Told Ya So
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"Told Ya So" by C. David McKirachan
"Clothed in Glory" by C. David McKirachan
"The Last Duckling" by John Sumwalt
"Where You Do not Wish to Go" by John Sumwalt
What's Up This Week
Jesus had a real penchant for upsetting the apple cart -- but just as is often the case today, the people he dealt with generally had a difficult time understanding the gist of his message… especially when he challenged them to break out of their tired, old ways of seeing things, as David McKirachan muses in this week's edition of StoryShare. McKirachan also shares a wry and interesting meditation on fashion sense, insecurity, and being "clothed in glory." John Sumwalt then offers us two very different approaches to this week's gospel text -- a charming children's story, and a cautionary tale about a once-dreaded disease that forces us to think about whether we will respond, like the disciple Peter, to Jesus' challenge about how deeply we love him.
* * * * * * * * *
Told Ya So
by C. David McKirachan
Revelation 5:11-14
Every once in a while I wonder what it must have been like to listen to Jesus preach. I doubt too many people fell asleep. But then again, never underestimate the extent of human stupidity. We are amazingly capable when it comes to ignoring or disagreeing with anything that doesn't fit into our tunnel vision. Our schedules rule our priorities, unless our budgets interfere. Now, the miracles aren't even on this list. Let's not even look at them. Let's just deal with his compassion and insight and ability to see into the heart of matters. Let's stick to his perspective of hope that allowed him to confront the smug ideologies that we carry around like a sack of rocks.
This guy was good. So why didn't people listen?
One of my sons has a motorcycle. This does not make his mother happy. She periodically has a go at convincing him of the idiocy of wrapping one's body around a machine and running it at speeds over five miles an hour. He is as most people are -- stubborn. She was bringing up the minor details of potholes and rocks in the road. He told her that the greater danger was a long rut in the road. Once one of your wheels gets into it, the other wheel will get squirrelly. This did not make her feel all warm and fuzzy.
But back to our stupidity. We live in ruts. Our patterns of living are almost impossible to see, with perspectives that don't include efficiency, comfort, fear, and money as more important than faith, hope, or love. Jesus talked to us about our ruts. He offered us another perspective. He demonstrated life based on something other than "We never did it that way before."
There's an old saying: "The only difference between a rut and the grave is depth." Maybe that's why Jesus blew away death. He lived out of the rut, out of the grave -- and so he rose. Now if that's not the best "told ya so" in history, I don't know what is. Yup, "worthy is the Lamb who was slain." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Wouldn't it be nice to get that reaction to a sermon once in a while?
Clothed in Glory
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 30
For years I blamed my sartorial idiocy on color-blindness. I am color-blind -- most men are. That might explain some of it, but at best it's a convenient excuse. Most of us don't have a clue what works and what doesn't. I think it's a gene. That short chromosome is another good excuse for just about anything. But this lack of dress sense is so consistent, it's a little spooky. Part of it had to do with my mother. That's an overused excuse. She always laid out my clothes for me. She was insistent at teaching me to cook and to clean (the latter I never did master), but she assumed the matching and coordinating skills would be taken over by some other person without a short chromosome. Oh well.
My father was never challenged in this area. He was a big church pastor of the old school. He had a couple of suits and a few ties and a lot of white shirts. On Sunday he wore a collar and tabs. On formal occasions he wore his doctoral hood. He had it made. As a teenager, when I began to suffer the qualms of insecurity that go along with sexual awakening and the desire to be attractive to the ones who do have some fashion sense, I was a bit frustrated by my father's uniforms. I assumed he had adopted these always well-matched, always appropriate modes of dress just to drive me nuts. (Back then the world was all about me.) I, on the other hand, had to pick and choose between outfits. And I was sure that every one of them was laughable to every female person in the free world. (I was told female people in the non-free world had no fashion sense.) It was the early '60s.
By the time I got to college I adopted my own uniform: Levis, t-shirts, flannel shirts, and boots. Hippies didn't need too many fashion choices. I was safe. If colors clashed, I was making a statement. I never did figure out what kind of statement some of those outfits were making. I stuck to basics.
