On Tuesday morning after my installation as pastor of New Cana Lutheran Church in southern Illinois, not far from St. Louis, Leonard Semanns came by my study to orient me to the community. He brought along the elders, three men charged with the spiritual oversight of the congregation, which in practice amounted to making sure that Sunday services ran on time and that Confirmation instruction was provided. As I would learn in succeeding weeks, they gathered every Sunday in the sacristy for ritual kibitzing before and after each service.
The trustees, on the other hand, were in charge of the church’s physical properties. They weren’t required to possess the spiritual aptitude of the elders. Unlike the trustees, who were almost always old and retired, and unlike the members of the cemetery committee, who were even older—older than the dirt they supervised—the elders tended to be middle-aged, the sons of trustees.
That morning Leonard and his cousin Gus spread out a hand-drawn map of the parish with each house and farm labeled. Members of the church were marked in red. The two of them, along with elders Bud Jordan and Ronnie Semanns, stood in their overalls in a respectful circle around my desk.
Their running commentary reminded me of a “talking map” I had once seen at the Gettysburg National Battlefield. Press a button near the site of a particular battle, and a recorded voice begins explaining it.
I had been heard to complain that the church kept no roster of its members. How can you organize a church without a list? I wanted to know. With their talking map they were remedying the situation.
“That would be Milfords’ place. Him and Clara moved there when his dad quit farming. You want to see a man plow a straight furrow, you watch old Ben.” Leonard and Gus exchanged knowing looks like a secret handshake. “You want to see the crookedest furrow in county, then I believe you’d have to visit Martin’s place in the spring.”
The four laughed uproariously. They were not bothering with last names and may have noticed my confusion. “Milford’s Clara and Martin’s Clara are both Dullmanns—of the Cherry Grove Dullmanns. Their mothers were cousins. Semanns and Dullmanns have been close.”
“Semanns is the right name for farmers, isn’t it,” I said. “You know, since it means seed in Latin.” The four looked at me without expression.
Leonard continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “So you can see, Pastor, that every house on the Loop Road belongs to a member.”
“What’s the blank space behind the church?” I asked.
“That ain’t nothin’ but the Brush,” said Ronnie. “We don’t have any members from the Brush. That’s mainly Irish and Hoosiers back in there. No church people.”
“Hoosiers?”
“You know, Trash,” Gus clarified.
“Have we ever had members from the Brush?” I asked. The only non-Semanns in the group, Bud, who worked as a plumber when he wasn’t farming, recollected something. “There was one, an immigrant . …” Then he stopped mysteriously and gave no indication that he would continue any time soon. I wanted to say, “I thought we were all immigrants on this prairie,” but held my tongue.
“Let me ask you about somebody else,” I said. “The big man at the reception with the two boys. Where are they on the map?”
“That’d be Buster Toland. He works at the garage. The young’un is Max. Poor Bust owes everybody. And Max, well, he’s slow, Pastor, real slow.”
“Does Buster have a wife?” The foursome sighed as if about to tell me that I needed a new fuel pump.
“He does,” Ronnie said regretfully.
At this point Leonard took command. “That family would have a chance at being a decent family—only a chance, mind you, what with them boys’ problems—if they had a woman who was solid. But she ain’t. Beulah’s on dope.”
“Dope!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” he replied adamantly. “I call it dope. She’s got every doctor in Alton, Blaydon, and Cherry Grove prescribing her pills. And Medicare pays. You and I pay!”
The subject was getting reframed in a hurry, so I asked again, “Where are they on the map?”
“Next to Buford’s Garage where Buster works.”
“I don’t see a house for them.”
“They’re renters.”
Wonder, bread
My first week brought a tumble of pastoral duties. Although I had yet to preach my first sermon or celebrate my first public Eucharist, I brought communion to one of my parishioners in the hospital. His name was Alfred.
Alfred and I had the place pretty much to ourselves as I prepared for the momentous event of my first Eucharist. Only the community rightly celebrates communion and when private distribution is necessary, the pastor should bring the consecrated elements from the community’s Sunday meal. But Alfred was sick, dying, and through his daughters and son he had asked for the Eucharist. He apparently didn’t mind that it was a stranger who would bring him the Bread of Life.
I brought my kit, which included a tiny paten and a screw-together chalice, a seminary graduation gift. We made the confession and absolution together and recited Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength; a very present help in trouble.” His gruff voice betrayed no emotion as he recited the words, which he uttered like a man breaking rocks with a sledge.
