When mom was a little girl, church was front and center to everything her family was about. Church was not a like a pond into which her family dabbled its toes from time to time. It was a full body immersion. There was intentionality. There was resolve. And if you knew Grandpa Matson, her father, you also knew there was fun.
My mother's family, as she grew up, were members of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Seattle. The Pastor was the Rev. Dr. Mark Matthews Tall. Stately. Fearsome. He was known to wear a top hat and tails into the pulpit every Sunday morning. Taking up the offering was a particularly solemn occasion in the worship service. One time mom's brother Emerson got away from his parents before the service started, stood up on the front step of the front of the sanctuary and said, in Rev. Dr. Mark Matthews tones, "Bring me your pennies."
One of the hallmark ministries that set First Presbyterian Church in Seattle apart was it's mission to the winnos and skid row derelicts on First Avenue and the water front. In fact, the term Skid Row, was first coined in Seattle. Built on several hills, everything slid down to the waterfront. The closer you got to the water front, back in those days, the more ruined your life. You skid down. Any wholesomeness your life had skid down, the lower down the hill you went.
There were several missions and soup kitchens on First Avenue. One of those was run by First Presbyterian Church. Mom's growing up family had a large part to do with the program in that soup kitchen. While the winnos and booze hounds slurped up their free soup and home made bread, music would be playing. Old hymns banged out on an similarly old, out of tune upright grand. The piano player was my mother's mother, Elizabeth.
After her father lead everyone in a number of hymns, with him ending up mostly singing solo's on each song, he would give a devotional. Only he called them "chalk talks." He had a large black board he would creak across the floor. He would start in on his chalk talk, drawing a line here or there on the board. A few souls would look up from their steamy soup. My mom's dad, Nils Matson, would begin weaving a story in his characteristic Swedish accent. My grandfather was an inventor, and many of his greatest inventions were the stories he told.
I never saw my grandfather do one of his chalk talks, but my mom told me about them. With each line or curve or circle that he'd add to the blackboard, more and more of the derelicts would put down their spoons, beginning to wonder what the picture was going to become. By the time he was done, my grandfather had everyone's attention. His bright red Swedish cheeks were only matched by the sparkle in his eye, as he masterfully reeled in his audience. By the time he was done, the lost souls were a little more found, a little more hopeful, and a little more fed.
Sitting down in front were three little children. Singing along with their mother as she played that old piano with chipped ivory keys. Watching as their father drew pictures on the large slate blackboard. Those three children were Emerson, Dorcas, and my mom. Sisters and brother growing up watching their parents be the church on Skid Row. Week in and week out they were doing ministry together. Although they may have never called it that. To them it was just how they were as family. Growing up in the working class neighborhood of the Roosevelt district of Seattle, my mom, the middle child of the three, had a life that revolved around a hard working mother, and an impish and child-like father whose love of fun often over-ruled the semi-sternness of her mother, and the church. Always the church.
In her later teenaged years there was a boy who was told about my mom. They were set up to meet through a mutual friend. It was a blind date. And it happened at church. At the same First Presbyterian Church in Seattle. My mother decided if this boy was going to meet her and show any kind of inkling toward her, it was going to be in church. And so they met, in church. During a worship service. Dr, Mark Matthews still pompously presiding in the pulpit. Soon they were dating. And then married Douglas Wing, my father.
But my mother was never able to fully pull my father into the orbit of the church as she was used to. Whereas my father only played at church, and later shunned it, my mother was immersed in it, and eventually became discouraged. She had grown up with the best Sunday School teachers. Men and women who were called home from the mission field as the second world war was getting ramped up. Sitting at the knees of these great Bible teachers, with their wild mission field stories, instilled a deep and learned quality to my mom's faith. She more than once expressed exasperation at the low quality of Sunday School teaching we were getting when she'd take us to church.
I was a reluctant attender of Sunday School. I remember waking up early on Sunday mornings and praying to God that my mom would sleep in so we wouldn't have to go to Sunday School. I'm not sure how God sorted out those prayers spoken by an impetuous little boy. I guess God showed me by calling me into the ministry, and finding myself in charge of the educational programs in the congregations I'd serve.
