Giants in the Earth

                                                         All Saints Day

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

                                                                                                Matthew 5:8

            Frederick Buechner, who is a much beloved and well read author of books about the Christian experience, wrote one which is titled, The Sacred Journey. It is the story of his childhood and some of the formative experiences which he had while growing up. For Buechner, life is a sacred journey filled with messages from God. Everyone has to make the journey, but not everyone gets the messages. In the opening chapter of this short memoir, he writes of the giants of his childhood, who literally “held up the world” for him. It would be Buechner’s conviction that all of us have known people like that, i.e. “giants” who took our world on their shoulders for a space of time.

            The Church has had its share of giants during its long history. We call them saints. The ones we know best lived during the early formative years of the infant Church. St. Peter and St. Paul would be examples of well known early Christian saints.   Every parish church during its history has had faithful members whose commitment and hard work kept that church alive and enabled its Christian witness. Many of them fall into the category of saints who have been long forgotten. This morning I would like to tell you the story of two people, both women as it happens, whose lives made a significant difference for two parish churches with which I have been associated during my life time.

Miss Murphy

            The first church is my home parish, St. George’s in Bismarck, North Dakota. Many of the details of my early years in that church are vague, but one memory which isn’t is my recollection of our choir. I can still see those people processing down the center aisle as though it were yesterday. The choir at St. George’s was – I suspect – like untold numbers of other small church choirs. Everyone in the choir didn’t have a great voice. As little kids we would sometimes snicker when some of the ladies hit sour notes. The men compensated for their lack of talent with volume. The thing which makes a church choir significant are the people who Sunday after Sunday and year after year show up and put on their choir robes and support the liturgy in that so valuable part of the worship life of the church. Where would we be without music?

            One of the great saints of my parish church sang in that choir. For the fifteen years that I belonged to that church, I can never remember seeing the choir sing without her.  Time would have stopped! Her name was Rita Murphy or Miss Murphy as she was respectfully addressed by everyone. She taught freshman English at Bismarck High. She never married. In those years it seemed like there were a large number of single women who gave their lives to teaching. At the beginning of the school year, Miss Murphy would tell each group of her students the one cardinal rule in her classes. It was: “Books open and mouths shut!” I believe she taught at Bismarck High for almost forty years. She was a legend in her own time. I never heard much about her background. She originally was from Grafton, North Dakota, a small town in the northeaster quadrant of our state. Something was said at one time that she had had a brother Lloyd who died in WWII when the hospital ship on which he was a patient was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese in the Pacific. When we knew her, she had no family, only the church, which for her seemed to be more than enough. There is a message in that!

            As I say, she was always in church every Sunday year after year. In our minds, St. George’s would not have been St. George’s without her. She had a big voice and the ability to almost dictate the tempo of the singing. She was a chaperone of the high school choir when it went on its annual tour. My brother and I were in the choir and on Sunday during the tour when the fifty or so Scandinavians went off to find a Lutheran church, Miss Murphy said to Tom and I, “Come on, boys!” and off we would go to the Episcopal Church. Those small congregations never knew what hit them when Miss Murphy strode in, picked up the singing, and took it in the direction she wanted to go. She was a good soul who didn’t have a mean bone in her body and didn’t believe anyone else did either. She was a beacon of stability for our parish church.

            In 1968, when it came time for me to leave for my first year in seminary, the night before I left, she called me up to wish me well and to tell me how proud she was of me. I found out several months later that, at the time she called, she knew that she was dying of cancer. She did die during my first year at seminary and the church was never the same without her. She did however greatly impact St. George’s after her death. She left our little parish church over half a million dollar and in 1968 that was a lot of money. She lived frugally as a single teacher and apparently handled her money very well. Because of her commitment in life and in death, St. George’s has been able to continue its corporate life of witness, a task which would have been very difficult without the support of the Rita Murphy Foundation, her bequest to the church.

Ann Lassey 

            In 1974 I returned to North Dakota to take a look at two churches who were interested in having me come and be their priest. (St. Peter’s was a parish and St. Michael & All Angel’s was a mission) My first Sunday there, I was driven out forty miles into the country to the mission church, by a couple named Julius and Ann Lassey. Over the course of my time there - over fourteen years - they became very close friends of mine and almost acted as surrogate parents for me. Everyone thinks that the clergy come to lead the church armed with all they need to know. Actually, it is the churches who train the clergy and not the seminaries. Young clergy in particular need a great deal of support and often guidance from older members and the Lasseys provided that for me. Julius died about half way through my fourteen years there. From that time on, Ann assumed a large leadership role in our congregation. She was a person whose life defined goodness and kindness. I did a lot up there to keep with two congregations to keep them moving and not stagnating. Whenever I would begin one of those projects – a nursery school for example – Ann would call me up and tell me she wanted to see me. I would go over and she would tell me that if we needed some extra money to get things off the ground, she would provide it. She owned a lot of land and the minerals were all leased to oil companies. One time she called me up and said, “Richard, I just drove by the church and saw poor Les Walling dragging hoses around to water the lawn. (St. Peter’s was on a large corner lot.) She continued, “Get an estimate on an automatic sprinkler system and then come and see me.” In short order, we had a completely computerized sprinkler system with nine zones, and shortly thereafter, one of the best looking lawns in town. She was a person who was always positive and cheerful. I have a picture of her which is a cherished possession.

            In 1989, about two months before we left the area to move to St. Louis, Ann became seriously ill. After admission to the hospital, she lapsed into a coma. It was Easter Sunday. Liz and I got a call from the hospital that she had died and they wanted me to come up. Suddenly we heard a great deal of commotion on the phone and someone said, “My God, she’s still alive!” Liz and I went running up to see her. We will never forget it. We were in her room with her stepdaughter Bonnie and a few other close friends of hers. All of a sudden Ann came to and sat up in bed. She said something like, “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone I love is in this room.” We visited with her for a while and she was perfectly lucid. She told us all how much she cared for us and what our being there meant to her. Shortly after we all left, she fell back into a coma and died a few hours after midnight. The people at the hospital had never seen anything like it and neither had I. She was a remarkable woman. It was as if God had given her a few extra hours to say her last goodbyes.

            I made the following statement at her funeral: “One of the most powerful images in the New Testament is that of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. To define his role, Jesus told the touching story of the shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep untended and went off in search of one that was lost. Why? It is because of the immeasurable value of just one life. I have seen the truth of this played out in my years in leading parish churches. Who can ever really accurately estimate the value and the consequences of their own life and the lives of others which touch theirs? Many or all of us here this morning can probably testify to the value of one life which touched ours.

            So God bless Rita Murphy and Ann Lassey, giants & saints in the church, whose lives for a time held up the world in which I lived. I tell you their stories on All Saint’s Sunday to make the point to you of the potential effect that one life – possibly your life – can have in the lives of others.

            The celebration of All Saint’s reminds us that nothing is ever really lost in this world. Lives of commitment and faith go on touching the lives of others long after death. Life is not meaningless! Love, faith, and commitment – all of these things count for much! They are acts of personal witness to the love shown to the world in the life of Jesus Christ and they will not be forgotten.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.