Second Cutting
Stories
Contents
“Second Cutting” by David O. Bales
“Everything Has Become New” by David O. Bales
Second Cutting
by David O. Bales
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
When Rod answered the phone his mother was talking and her voice blasted him, “—elp in the hay.”
“Mom,” he raised his voice into the phone.
She hadn’t heard him and talked over him, “… broke the contract and your dad’s been trying to do everything himself.”
After a couple tries Rod was able to shout his way into her nearly deaf ear and get her to start over. Rod’s parents had retired from farming five years before and leased their hay fields to neighbors. The neighbors, the Swansons, in the middle of haying season broke the contract and moved somewhere Rod couldn’t understand.
“Matthew’s trying to do it himself and he’s too old. Equipment keeps breaking down. You and William need to come help. Please come right now. Be here tomorrow morning.”
Rod tried to explain it was “just impossible,” but she couldn’t hear him. He hung up the phone knowing she hadn’t heard his ‘goodbye.’ It took some first class begging with his boss and extra promises to Flo about a later and better weekend trip, but Rod was in the pickup before light the next morning for a two hour drive to his parents’ farm.
He arrived half an hour before Billie, whom he greeted coldly. Their father was all joy, nearly jumping as he said, “Good to have both the boys back, isn’t it Arleen?”
She answered, “I will, Matthew. I will. Soon as I make the coffee.”
Rod stepped back to gaze at his nuclear family: an irresponsible brother, a mother who couldn’t hear, and a father who repeated, “We’ll work this out somehow.” He thought, “How can I physically survive this? I don’t even jog anymore.”
“The second cutting was down and windrowed and they just left,” Matthew said. “The alfalfa was ready to bale. After two days I started nosing around. Where were the Swansons? They’d skedaddled. Not a word to anybody. When I met the guys for coffee at Pancake Flats, everybody guessed they were running away from debt.”
Matthew had managed to bring their ancient baler back to life — constant problems with the knotter — but his hay picker had broken down years before he retired and he said it was “beyond the reach of mechanic or magician. And there lay the bales, begging to be gathered into the barn. So your mom says ‘call the boys.’ Awful glad you came. Let’s get at it.”
Next to the barn the old man asked who wanted the privilege of spinning the John Deere’s fly wheel. Rod stepped over. His father said, “Remember how to open the petcock and then close it when one cylinder starts?” How could Rod forget? After a strenuous and slightly frightening minute the old Model B began its ‘pop, pop, pop.’ Their farming equipment had always been a month away from the wrecking yard. When their father retired he sold the few pieces that still worked but he couldn’t part with the John Deere. “We can fix it and fix it and it will run for a hundred years.” That was one of his favorite sayings. Another was, always with outstretched arms, “Some day this will all be yours,” a promise the brothers neither requested nor appreciated. Now Matthew climbed painfully onto the tractor’s seat and pointed forward like a general ordering the charge.
The brothers hopped on the back of the flatbed trailer to ride to the field. They’d done the same all their youth, taking turns to drive the tractor from the time they were twelve. Rod was 42 and Billie was 40, but to Rod riding on the trailer was the same as 30 years before. Every year aimed to the alfalfa harvest. The Washington Farmer calendar on their kitchen wall might as well have had its months start with the spring fertilizing, then the regular irrigating which led Matthew to say, how “those beautiful little sprouts started greening the field.” Then every year before they knew it the boys and their father were snaking through the field with tractor and trailer retrieving hundreds of dark green, very heavy bales of alfalfa.
With a clank of the hitch the tractor and trailer now lurched toward the field. The task was so simple that a new hired hand learned it in five minutes — or quit and went home: driving through the bales and tossing them onto the trailer, lacing them row by row, alternating bales like bricks to hold them against the occasional jerking of the clutch. Three crops a season. Rod knew that he and Billie both hoped that by the third cutting this year their father would have arranged for custom cutters. Rod didn’t, however, say this to Billie. The brothers sat next to one another and didn’t speak.
In 15 minutes they’d bounced to the far end of the west field and Matthew turned to start the picking. Rod dreaded what awaited them. Their long sleeves and straw hats offered the slightest of comfort. These bales would surely maim both brothers.
