Isaiah 55:8-12; Matthew 10:5,7
Guest Preacher Rev. Jill Job Saxby
Joe was on a mission. It was just an ordinary late afternoon, the skies darkening with the threat of rain. And here was Joe, age 78, climbing into his ten year old Chrysler, setting out with a sense of purpose, fueled in roughly equal parts by love and exasperation. As he carefully backed out of the driveway, trying to see around the overgrown azalea bush on the corner, Joe had a sense of being sent forth on a mission. Sent out into the fading light and the growing, hissing drizzle to bring back a very particular brand of orange juice favored by Mary, love of his life and his wife of 47 years. For some time, Mary’s memory had been slipping sideways and off the edge of her world, getting worse this past year. Mary sometimes had a hard time remembering who Joe was now, but she remembered her favorite orange juice, and she had asked for it all day, over and over again, forgetting she’d just been told they were all out. When the caregiver had arrived at 4:30 that afternoon, Joe had decided he’d had enough. He would go out and, come hell or high water, buy some of that juice and bring it back for her.
As he drove into town, squinting a little to see the road, Joe found himself musing on all the times in his long life he’d felt he’d been sent forth on a mission.
Sent off to kindergarten at age five, to be initiated into the mysteries of school glue and consonants and why a triangle is not a circle but they are both useful for building whole worlds out of construction paper.
Sent out, a few years later — a skinny, too-tall, shy eighth-grader — onto the school basketball court. Told in no uncertain terms by Coach to return with his shield or on it. Pushed out there, really, by the mountain of expectations and embarrassments, desires and dreads that pile up on a person by the time he turns thirteen. Seemed like the end of the world, or maybe the beginning, back then, but now Joe found he couldn’t remember the final score in the big game that year.
As the rain picked up, Joe made a careful right on red, turning onto the main road into town now, trying to pay better attention to the traffic. But soon he was reliving in his mind’s eye the day he’d been sent off to college. The first in his family to go. He was supposed to come back with enough knowledge to make a useful living with his head and not with his hands. This was his mission then: to redeem the sacrifices of his parents and grandparents, and the countless generations before them, men and women, who had survived by endless physical labor, at home, on the farm, in the factory. All so that he, Joe, could be born, survive childhood and go off to enroll at the state university.
Joe thought about those previous generations every spring, when the snow melted and his suburban lawn yielded up the most spectacular crop of dandelions and dog droppings in the neighborhood. Sweating over his yardwork, Joe would gaze up and imagine those farmer ancestors looking down from heaven, clucking their tongues over what they had begotten: a dandelion farmer.
But Joe had achieved the job at a desk. A few years later, he’d met Mary, gotten married, the kids came along. Three of them: a girl, a boy, another boy. By the time Joe had arrived at middle-age, he’d been sent on more errands, quests and missions than he could remember – and a few wild-goose chases, too.
Now, as he drove past the playground near their old neighborhood, Joe smiled, remembering the time he’d been sent out at midnight armed only with a small flashlight and a commission to find his young daughter’s favorite teddy bear, left behind that afternoon. There would be no sleeping in the house that night until the prodigal teddy bear had returned. He’d searched in the moonless night, tripping over see-saws and sand-pits, but had finally found the beloved bear. Joe had come out of that one feeling like a true hero.
Joe often wondered these days how his now middle-aged children remembered their childhoods, if their memories of those years were as sweet-scented and tender as his. But then, he realized, he’d only ever really known his children with the mind of a parent; just as he’d only ever really known his own mother and father as their child. Do we ever see anyone else whole and clear?
For a few adolescent years there, the middle boy nearly sent Joe and Mary off the rails, into a ditch of worry and grief. Drugs, the wrong friends, collect calls at 3 a.m. from the local jail, constant trouble that lasted nearly a decade. That boy had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Joe found himself wondering for the millionth time if there had been some single, crucial moment he had missed with his middle child, some day when he had been too busy, hands full, head turned the other way; a moment when he could have yelled out, like a frantic back-seat driver clutching the map, “no! no! don’t go that way! Watch out!” And everything would have been different.