We were making Eucharist on a hospital tray on wheels. I poured some wine into my little chalice and set it before him, but when I reached farther into the kit I discovered to my horror that I had forgotten the wafers. “I don’t have any bread,” I said.
Alfred looked deeply into my face and sighed. His eyes quickly surveyed the ward, as mine had done a split-second earlier, in hopes of spotting a stray scrap of bread on a lunch tray. No such luck. “Well, why don’t you get some bread. … Pastor.” He stressed the last word of the sentence in order to remind me of something about me. “I’ll be here.”
The hospital kitchen was closed until 5 p.m., so I drove into town and sped back to the hospital and entered as though nothing had happened.
Take eat. This is my body given in death for you, I said for the first time in my life. Receive this host. Jesus is the host at every sacramental meal, no matter if it is celebrated at the high altar of a great cathedral or in the deserted ward of a country hospital. Jesus hosted our little meal, too, and did not forsake Alfred. I was his stand-in on this bleak occasion, but I had proved less than hospitable. With ten years of theology under my belt, I had scrambled awkwardly to produce a scrap of God’s body for a dying man.
Barely beloved
One of Billy Semann’s daughters was waiting for the new pastor. She was ready to have a proper wedding. This word was only relayed to me by telephone, as Billy himself, who was perennially between jobs and wives and lived alone in a camper east of Prairieview, had had nothing to do with the church ever since someone from Cana had asked him for a financial pledge. That had been fourteen years ago.
“The church is only interested in my money,” he had complained, implying that this church, like all the rest of them, was preying on his vast wealth in order, say, to build a marble campanile in the parking lot or to support the voluptuous lifestyle of a missionary in East St. Louis.
According to the grapevine, the previous pastor had offended him by saying, “Billy, you don’t have any money. What would we want with you?”
The daughter and her intended arrived at the parsonage promptly at five, he having taken off a few minutes early from his job as an asphalt man on the county’s roads. Leeta and Shane were 17 and 18 years old respectively.
She was darkly, even beautifully, beetle-browed, a feature that lent determination to her young face from the first hello. Shane was a serious sort of young man with close-set eyes and hair that was already thinning on top. Thirty seconds into the interview, she seemed strong, he seemed weak. Together, they were so nervous that they couldn’t even slouch. Teenagers simply do not sit as straight as those two were sitting in front of my desk.
“Shane and I want to get married, and Shane wants to take adult instructions, don’t you, hon? I’d come with him every time. I promise,” she said to Shane, and smiled sweetly at both of us. “We want to do everything right. Same goes for Shane’s baptism. We won’t wait forever to have that done, will we, hon? We could start studying up on the baptism anytime soon.”
Then she opened her pea coat to reveal what I’d known was in there the moment she’d entered the room, a little Semanns about six months along. Leeta’s white polyester shift was awkwardly high on her legs and tight across the midriff.
Leeta and Shane had come to rehab what little they had of a past and to begin a new future. They wanted to get off on the right foot—two poor, uneducated teenagers, one of them pregnant, the other unbaptized, both of them scared and excited at the same time. It appeared I could combine premarital counseling with adult membership instruction along with some lessons in baptism.
These two would be the first beneficiaries of several semesters of training in pastoral care and counseling.
“My practice is to meet at least six times with the couple before marriage, so that we can go over the service and discuss all the issues pertinent to Christian marriage. We’ll do a modified version of the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory. At the rehearsal . …”
Why I said “My practice” I have no idea, since I had never performed a marriage, had no “practice,” and did not understand the futility of trying to prepare anybody for marriage, let alone two teenagers:
You can’t imagine this, Shane and Leeta, but let me tell you a little about your future: at twenty-eight, Shane is drinking eight or ten beers a day and already daydreaming about retiring from his job on the second shift at the glassworks. Leeta is so exhausted from caring for a little boy with cystic fibrosis that she is making desperate plans. Your parents are all dead, including Billy, who got drunk and burned up in his camper one night. You two don’t say grace at meals, or kiss each other good morning, good night, or good-bye. You do not engage in the ritual tendernesses that make an ordinary day endurable. And did I mention that Leeta thinks she’s pregnant again, and is seriously considering a trip to Chicago where something can be done about it? Yes, let wise Pastor Lischer prepare you for married life.
Leeta stood up in front of the desk and gave me a smile, as if to say, “I have news for you.” (She really was determined.) “Honey, give the pastor the license.”
Shane and I stood up, as two men will do when they are about to close a business deal or fight a duel. In a voice that a boy might use when asking a girl’s father for her hand, he said, “Could you do it tonight? This here’s the license. We done passed the blood test with fly’n colors, didn’t we, babe? We can’t wait no longer, Pastor. It’s time.”