Getting a job brought me back to making choices. But poverty limited them, so I continued to make do, without much thought as to what I was wearing. During that early part of my ministry, with my poverty-driven fashion choices, I was insecure again. It didn't have to do with women. It had to do with the church I worked in, its poverty, its size, and the way people treated me in professional circles. I knew they considered me something less than a success because I had gotten stuck in the inner city. It was pretty obvious I was on the fast track to oblivion -- I was still driving a VW bus.
During that time I had the privilege to share the responsibilities of marrying my niece. My partners were my father and my brother. I was intimidated by them. I considered them great people, stupendous preachers, and beyond the pale of frustrations and insecurities. I was a dumb kid. They were better than I knew, and human to boot.
My father had retired, and he had a couple heart attacks and a few small strokes. He rarely preached any more. My brother and I had worked up some strategies for stepping in at specific points to cover any lapses that might occur. I was awed by being included in supporting my father. Everything went well. They were amazing, per usual. I was insecure, but thought I'd hidden it rather well.
Afterward, we were out in the back of the church, de-robeing. I was a few steps away from my father as my mother came to him. I overheard a mind-blowing conversation.
He asked her, "Did I look old?" I couldn't believe he even considered that. I always thought that kind of thing was never an issue for him.
She stood there facing him, her hands on his chest. She was one of the most loving and one of the most honest people I've ever met. She wouldn't lie. It wasn't in her. "When you first stepped up to preach I thought you looked a bit threadbare…"
My eyes probably fell out of my head at that point. I felt like I'd never known them. But then she went on: "… you looked a bit threadbare, but when you began to speak, you were clothed in glory."
I left the room. I was crying. I was crying in gratitude for them, for their courage, for their honesty, for their love.
Every time I read this Psalm, it reminds me of that moment: "… thou hast loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness." The gift of love is a fashion statement that never goes out of style, whatever the length of your chromosomes.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
The Last Duckling
by John Sumwalt
John 21:1-19
A little boy spied a large white egg one day as he peered through a crack in the floor of the back porch. He had never seen such a big, beautiful egg -- it was much bigger than the ones they bought at the grocery store. He ran into the house to ask his mom if he could keep the egg. His mom came to see for herself, but when they looked through the crack in the porch the egg could no longer be seen -- it was covered by a big white duck. The little boy's mom laughed when she saw the duck. "That mama duck is nesting," she said. "You watch, soon there will be more eggs in her nest."
The little boy checked the nest every day. His mom was right. More and more eggs began to appear. Soon there were 17. Every day the little boy looked through the crack in the porch, and every day he saw the mother duck sitting on her eggs. His mom told him that the mother duck was keeping them warm until it was time for them to hatch.
One day he looked beneath the porch and all of the eggs were gone but one. In the nest where the eggs had been there were 16 tiny yellow ducklings. The little boy ran to tell his mom. "Come quickly," he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her out the door. "Look at all of the baby ducks."
The little boy and his mom were both very excited as they looked at the baby ducks. "What about the last egg?" the little boy asked. "Is it going to hatch too?"
"Just wait," his mom said. "Time will tell."
The little boy looked through the crack often to check on the egg. Two days passed, and it still had not hatched. The little boy's mom told him that some eggs never hatch, and that perhaps this was one of those eggs. But on the morning of the third day the little boy noticed that it had started to crack. He watched as a tiny yellow beak appeared. Slowly the last yellow duckling pushed himself out of the egg and took his place with the other 16 ducklings.
One day, the little boy saw the mother duck lead all of the ducklings out from under the porch and take them to the creek that ran along the edge of the backyard. The ducklings jumped into the water behind their mother and swam with her up and down the creek. The little boy went down to the creek every day and watched as the ducklings got bigger and bigger. Their feathers turned from yellow to white, like the mother duck's feathers. And then one day all 17 grown-up ducks spread their wings and flew up over the creek and around the cottonwood tree at the edge of the yard. The little boy watched until they passed out of sight. Then he went back to the house, crawled under the porch, and gathered up all of the egg shells in the empty nest. He put them in a mayonnaise jar that he kept under his bed. Every once in a while he would take them out to look at them so that he would never forget the wonderful miracle he had seen.
This is a children's story, but will also serve as a jumping-off point for the grown-up sermon on this text. In this last resurrection story in John's gospel the author is gathering up the eggshells, the memories that the disciples had of the times Jesus spent with them before his ascension into heaven.
