, I used to view those words as if they were the Miss Congeniality of life's beauty pageant. If you can't be pretty, you should at least try to cultivate desirability because you're a pleasant, helpful person. Let's be honest here. Everyone knows that the Pharaoh mentioned in Genesis 12 didn't want 65-year-old Sarai for her mind or because she was "nice."

If we in the church are first and foremost members citizens of God's kingdom, than we must go beyond repackaging cultural norms to fit our own subculture in order to create kingdom culture both in our congregations and in the world around us. For example, our congregation is normally silent during sermons, but in the moments that followed the pastor's clumsy comment about older women, a loud chorus of both male and female boos brought the house down. I believe the catcalls did more than pause the sermon. They brought a bit of kingdom recalibration to our local body.

Desirability is intrinsic to beauty. If we in the church truly desire older women as valued members of a congregation, we will honor them by appropriately celebrating their wisdom, experience and yes, physical beauty in our casual conversations as well as our sermons. As we do, we live the best kind of counterculture, one that cultivates the kind of reverence to which older women are invited, and which will spill into the next generation lives the older women are called to shape. That's true beauty in action.

As we affirm that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, we must include the reality that even our graying hair and sagging midsections proclaim God's creativity and beauty in the same way a starry sky or a blooming rose does. He would not have designed our bodies to age the way they do if he did not think each one of us in our mature years lovely as Sarai in his loving eyes.