Fellowship Class

Tarrytown United Methodist Church

April 19, 1998

Wayne Danielson


Mending


Mark 2:21. “No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak: if he does, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.”


Matthew 9:1-8. He got back in the boat, crossed the water and came to his own town. Then some people appeared, bringing him a paralytic stretched out on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Courage, my child, your sins are forgiven.” And at this some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” Knowing what was in their minds Jesus said, “Why do you have such wicked thoughts in your hearts? Now which of these is easier: to say “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up and walk?” But to prove to you that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins — he said to the paralytic — “get up, and pick up your bed and go off home” And he got up and went home. A feeling of awe came over the crowd when they saw this, and they praised God for giving such power to men.


Luke 5:6-11. Now on another sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him to see if he would cure a man on the sabbath, hoping to find something to use against him. But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man with the withered hand, “Stand up! Come out into the middle.” And he came out and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I put it to you: is it against the law on the sabbath to do good, or to do evil: to save life, or to destroy it?” Then he looked around at them all and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was better. But they were furious, and began to discuss the best way of dealing with Jesus.


John: 9:1-7. As he went along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind” “Neither he nor his parents sinned,” Jesus answered. “ He was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

Having said this, he spat on the ground, made a paste with the spittle, put this over the eyes of the blind man and said to him, “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam” (a name that means Sent) So the blind man went off and washed himself, and came away with his sight restored.


John: 14:15-20. If ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever: Even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: But ye know him, for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave your comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me: Because I live ye shall live also. At that day, ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.



Out of respect for LaVonne and for the difference in our ages, I have tried to change — to be a more contemporary husband, a ’90s kind of guy.

I don’t know how successful I have been. (You’d have to ask LaVonne about that.) But I have been trying. And that is why, if you come by 10407 Skyflower Drive some time, you may find me — a sensitive and attentive kind of ’90s guy — cooking dinner, vacuuming the living room carpet, or, on occasion, sewing a button on a shirt.

Cooking and cleaning are fairly easy for me. I’m not great, but basically I know what to do. My mother was a woman ahead of her time. And many years ago, she decided that she would teach her daughters and her sons how to feed and clothe a family and keep a house neat and clean.

“You never know what might happen,” she used to say, as I worked around the house under her close supervision, “and you had better learn how to manage.”

But I was her last child, born when she was 42 years old, and maybe that accounts for the fact that although she taught my brothers to sew, she neglected my education in this respect. Her family had unexpectedly spread out over 21 years. She was getting a little tired of children when I came along, I suppose. I am, as a result, and regretfully, a self-taught sewer.

Any kind of mending is difficult for me.

I don’t know what finger the thimble goes on. I have a lot of trouble just putting the thread through the eye of the needle. My stitches are large and weave a drunken path across the fabric. When I sew on a button I have no idea which hole the needle will come through — that’s just a matter of chance — a mystery to me. I use up a lot of thread sewing on a button because I like to have at least one or two threads in every little hole, and it usually takes me a long time to accomplish that feat.

While I was at work not long ago, my favorite maroon sweater developed a hole in the shoulder. I recognized the seriousness of the injury and decided to fix it on the spot. The only thread I could find in my desk was in one of those kits they used to give away at better hotels, and the closest match to maroon was a fluorescent pink from the 1970s. Well, I forged ahead with the pink thread and my large and wavering stitches, and managed to pull the hole into a kind of puckered patch. But that pink thread really stood out on the maroon sweater — it looked as if I had a rose pinned on my shoulder.

I decided to tone the pink down with some Magic Markers I found in my desk drawer, and I succeeded at last in turning the pink rose into a kind of purplish blackish spot, which I hoped my friends would attribute to the ordinary messiness of a man my age.

Later, when I told my mother-in-law the story, she said, “Did you sew that sweater with thread? You should have used yarn. Thread will cut the sweater, and you’ll have a bigger hole than you started out with.”

The statement was almost biblical in its directness and vividness.

I thought of a teaching of Jesus about mending that appears in all the synoptic gospels:

Mark 2:21. “No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak: if he does, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.”

