"Even if Grandma Forgets"
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 15, 2007
First John 1:1 – 2:2, John 20:19-31
Rev. Larry Lange
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Jodi landed a new job in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Despite being so far from her hometown, Jodi decided it was the job available with the best potential for advancement and earnings.
Because Jodi really did need the money. Her ex-husband had stopped sending child support as soon as he had started up his next family, and Jodi was too exhausted to go after him through legal channels. She took another job on weekends, instead.
“All that work is going to kill you, just like it did your father,” Jodi’s mother told her.
“Ma, I’m tough. I got bills to pay. I’ll be fine.”
When Jodi finally felt settled in enough, she invited her mother to come and visit. Her mother’s name is Joan. But it’s a long drive from Milwaukee where Joan lives to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Depending on Chicago traffic and the weather, it can take six hours. And Joan was pushing 70 and was fragile from years of struggling with bi-polar disorder. Painfully aware of her weak condition, Joan still instantly said “yes” to the invitation, because she had not seen her daughter or her granddaughters for almost a year.
Joan left Milwaukee in a vicious, windy rainstorm that kept trying to blow her out of her lane into the semis and cars that rocketed by throwing up spray that overwhelmed her windshield wipers, completely obscuring the road ahead.
Despite missing her daughter and grandchildren, Joan was hesitant about the trip to Michigan for another reason besides the distance and the weather. Joan had been looking forward to singing with the choir on Easter Sunday in her new church home. Just after she had joined that church, her brother died, only a few months after doctors discovered he was filled with cancer. Joan’s new pastor handled the whole thing so graciously, including the fact that her brother had not been a member of any church and including the hysterical grief of her brother’s wife who they had to physically drag from his corpse before closing the coffin.
Joan hung in there with her sister-in-law, invited her to church, and it wasn’t long before her sister-in-law joined, too. But it wasn’t just the pastor who had become a wonderful blessing for Joan: it was the whole congregation. When Joan’s mother was in the hospital for a serious operation several members of the congregation asked if they could include her mother in a prayer chain, and they sent her mother get well cards. Joan wished her daughter Jodi had invited her to visit on any other weekend than Easter Sunday. Joan felt singing with the choir on Easter Sunday was her chance to proclaim, to declare, to testify in song about the word of life. Joan, like the writer of the second lesson, found complete joy communicating the word of life.
It was Joan’s way of feeling she was following Jesus’ directive in today’s Gospel:
"So I send you."
Joan felt Jesus had sent her to this world to sing and singing, especially the music of Easter and Christmas, was a way Joan felt recreated, born anew, just as the disciples are recreated in today’s Gospel lesson. In the Gospel lesson, Jesus breathes new and abundant and everlasting life into his disciples, just as God had breathed life into the dust he had formed as the first man in Genesis chapter 2. Missing singing at Easter, Joan felt she was missing being her True Self, whom God had sent out into the world to Sing, whom God had recreated time and again through all the struggles in her life.
As her car shuddered and wallowed on in the dark storm, as her shoulders stung and burned with the strain of gripping the wheel, Joan felt misgivings leaving a fellowship of light she had found in no other church in her entire life.
When Joan arrived at Jodi’s apartment, she was so exhausted, she could only stagger into the room her daughter had prepared for her and immediately fell asleep.
When Joan awoke on Good Friday no one was home at all. A note on the counter explained that Jodi would be out with friends that night and requested that she pick the girls up at daycare at three and informed her that there were pizzas in the freezer.
“Out partying on Good Friday night,” said Joan, shaking her head.
Though Joan had some difficulty finding the daycare in the strange city, she did enjoy the afternoon and evening with her granddaughters, but a day of parenting wore her out and try as she might, she couldn’t stay up late enough to see Jodi that night.
On Saturday, Jodi and the girls slept in and when they finally all woke up, Joan had Easter eggs ready to dye, a project they all did together just as Joan had done with her own children years before. As they dyed eggs and scrapped about who got which stickers and shrink wraps, Joan told the girls about Jesus, but didn’t notice that Jodi was getting fidgety about it over at the kitchen sink and that the girls looked somewhat puzzled.
One of the girls finally asked: “Do you mean Jesus Christ, grandma?”
“Yes, Jesus Christ.”
“Oh. We thought that was a swear word.”
Joan glared at her daughter.