I felt years of training slipping away from me in a matter of minutes as I agreed to the “wedding.” All my pastoral actions were occurring outside the lines and away from the sanctuary—an unauthorized Eucharist in a hospital, a pickup wedding in my house. I invited them to walk over to the church, but they politely but firmly declined on the tacit grounds of their own unworthiness.
“Witnesses,” I said, “we must have witnesses,” again with no earthly idea of the truth or falsity of the statement. I walked down the short hall to the kitchen where my own pregnant wife was fixing supper with Sarah wrapped around one of her legs.
“I need you,” I said.
Soon our little tableau was in place. Leeta and Shane stood before me, Tracy at Leeta’s side, our Sarah gazing in from the doorway.
The bride, six months pregnant, looked dark-eyed and radiant. The matron of honor, eight and a half months pregnant, nervously brushed her long blond hair away from her face. The women were smiling and blooming with life; the men were trying not to make a mistake. The groom appeared pale but steady, a little moist beneath the nose. The minister kept his eyes in his book. To an outsider peering through the window, the scene might have been borrowed from a French farce or a Monty Python skit.
At the book-appointed time, I laid the stole across Leeta and Shane’s clutched hands and onto her belly, read the right words, and the deed was done. Shane and Leeta got themselves married.
They left in a rusted El Camino, seated well apart from one another like an old married couple. They looked sad beyond knowing.
Early morning at OR
Two nights later in that same interminable week the telephone rang at about 3 a.m. “Pastor,” the voice on the other end said, pronouncing it Pestur, “Ed Franco. My Doral is here in St. Joe’s. Gall bladder’s rupturin’. It ain’t good. It ain’t good at all. We’re goin’ to have surgery in thirty, forty minutes. We need you here—if you can.”
“Of course,” I said. “St. Joe’s?” Did I understand the difference between the Front Way and the Back Way out of town, he asked. I didn’t, and he explained. He gave me clear directions from the driveway of the parsonage over the Back Way to the hard road, then to 140 directly into Upper Alton and to St. Joseph’s Hospital.
I was into my clerical gear and out of the house in five minutes.
At three-thirty in the morning one does not easily walk into a small-town hospital. The doors were locked, and it appeared that everyone had turned in for the night. This was an unassuming place, more like a neighborhood B&B than a full-service, Ramada-type hospital. My clerical collar finally got me into the building.
I raced down toward the OR, passing through a couple of NO ADMITTANCE doors, and found the Francos strangely alone in a laundry alcove next to the operating room.
The only decoration on the wall was a picture of Joseph the Carpenter with the boy Jesus, who was lighting his father’s workplace with a candle. A red fire extinguisher was hung in an arrangement beside the picture.
Doral and her gurney were parked to one side. Ed hovered above her, nervously patting her.
The Francos were a childless, middle-aged couple who never missed a Sunday but were not prominent members of the church, perhaps because Ed not only came from Blaydon but was, according to my Tuesday rundown with Leonard and the elders, of “foreign extraction.”
Doral was as thick and bouffant as Ed was skinny and bald. You could feel their love for one another in the shadows of the alcove.
“Are we glad to see you,” Ed said, as though I was about to make a difference.
Suddenly I realized that I hadn’t brought a little book or any other tools for ministry. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. But I did take a good look at Doral, her hair undone, expressive eyes moving from my face to Ed’s and back, her face and arms pasty with sweat. She was the most frightened person I had ever seen.
They looked at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know the Francos. I must have known people like them in my boyhood congregation. Surely, we had a great deal in common, but at the moment what we had was silence. It was very quiet in the alcove.
What came, finally, was the fragment of a shared script. I said,
The Lord be with you to which Ed and Doral replied in unison, And with thy spirit.
I said, Lift up your hearts.
They said, We lift them up to the Lord.
And suddenly the Lord himself became as palpable as Ed’s love for Doral. What was disheveled and panicky recomposed itself. The Lord assumed his rightful place as Lord of the Alcove, and the three of us wordlessly acknowledged the presence. It was as if Ed and Doral and I had begun humming the same melody from our separate childhoods.
That night the Spirit moved like a gentle breeze among us and created something ineffable and real. We prayed together, then recited the Lord’s Prayer; and whatever it was that happened came to an end as quickly as it had begun.
Richard Lischer, after 14 years as a Lutheran pastor, now teaches at the Duke University divinity school. This article is adapted by permission from his book Open Secrets (Doubleday, 2001).
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership.