Now Joe, behind the wheel, realized that the traffic and the rain had both thickened. He turned the windshield wipers up a notch. It was that time of day before it really gets dark, the time when you start to think, “it’s going to get dark soon, but it hasn’t yet.” Joe realized that if Mary was with him she would have told him about two miles ago to let up on the gas. How often he would have gotten lost or worse without Mary. Like that time they’d gone camping, just the two of them, out west, at Big Sur. They’d arrived at the entrance gate just before sunset. While Mary used the facilities, Joe went to get them checked in. By the time he came back to the car, it was really quite dark. Joe got in, started driving the dirt road to their site, talking non-stop about his chat with the park ranger. After about five miles, he started to feel just a little annoyed that Mary didn’t seem very enthusiastic. So he turned to say, “well, whaddya think?” And only then realized that Mary was not, in fact, in the car at all.
It was a long five mile drive back to the gate, where he found Mary, patiently waiting, knowing he’d return, forgiving him before he got there. “At least you eventually noticed!” Mary would say whenever they told the story later.
Now Joe forced himself to focus on today’s mission. He was always on the lookout for things he could use to build bridges for Mary, back to the solid world they had navigated together for so long. The taste of this particular juice worked that way, he’d discovered. It never lasted but it was worth it for the look on her face after that first sip. If you can build a world out of paper triangles and circles, Joe thought, maybe you can build a bridge out of orange juice cartons.
Unfortunately, they no longer carried Mary’s favorite juice at the giant Walmart store where Joe now did all their grocery shopping alone. So now, here he was, pulling in to a spot at the small grocery store in the center of town, the one that always seemed on the verge of going out of business, the only one that still sold Mary’s particular orange juice. Since he was rarely here at this hour, Joe was surprised to find the place crowded. Lots of people stopping in on the way home, to pick up something they’d forgotten to buy elsewhere.
A few minutes later, Joe stood in the check-out line, clutching two cartons of Mary’s orange juice in his hands. As he waited, he wondered how long his own grocery list would be if it only listed all the things he’d forgotten over the years. The line edged forward. The cartons were getting a little slippery. Joe shifted them awkwardly into his arms.
Maybe, Joe thought, that’s what St. Peter really presents you with when it’s finally your turn at the pearly gates. A list of all the things you’ve forgotten in life: letters not mailed, bread not bought, votes you forgot to cast, people you forgot to say “sorry” or “I love you” to. Maybe if your list is really long, St. Peter just looks you in the eye and says, “You were down there a long time, Bud – weren’t you paying attention at all?”
Joe surprised himself these days with how much he thought about things like heaven and God. He’d been going to church all his life, but still wasn’t sure about a lot of it. Mary was the religious one – or “spiritual” as they now seemed to call it. And before that, it was Joe’s mother who made sure he went. His mother, who loved everyone, yet still believed to her dying day that when she got to heaven, she was only going to meet other Presbyterians, with maybe the odd Methodist thrown in for variety and a Unitarian to argue with, for entertainment purposes only.
Suddenly, Joe began to feel impatient with this line, this shuffling forward, the cold weight of the two slippery cartons. He hoped Mary wasn’t wondering where he was. Sometimes she nearly panicked if he just went into the kitchen to make lunch. What was he doing here at 5:30 on a rainy night, his legs sore, his hands stiff, holding two cartons of orange juice as if they were the stone tablets Jehovah had given to Moses?
He looked ahead. At the front of the line was a tiny woman, speaking mostly Spanish, now pulling a thick wad of crumpled coupons out of her pocket and presenting them to the check-out girl for sorting. Behind her, a young mother with two cranky kids in the cart, the older one starting to hit the other, the toddler winding up for an epic howl. Behind them, a middle-aged man in a worn coat, work boots and jeans, weariness in his shoulders, a six pack of Bud Light and some Genoa salami on the conveyor belt next to him. Joe looked down at the floor beneath their feet. They’d all tracked in some rain. A thin slurry of mud was forming on the linoleum floor. The check-out girl was wearing a small gold cross on a chain around her neck. Joe felt a cramp start up in his left leg.