Where You Do not Wish to Go
by John Sumwalt
John 21:1-19
"Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go."
-- John 21:18
Wilma Peterson chaired the social concerns committee in her church. She also headed an action group that lobbied the state legislature on senior citizen issues; she served on the regional Commission on Aging and was secretary of a city task force that was seeking a government grant to build low-income housing. When the doctor told her she needed gall bladder surgery, the first thing she said was, "How long will I be laid up?" When she was assured it would only be four to six weeks, she said, "Oh, that won't be so bad. I can write letters and make phone calls while I'm recovering." The doctor frowned, but he didn't say anything; he didn't think it would do any good. Wilma was a determined woman. It would take a lot more than a doctor's warning and a little thing like gall bladder surgery to slow her down.
Ten weeks later, Wilma was feeling worse than she had before the operation. She couldn't understand why she wasn't getting better. The doctor suggested that she come in for tests. When the results came back, he came immediately into her room and broke the news as gently as he could.
"Wilma, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the blood tests show that you have AIDS."
Wilma couldn't believe her ears. How could a 70-year-old woman get AIDS? "It was in the blood transfusion you received during your surgery," he said. Wilma just couldn't believe it. What was she going to do?
It wasn't that she was afraid of dying. Wilma was prepared for death -- even a slow, painful death, if that's the way it came. That was the way of the world. She had seen enough of death to know that no one was spared. Her husband had died of lung cancer and she had lost a son to polio. It was the thought of telling her family and friends. What would they think... that she had been indiscreet?
She didn't tell anyone at first, but as the disease progressed she decided that people had the right to know. It was an incident with a needle that convinced her to tell. A nurse in the doctor's office had been about to give her an injection one day when the needle slipped and she pricked her own finger. The fact that it occurred before the injection spared the nurse any danger of infection, but Wilma could see that it had been very upsetting to her. The nurse knew she had AIDS. Wilma decided that everyone else who came into contact with her had a right to know too.
The word spread fast. There were many expressions of caring; phone calls, cards, letters, and quiet conversations with neighbors and friends. People were horrified for her and sympathetic at the same time -- or so it seemed. She felt no sense of rejection until the following Sunday morning when she went to church. She sat in her usual pew, but the people who always sat beside her, or in the pews around her, sat elsewhere. She was beginning to think no one was going to sit near her at all, when Kevin Holmstead, that nice young man from the bank who usually sat near the back, came in and sat beside her on the end of the pew next to the aisle in the same spot her husband Frank had always sat when he was alive. Kevin greeted her pleasantly, as if nothing had changed. "Maybe he hasn't heard yet," she thought to herself, but something about his manner told her that he sat beside her because he had heard. That was the beginning of their special friendship. From then on Kevin sat beside her every Sunday that she was able to go to church.
Wilma lived just three years from the time her AIDS was diagnosed -- and much of the last few months of her life she was in bed at home or in the hospital, too weak to move around on her own. During that time her family members and several volunteers, organized by Kevin, took care of all of her bodily needs. They bathed and fed her and helped her with her toilet, changed her diapers when there was a need. They took turns pushing her around in her wheelchair and carrying her from the bed to the couch and back again. But during the first two-and-a-half years of her illness, before she was bedridden, Wilma was very much the crusader that she had been all of her life. She organized a support group for persons like herself who were living with AIDS. She visited AIDS patients in their homes, in hospitals and hospices. Many of them told how they had been forsaken by family and friends, how they had lost their homes and their jobs, how difficult it was to get the medical treatment they needed, and how insurance companies and the government denied them financial assistance. She wrote to congresspersons and state legislators about the needs of persons with AIDS. She lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance that would prevent landlords and employers from discriminating against persons with AIDS. She spoke to church and civic groups, pleading with them to support the human rights of all persons.
On the day that she died, Wilma asked Kevin if he would help to carry on her work. He promised her that he would, and he thanked her for all that she had done. He said, "It will be easier for me because of you."
On the Sunday following Wilma's funeral, Kevin stood up in church during the time for expressing prayer concerns and said, "You all know how important Wilma's work has been in this community. Will you help me to continue what she has started? There are many persons with AIDS among us who need our love and support. A great many of them are members of the gay and lesbian community, as I am. Will you stand with us in our time of need?"