That’s right. That’s exactly what was happening to my old maroon sweater. My mother should have told me. Or I should have read my Bible better. I’m not a very good mender.

You have to be careful when you’re trying to mend something, don’t you? Mending takes time. You have to think about it. You have to match things up right. And I don’t seem to have much time any more. I can remember when I always used to mend my socks when they developed holes, but I don’t do that any more. If a hole appears, I just throw the socks away. It’s a different time, a different era, isn’t it? “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do,” was what my grandmother used to say. That old saw sound archaic today, doesn’t it? The saying today might be: “Out of date. Doesn’t work. Throw it out. Get something better.”

I wonder what Jesus would have said about that? He wasn’t much in favor of throwing things away, I think. If one sheep out of a hundred got lost, he was in favor of the shepherd’s going looking for it, wasn’t he? And if one man was left dying on the side of the road, he was in favor of the Good Samaritan’s stopping to pick him up. And if one prodigal son took his inheritance early from his father and wasted it living it up in a distant land, Jesus was in favor of the father’s taking the boy back into the family when he appeared once again at his house.

Jesus was in favor of saving things, of mending them.

That’s why we call him our savior and our redeemer.

We ought to emulate Jesus, in every way that we can. But to tell the truth, mending and saving are not the style any more. We just don’t do it as much as we used to. We seem to have lost some of the respect for things and for people that we used to have.

An old Swedish man in my home town up in Iowa had a beautiful pair of shoes. He wore them only on Sunday morning. He kept them clean and brightly polished. I suppose he had them resoled every few years, but I’m not sure he had to, because he walked so carefully in them, taking no chance that they might get scuffed or cut. He used to serve as an usher and pass the collection plate in church, and those dried out old shoes creaked as he walked down the aisle. He didn’t seem to mind.

I asked him once how old they were.

“I got them for my wedding,” he said. “That was 55 years ago. They’re still good, and I intend to be buried in them.”
He kept things. He respected things. He mended things. I moved out of town before he died, but I’ll wager he kept his vow.

He had respect for things, and he had respect for people. I wonder whether the two go together? 

Lots of things have holes in them, I think. Lots of things still need saving. Lots of things still need mending.

Our little dog Chelsea — 15 years old — got sick this month, and just couldn’t get better. We tried to mend him. We fed him by hand. We gave him his medicine around the clock. But he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t see. His food didn’t taste good to him any more, and he stopped eating by himself. He began to cry and couldn’t be comforted. One morning, LaVonne said her final farewells to him, and said I should take him in and have the vet put him to sleep. I did, but I have to say it left a hole in the fabric of our lives, a hole much larger than you’d think a 3 1/2-pound dog would make.

How do you mend a hole like that?

How do you mend holes where pets used to be? Or larger holes where our friends and loved ones were? Or a great big hole where God used to be? All these holes still need mending. How do we go about it? How do we mend the fabric of our lives when it becomes filled with so many holes it looks like a lace tablecloth — how do we make good strong patches that hold then?

Most of us have a lot to learn about mending, I think. I’m not alone in in being uneducated as a mender.

When I had to start taking care of a house again 10 years ago — just as my mother predicted I might have to do one day — I had a lot of trouble. I was so ignorant. When the laundry detergent ran out, I thought I could substitute dishwashing detergent, so I poured in a cup of Dawn. I found out that that wasn’t it. Bubbles came out of the washing machine for half an hour and completely covered the floor of the kitchen.

Homer Thornberry and I both became widowed about the same time. I used to run into him at the grocery store. He was a smart man, a justice of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. But we usually found each other wandering around Rylanders with blank looks on our faces, searching for products that hadn’t been made in 30 years or more, or, if they were still being made, were now relegated to the bottom shelves, out of the way of serious shoppers.

“Where’s the Ovaltine?” I asked Homer.

“Beats me,” the judge of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said. “Do you know whether they make Pepsodent any more?”

“I’m not sure, “ I replied. “Maybe they keep it on the same shelf with the Ovaltine.”

It takes time to learn how to mend things. It helps to have a teacher. But you have to do a lot of it yourself.