He looked up and saw the check-out girl bend forward slightly toward her customer, with a look on her face – a sort of concentrated kindness – a look that somehow, oddly, reminded Joe all at once of his mother, of Mary, and of his middle son. The son who had fought his way back from the jungle of his addictions, slayed his own dragons. More than anyone Joe knew, that son had become a great listener, a great payer-of-attention. Though he loved all his children equally, Joe was secretly the most proud of that son.
And that’s when it happened, right then. Something about the look on the clerk’s face. Something about these two strangers, the clerk and the lady with too many coupons, trying against all odds not to fail one another.
The world seemed to go silent. And then, in the next instant, it was everywhere – a sort of shining, a sort of “glory” as it said in the old hymns. Joe didn’t know where it had come from, but suddenly there it was – in a thread sticking out of the frayed collar of the man in front of him; in the mud congealing on the floor; in the gray, wet glow of the day’s last light coming through the plate glass windows, between the ads for Pepsi and canned corn on sale. He hugged the cartons closer to his chest.
His eyes fell on the toddler, the one who had been winding up for an awesome display of protest at life’s unfairness. They locked eyes.
The silence completed itself like the end of a long sigh, as though a great symphony had been playing and had just now stopped. It seemed to Joe as if this child had looked right at him and said, without uttering a word, “Yes. I know.”
Joe felt as though he had been let in on a great secret, as though he could see all of them, and even himself, the way he imagined God saw them: full of faults and blind spots, yearnings and memories — but beloved, so very beloved. And for just that one instant, with all his fractured heart, Joe saw them all, even himself, for who they really were: Each one of infinite value.
It all came and went so fast Joe wondered if he’d had some sort of medical event, some breakdown of brain circuitry. But he knew that wasn’t it. Something indescribable had . . . , well, had drawn near, had . . . shone through.
A few minutes later, clutching a double plastic bag with the orange juice safely inside, Joe left the store feeling certain that, right then, he could go out and scratch the surface of the world anywhere and this glory – this love – this whatever-it-was — would come shining through, just as if it had been there all along, waiting to be noticed.
On the drive home, with the rain now teeming down from a black sky, Joe turned on the headlights and wipers full blast, still in the grip of whatever had happened back there. Well, he finally thought, why not? He had sat through enough church services to know the Bible is full of stories about something extraordinary winging down, making people fall off their horses, drop their buckets at the well, quit their jobs, go on crazy, unplanned journeys. Wasn’t it at least possible that grace or glory or whatever-it-was could show up at 5:30 p.m. on a rainy Thursday at the IGA? Who was he to say it couldn’t?
As Joe pulled into his driveway, the rain finally began to let up. He went in, turned on a few lights. The caregiver left. He poured some orange juice into a plastic cup and went in to Mary, who was already in bed.
The small lamp on her nightstand was on, her books still piled up there, though she didn’t read anymore. He picked one up, by some minister named Fred Buechner, saw an old post-it note marking one page. He scanned the passage Mary had once underlined there: “To go on,” it said, “to go on as though something HAS happened, even though we’re not sure what it was or just where we’re supposed to go with it. (In the dark), a face I cannot see says, “bring the good news into whatever bad news your feet may find, and (bring with you) such ragged glimpses of mystery as you stumble on.”
Joe looked up. Mary was watching him, a puzzled look on her face. He put the book down and handed her the cup. She took a few sips, smiled and handed it back to him. “Thank you,” she said. He couldn’t be sure, but Joe thought that, just then, maybe she had recognized him. He decided to believe it was true.
She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “You’re welcome,” he said.
Tired now, Joe sat down in the armchair he’d put near the bed a few weeks ago, closed his own eyes. The rain had stopped, but a strong wind at the back edge of the storm was picking up. Outside the window in the backyard, he could hear the arms of the swamp maple trees clapping together with each gust. To Joe, it sounded so close and familiar, and yet so part of another world, watery and dark and full of the wind, blowing through as if with an urgent purpose of its own. Joe smiled a little as he began to drift off to sleep and thought of the trees. Full of their own ragged mystery, he supposed. Trying to make sense of it all, just like him. “Well,” he thought, “tomorrow is another day.”