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| Mom, celebrating 90 years in October, 2017 |
The little Presbyterian congregation that I serve in metro DC has
spent this summer studying the 25th chapter of Matthew, and asking
ourselves what it would mean to be a church shaped primarily by that
foundational gospel text.
I probably should have just told them about my mom. She spent her
entire life living out the deepest meaning of that chapter from the New
Testament.
When I was sitting with her a few days before her death, I picked
up her Bible and read those verses from Matthew 25. Mom marked up a lot of
passages in her Bible, but she didn’t actually mark any of the verses I just
read. I don’t think she needed to be reminded of them because her life
testified to the importance of those words for the way she chose to live her
days.
When mom encountered people who were hungry, she figured out how to
feed them even though she hated cooking and wasn’t really all that much into
food herself. She helped countless poor families throughout Chattanooga figure
out how to navigate systems so that they could get breakfast and lunch for
their children.
At the same time, she fed us day by day, and though she didn’t find
a great deal of joy in the kitchen, she did find joy and share it at the dining
room table. We ate dinner together as a family almost every evening of my
growing up, and I know that practice passed along to the next generation. There
is, of course, something profound and sacramental about breaking bread
together, and we are shaped through such simple practices. At the table that my
mother set, we were shaped for the kinds of service that our parents provided
in their professional lives.
When mom encountered people who were naked she clothed them. She
was part of the Neighborhood House system in North Chattanooga from its earlies
days, both donating and delivering all kinds of gently used items of clothes
that made their way to families in need. She stood in solidarity with poor
families in their most trying times, and served them in ways as simple and
profound as finding shoes and winter coats for their children, and in ways as
complex and difficult as going to family court with them.
One of my strongest memories of mom is of going with her, after the
Christmas Eve candlelight service here, into Chattanooga’s public housing projects
to deliver Christmas to families whose trees would be far less richly adorned
than the one I’d wake up to the next morning on Avalon Circle.
When mom encountered lonely people, she visited. In retirement she
volunteered in all manner of ways, answering calls for Chattanooga’s crisis
line often on holidays, serving as a hospice volunteer, and, in work that
brought her deep joy, volunteering for years at the little house in the
Children’s Museum where she often reconnected momentarily lost little ones with
their parents.
Although she would likely have rolled her eyes at the divinity
school vocabulary, what I’m trying to say is that my mother understood
incarnational theology. That is to say, she deeply believed that whatever she
did with and for the least of these – the poor, the disenfranchised, the
marginalized, the lonely, the children of Chattanooga – she was doing with and
for Jesus.
You always have a choice when you look at others. If you look for
the worst in others you’ll find it. If you look for the Christ in them, you’ll
find that, too. You’ll also find yourself a whole lot happier.
I learned from my mother that complicated abstract responses to
unanswerable questions do not add up to a life of faith. Entering the kindom
prepared for you from the foundations of the earth is not about your answer to
the abstract question about the divinity or humanity of Jesus; it’s about
seeing the divine spark in every human being and treating them the way you
imagine you’d treat Jesus: with kindness and humility.
Thirtysome years ago I gave mom a wall-hanging for Christmas with
the words from Micah 6:8 – do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your
God. Mom served the least of these through that lens. She was a fierce advocate
of basic fairness, and a system rigged by and for the rich and powerful deeply
offended her. She walked through every day with a loving kindness that touched
everyone she encountered. And she always shined the light on others, being an
incredibly supportive partner to our dad, a proud parent who always showed up
for each of us, and a loving, doting grandma who, as Kaycee noted, taught her
grandkids that there are some things an Ensign doesn’t do.
I was never clear on what those things are, and I’m pretty sure
that her kids and grandkids stretched her imagination on just what things were
acceptable. I will leave those things to your imaginations. In that way, as
well, mom grasped something profoundly important: if you begin with love you
can build and hold on to relationships through most any challenge.
In recent years it was challenging to get out of places with mom.
Some of that was because her body started giving out long before her
indomitable spirt waned, but most of it was because most everywhere we went
with her she would run into folks she knew and they would want to stop and talk
with her. Mom spent her lifetime building and holding on to relationships that
began with her loving spirit.
She extended that curiosity to people in every walk of life. She
knew the family stories of every principal in all of the schools that she
served, and she also knew the family stories of every custodian.
My mom never turned down a chance to talk with an old friend, or a
new friend, or a potential friend. She had a curiosity about life that drove
her to want to learn about you, and a fundamental kindness that compelled
countless folks to want to share their stories with her.
Throughout scripture salvation means wholeness, it means well-being,
it means communion with God and with neighbor. All of that begins and ends with
love. Mom lived and loved into such salvation day by day, and she rests in it
now and forevermore. Hallelujah. Amen.