The tractor stopped squarely between two rows of bales. The old man looked back at his sons, his face no longer tanned as it had been in their youth, but his same ridiculous hat flopped so low he had to tip his head back to see higher than the end of the tractor. “Here we go, boys,” he said with that goofy smile that was half a gasp. “Gotta’ make hay while the sun shines.” Another of his favorite sayings.
Rod hopped off to his side of the trailer and Billie to the other. With the trailer empty they were visible to one another and in unison they sank a hook into a bale and dragged it to the trailer, grunting to lift. The tractor tugged through the waiting bales, stopping for the next two. Rod was exhausted after the first row of 12 and was glad it was a short trailer. By the second row the boys were lifting over waist high and Rod expected that Billie was as tired as he was. They’d both been strong boys. Life on the farm guaranteed that. Rod had played on the school teams. Billie was the fastest boy in high school. In his junior year in gym class he set a school record running the 400 meters in gym shoes, not track spikes. Yet he never joined a team. The closest Billie got to organized athletics, Rod thought, was one of many short-lived jobs in a sporting goods store.
The tractor stopped for the fourth layer. Rod wondered if his father would consider driving to the barn with only three layers instead of the four they’d done when they were younger. He walked behind the trailer to see if Billie agreed that three layers were high enough. Billie was at the front of the trailer and Rod watched him snap the bale up, balance it against the third layer, and toss it onto the top, almost like shooting a two hand set shot in basketball. “Alright,” Rod thought, “I guess we go four layers.”
Even with leather gloves, by the third trailer load Rod felt blisters on his uncallused hands. By the fifth load, blisters on each hand had burst, lubricating the inside of his gloves with watery blood. His allergies were kicking in and his resolve to breath through his nose had ended in the first five minutes. He could see that Billie also was breathing through his mouth and both their tongues hung out. He wondered how much longer they could continue. He began to worry about his middle-aged heart.
The more he labored the more he recalled how often he’d had to make up for Billie in the past. He thought of his mother’s saying, “He’ll be better this time. He promises.” Unfortunately, she’d said that at least three times. Billie’s early alcoholism had robbed Rod of a good deal of his childhood and it had left Billie, finally sober at 35, having lost his edge on thinking, slow even balancing his checkbook, unable to remember the phone numbers of his children who lived with his ex-wife. Soon Rod’s past anger began to drive him as he lifted each bale. When they finally finished this horrible work, he was going to inform Billie how much extra labor his irresponsibility had cost him over the years and how many things he’d missed because he was doing the work of two.
He was jerked back to the present because the trailer didn’t stop. It drew away from Rod and Billie and, hooks in their bales, they stood looking at one another. The trailer didn’t stop. They gazed stupidly at it and by 15 yards realized something was wrong. They couldn’t spot their father’s head and the tractor began to turn slightly to the left side. “Dad,” Billie yelled, and they both ran as fast as their worn out legs could move. The trailer had swerved toward Rod’s side. It hit a bale which clipped his leg and knocked him down. He’d just gotten up when he saw Billie’s head appear over the hitch as he leaned forward to pull his dad up. He struggled to reach over him and disengage the clutch.
Arleen and the brothers weren’t allowed to stay with Matthew in the Emergency Room. The small hospital was jammed, so they sat two hours in a hallway as medical personnel shuffled past without a look. Rod didn’t realize it, but he was constantly rubbing one shoulder, arm and wrist and then the other.
Billie said, “Pretty sore?”
Rod gritted his teeth and said, Just tired. I don’t know if I can keep this up.”
“When you’re tired, you need to be extra careful. Halt.”
Rod stared blankly at him.
“‘Halt’ is what we learned in recovery. Stands for ‘Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.’ When you’re any of those you need to guard against abusing alcohol, but also of causing an accident.”
Arleen shouted to the brothers, “What’s going on with Matthew?” Billie stood directly in front of her to state loudly that no one had told them anything. Then he had to move for a cart with food trays to pass.
Billie watched it pass and, when he sat down, leaned to Rod, “When I was out of recovery and trying desperately to stay sober, I worked in a hospital for a year. Mostly mopped floors, disposed of the worst kind of messes, and passed food trays. The worst jobs pay the least. I barely earned enough for a small apartment. Lots of times when I picked up the trays after the patients ate, or didn’t eat, I ate off the trays.”
