Keeping Faith with our Ancestors
Scripture: 2 Timothy 1:3-7, Hebrews 11:1-3, 12:1-2
Good morning, everyone! Today I am joining in our worship via a recording I made here at the church yesterday. Covid hit our home this week, and I am not quite far enough along in recovery to re-join the world yet. It does feel like a blast from the past to be preaching to a camera again, after the year and a half we spent doing that at the beginning of the pandemic. But it sure is handy to have this option still when we need it. I will miss being present and lighting candles in the sanctuary today, but we know that our community always does extend well beyond those who are here on a Sunday morning anyway.
So, “Keeping Faith With Our Ancestors”. These days the idea of ancestry is having a bit of a moment. Fueled by websites like ancestry.com and 23andme, folks are signing up in droves to swab their DNA and find out what the magic of laboratory science can reveal about their family history. It’s amazing what they can isolate and discover about the ethnicities and geographies that we’ve come from. Some of us have a pretty good idea of our family stories and backgrounds already, but many don’t. And there’s something understandably compelling about making these connections to the places and the communities of our ancestors.
There is a bit of healthy corrective in this newfound fascination, I think. Too often we’ve struggled to see the past in continuity with our present. As a whole, our culture does not always remember its stories well or recall that we are each part of a much bigger picture that extends backwards and forwards through time. We live like we owe our ancestors nothing, and our children even less. We struggle to learn the lessons of history and pass down anything of lasting value.
So there may be something good about this trend that brings our ancestors and our connections closer to mind. Those who have gone before remain a part of us in important ways, and not only through the strands of DNA that mark our biological relationships. That veil between worlds, between the past and the present, is probably thinner than we think. We are, as the writer of Hebrews says, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.
Did you notice Paul’s references to ancestors in the opening verses of 2 Timothy? “I am grateful to God”, he writes, “whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did, when I remember you in my prayers.” And then he goes on to connect his young friend Timothy back through the links of his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois, from whom he has received a profound and sincere faith.
Now, we know that faith isn’t only passed down from parent to child. There’s a lot more than biology that’s keeping God’s people together. When the writer of Hebrews calls to mind that great cloud of witnesses, he goes back to Abram, to Moses, to Rahab and to others from the witness of scripture. And when we think of ancestors in faith we might as easily think of those in the early days of the Anabaptist movement or of this particular congregation. The traditional Christian way of talking about this describes a great communion of saints. United across time and space in the body of Christ, we claim and receive as our ancestors all those whose faith we now inherit.
This is something that mailing a swab away to ancestry.com will never capture. Ancestry isn’t just a matter of blood and ethnicity and geography. It’s also a matter of spiritual connections. Many of us have had mentors and guides and companions on our journeys of faith that extend beyond our own families. Or teachers whose writings have shaped us profoundly even if we’ve never met them in person.
And yet we know that there is also something important about our biological links and ancestral connections. It does matter who our parents and grandparents are, who our people are, where on this earth we come from. Those who have been cut off from the family of their birth for whatever reason often find themselves on a pilgrimage of discovery at some point in their lives, looking to find and reclaim roots that were lost. I think especially of indigenous children removed from their communities, whether through the residential school system or through fostering and adoption. For so many, the process of rediscovering family, identity, land and ceremony is critical to healing and wholeness.
It’s interesting to read the genealogies that are included in a number of places in the Bible. Lists of generations connecting the past to the writer’s present. These genealogies are both biological and spiritual. They name who was born to who – usually fathers and sons, though also a few very interesting mothers – but they also claim spiritual ancestry that needn’t be too tightly tied to precise birth records. They are faith formation tools as much as anything else, connecting different parts of the story of God’s people.
Paul shares a very brief genealogy in the opening of his second letter to Timothy. One that also holds together ancestries of blood and of faith. “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you” (2 Tim 1:5). It’s a beautiful image of maternal care and formation that has been passed down and now lives in Timothy. And Paul is confident that Timothy will be able to keep faith with these ancestors as his own faith is rekindled day to day by the grace of Jesus Christ.
As I reflected on Timothy’s mother and grandmother, I couldn’t help but think of my own. My faith has a number of roots that go back in different directions, but I can very truthfully give thanks for a faith that lived in my grandmother Helen and my mother Margaret, and now by God’s grace lives in me.
This maternal grandmother Helen died a few years ago, and remains the most recent significant death in my extended family. So I will be thinking of her as we light candles this morning, and thought I’d share a bit about this ancestor with whom I am trying to keep faith. Perhaps others have their own “Eunice and Lois” stories that could be shared as well.
My grandmother was born Helen Pauls in 1930, in a small town in Manitoba, to parents who immigrated from the Mennonite colonies of Ukraine in the 1920’s. She grew up mainly in southern Alberta, where her family moved while she was still a child. Helen’s mother’s relatives had settled first on farms near Coaldale Alberta, but the story goes that they had all been teachers and preachers in their previous life and were useless at farming. So they implored their Pauls inlaws, themselves much more accomplished farmers, to move out west and help them.
