Remembering Peg [All Saints' Sunday - Luke 6:20-31]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Luke 6:20-31

 

Remembering Peg

 

Every summer, just before my boys go back to school, our family navigates the mountain passes between here and Breckenridge for a week of rest before the Fall swings full.  It has become a treasured tradition.  We hike paths now familiar.  We eat at restaurants that have become vacation favorites.  The adults wait as patiently as possible while the indecisive young ones try to decide on their annual souvenir.  We play Uno – the Simpsons variety.  And when clear skies allow it, we ride the gondola, higher up and further into the mountains.

 

This year, as we were riding the gondola, my phone vibrated that pulse that tells me I have an incoming call.  I didn’t recognize the number.  In my life, and because of my work, I am typically very plugged in, perhaps too plugged in, and so during that week away I try to screen my calls and ignore my bursting email inbox.  And so I didn’t answer.  I let the call go to voicemail. 

 

Seeing that the voicemail stretched past the minute mark, I decided to listen immediately.  Usually telemarketers, and I thought it was probably a telemarketer, leave short wordless messages – if they leave messages at all.  And this message was long, longer than I expected.  And so there on the gondola, moving through an endless blue sky, I held my phone to my ear and listened to what turned out to be a shocking and terribly sad message.

 

The voice on the line spoke through a deep sorrow.  The voice on the line called to inform me that her mother had died – very suddenly, very unexpectedly.  Her mother was named Peg Sammons and she was one of my son Oscar’s godparents.

 

We chose Peg, along with her husband, Greg, in part because they welcomed us so warmly and so generously when we arrived in Toledo, Ohio.  Three decades their junior, they treated us with respect and kindness.  Like us, they were a clergy couple; and, though we did not know it when we asked them to godparent our oldest, like us they were the parents of two PKs.  They were good colleagues, good priests, good friends.

 

But it was more than just friendship that led us to ask Peg to claim this holy and important role in the life of our firstborn.  Peg, we could plainly see, possessed qualities of a saint.  And we wanted our baby son to learn the Christian faith from her.

 

Peg carried holy fire in her slight frame.  She was brave in the way of those who blaze trails.  Peg was one of the first women ordained to the Episcopal priesthood – and the very first in the Diocese of Western Michigan.  Her faith and trust in God birthed in her a courage that was stunning, that I wish I possessed.  After spending three years in Liberia, teaching children and living in a simple hut, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Peg returned to the US and enrolled at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.  She enrolled because she was called to the priesthood and enroll in seminary is what one does when they experience that particular call; God was calling her to be a priest and she knew it deep down in her soul.  But there was a problem: at that time women could not be ordained in the Episcopal Church.  But Peg was not about to allow the impossible to stand in the way.  She started walking the ordination path anyway – not knowing if there was even a finish line in her future.  If the Bible is right and faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, well, then Peg had a faith that is usually encountered only in old stories.  Her faith could move mountains; and I think it did.

 

While she was still in seminary, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted to allow for the ordination of women.  And Peg was ordained to the priesthood in 1978.  But not everyone in the Church was on-board.  And some of those in attendance on that special, long-awaited, hard-earned day, were in the pews to protest.  And that did happen.  Peg’s ordination service was interrupted by, of all people, an angry Episcopal nun.  But only interrupted momentarily.  God’s will triumphed and the Holy Spirit, through a Bishop’s hands, made Peg a priest on that May day, that good day.

 

In a world, and in a nation, in which so many people simply walk away from the Church, I think it is amazing that Peg fought so hard to find her place in the Church.  She believed so deeply in an institution that took a really long time to believe in her.  She loved a Church that included the people who tried to undermine her ministry.  And she did so with a furious grace, a gentle kindness, and an unwavering belief in the redemptive power of love.  And I wanted my son to learn that furious grace and that gentle kindness and to have that same unwavering belief.

 

I wanted my son to learn from his godmother what it means to live as a baptized Christian in this fractured, and sometimes cruel world.  I wanted my son to learn from his godmother what is looks like to live today’s Gospel – the Beatitudes from Luke, the Gospel appointed for this All Saints’ Sunday. 

 

Some parts are easier to do than others.  While it is difficult to be poor, it’s not that hard to become poor.  And the world is hard and so weeping will sometimes be as natural as breathing.  But what is stunningly hard, perhaps one of the hardest things to do as a Christian, is: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.  Because it is painful to take those losses and bear that burden and carry that weight around in one’s soul.  And Peg did that – with grace.  And she never allowed the scars she acquired, in this world and in the Church, to dim her smile or diminish her kindness.  Her journey on this planet was not easy but it could not, and did not, steal her joy.  And I am forever thankful that Oscar was able to witness that for the first almost 11 years of his life and to live in the shadow of this legacy for the rest of this life.

 

Ultimately, Peg’s body was simply not as strong as her spirit.  And on August 3 of this year, at the age of 73, Peg died, surrounded by her family. 

 

This is, of course, the first All Saints’ Sunday since her death.  And on this holy day, we, in the Church, feel the dead more closely; we remember those who blazed our trails and taught us to follow Jesus.  We remember.  I am honored to remember Peg today.  And also I treasure her company today.  I am glad to know that, despite the roadblocks she encountered on this earth, she did not have to struggle or fight to find her place in the great heavenly Communion of Saints.  But she could have and she would have – with all the fiery grace she could muster.

 

Because I am human it makes me sad to remember today that Oscar has one fewer godparent on this planet.  But because I am a Christian I am happy to know that he has one in Heaven and that her prayers for my son no longer have quite as far to travel.