Rod looked at him with wonder. Billie never told him about his wrestling with alcoholism and he’d never asked. For all the times the police phoned about Billie and for all the times the family visited him in recovery, Rod remained obedient to his parents’ command not to say anything negative about it to Billie. Thus year by year he said less and less until in the last decade he’d hardly spoken to Billie.
“We’ll call it sunstroke for now,” the doctor said when they allowed the three into Matthew’s room. “Not a scientific diagnosis. Certainly dehydration.”
Matthew spoke weakly to the doctor, “We had to make hay while the sun shined.”
The doctor continued facing the family, “We’re giving him IVs and he’s responding. He seems a fairly healthy 70 year old. We’ll run more tests in the morning.”
As the doctor left he held the door for the chaplain to enter. “Nurse said you’d like a prayer here,” she said.
Billie shouted to Arleen that this was the chaplain and she’d come to offer prayer.
“Yes. Good, good,” Arleen shouted back. “Matthew needs prayer.”
After talking with the family for a few minutes, Chaplain Woodly stepped beside the bed and gently took Matthew’s hand. “Matthew, I’m the hospital chaplain and I’m going to pray for you.” Matthew tipped his head on the pillow and gave his goofy gasping smile. Arleen was on the other side of his bed and held his other hand. The chaplain said, “Let’s pray together,” and reached out to Rod. He hesitated only slightly to take her hand while Arleen grabbed Billie’s hand. Arleen glanced at one and then the other of her sons. Then, as though working in tandem on the hay trailer, each looked at his father, and, knowing that their mother wouldn’t hear if they refused, they grabbed the other’s blistered, bloody hand in prayer over their father.
Preaching Point: Hope for broken relationships.
* * *
Everything Has Become New
by David O. Bales
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
In the first year of Jayne’s first pastorate the pastors’ cluster provided her most important instruction in how Christ’s grace was applied in the real world. Every month the seasoned pastors listened, counseled, and prayed for her. At the end of her first year she acknowledged what she would never have guessed when she began: Her second most important source of learning was preparing for funerals. In meeting with loved ones before funerals, she bumped into more convoluted life situations, tortured relationships, and families’ destructive varieties of grieving than she ever imagined: a man whose aunt was disclosed as his mother, a woman whose husband had hidden two previous marriages with five offspring, a man who found that his wife had been ten years older than she claimed, and a woman who had to face another claiming she was currently married to the deceased. Each situation needed a massive infusion of Christ’s grace. Yet, Jayne’s meeting with one family to prepare a funeral was like no other.
During that first year Archie Taunton and his wife Evelyn had been able to attend worship only a few times. Archie needed a walker and Evelyn had suffered a stroke which prevented her speaking. Jayne visited twice in their home and she prayed with Archie three times in the hospital before he died. All her encounters with the Tauntons heartened Jayne with their faith. Now their two children Tanny and Graham had arrived and helped Evelyn into Jayne’s office to plan Archie’s funeral.
Jayne greeted the family and seated them and expressed her condolences. She asked a few questions about where the children now lived and when they’d seen their father last.
“Have you thought about favorite scriptures to be read or people to share memories of Archie?”
“First thing,” Tanny said, “his name wasn’t Archie.”
“Archibald?” Jayne asked?
“His given name was Graham Paul Taunton,” Graham said. “I’m actually ‘Graham Jr.’”
Evelyn nodded to Jayne. Her children seemed smug.
Jayne was puzzled both with the difference in the name and in the way the children told her. She plowed straight ahead, “Sooo….,” which brought a broad smile from the children and a slight grin from Evelyn.
“Archie Bunker,” Tanny said.
“Television,” Jayne said. “Before I was born. He was kind of a loveable bigot?”
“More or less,” Graham said.
“It was when we were kids,” Tanny said. “We watched it every week, right Mom?”
Evelyn nodded, a pained smile on the corners of her mouth.
“We’d only seen it a couple weeks,” Tanny said, “and Mom just started calling Dad ‘Archie.’”
It fit. We grew up hearing him joke about Jews, Poles, Italians and Asians; and he had all kinds of terms for blacks. When boys started wearing long hair, he blipped off about it all the time. Thus, ‘Archie.’ Mom saw the similarity and basically called him on it, but in her nice way.”
