Mary Angevine's Gift

Midway through our time in Ohio, where I was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pataskala, two things happened simultaneously. While not related, they came together in an odd moment in my office. The first was a broken furnace-actually, a leaking furnace which was detected by a cardon monoxide device and headaches. The second was Kathy became pregnant with our fourth child, Ethan. How these two came together was the clerk of session, Mary Angevine.

Mary heard I declined the offer of the session to install air conditioning in the manse when the furnace was replaced.  Didn't need it; too expensive; air conditioning makes me nervous. When Mary heard this, declining the offer even though my wife was pregnant and the brutal midwestern summer was fast approaching, she marched into my office and slammed her checkbook down on my desk. After writing a check for $5000 she looked me dead in the eye and said, "you're an idiot, put in the air conditioning." She walked out.

In Mary's defense she is just one in a rather robust cast of wise elders who have revealed my folly.  She is a great example of why the church must be led by elders.  To her credit she was rarely this caustic.  Always blunt, but rarely demeaning or disparaging.  On more than one occasion Mary saved me with her wit and clarity; she seemed to intuit my preference for words without subtly or subterfuge.

              I am struck, when I remember her, by how many lessons, how many times she changed my life in a brief span of time.  If I were a sermon-series-preacher, I could fill many a Sunday with the gifts she gave to me.  Today I would like to offer two.  Two of her gifts cast a great light on the teaching of Jesus we read.  The first light was how she revealed the power of guilt and remorse. 

              I encountered the power of grief and remorse as she recounted the great tragedy of her life.  Mary lost a young son, killed on his bike just down the hill from their farm.  The young boy was much like Mary, strong willed, onery, unbending.  They had a row and he stormed off.  I could tell as Mary told this story it was in the moment he turned away where she found the limit of life, the ability to control, the inability that is.  She would give anything to turn back the clock to the moment in the argument when her son stormed off, if only she could have lived it differently.

              Yet, the tragedy was increased because as her son rode down the hill and blindly entered a county road he was struck by their next-door neighbor.  Both her son and the neighbor died that day.  Her son died instantly; the neighbor would die slowly of shame and guilt and remorse over the next few decades. 

              It was what Mary said to him, pleaded with him to believe that changed how I look at guilt and shame.  She begged him not to blame himself.  Blame her; blame her son.  Blame anyone except yourself.  How many times she went to this neighbor and tried to convince him she bore him no anger, no ill will, no fault.  But her words were powerless, and the once jovial man became withdrawn, slowly dying of shame, guilt.

              I believe Mary shared this heartbreak with me decades after the fact as a way of helping me see her heart; I would come to see there are people for whom tragedy makes for a fierce hold on life, a tenacity, a courage because you now fear nothing.  She could be blunt, terse, rude ever without the fear that keeps others silent for she feared nothing.

              I also believe Mary shared her loss with me so I would be a better pastor, a better human being.  She wanted me to see the power of guilt and shame, see it for the demon it is, see the destruction regret can bring, help me to appreciate the need for freedom from shame.  If I was going to say, "your sins are forgiven" I should know how heavy they can be; how hard they can be to cast aside.

              Another gift Mary Angevine gave me was a book.  A green hardback, folio sized book with glossy pages.  The book was filled with images of trees.  Deciduous trees and evergreens of North America.  The evergreens had photos of the cones and needles so the would-be-arborist can distinguish the spruce from the fir.  And the deciduous trees were shown in bloom, leafed, and out of foliage, bare. It was in this book my growing love of trees came to fruition.  Here I could learn the difference between the oaks and the maples; I learned where the sycamores grow and how a beech tree holds onto its leaves in the winter after they die, making them easy to find in a forest. 

              Mary's father gave her this book when she was a young woman.  Had her son lived I imagine Mary would have given this book to him.  I didn't connect those dots until after she died.  How she might have treated me a bit like the son she lost as I would have been close in age and temperament.  She reveled in my curiosity, something I shared with her, and I guess she shared with her son which made for their constant clashes.

              In the green folio book with the glossy black-in-white photos my interest in trees became an abiding love.  Perhaps the greatest love was to learn the beauty of the barren tree.  The gray trunk of the beech; the thick white limbs of the sycamore.  The way an old oak tree seems to crack the cloudy, dark winter sky and form its own silhouette.  I don't walk a street, amble a field, stand in a backyard and not live from this book.  From Mary's gift the world became filled with such wonderful and curious things to see. Trees everywhere.