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
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StoryShare, April 18, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
What's Up This Week
"Told Ya So" by C. David McKirachan
"Clothed in Glory" by C. David McKirachan
"The Last Duckling" by John Sumwalt
"Where You Do not Wish to Go" by John Sumwalt
What's Up This Week
Jesus had a real penchant for upsetting the apple cart -- but just as is often the case today, the people he dealt with generally had a difficult time understanding the gist of his message… especially when he challenged them to break out of their tired, old ways of seeing things, as David McKirachan muses in this week's edition of StoryShare. McKirachan also shares a wry and interesting meditation on fashion sense, insecurity, and being "clothed in glory." John Sumwalt then offers us two very different approaches to this week's gospel text -- a charming children's story, and a cautionary tale about a once-dreaded disease that forces us to think about whether we will respond, like the disciple Peter, to Jesus' challenge about how deeply we love him.
* * * * * * * * *
Told Ya So
by C. David McKirachan
Revelation 5:11-14
Every once in a while I wonder what it must have been like to listen to Jesus preach. I doubt too many people fell asleep. But then again, never underestimate the extent of human stupidity. We are amazingly capable when it comes to ignoring or disagreeing with anything that doesn't fit into our tunnel vision. Our schedules rule our priorities, unless our budgets interfere. Now, the miracles aren't even on this list. Let's not even look at them. Let's just deal with his compassion and insight and ability to see into the heart of matters. Let's stick to his perspective of hope that allowed him to confront the smug ideologies that we carry around like a sack of rocks.
This guy was good. So why didn't people listen?
One of my sons has a motorcycle. This does not make his mother happy. She periodically has a go at convincing him of the idiocy of wrapping one's body around a machine and running it at speeds over five miles an hour. He is as most people are -- stubborn. She was bringing up the minor details of potholes and rocks in the road. He told her that the greater danger was a long rut in the road. Once one of your wheels gets into it, the other wheel will get squirrelly. This did not make her feel all warm and fuzzy.
But back to our stupidity. We live in ruts. Our patterns of living are almost impossible to see, with perspectives that don't include efficiency, comfort, fear, and money as more important than faith, hope, or love. Jesus talked to us about our ruts. He offered us another perspective. He demonstrated life based on something other than "We never did it that way before."
There's an old saying: "The only difference between a rut and the grave is depth." Maybe that's why Jesus blew away death. He lived out of the rut, out of the grave -- and so he rose. Now if that's not the best "told ya so" in history, I don't know what is. Yup, "worthy is the Lamb who was slain." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Wouldn't it be nice to get that reaction to a sermon once in a while?
Clothed in Glory
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 30
For years I blamed my sartorial idiocy on color-blindness. I am color-blind -- most men are. That might explain some of it, but at best it's a convenient excuse. Most of us don't have a clue what works and what doesn't. I think it's a gene. That short chromosome is another good excuse for just about anything. But this lack of dress sense is so consistent, it's a little spooky. Part of it had to do with my mother. That's an overused excuse. She always laid out my clothes for me. She was insistent at teaching me to cook and to clean (the latter I never did master), but she assumed the matching and coordinating skills would be taken over by some other person without a short chromosome. Oh well.
My father was never challenged in this area. He was a big church pastor of the old school. He had a couple of suits and a few ties and a lot of white shirts. On Sunday he wore a collar and tabs. On formal occasions he wore his doctoral hood. He had it made. As a teenager, when I began to suffer the qualms of insecurity that go along with sexual awakening and the desire to be attractive to the ones who do have some fashion sense, I was a bit frustrated by my father's uniforms. I assumed he had adopted these always well-matched, always appropriate modes of dress just to drive me nuts. (Back then the world was all about me.) I, on the other hand, had to pick and choose between outfits. And I was sure that every one of them was laughable to every female person in the free world. (I was told female people in the non-free world had no fashion sense.) It was the early '60s.
By the time I got to college I adopted my own uniform: Levis, t-shirts, flannel shirts, and boots. Hippies didn't need too many fashion choices. I was safe. If colors clashed, I was making a statement. I never did figure out what kind of statement some of those outfits were making. I stuck to basics.