“He didn’t see the program the way we did,” Graham said. “We were in middle school and high school with all different kinds of kids. We accepted one another and that’s what school taught and encouraged. It’s the U. S. Constitution. Dad was thinking as did the group he grew up with. It’s all he knew. He pushed back against the belief that every human being is equal and others don’t have to think, act, speak, and believe the same as we do in order to be fellow citizens.”
Jayne listened with awe. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I teach Constitutional Law,” Graham said with a laugh.
“We kids goaded Dad,” Tanny said, “letting him know racism wasn’t acceptable to us and, as Graham says, un-American. Mom did it by calling him ‘Archie.’”
“That was the early 70s and Pastor Lummer was here. He was a really great preacher. Week after week he preached about what Jesus says to our world. He spoke a lot about racism and anti-Semitism, because it was a problem in this city. Dad had always believed in Jesus and the Bible, but slowly his thinking was sharpened and his heart was warmed. Over the decades, instead of denigrating people who were different from him, he began to tolerate them and — not always wholeheartedly — to extend Christ’s love to them. We watched Dad slowly move, slowly being pushed.”
“In a way Tanny and I feel he grew up with us,” Graham said. “We discussed these things often and sometimes argued, but it’s not just that he was losing the household vote of three against one. He really came to understand. Right Mom?” Graham said to Evelyn. Evelyn mumbled a positive response. Tears dropped onto her blouse. She shook her head to chase them away.
“Dad kept the name ‘Archie’ as kind of a badge,” Graham said, “a statement that Jesus can change people. Others began calling him Archie too. His grandkids only know him as ‘Grandpa Archie.’ You’ve probably never heard him called ‘Graham’ or ‘Gray’ have you?”
“Sure haven’t,” Jayne said.
The three younger people became silent. Evelyn was quietly weeping. Tanny stepped to her with a handkerchief and helped dry her tears. Evelyn nodded her thanks. Tanny turned to sit back down and said, “That’s why we’ve chosen the scripture we want read for Dad: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.’ In Dad’s case he even got a new name he claimed and rejoiced in.”
Jayne told her pastors’ cluster that this was the first funeral she’d performed where the biblical text as well as the sermon was supplied by the family.
Preaching point: Christ changes each believer more and more into a new creation.
*****************************************
StoryShare, March 31, 2019, issue.
Copyright 2018 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.
“Second Cutting” by David O. Bales
“Everything Has Become New” by David O. Bales
Second Cutting
by David O. Bales
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
When Rod answered the phone his mother was talking and her voice blasted him, “—elp in the hay.”
“Mom,” he raised his voice into the phone.
She hadn’t heard him and talked over him, “… broke the contract and your dad’s been trying to do everything himself.”
After a couple tries Rod was able to shout his way into her nearly deaf ear and get her to start over. Rod’s parents had retired from farming five years before and leased their hay fields to neighbors. The neighbors, the Swansons, in the middle of haying season broke the contract and moved somewhere Rod couldn’t understand.
“Matthew’s trying to do it himself and he’s too old. Equipment keeps breaking down. You and William need to come help. Please come right now. Be here tomorrow morning.”
Rod tried to explain it was “just impossible,” but she couldn’t hear him. He hung up the phone knowing she hadn’t heard his ‘goodbye.’ It took some first class begging with his boss and extra promises to Flo about a later and better weekend trip, but Rod was in the pickup before light the next morning for a two hour drive to his parents’ farm.
He arrived half an hour before Billie, whom he greeted coldly. Their father was all joy, nearly jumping as he said, “Good to have both the boys back, isn’t it Arleen?”
She answered, “I will, Matthew. I will. Soon as I make the coffee.”
Rod stepped back to gaze at his nuclear family: an irresponsible brother, a mother who couldn’t hear, and a father who repeated, “We’ll work this out somehow.” He thought, “How can I physically survive this? I don’t even jog anymore.”
“The second cutting was down and windrowed and they just left,” Matthew said. “The alfalfa was ready to bale. After two days I started nosing around. Where were the Swansons? They’d skedaddled. Not a word to anybody. When I met the guys for coffee at Pancake Flats, everybody guessed they were running away from debt.”
Matthew had managed to bring their ancient baler back to life — constant problems with the knotter — but his hay picker had broken down years before he retired and he said it was “beyond the reach of mechanic or magician. And there lay the bales, begging to be gathered into the barn. So your mom says ‘call the boys.’ Awful glad you came. Let’s get at it.”
