Evergreen
Evergreen
The Christmas tree is up, decorated, and lit at the Shirey apartment. All this thanks to Jennie who returned from a hiatus in Lexington for appointments and checking on the house with an assortment of Christmas décor just right for our little place. A six-foot garland runs up the banister leading upstairs. Braids of the holly and the ivy span the top of our window frames. A strand of gold tinsel fronts the television bookended by red poinsettias. A wicker basket sits perched on an ottoman for any Christmas cards that get forwarded to us by the USPS in time for Christmas. There’s a three-foot high stuffed Santa for our three-foot two-year-old to meet when he comes for Christmas. Jennie bought a nativity set at the SERVV store (fair trade international crafts) that was peddling its wares last Sunday in our church’s Fellowship Hall, its whimsical figures sculpted out of felt. And next to the couch on the end table is our tree which measures a little less than three feet and is adorned with a couple dozen ornaments, including our most recent.
There are stories behind most of our ornaments, most of which remain in a box in our Lexington garage. There are a few from Jennie’s childhood including a pudgy-cheeked elf in a pink frock coat. Ornaments from my early years include a half dozen ornate beaded ones with a faux Victorian vibe my grandmother Clarabelle made fifty years ago during her one and only foray into arts and crafts. Of course, we have the ones our kids made. They’re showing their age. A doily-skirted angel with the face of 5-year-old Laura sporting the bowl cut bangs for which she has never forgiven her mother. Will as Santa, his round boyish face sporting a cotton beard and glued atop the requisite red coat, trousers, and black boots.
Our favorite Betsy ornament didn’t make the trip. When she was little, Betsy came home from church one Sunday with one of those Sunday School specials of the construction paper and Elmer’s glue variety. We smiled, said it was really nice, and asked her who it was. John the Baptist was the answer, or as Betsy pronounced it back then, Johnna-Battist. Well, we’ve kept ‘ol Johnna through the years and when the tree goes up, we hoist him to his perch in the upper boughs. You might ask, “Who wants a guy in a leather girdle with an appetite for locusts and honey shouting from the top of their tree, ‘Repent, you brood of vipers!’” and you’d have a point.
I could go on with all our other ornaments and their sentimental pedigree and you could do the same for yours, I’m sure.
The new addition to our tree this year is a 3” diameter wreath composed of swatches of multicolored green fabric squares sporting tiny white pom poms sprinkled with silver glitter and capped with a white ribbon bow. I bought it two weeks ago from its maker at the Christmas bazaar in the Fellowship Hall of Columbia’s downtown First Christian Church where Laura and her husband Ryan are members.
First, the back story. Yours truly was tapped to preach the sermon on Youth Sunday 1975 at Central Christian Church in Warren, Ohio. I have no memory as to why. What I do remember is the following:
My text was “God is love” from 1 John 4:7-11.
I was nervous. Sick at my stomach, knee-knocking nervous.
My dad, who rarely came to church, came that Sunday and told me after the service, “You talked so fast I couldn't understand you” (cf. the nerves above).
Jay Stevenson, who with his wife Mona had been my middle school youth group sponsors, had me stand in the pulpit after worship so he could take my picture. The photo Jay took 48 years ago is on our family room wall in Lexington now.
Fast-forward 48 years from Jay’s photo. After my first Sunday as Interim Lead Pastor at Broadway Christian Church on July 9, as I greeted everyone at the door of the sanctuary, I looked up, looked into the faces of two people standing before me, and couldn’t believe my eyes. Jay and Mona Stevenson. They now live in Fayette, MO, 30 miles northwest from here. Somehow, they heard I was coming to Broadway and drove down to Columbia to welcome me.
Now fast-forward 5 months from July to the bazaar at the church where I ambled up to a table of Christmas crafts, looked up at the proprietor of the table, and there stood Mona peddling her wares, including the wreath I bought to hang on my tree in this and future years to remind me of the person who patiently sowed gospel seed in my squirming adolescent ears, whose husband snapped a photo of my first sermon 48 years ago, and who with him made a drive to be there for sermon #1,895 a year before I’m eligible for Medicare.
We’re a long way from home this Advent, but thanks to her homemaking touch Jennie went to Lexington and got us a Christmas to go, a carry out order of just enough red, green, gold and silver memorabilia to do what this season does: awaken our memory of precious people and places. Johnna Battist. My grandmother Clarabelle. Laura and her bowl cut bangs. Cotton-bearded Will.
It’s no coincidence the wreath ornament Mona made and the tree on which it hangs are evergreen, a word that connotes things that are steadfast, undying, perennial, always there.
“Lo, I will be with you always” says the One whose coming the ornaments herald, to whom I was introduced half a century ago by such as Jay and Mona, whose presence and teachings – theirs and his – remain evergreen.