“Sunday morning is my only time free with the kids, Ma, and I’m supposed to get them up at the crack of dawn and drag them to some boring church service and some boring Sunday School class? I don’t think so.”
Now Joan knew a lecture on God’s commandment to keep the Sabbath Day holy wasn’t going to work. She knew that the Law only accuses and does not inspire. Joan chose the Gospel. Joan suddenly felt sent, felt charged with new life. “If it weren’t for Jesus Christ,” began Joan quietly, directing her attention to her granddaughters, “I don’t think Grandma would be alive after all she’s been through. Jesus was there when grandpa died. Jesus was there all the times I’ve been in the hospital. Jesus was there when Uncle Bill died. And when Great Grandma was in the hospital. When Grandma sings, Grandma feels happy, because she loves music and because she believes Jesus gave her the gift of singing, and so when she’s singing, she’s thanking Jesus for being able to sing and for helping her through all those bad times.”
“How do you know Jesus was there?” one of the girls asked.
Joan thought for a moment. Then she sang.
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me; yes, Jesus loves me;
yes, Jesus loves me; the bible tells me so.
“The bible tells me Jesus was there,” said Joan. “The word of God, the word of life is in the bible. Whenever I hear it, whenever somebody reads it or preaches it or when I sing it, I remember Jesus is there.”
“Do you forget sometimes, Grandma?”
“Oh yes. Grandmas forget a lot of things. But even if Grandma forgets about Jesus, Jesus is still there to keep reminding me. Your mom tells you she loves you a lot, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“But if she only told you she loved you one time in your whole life, you’d think that was kind of strange, wouldn’t you?”
”Yes.”
“Well, it’s the same with God. God keeps reminding us that he loves us in all different kinds of ways or we forget, and it’s easy to forget about God, I guess, because we can’t see him.”
Very early the next day, Easter Sunday, before the sun had come up, Joan was resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t be seeing God that day. Jodi had no church, and she told her mother she didn’t want to feel like a stranger in one on Easter Sunday. Jodi said, “You can go if you want, but the girls’ll probably get up while you’re gone, and you’ll miss the Easter basket hunt.”
Joan turned on the TV and there were a few of the 100 channels with Sunrise Services with choirs and orchestras and angels and light shows and perfectly dressed preachers with handsome faces, beautiful faces, perfect hair, expensive clothes, peach make-up caked on their faces, men and women alike.
Easter on TV was nice.
But the pastor’s sermon manuscript didn’t fall off the pulpit while he was preaching causing the congregation to chuckle. And the third candle on the candelabra didn’t keep going out causing the acolytes to keep trying to relight it. And people weren’t coming up to Joan to ask about her mother, although you could dial the phone number that raced along in a banner at the bottom of the screen and someone would pray with you 24/7 about whatever you wanted.
Worst of all, Joan couldn’t be part of a song that made a difference in the lives of the members of the congregation. Joan couldn’t be part of making God’s word come alive. She just sat on the couch—“an awful fancy couch,” Joan was thinking, “for a girl who’s always complaining she’s broke.” Joan just sat there on that fancy couch, her hair an unmanageable wiry gray mess, wrapping her tattered white terry cloth robe around her, because she was cold.
Joan dozed off and dreamed her daughter and the girls had come out of their dark rooms dressed in their bright white Easter best and dragged her to church in her old white terry cloth robe over her panicked objections about being embarrassed. She could hear her daughter saying, “God don’t care what you wear, Ma.”
When she got to church the choir was an African American Gospel choir who clapped and swayed while they sang, and who were all wearing tattered white terry cloth robes, and they called out to her, “Come on up, Joan!”
Joan had always wanted to sing with a choir like that, but then her real granddaughters woke her with their squeals of delight about their baskets full of chocolate bunnies and chocolate marshmallow eggs.
The children’s bibles, which Joan had snuck in the baskets were set aside without a word of thanks.
Joan drove home feeling as though she had had an opportunity to proclaim, declare, and testify about the word of life, and usually she felt complete joy in doing so, but this mission had been a tough one.
About an hour after Joan arrived home, she was just drifting off to an exhausted sleep when the phone rang.
“Hi Gramma!”
“Girls!” she found herself saying as she struggled out of sleep, “you shouldn’t be on the phone! Your mother’s not home. It’s…it’s expensive! You’ll get in trouble!”
“We don’t care, Gramma. We just want to hear you sing that song about Jesus.”
And so she did.
Amen.