Next to the barn the old man asked who wanted the privilege of spinning the John Deere’s fly wheel. Rod stepped over. His father said, “Remember how to open the petcock and then close it when one cylinder starts?” How could Rod forget? After a strenuous and slightly frightening minute the old Model B began its ‘pop, pop, pop.’ Their farming equipment had always been a month away from the wrecking yard. When their father retired he sold the few pieces that still worked but he couldn’t part with the John Deere. “We can fix it and fix it and it will run for a hundred years.” That was one of his favorite sayings. Another was, always with outstretched arms, “Some day this will all be yours,” a promise the brothers neither requested nor appreciated. Now Matthew climbed painfully onto the tractor’s seat and pointed forward like a general ordering the charge.
The brothers hopped on the back of the flatbed trailer to ride to the field. They’d done the same all their youth, taking turns to drive the tractor from the time they were twelve. Rod was 42 and Billie was 40, but to Rod riding on the trailer was the same as 30 years before. Every year aimed to the alfalfa harvest. The Washington Farmer calendar on their kitchen wall might as well have had its months start with the spring fertilizing, then the regular irrigating which led Matthew to say, how “those beautiful little sprouts started greening the field.” Then every year before they knew it the boys and their father were snaking through the field with tractor and trailer retrieving hundreds of dark green, very heavy bales of alfalfa.
With a clank of the hitch the tractor and trailer now lurched toward the field. The task was so simple that a new hired hand learned it in five minutes — or quit and went home: driving through the bales and tossing them onto the trailer, lacing them row by row, alternating bales like bricks to hold them against the occasional jerking of the clutch. Three crops a season. Rod knew that he and Billie both hoped that by the third cutting this year their father would have arranged for custom cutters. Rod didn’t, however, say this to Billie. The brothers sat next to one another and didn’t speak.
In 15 minutes they’d bounced to the far end of the west field and Matthew turned to start the picking. Rod dreaded what awaited them. Their long sleeves and straw hats offered the slightest of comfort. These bales would surely maim both brothers.
The tractor stopped squarely between two rows of bales. The old man looked back at his sons, his face no longer tanned as it had been in their youth, but his same ridiculous hat flopped so low he had to tip his head back to see higher than the end of the tractor. “Here we go, boys,” he said with that goofy smile that was half a gasp. “Gotta’ make hay while the sun shines.” Another of his favorite sayings.
Rod hopped off to his side of the trailer and Billie to the other. With the trailer empty they were visible to one another and in unison they sank a hook into a bale and dragged it to the trailer, grunting to lift. The tractor tugged through the waiting bales, stopping for the next two. Rod was exhausted after the first row of 12 and was glad it was a short trailer. By the second row the boys were lifting over waist high and Rod expected that Billie was as tired as he was. They’d both been strong boys. Life on the farm guaranteed that. Rod had played on the school teams. Billie was the fastest boy in high school. In his junior year in gym class he set a school record running the 400 meters in gym shoes, not track spikes. Yet he never joined a team. The closest Billie got to organized athletics, Rod thought, was one of many short-lived jobs in a sporting goods store.
The tractor stopped for the fourth layer. Rod wondered if his father would consider driving to the barn with only three layers instead of the four they’d done when they were younger. He walked behind the trailer to see if Billie agreed that three layers were high enough. Billie was at the front of the trailer and Rod watched him snap the bale up, balance it against the third layer, and toss it onto the top, almost like shooting a two hand set shot in basketball. “Alright,” Rod thought, “I guess we go four layers.”
Even with leather gloves, by the third trailer load Rod felt blisters on his uncallused hands. By the fifth load, blisters on each hand had burst, lubricating the inside of his gloves with watery blood. His allergies were kicking in and his resolve to breath through his nose had ended in the first five minutes. He could see that Billie also was breathing through his mouth and both their tongues hung out. He wondered how much longer they could continue. He began to worry about his middle-aged heart.
The more he labored the more he recalled how often he’d had to make up for Billie in the past. He thought of his mother’s saying, “He’ll be better this time. He promises.” Unfortunately, she’d said that at least three times. Billie’s early alcoholism had robbed Rod of a good deal of his childhood and it had left Billie, finally sober at 35, having lost his edge on thinking, slow even balancing his checkbook, unable to remember the phone numbers of his children who lived with his ex-wife. Soon Rod’s past anger began to drive him as he lifted each bale. When they finally finished this horrible work, he was going to inform Billie how much extra labor his irresponsibility had cost him over the years and how many things he’d missed because he was doing the work of two.