Consider almost any of the healing miracles of Jesus. The thing they have in common is that Jesus usually asked the person who needed to be healed — the person who needed to be mended — to do something himself.

To a paralyzed man carried in on a bed, Jesus said:

“Get up, pick up your bed, and go off home.” And the man got up and went home.

Matthew tells us that “a feeling of awe came over the crowd when they saw this, and they praised God for giving such power to men.”

The man had to want to be mended, but he had to do something himself.

To the man with a paralyzed hand Jesus said, “Stand up! Come out into the middle.” And he came out and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I put it to you: is it against the law on the sabbath to do good, or to do evil: to save life, or to destroy it?” Then he looked around at them all and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was better.

The thing that strikes me again is that the man had to do something for himself. When he did, the power of God came streaming through, and he was mended.

Or take the story from the Book of John. Jesus said to the blind man: “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam” So the blind man went off and washed himself, and came away with his sight restored. John devotes an entire chapter to that story. He thought it was very important.

Again, God did the healing, but he did it to the man who wanted to be healed and who took the action recommended by the Savior.

When the fabric of life is torn, you can just say, “Savior, heal me, mend me,” but chances are he will ask you to do something for yourself.

We do need to look after ourselves, don’t we, just as we need to learn how to look after one another.

My mother strongly believed that when you did something for someone else it made you feel better. It helped you mend.

When I used to get cross and grumpy as a child because I was weak and had a bad heart and couldn’t play the strenuous games I used to play, she sent me to play with George Lundeen, a boy down the street who had a kind of palsy and could barely walk, even with the aid of iron braces.

I always came home feeling a little better about my own lot.

I remember when I broke my knee some years back, my children moved my bed to the first floor of the house, so I could get around on my crutches without having to bother going up and down stairs.

Nevertheless, it took me a long time to get up and get going. Sometimes I would hear someone knocking at the door, but by the time I got there, they were gone, and on the door step I would find a little something — once it was a brass candlestick and a tuna casserole.

Where did these gifts come from?

I suspect they came from members of this class. I’m not sure. All I can tell you is that eating a tuna casserole by the light of a candle in a brass candlestick is a healing thing. I often think of the good people who helped me mend, and I try —not as often as I should — to do the same for others.

Helping others mend is a good way to help yourself. My mother knew that, and the members of this class know that.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a true saying of our Lord, and well worth observing, if we wish to mend the fabric of our lives or help others mend theirs.

Finally, I have to say that many things that happen to us when we are young are easily mended. Indeed, they often mend themselves. Later on, mending takes more time and we have to work at it. But sooner or later, we begin to encounter the kinds of holes in the fabric of life that can’t really be mended. They are just there, and they will be there as long as we live.

What do we do about these? How do we mend what can’t be mended?

I’ve thought a lot about this question in quiet moments by myself, and while I don’t know what the answer may be for you, for me the best answer is simply prayer.

Jesus prayed a lot. He was convinced of the power of prayer. He thought that miracles of healing originated in prayer.

He sometimes chastised his disciples for not praying, or for not believing in the power of prayer.

It often seems to me that I am like those bad disciples.

I don’t pray for the power of God to come into my life as I should.

“What good will it do?” I say to myself. “God may have talked to Jesus, but will he talk to me?”

It is in those dark moments of doubt that I remember the wonderful words of Jesus in his final sermon to his disciples as recorded in the Book of John:

If ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever: Even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: But ye know him, for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me: Because I live ye shall live also. At that day, ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

Those who know me well, know that I am not a spiritual person, but I have always found these words to be true. God has not left us comfortless. We have the Spirit of Truth with us at all times. And this spirit is accessible to us through prayer.

I go to God in prayer at my worst times — the times when things simply can’t be mended, when the last possible patch has been put on my maroon sweater — when the only place the garment of life can go is to Good Will. In those moments of prayer, healing doesn’t happen because it can’t happen any more, mending doesn’t happen because things have gone beyond mending, but something happens. The promised Comforter sent by God at the request of Jesus does come. I am comforted. And I arise from my solitude with renewed strength and renewed faith, ready to live again, mended or unmended, in God’s world.