Getting a job brought me back to making choices. But poverty limited them, so I continued to make do, without much thought as to what I was wearing. During that early part of my ministry, with my poverty-driven fashion choices, I was insecure again. It didn't have to do with women. It had to do with the church I worked in, its poverty, its size, and the way people treated me in professional circles. I knew they considered me something less than a success because I had gotten stuck in the inner city. It was pretty obvious I was on the fast track to oblivion -- I was still driving a VW bus.
During that time I had the privilege to share the responsibilities of marrying my niece. My partners were my father and my brother. I was intimidated by them. I considered them great people, stupendous preachers, and beyond the pale of frustrations and insecurities. I was a dumb kid. They were better than I knew, and human to boot.
My father had retired, and he had a couple heart attacks and a few small strokes. He rarely preached any more. My brother and I had worked up some strategies for stepping in at specific points to cover any lapses that might occur. I was awed by being included in supporting my father. Everything went well. They were amazing, per usual. I was insecure, but thought I'd hidden it rather well.
Afterward, we were out in the back of the church, de-robeing. I was a few steps away from my father as my mother came to him. I overheard a mind-blowing conversation.
He asked her, "Did I look old?" I couldn't believe he even considered that. I always thought that kind of thing was never an issue for him.
She stood there facing him, her hands on his chest. She was one of the most loving and one of the most honest people I've ever met. She wouldn't lie. It wasn't in her. "When you first stepped up to preach I thought you looked a bit threadbare…"
My eyes probably fell out of my head at that point. I felt like I'd never known them. But then she went on: "… you looked a bit threadbare, but when you began to speak, you were clothed in glory."
I left the room. I was crying. I was crying in gratitude for them, for their courage, for their honesty, for their love.
Every time I read this Psalm, it reminds me of that moment: "… thou hast loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness." The gift of love is a fashion statement that never goes out of style, whatever the length of your chromosomes.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
The Last Duckling
by John Sumwalt
John 21:1-19
A little boy spied a large white egg one day as he peered through a crack in the floor of the back porch. He had never seen such a big, beautiful egg -- it was much bigger than the ones they bought at the grocery store. He ran into the house to ask his mom if he could keep the egg. His mom came to see for herself, but when they looked through the crack in the porch the egg could no longer be seen -- it was covered by a big white duck. The little boy's mom laughed when she saw the duck. "That mama duck is nesting," she said. "You watch, soon there will be more eggs in her nest."
The little boy checked the nest every day. His mom was right. More and more eggs began to appear. Soon there were 17. Every day the little boy looked through the crack in the porch, and every day he saw the mother duck sitting on her eggs. His mom told him that the mother duck was keeping them warm until it was time for them to hatch.
One day he looked beneath the porch and all of the eggs were gone but one. In the nest where the eggs had been there were 16 tiny yellow ducklings. The little boy ran to tell his mom. "Come quickly," he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her out the door. "Look at all of the baby ducks."
The little boy and his mom were both very excited as they looked at the baby ducks. "What about the last egg?" the little boy asked. "Is it going to hatch too?"
"Just wait," his mom said. "Time will tell."
The little boy looked through the crack often to check on the egg. Two days passed, and it still had not hatched. The little boy's mom told him that some eggs never hatch, and that perhaps this was one of those eggs. But on the morning of the third day the little boy noticed that it had started to crack. He watched as a tiny yellow beak appeared. Slowly the last yellow duckling pushed himself out of the egg and took his place with the other 16 ducklings.
One day, the little boy saw the mother duck lead all of the ducklings out from under the porch and take them to the creek that ran along the edge of the backyard. The ducklings jumped into the water behind their mother and swam with her up and down the creek. The little boy went down to the creek every day and watched as the ducklings got bigger and bigger. Their feathers turned from yellow to white, like the mother duck's feathers. And then one day all 17 grown-up ducks spread their wings and flew up over the creek and around the cottonwood tree at the edge of the yard. The little boy watched until they passed out of sight. Then he went back to the house, crawled under the porch, and gathered up all of the egg shells in the empty nest. He put them in a mayonnaise jar that he kept under his bed. Every once in a while he would take them out to look at them so that he would never forget the wonderful miracle he had seen.
This is a children's story, but will also serve as a jumping-off point for the grown-up sermon on this text. In this last resurrection story in John's gospel the author is gathering up the eggshells, the memories that the disciples had of the times Jesus spent with them before his ascension into heaven.