He was jerked back to the present because the trailer didn’t stop. It drew away from Rod and Billie and, hooks in their bales, they stood looking at one another. The trailer didn’t stop. They gazed stupidly at it and by 15 yards realized something was wrong. They couldn’t spot their father’s head and the tractor began to turn slightly to the left side. “Dad,” Billie yelled, and they both ran as fast as their worn out legs could move. The trailer had swerved toward Rod’s side. It hit a bale which clipped his leg and knocked him down. He’d just gotten up when he saw Billie’s head appear over the hitch as he leaned forward to pull his dad up. He struggled to reach over him and disengage the clutch.
Arleen and the brothers weren’t allowed to stay with Matthew in the Emergency Room. The small hospital was jammed, so they sat two hours in a hallway as medical personnel shuffled past without a look. Rod didn’t realize it, but he was constantly rubbing one shoulder, arm and wrist and then the other.
Billie said, “Pretty sore?”
Rod gritted his teeth and said, Just tired. I don’t know if I can keep this up.”
“When you’re tired, you need to be extra careful. Halt.”
Rod stared blankly at him.
“‘Halt’ is what we learned in recovery. Stands for ‘Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.’ When you’re any of those you need to guard against abusing alcohol, but also of causing an accident.”
Arleen shouted to the brothers, “What’s going on with Matthew?” Billie stood directly in front of her to state loudly that no one had told them anything. Then he had to move for a cart with food trays to pass.
Billie watched it pass and, when he sat down, leaned to Rod, “When I was out of recovery and trying desperately to stay sober, I worked in a hospital for a year. Mostly mopped floors, disposed of the worst kind of messes, and passed food trays. The worst jobs pay the least. I barely earned enough for a small apartment. Lots of times when I picked up the trays after the patients ate, or didn’t eat, I ate off the trays.”
Rod looked at him with wonder. Billie never told him about his wrestling with alcoholism and he’d never asked. For all the times the police phoned about Billie and for all the times the family visited him in recovery, Rod remained obedient to his parents’ command not to say anything negative about it to Billie. Thus year by year he said less and less until in the last decade he’d hardly spoken to Billie.
“We’ll call it sunstroke for now,” the doctor said when they allowed the three into Matthew’s room. “Not a scientific diagnosis. Certainly dehydration.”
Matthew spoke weakly to the doctor, “We had to make hay while the sun shined.”
The doctor continued facing the family, “We’re giving him IVs and he’s responding. He seems a fairly healthy 70 year old. We’ll run more tests in the morning.”
As the doctor left he held the door for the chaplain to enter. “Nurse said you’d like a prayer here,” she said.
Billie shouted to Arleen that this was the chaplain and she’d come to offer prayer.
“Yes. Good, good,” Arleen shouted back. “Matthew needs prayer.”
After talking with the family for a few minutes, Chaplain Woodly stepped beside the bed and gently took Matthew’s hand. “Matthew, I’m the hospital chaplain and I’m going to pray for you.” Matthew tipped his head on the pillow and gave his goofy gasping smile. Arleen was on the other side of his bed and held his other hand. The chaplain said, “Let’s pray together,” and reached out to Rod. He hesitated only slightly to take her hand while Arleen grabbed Billie’s hand. Arleen glanced at one and then the other of her sons. Then, as though working in tandem on the hay trailer, each looked at his father, and, knowing that their mother wouldn’t hear if they refused, they grabbed the other’s blistered, bloody hand in prayer over their father.
Preaching Point: Hope for broken relationships.
* * *
Everything Has Become New
by David O. Bales
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
In the first year of Jayne’s first pastorate the pastors’ cluster provided her most important instruction in how Christ’s grace was applied in the real world. Every month the seasoned pastors listened, counseled, and prayed for her. At the end of her first year she acknowledged what she would never have guessed when she began: Her second most important source of learning was preparing for funerals. In meeting with loved ones before funerals, she bumped into more convoluted life situations, tortured relationships, and families’ destructive varieties of grieving than she ever imagined: a man whose aunt was disclosed as his mother, a woman whose husband had hidden two previous marriages with five offspring, a man who found that his wife had been ten years older than she claimed, and a woman who had to face another claiming she was currently married to the deceased. Each situation needed a massive infusion of Christ’s grace. Yet, Jayne’s meeting with one family to prepare a funeral was like no other.