When Helen grew up, she did nursing training and made plans to work overseas as a missionary nurse. Life didn’t quite end up following these designs, as her plans were interrupted by an unexpected romance.
In 1955, Helen married Victor Dick, a family friend in Coaldale. Their wedding was on September 11, and on September 12 they got on a train and left for Winnipeg where Victor was to start medical school immediately. Helen worked in the maternity ward of the hospital there.
Victor and Helen had five kids, my mother Margaret being the oldest and the first of four children in four years. It was undoubtedly a busy home for Helen, with all those little ones and a husband who worked long hours as a family physician. They lived in a couple of small Manitoba towns through the 1960’s, before moving to Abbotsford BC in 1971. In large part, a move seeking a friendlier climate for their youngest child, who lived with debilitating asthma.
Victor and Helen never left Abbotsford, and so for all of my growing up they were known to me as “Grandma and Grandpa in BC”. We lived in Winnipeg, so this was a long-distance grandparent relationship. But I loved visiting them in Abbotsford. Their home was pretty much my favorite place in the world as a child. And they came to visit us in Winnipeg often – whenever there was a special occasion or important event, they were there.
Grandma always spent a lot of time bustling around the kitchen. She was forever cooking and cleaning, worried about getting things ready for whichever crowd happened to be around. And there were often crowds, as they hosted out of town family and local connections. That’s me in this picture, sitting with Grandma at the kitchen counter during a period of months when my family was staying at my grandparents home.
When the family got together, the game was always Rook. It was my Grandpa’s favorite, and Grandma would always protest that she was no good at it and try to avoid playing. But we would convince her, and invariably she’d sit on her hands, take no risks, and slowly rise to the top of the scores.
Grandma was also famous for her greeting cards. She had an extensive birthday calendar, and faithfully wrote cards to a very wide array of family and friends for years.
She’d find cards with greetings or poems inside, and then underline the words or lines that she particularly wanted to emphasize. She sent this one to me when our youngest, Caroline, was born.
Every morning grandma would turn on the weather channel and watch carefully for the forecast in the many places where her children and grandchildren had wandered away too. And that was a lot of places over the years. At one time or another, she had kids in Calgary, Winnipeg, Newfoundland, Detroit, Nepal, France, Zaire, Japan, Argentina, Chile, Peru and doubtless others I’ve missed. She watched the forecasts every morning and prayed diligently for her family.
And she visited her kids in each place, no matter how far away or remote. Here she is with me in Zaire, during the years that my family lived there when I was young.
Grandma also had a deep commitment to the life of her church, and especially to supporting church workers and missionaries. Her fridge was always covered in prayer cards and thank you notes. Her faith was expressed daily in prayer and service, offering her home and her resources and her time wherever they were needed.
Sometime in my late 20’s, Grandma began to develop dementia. She and Grandpa moved out of their spacious condo and into a small assisted living apartment. She became more and more confused over the years, which triggered her own anxieties as well. These were difficult years of parent care for her kids, and my Mom made frequent trips to BC to do her part, alongside her regular trips to Ontario to visit us. They were also difficult years for my Grandpa, who carried the primary weight of her day to day care.
I am forever grateful, however, that she was able to meet and enjoy each of my three children in her final decade of life. BC is a long way from Ontario, but we tried to make the trip every year or two so the connections would still be there.
On one of my last visits before she died, Grandma was in a particular good space as I was saying goodbye. We stood at the entrance to her assisted living complex, and had a little moment. She told me that nothing that has been is lost. I’m not even sure what she meant by it, or whether she knew herself. But I took it to be a reminder that even as she lost her memory, even as she came to the end of her life, all the richness and beauty that had been remains. Even if the next time I saw her, she might not know who I was.
And I thought of the song that we’ll sing after we’ve lit our candles this morning: Nothing is lost on the breath of God – nothing is lost forever. (VT 653)
What does it mean to keep faith with our ancestors? I think part of it is remembering that in the grace and love of God, what has gone before remains a part of us and a part of the world. Nothing gets lost forever. We are sustained by a witness of faith that is a gift from mothers and grandmothers, but also from a great cloud of those across time and space who through Christ remain our examples and companions. We keep faith as we remember and give thanks for these ancestors who accompany us in our own walks of life.
As we prepare now to light our candles of memory and hope, we’re going to receive a song by Larry and Marcia Shantz called “Angel Band”. It’s a recording they prepared for the celebration of life for Maurice Brubacher, son of the late Curtis and Alice Brubacher, in February of this year. You can find a version of this song at Voices Together 662, where its titled “My Latest Sun is sinking fast.”