MARY CRIPE ON GIVING
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

October 19, 2008

I want to thank our stewardship committee for taking the lead again this year in reminding us that what the world needs now more than ever before are generous hearts. You might think that the very last committee you would ever want to serve on in a religious organization is the stewardship committee that is given the task of asking people to give. Honestly, this group, chaired by Pat Briggs, has a most envious task of stepping before a congregation that is already very generous.

After being here for just over two years I have only a small awareness for the totality of giving that is represented in this gathered group of persons of faith. So many of you live by the adage that "from whom much has been given, much is required." I appreciate watching, how mainly in secret, so many here are already phenemonally generous in both time, talent and (money needs to start with a "t" to honor my need for alteration).

Very simply this morning, I want to thank you all for all you have given. In ways that we can scarcely comphrhend, our giving both individually and corporately has given new hope in places for which no hope was appearing until your giving showed up. I have one quick story of our giving making a most recent impact.

Our Board of Outreach sponsored in June a trip for several of us down to an area of Appalachia in southeastern Kentucky, an area called Harlan County. They don't much care for strangers in Harlan County and they know who belongs and who doesn't. It is a beautiful county geologically. It is filled however with economic poverty that is a couple hundred years old and still gaining steam.

Our group worked on two homes while we were there. These homes were beyond the pale of what the word modest implies. They are small dwellings that used to be coal mining camps. On behalf of all of all of you, our group received hugs of pure joy, saw tears of immense graditude because we spent less than a week doing significant home repairs that these two women could not have afforded in their lifetimes.

We did the work as an extension of our belief in giving. We did the work that we did, alongside ninety others that week from other churches of the Indiana Kentucky United Church of Christ. We were just one week of four weeks that our denomination of churches underwrites each year and has done so in that one county for the last decade.

We were told stories of not driving around after dark. We were told that people don't drive into Harland County after dark. But, what I know is that one day I went to a very local homestyle hardware store to buy nails and something else and was greeted at the cash register with the statement, "You're part of that church group from Indiana, we don't charge you much because of the work you folks do for our people down here."

I'm wanting to pay full price just because they are local venders. But, I needed to allow them to give and to receive their hospitality with the same open spirit that the many down in Harland county were receiving from us. Mona and Leeza both told us to tell you, thank you for your generosity and love. And please see tears streaming from their faces.

I'm very serious when I say that I could share easily two hundred stories from this last year alone that have come my way because of our joint generosity. The stories would come from parents whose children are valued and loved and taught credible religious education here. They would come from the words and faces and relief of care givers who bring their memory impaired loved ones to our Partners Program on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A highlight of my life was joining the group in Partners, I think it was last Thanksgiving, for a tea party in which we shared childhood memories. It was beyond magic those moments spent celebrating the memories in that group.

All I really want to remind us of is that all of this happens out of the giving of this congregation daily and it happens, the impact of our giving, globally, because of our generosity and our family connections through both the American Baptist and the United Church of Christ.

How did you learn how to give?

I want to briefly tell you a story, to the best I can remember it, of how I learned to give from a woman that is dear to my heart. Her name is Mary Cripe.

I grew up on a farm that had a huge barn built into an embankment. The embankment enabled us to drive up a slope and enter the barn at its middle level. Even from its middle level it was still forty feet higher up to the rafters where the pigeons cooed and owls hooted. An interesting phrase got written in pencil up on one of the tippy top rafters of our barn. You only ever discovered it when the hay was stacked to the top and in fact this writing is only found on the side where we always stored our straw that we used for bedding in the stalls. The phrase reads, "Will we ever fight for women's rights?"

Underneath it has the date 1861. It was another sixty years from then before women got to vote in this country. I often wondered as a child who it was that hid their feelings nearly forty feet up in a barn loft.

Farming has changed so much since even my youth. Rarely does anyone get up that high in the barn anymore. The barns are relics of another age when they housed not only large groups of animals but were also used for community and family gatherings. People would gather on benches and climb up to the hay piles, yesterday's balconies.

Back home on the farm they now have church buildings, though much more simple than the one we enjoy. My uncle Ezra is a senior minister of the church I grew up in, that my grandfather Skiles was a minister in. They have twelve ministers as they seek to model themselves after the early church's twelve apostles. Of course, none of them are women. On Sunday at their meeting time, the women and men are segregated from each other and women are never allowed to speak publicly in church.

They also have a fall stewardship effort and they have a tendency to harken back to simpler times even in their lives. They do a cute thing, they have returned to meeting in a barn on a Saturday night to kick off their campaign and hold a dinner and a time of worship like the old folks used to do. They roasted a pig and had apple cider and apple butter and tons of homemade apple and pumpkin pies and even a green tomato pie and few persimmon puddings and some pawpaw bread. They sat on old benches pulled out of the corners, the kids climbed up to the same hay lofts and they had over a hundred folks come out.

There are not any cows, or pigs or even chickens clucking around anymore. The barn is just a shell of another age. The person of honor for the evening was ninety-six year old Mary Cripe, the church's oldest member who can still get out and who still has her mind farily well in place. Mary, an old farmer's wife now lives in one of the new condominium units on the edge of our small town. She loves instant coffee and dry white toast. She says that she has "lived too long, but what ya gonna do about it? God gave me a life and it's my job to live it till I die."

Mary was alive, a spry young woman really, when the place they call a Meeting House or their new church was built after WWII in my great grandfather's field. Someone asked her the other evening what it was like to use the pit toilets that still are sitting at the back of property, now un-used. She said back very tartly, "Do you mind, I'm eating. " They had brought to the barn event a couple of those blue port-a-potties for the program. Mary said later to her daughter, Janet, "I'd rather explode than use one of those."