During that first year Archie Taunton and his wife Evelyn had been able to attend worship only a few times. Archie needed a walker and Evelyn had suffered a stroke which prevented her speaking. Jayne visited twice in their home and she prayed with Archie three times in the hospital before he died. All her encounters with the Tauntons heartened Jayne with their faith. Now their two children Tanny and Graham had arrived and helped Evelyn into Jayne’s office to plan Archie’s funeral.
Jayne greeted the family and seated them and expressed her condolences. She asked a few questions about where the children now lived and when they’d seen their father last.
“Have you thought about favorite scriptures to be read or people to share memories of Archie?”
“First thing,” Tanny said, “his name wasn’t Archie.”
“Archibald?” Jayne asked?
“His given name was Graham Paul Taunton,” Graham said. “I’m actually ‘Graham Jr.’”
Evelyn nodded to Jayne. Her children seemed smug.
Jayne was puzzled both with the difference in the name and in the way the children told her. She plowed straight ahead, “Sooo….,” which brought a broad smile from the children and a slight grin from Evelyn.
“Archie Bunker,” Tanny said.
“Television,” Jayne said. “Before I was born. He was kind of a loveable bigot?”
“More or less,” Graham said.
“It was when we were kids,” Tanny said. “We watched it every week, right Mom?”
Evelyn nodded, a pained smile on the corners of her mouth.
“We’d only seen it a couple weeks,” Tanny said, “and Mom just started calling Dad ‘Archie.’”
It fit. We grew up hearing him joke about Jews, Poles, Italians and Asians; and he had all kinds of terms for blacks. When boys started wearing long hair, he blipped off about it all the time. Thus, ‘Archie.’ Mom saw the similarity and basically called him on it, but in her nice way.”
“He didn’t see the program the way we did,” Graham said. “We were in middle school and high school with all different kinds of kids. We accepted one another and that’s what school taught and encouraged. It’s the U. S. Constitution. Dad was thinking as did the group he grew up with. It’s all he knew. He pushed back against the belief that every human being is equal and others don’t have to think, act, speak, and believe the same as we do in order to be fellow citizens.”
Jayne listened with awe. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I teach Constitutional Law,” Graham said with a laugh.
“We kids goaded Dad,” Tanny said, “letting him know racism wasn’t acceptable to us and, as Graham says, un-American. Mom did it by calling him ‘Archie.’”
“That was the early 70s and Pastor Lummer was here. He was a really great preacher. Week after week he preached about what Jesus says to our world. He spoke a lot about racism and anti-Semitism, because it was a problem in this city. Dad had always believed in Jesus and the Bible, but slowly his thinking was sharpened and his heart was warmed. Over the decades, instead of denigrating people who were different from him, he began to tolerate them and — not always wholeheartedly — to extend Christ’s love to them. We watched Dad slowly move, slowly being pushed.”
“In a way Tanny and I feel he grew up with us,” Graham said. “We discussed these things often and sometimes argued, but it’s not just that he was losing the household vote of three against one. He really came to understand. Right Mom?” Graham said to Evelyn. Evelyn mumbled a positive response. Tears dropped onto her blouse. She shook her head to chase them away.
“Dad kept the name ‘Archie’ as kind of a badge,” Graham said, “a statement that Jesus can change people. Others began calling him Archie too. His grandkids only know him as ‘Grandpa Archie.’ You’ve probably never heard him called ‘Graham’ or ‘Gray’ have you?”
“Sure haven’t,” Jayne said.
The three younger people became silent. Evelyn was quietly weeping. Tanny stepped to her with a handkerchief and helped dry her tears. Evelyn nodded her thanks. Tanny turned to sit back down and said, “That’s why we’ve chosen the scripture we want read for Dad: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.’ In Dad’s case he even got a new name he claimed and rejoiced in.”
Jayne told her pastors’ cluster that this was the first funeral she’d performed where the biblical text as well as the sermon was supplied by the family.
Preaching point: Christ changes each believer more and more into a new creation.
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StoryShare, March 31, 2019, issue.
Copyright 2018 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.
