Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
June 12, 2005

"Quilting a Faithful Life"

Preached by The Rev. Dr. Barbara Anderson

Scripture:  Matthew 9:35 - 10:3  

It's good to be back in the saddle.  I want to say again what I said last week: thank you for how well you provided help and support to Mark Smutny and me over these past months, yet kept the distance  necessary to allow my heart to heal.

One  year ago in March, my heart was functioning fully.  Then I caught a virus and by Christmas my heart was barely functioning at all.  At New Year's, when I was diagnosed, I was just days away from being in the cardiac care unit in heart failure.  I had absolutely no idea how ill I was the last Sunday I stood in this pulpit.  It took six weeks before Mark and I, and my cardiologist had any confidence that I would survive to the end of each day.  I'll try to make this the only time I say it: Don't do what I did.  Listen to what your body is trying to tell you.  

I've come a long way back.  I do still need to rebuild my stamina and my heart is not yet back to full health. We hope it will continue to improve over the next eight months.  So I will ease slowly back into my responsibilities over the course of the summer, part-time at first, then closer to full-time as fall approaches.  

I've asked Carol Kaufman, one of our administrative assistants, to be my right-hand person on Sundays for a few weeks, so I don't have to run up and down stairs or across the patio very much, and so that when I get really excited about a conversation she can remind me to calm down and save my energy.  Good luck, Carol.

Once again, thank you for your prayers to which I trusted myself every day, your thoughts and cards, gifts and books.  I don't know how Mark and I would have made it through this time without you, and without the strength and love of God that carried us each day.  It is great to be your pastor!

In the last few months, many of you have recommended or shared books with me.  One of those books was "Composing a Life" by Mary Catherine Bateson.  Bateson writes that most us expect life to be a straight line, purposeful towards a particular goal or image we hold in our heads.  We graduate and go on for more degrees, or choose a particular occupation and hope we've found the right one in which we will progress and be happy.  Even if our graduations are long behind us, we still see achievement as a straight-forward progression, monolithic, "like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies" (p.4). 

Even I, who am privileged to share so many other lives, was caught unprepared when my life veered so far off its expected course.  It was a gift to realize that, for most people, life is not a straight line.  It is non-linear, twisting and turning, even bending back on itself, taking us in directions we didn't plan and didn't necessarily want to go.  We lose our job or realize we took the wrong job and need to follow our heart instead.  We have children and our life begins a new series of turns.  Our parents grow old, need our care, and we adjust again.  We grow and change in ways we never dreamed, disappointments crash upon us, opportunities burst upon us, relationships fall apart, new ones grow, illness and death enter our life or the lives of those we love, and our life is changed.  Life is not a straight line.  It's like a patchwork quilt that we make as we decide how to put the pieces together into a pattern that brings beauty and warmth into the world.   

Over lunch one day, I was talking with a friend about how to make sense of and bring good from this illness that had dropped, unwanted, into my life, my life that had seemed to be on a pretty clear path, at least to me.  Later that day, she sent me these words from a woman in one of the hollers of Kentucky.  Aunt Jane is talking about predestination and free will.

"Did you even think, child...how much piecin' a quilt's like livin' a life? And as for sermons, why, they ain't no better sermon to me than a patchwork quilt, and the doctrines is right there a heap plainer'n they are in the catechism.

"Many a time I've set and listened to Parson Page preachin' about predestination and free-will, and I've said to myself, 'Well, I ain't never been through Centre College up at Danville, but if I could jest get up in the pulpit with one of my quilts, I could make it a heap plainer to folks than parson's makin' it with all his big words.'

"You see, you start out with jest so much caliker; you don't go to the store and pick it out and buy it, but the neighbors will give you a piece here and a piece there, and you have a piece left every time you cut out a dress, and you take jest what happens to come. And that's like predestination.

"But when it comes to the cuttin' out, why, you're free to choose your own pattern. You can give the same kind o' pieces to two persons, and one'll make a 'nine-patch' and one'll make a 'wild-goose chase,' and there'll be two quilts made out o' the same pieces, and jest as different as they can be.  