              You can see how when I read the teaching of Jesus, how there are good trees and bad trees, good fruit of trees and trees that bare bad fruit, you can see how I might find the memory of Mary and her gift filling my heart.  Yet, as a great gift will often provide, I was amazed at how the teaching of Jesus is illumined not only by the book about trees but also how her loss, her graciousness, and its failure casts a light on this teaching as well.

              There are two parts to consider here.  First is that there are many trees.  And the trees can be identified.  There are not two types of trees, but many trees, many varieties.  As is often the case with Jesus, his teachings can be reduced to a poor appraisal, to a division which paints people in poor light.  There are good trees and bad trees, but this does not mean there are good people and bad people.  Nor does it mean that the people who do good things are good trees and people who do wrong are bad trees. 

              As my children will tell you having endured many a tree lecture in a zoo or a forest or just about anywhere you find a tree, there are many, many types of trees.  Walk slowly through our cemetery today and you will be able to count at least thirty different types of trees.  Everything from the gingko to the red oak, the pine and the fir, the spruce and the cedar. To best understand what Jesus means when he talks about trees, think of your heart like that cemetery, you contain many different types of trees.  Think of your heart as having a tree of wisdom and a tree of folly, trees of mercy and compassion and kindness and trees of madness and hatred and revenge.  Like Wittman said, I contain multitudes. 

              This is the first thing we need to consider.  There is in us both good and bad planted deep in our heart.  In each of us are memories that ruin us and memories that sustain us, keep us from ruin.  In us there are dreams and hopes and yearnings that free us and the same sort that incarcerate us in fear.  You and I contain multitudes.  We cannot be reduced to a good one or a bad one, a good person or a bad person.  Not even close to what Jesus meant.

              The second thing to consider is tricky, it is the irony of the teaching. Jesus says, would anyone expect a good tree to bear bad fruit and a bad tree to bear good fruit?  The question is parabolic for the answer is: we all do this.  We all expect good things to come from our anger.  We shout and rage and threaten and condemn all the while we think, well, that will show them; that will fix them.  We expect good fruit to come from a bad tree.

              The same is true of a good tree, we fear what damage will be done.  If I am forgiving, if I am patient, if I embrace the outcast, what terrible things can happen?  If I am loving, will people see me as weak and take advantage of me?  If I share my joy, will it just be mocked or trampled?  How much we trust greed and possessiveness and avarice all the while believing such trust is the way we will succeed, get what we want or keep what we have.  How often do we dread the prospect of generosity believing it will ruin us? 

              Generosity is a good tree; generosity bears good fruit.  Yet how often do we fear generosity, both in the giving and the receiving?  Anger is a bad tree; anger bears bad fruit.  Nothing good comes from anger, it is ever and only destruction, but how often do we expect our anger to keep us safe, to right a wrong, to gain an upper hand? 

              Mary Angevine was a very generous person.  She gave a lot to me, and she gave a lot to the church.  Her gift of the new air conditioner was a great moment for a mother with a newborn son in a hot Ohio summer.  She not only provided for a better life, but she also helped me see the difference between sacrifice and stupidity, how not to confuse them.  Good lesson.

              Maybe my love for trees would have grown without her gift.  But the book is a wonderful part of my life and a door to a storehouse of memories much than the oak or maple variety.

              Yet, the gift emerging so often is how she shared her tragedy and how she tried to free her neighbor from guilt and shame.  For in her failure, I could see how the tree of guilt and the tree of shame and the tree of remorse, how these trees bear terrible fruit.  Imagine the weight the neighbor carried.  Imagine the pain of living next door to the reminder of such tragedy.  No matter how much she tried to assuage his guilt, her words didn't heal him.  The words failed because the neighbor could no longer see the multitude of trees in him, the love and the joy and the freedom in his heart.  He ate from bad trees; he only ate the fruit of guilt and shame.

              From time to time, we all taste the bitter fruit of our misdeed, failure, or painful memories.  We do. Yet you and I contain multitudes, so many trees.  We must be wise and not expect the bad trees to bear good fruit.  God is not going to make a heaven out of our hell.  We must remember and taste the good fruit from the great trees in us.  They are in us.  May we learn to nurture them, trust them, taste them as delight.  Amen.