As much as I despised coming to Sunday School and memorizing Bible verses, just as equally or more, I loved going to worship with my mom. There was something about sitting next to my mother in that large, long A-frame sanctuary at First Presbyterian Church in Bellevue that filled me with awe. It all started when I was a boy and I was sent to St. Thomas Episcopal Day School. Dave and I went. Dave was transferred over to Medina Elementary after one year, but I was kept at St. Thomas up through the 3rd grade. I've never been sure why I was kept there by my parents. Marching to chapel every day in my crisp white shirt and salt and pepper pants. Banging down the prayer kneelers as loud as we could when Father Val Spinosa said, "Let us pray." The round stained glass window in the back of the sanctuary beaming red and blue lights all over us.
That's what I carried forward with me as I sat in church with my mom, in junior high. Rev. Frank Burgess looking down at us from that tall pulpit through those rose colored glasses of his. I could never tell exactly where he was looking. I always felt like he was looking straight at me and my mom. It was sitting in church with my mom one Sunday, that I heard the still small voice saying, "Steve, this is what I want you to do." I remember looking at my mom wondering if it was her who spoke. I remember looking all around to see whose voice that might have been and finally decided it was God. I remember telling mom on the way home, "I think I heard God telling me he wants me to be a minister." She looked over at me, her 7th grade son, and simply said, "Oh, that's nice." I think she really wanted someone to carry on the legacy of church that she had grown up with--but not take it so far as to become a minister.
My mom had a falling out with church at First Pres, as we called it. I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden we stopped going. I just happened to meet a girl in the youth group, so I kept going. But mom ran into one of those hard spots that most of us run into with church. Hard nosed people who don't understand grace. Judgmental and unkind. Treating church as more of an extension of the country club than what she had grown up with at her father and mother's knees.
I am so thankful to God that she found this church, Rose Hill. Here she was able to refigure out her way, and gain a new enthusiasm for church. Here she didn't sit back anymore, but got involved with several ministry oriented committees, then became a Deacon and an Elder. As a Deacon she began to reclaim her roots of reaching out to hurting people. She helped start something called the Tea Cup Ministry, extending caring, companionship and hospitality to those who were newly widowed. It was a ministry that eventually served her when our father died in 1995. And I think, if I remember right, the Tea Cup Ministry was taken up by other churches in the area, once they heard about the work my mom and her friends on the Deacons had got going. It is the tea cup ministry that will serve us as we fellowship together after worship.
It was also here that I got to continue one of the things I loved to do best as a boy and youth, and that's attend church with my mom. When ever I was in town, we'd sit right back here. She'd proudly introduce me to all her friends sitting around her, and she always had to add, "He's a Presbyterian minister." No chance of just coming and hiding out in church with mom.
But for me church has been that special bond between my mom and me. I felt like I got caught up in her legacy, started so many years ago on Skid Row. She helped me catch a love for Scripture, one that she nurtured through years of Bible Study Fellowship. Her priority of service oriented ministry has been a laser light of direction for me. Her unwillingness to give up on the church, even when the church was being lead and populated by hurtful idiots, has been a rock for me when I have felt like giving up on the ministry.
And I think that's why I'm telling you all this. My mom's life has had a common thread. And that thread has been her relationship with Jesus Christ and his church. She never gave up. She never gave up on it even when my father was pressuring her not to go, or involve us kids in church. She never gave up on it when she was hurt by it. She sat here in the pew, and she loved it, and fought for what was best and right in it. She made it her life.
I would be remiss if I didn't say this to you all, and I think she would reach down out of heaven and shake me if I didn't ask you to think about this. To think about her and what her life meant. I know some of you have had a hard time figuring the ins and outs of your faith. Including some of her own children and grandchildren. I know you're sitting there thinking, "Oh, boy, here it comes." I can't tell you the number of conversations I had with her about how she wished you would all find your way in the church. That somehow her life mattered because you would make what mattered to her most deeply, matter to you as well. Our mother's greatest legacy, as great as we are, is not her children or grandchildren. Even above us, is her faith, her love for the Savior, and how she expressed that faith and love in her work in the church. That, above all things, is what she wanted passed on to us.
I'm not going to take advantage of your emotions, too much, here at mom's memorial service, and guilt you into the life of the church as she lived it. I only ask, in her name, that you would consider it. If you have strayed, if you've been hurt, even if it just doesn't make sense any more, would you, for mom, just think about the place of the church in your life, and your relationship with the Lord. As I look back over her life, I believe it is her greatest legacy. Is there some way you can get caught up in that legacy in some new way.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so,
Little ones to him belong,
They are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so.
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