"And that is jest the way with livin.' The Lord send us the pieces, but we can cut 'em out and put 'em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there's a heap more in the cuttin' out and the sewin' than there is in the caliker..." (1)

We have the God-given ability to choose how we will respond to the circumstances of our life, both those that are pleasant and those that are unpleasant. One of the central purposes of Sunday School and Bible study is to help us learn how to choose well, stitching the circumstances of birth, our particular giftedness, our trials, our financial resources, our relationships, and our life experience into a pattern that is faithful to God's purposes, and therefore brings beauty and love into the world no matter what fabric we've been given. We can choose to be selfish or generous with the blessings of our life. We can choose to be bitter or to bring good from our trials.  Our teachers and mentors help us learn how to take whatever fabric we are given and make a beautiful and faithfully quilted life.  

On December 31, I turned 48.  Just five days later, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, told to eliminate all stress from my life, take half-a-dozen prescriptions every day, follow the doctor's orders, and maybe my heart would get better.  Of course, my heart has improved, but we didn't know then it would respond so well.  After I left the doctor, I stopped by the church to give Mark the news, then headed up the hill to Webster's Pharmacy with a handful of prescriptions to be filled.  I sat down to wait.  I was in shock, absolutely stunned at the news and its implications, filled with disbelief.  But not so filled with disbelief that there wasn't room for anger:

"I don't deserve this," I thought.  "I've come through enough.   My life was just opening up in wonderful ways and I'd just gone back to the gym so I could get healthy and strong and hike in the mountains again.  I'm way too young.  This is so unfair."  Many of you know the script.  You've thought the same when your world crashed around you.  

I was having a very angry conversation with God when a man in his late 50's walked by.  He had the gait of a hiker: strong, loose and confident.  My resentment built as I watched him. "It's not fair,"  I said.  "I went back to the gym so I could hike.  Why does he get to be in such good health and I'm not!" 

I tried to talk myself out of my anger and resentment.  "Barbara, you know that people don't get sick because they deserve to get sick.  They just get sick.  You just got sick.  And besides, you don't know what else is going on in that man's life.  Maybe it's filled with grief about which you know nothing at all."  It didn't work.  

As I sat deep in self-pity and anger at God, another man came my direction.  He was probably 20-something, dark-haired and in a wheelchair.  His head tilted to the side. His entire body seemed rigid and his hands were turned in.  With great concentration he pushed the controls to turn his electric wheelchair down the aisle towards the door.  But he bumped into the counter and could move neither forward or back.  He spoke with a garbled voice over his shoulder to his care-giver.  They laughed.  Then she adjusted the angle of his chair, and chatting happily together, they went on their way.  

A lesson of life and faith had just played out in front of me, so hard a lesson that part of me wished I hadn't seen it, but a lesson of hope I knew I needed.  I've had 48 years of a full life and a fully functioning body.  That's a gift for which to say "thanks."   The man in the wheelchair had been dealing with circumstances much more difficult than mine, and for a very long time.  He may never have had the joy of hiking in the mountains, he couldn't even go to the pharmacy by himself.  Most of the things I take for granted in my life would be quite challenging for this man, if he could do them at all.  Yet his joy in that pharmacy, even as he bumped into the counter, was radiant.  Even with his limitations, he had found a path to joy.  

"Okay, God," I said.  "How much my heart recovers is yet to be seen.  But whatever comes, I want to live it with the kind of joy that young man had in this store today, not with the bitterness I felt a few minutes ago.  I am going to do this next part of my life with grace.  And whatever happens, I am going to find a way to live with joy.  That's what we're gonna do, you and I, and you're gonna help, 'cuz it's too way big for me.  You have to help me be like that man in the wheelchair.  You will help me do that." I didn't say "please" that day.  I just demanded God's help in making sense of and bringing good from what has happened.  The "please" and "thank you" have come later.  I'm still trying to live with grace and joy.  

Aren't we all, though?  Isn't each of us trying to choose grace and joy in our life?  No matter our circumstances, in times of obvious abundance, in times of confusion, in times of despair: we each have the choice of how to cut and stitch the fabric of life we've been given.  We have the freedom to stitch our pieces of fabric into a beautiful, faithfully quilted life.   

As Aunt Jane of Kentucky says, "...that is jest the way with livin.' The Lord send us the pieces, but we can cut 'em out and put 'em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there's a heap more in the cuttin' out and the sewin' than there is in the caliker..."1  Amen.

(c) Copyright 2005 by Barbara A. Anderson.  All rights reserved.  
Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.  

(1) "Aunt Jane of Kentucky" by Eliza Calvert Hall in "Cries of the Spirit," Marilyn Sewell, ed..