They gathered for worship in the barn. They had set up a portable microphone system with speakers hung on the big old hay hook up near the center of the barn where the pigeons roost. They had brought in a little lectern to speak from. It was a gorgeous autumn evening to sit on the hay with the sunlight streaming in through the cracks between the forty foot long series of planks that make up the western wall. They have been there, the boards for over one hundred and fifty years.

They sang every hymn that they could that was really old that anyone had any memory of: On A Hill Far Away Stood an Old Rugged Cross, the Emblem of suffering and shame....and of course, Come to Church in the Wild Wood, oh, come to the church in the Vale. Finally one of the Trustees stood up and talked about the church's budget needs and the cost of doing the work of God, how expensive it is to keep up an old building. You could tell he wanted to tell each person exactly how much they should give, but he up ended by saying, "Please sign your pledge card and get it back to us real soon, I'm sure that you'll give more than you did last year. "

Toward the end of the service they had asked Mary Cripe, in advance, to speak. They were hoping that the presence of the oldest member on the program would stir up enough nostalgia to get those people who were giving a whole dollar in 1952 and who had remained faithful all those years, which meant they were still giving a dollar in 2008, that perhaps ninety-six year old Mary saying she was giving an increase might move some of them to raise their giving.

Mary had been sitting on a bale of hay feeling it poke through her thin cotton dress wondering why folks needed to come out to a barn to find God ---- she was pretty much of the mind set that pews in a heated church were a great idea, one giant leap for humankind. She found she could not keep herself from looking up toward the raised platform that used to be stacked high with straw. Her eyes could no longer see, but her heart remembered her grandmother and she up on that straw, her grandmother showing her the words that her great-grandmother had written there when she was a young bride and the community had gathered to raise this barn that she now sat in as an old woman surrounded with more memory than anything else.

Mary remembered that she had first kissed a young man in the same straw stack when she was seventeen years old. They were supposed to be watching over her younger siblings who were playing hide and seek in the hay. She and Daniel Metzger hid behind the bales of straw where they believed they could not be seen and she first tasted the passion that lips can offer. She cried a little knowing that Daniel, as well as her husband, David, with whom she had shared the passions and monotony of life for sixty one years, both men were now gone, buried nearly side by side on the hill across from the church.

They were calling for Mary to speak, it was her turn, they were pulling her to stand at the microphone, they saw her slowness to respond as an indication of her age and decrepitude. Of course, only she knew that she was reliving memories, feeling the love and closeness that were once hers and she smiled as they asked, "Mary, are you ready to say something to us? "

She leaned over to her son who was pulling her up and said, "Don't ever use that tone of voice with your mother or I will kiss you in front of all of these people!" He felt automatically reassured that his mother was in good form. Mary was slow but determined as she walked to the podium, yet, she would say later, she was still grazed by the onslaught of memories that were happening inside of her.

She looked at all the gathered faces and wondered ever so briefly, "Who are all these strangers in my barn?"

"I'm the oldest person in these parts, " she began. "I reckon most of you don't much care what an old lady has to say. I can't say I blame you much. A lot of you will just be glad when I finished and you'll suspect that maybe that'll be the last time you hear anything out of old Mary Cripe before I die. That might well be true."

She reached up and pushed her upper denture back into place. "Seems to me that churches have been tryin' to get money outta people as long as time itself. I can't say I've ever given a cent to the church or to charity cause I was asked to. Won't neither. "

"I've given to God, though, because I love God and pretty darn sure God feels the same about me. " She paused and it got a little awkwardly long and a few folks were beginning to wonder if she had gotten lost in a memory.

"My mother and father used to give us kids everything we needed and a bit more. I used to be ashamed and my mother pulled me aside and said, "Stop it, Mary! We give because we love you and we give even more than we might have to because we love you that much. That's where I learned about how to give. I give because I love."

She went on, "God has always been there and good to me and I figure I've suffered as much as anybody. I lost both my folks early. I lost four babies and three of my grown children have died before me of old age. God didn't take them from me....God just was there to accept their souls and love'em. I couldn't ever love a God that would kill and take away my children on purpose. That would be a no account God, I figure. And God loved me when I was cryin' and hurtin'. My husband, Daniel been dead so long I can scarcely remember ----but, I ain't alone, God is with me. "

"I give to God and to people who need help. This here church has been here for me and a lot of other folks that I don't even remember anymore by name. I give so that the church can love for me. I don't much care for the preacher we have right now. That's okay, he not that bad. I still give because giving is what I do when I love and I love God and God's church."

"I never listen to those Trustees either. What do they know, just a bunch of men. What do they know about loving. They just doin what somebody told them to do. Give because you love God and because we gotta give ourselves away so that we can be given to and appreciate it."

She closed by saying, "Thanks for coming out to my barn. Me and Mamma used to sit right up there. She's a smilin' today, cause she never thought no girl of hers would ever get to talk in a church meeting. I'll see ya soon Mamma."

My Uncle Ezra, the preacher that Mary says she doesn't care much for, he's married to Mary's daughter, Nellie, who pulled me aside one day and said, "A fat wife and big barn never did any man harm."

Ezra took Mary home and settled her into the living room couch and said to her that he had learned a whole whale of lot about loving from her and how he still missed Nellie and that he was blessed to have been taught and learned so much from women. She reached up and gently slapped his face with her old hand and said, "You ain't as bad as I remember, Preacher."

He kissed her and she headed off for a nap ready to wake up either to a new day of living or to awaken in eternity to be with the God whom she loves and with her family who will have gathered to welcome her generous soul to its new home in heaven.

This is a true story, the best I can remember it. It all happened many years ago, but friends, it is from my grandmother, Mary Cripe, that I learned about having a generous heart for the world.

Amen.