Where You Do not Wish to Go
by John Sumwalt
John 21:1-19
"Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go."
-- John 21:18
Wilma Peterson chaired the social concerns committee in her church. She also headed an action group that lobbied the state legislature on senior citizen issues; she served on the regional Commission on Aging and was secretary of a city task force that was seeking a government grant to build low-income housing. When the doctor told her she needed gall bladder surgery, the first thing she said was, "How long will I be laid up?" When she was assured it would only be four to six weeks, she said, "Oh, that won't be so bad. I can write letters and make phone calls while I'm recovering." The doctor frowned, but he didn't say anything; he didn't think it would do any good. Wilma was a determined woman. It would take a lot more than a doctor's warning and a little thing like gall bladder surgery to slow her down.
Ten weeks later, Wilma was feeling worse than she had before the operation. She couldn't understand why she wasn't getting better. The doctor suggested that she come in for tests. When the results came back, he came immediately into her room and broke the news as gently as he could.
"Wilma, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the blood tests show that you have AIDS."
Wilma couldn't believe her ears. How could a 70-year-old woman get AIDS? "It was in the blood transfusion you received during your surgery," he said. Wilma just couldn't believe it. What was she going to do?
It wasn't that she was afraid of dying. Wilma was prepared for death -- even a slow, painful death, if that's the way it came. That was the way of the world. She had seen enough of death to know that no one was spared. Her husband had died of lung cancer and she had lost a son to polio. It was the thought of telling her family and friends. What would they think... that she had been indiscreet?
She didn't tell anyone at first, but as the disease progressed she decided that people had the right to know. It was an incident with a needle that convinced her to tell. A nurse in the doctor's office had been about to give her an injection one day when the needle slipped and she pricked her own finger. The fact that it occurred before the injection spared the nurse any danger of infection, but Wilma could see that it had been very upsetting to her. The nurse knew she had AIDS. Wilma decided that everyone else who came into contact with her had a right to know too.
The word spread fast. There were many expressions of caring; phone calls, cards, letters, and quiet conversations with neighbors and friends. People were horrified for her and sympathetic at the same time -- or so it seemed. She felt no sense of rejection until the following Sunday morning when she went to church. She sat in her usual pew, but the people who always sat beside her, or in the pews around her, sat elsewhere. She was beginning to think no one was going to sit near her at all, when Kevin Holmstead, that nice young man from the bank who usually sat near the back, came in and sat beside her on the end of the pew next to the aisle in the same spot her husband Frank had always sat when he was alive. Kevin greeted her pleasantly, as if nothing had changed. "Maybe he hasn't heard yet," she thought to herself, but something about his manner told her that he sat beside her because he had heard. That was the beginning of their special friendship. From then on Kevin sat beside her every Sunday that she was able to go to church.
Wilma lived just three years from the time her AIDS was diagnosed -- and much of the last few months of her life she was in bed at home or in the hospital, too weak to move around on her own. During that time her family members and several volunteers, organized by Kevin, took care of all of her bodily needs. They bathed and fed her and helped her with her toilet, changed her diapers when there was a need. They took turns pushing her around in her wheelchair and carrying her from the bed to the couch and back again. But during the first two-and-a-half years of her illness, before she was bedridden, Wilma was very much the crusader that she had been all of her life. She organized a support group for persons like herself who were living with AIDS. She visited AIDS patients in their homes, in hospitals and hospices. Many of them told how they had been forsaken by family and friends, how they had lost their homes and their jobs, how difficult it was to get the medical treatment they needed, and how insurance companies and the government denied them financial assistance. She wrote to congresspersons and state legislators about the needs of persons with AIDS. She lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance that would prevent landlords and employers from discriminating against persons with AIDS. She spoke to church and civic groups, pleading with them to support the human rights of all persons.
On the day that she died, Wilma asked Kevin if he would help to carry on her work. He promised her that he would, and he thanked her for all that she had done. He said, "It will be easier for me because of you."
On the Sunday following Wilma's funeral, Kevin stood up in church during the time for expressing prayer concerns and said, "You all know how important Wilma's work has been in this community. Will you help me to continue what she has started? There are many persons with AIDS among us who need our love and support. A great many of them are members of the gay and lesbian community, as I am. Will you stand with us in our time of need?"
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
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StoryShare, April 18, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
