Fred was a robust man who was everyone’s friend at church. Every Sunday morning after worship, he would greet me, a little boy, with a huge smile: “vel, Timoteus, how are ve?” A grandfather figure, he exuded warmth; I could feel that he cared about me, even when he teased me. He spoke with a German accent that was quite different from that of my rural Ohio grandparents and extended family. And no one else called me “Timoteus”. Timoteus!, in fact, as a boy I always understood him to call me “Tim-o-tears”, and wondered why gentle friendly old Fred called me Tim-o-tears. Tears? Had I cried a lot as a baby in church?
It was only as a teenager that I learned that Fred, Frederick Linhardt, had survived a Russian prison camp during World War II and had faced a communist firing squad. At the age of 20, filled with grief and bitterness after the death of his fiancée, Fred rejected God and began to idolise Hitler. Nazism became his faith. He enlisted in the army and was a decorated for bravery for his service during the invasion of Russia. But his bitterness and his rejection of faith remained. And he was haunted by the memory of numerous teenaged Russian soldiers he had killed. Then Hitler committed suicide and Fred’s world fell apart. He became despondent. In the depths of despair, he lost hope for life. He cried out to God, and received an answer. Gradually and with much struggle, Fred came to faith and new hope. He found deep joy and meaning in Christian faith. And he shared his joy with whoever would listen. He also found love, and married Katie. But the employment and housing situation in post-war Germany was extremely difficult. Still, Fred witnessed to all – of his salvation from hate and bitterness. Christ had saved him! He was persecuted due to his Christian witness and openness to Jews.
An expert glass worker, Fred and his young wife and child immigrated to Winnipeg for work in the 1950s, but the promised job didn’t last long. He was then offered a position in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo, Ohio – he didn’t even know where it was. Shortly after moving there, Fred was befriended by people from Toledo Mennonite church. That was about the time I was born, so Fred, Katie, and their daughter Elizabeth were part of my church during my whole childhood. In Toledo, Fred experienced hate from others in the city due to being German. He would try to talk to his enemies, many who had lost family members in the war. On one occasion, he saved the life of one of those enemies by giving blood; his was a rare type.
I learned from Fred that “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Jesus loves us, and so we love him in response. Plus, Jesus loves everyone, so helping others means being like Jesus, it means helping Jesus himself. And plus, there is deep joy in a faith-filled life. Fred would often ask for the congregation to sing “Gott ist die liebe” even though most in the congregation no longer spoke Pennsylvania German in daily life. Fred lived the joy of his salvation in Christ.
And the uplifting letter to the churches of Ephesians is filled with expressions of this same kind of joy in faith. Chapter 2.4-10: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…. 7so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God….” And in chapter 3 the phrases “the gift of God’s grace … the boundless riches of Christ” are repeated several times.
In preparation for this series on Ephesians, the Preaching Team read through the letter together, out-loud, from beginning to end. And we were struck by how many of us had grown up imbibing and absorbing many of the themes in Ephesians. Hearing key Ephesians passages read regularly – yes; but even more, seeing Ephesians expressed and lived out in the values of family and church. So the Preaching Team asked me to reflect on what I had learned, imbibed, and absorbed as a child about what it meant to be Mennonite, and how that’s reflected in Ephesians.
I grew up in a Mennonite church in a city that was 40 miles away from the heart of the large northwest Ohio Amish-Mennonite community. So we were close enough to be well-connected, but far enough to be somewhat separate. Amongst my numerous rural cousins, I was the city boy. I won’t tell you about all the tricks they played on me – in the haymow, in the silo, in the chicken coop, in the corn field.
Of course, not all Mennonite kids grew up with the same experiences as I did. Yet in my 30 years of adult life I’ve been a committed student and inside observer of “all things Mennonite”. By that I mean “Christian faith as lived by Mennonites”. And as a committed observer I’ve seen that what I imbibed as a child and youth, what I unconsciously learned about what it means to be a Mennonite follower of Jesus, are values and themes present also among other people who were raised within the Mennonite / Anabaptist faith tradition. And of course these themes and values are present in other Christian traditions; they’re not limited to Mennonites, thank God. There are other denominations that share our historic Anabaptist roots (Church of the Brethren, Brethren in Christ). And there are other Christian traditions quite close to ours in numerous ways (Quakers in their pacifism, Plymouth Brethren and some Baptists in their believer’s baptism and piety). And much more.
So to summarise these two caveats: 1) I don’t assume my experiences growing up as a Mennonite are normative for all Mennonites, and 2) I’m sure others who grew up in other Christian faith traditions will find some resonance with the core faith values I imbibed as a child, as reflected in Ephesians.
Thankfully, these core faith values that I absorbed I believe are shared by many others, with different stories and cultural contexts.
And the first core faith value I learned from Fred and Toledo Mennonite church was that Jesus saves, and the joy we have in Christ’s love permeates life. As an adult I have at times called that kind of language pietistic and perhaps overly sentimental. Yet it was core to what I grew up understanding about faith and being Mennonite. And Ephesians is full of that joy too.
One more note here before moving on to the second core faith value I absorbed as a child. I also understood clearly that as Mennonites, we were different from the people around us, the “world”. We weren’t Amish, I remember explaining to some high school friends (I didn’t know then that my great grandparents WERE Amish, but of the progressive wing) – we weren’t Amish, but somehow I knew we were different. Perhaps that was due partly to being in a blue collar city where most people knew nothing about Mennonites. No doubt it had much to do with the separateness I would feel frequently in school — staying back, alone in the classroom, when all my classmates would go to the school basement to buy war stamps and come back bragging about how close their stamp book was to being filled. Plus, I was the only boy in the neighbourhood who wasn’t allowed to watch Superman on TV. Oh yes, and we were also different because my mom wore a “covering”. Those doily-like white thingies that many Swiss Mennonite (and Brethren in Christ) women in Ontario and the USA wore on their heads. Picture evidence shows that my mom wore it all day every day when I was quite small; however I only remember her wearing it to church – Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings, as did my city Grandma. My maternal grandma on the farm, however, wore it all her waking hours.
They called it their “prayer covering”. It was part of their reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5.21) and a very visible symbol of their dedication to Christ – being always in a spirit of prayer. It was part of their Christian joy. In the late 60s and early 70s, the covering was abandoned by most women in my church and beyond because it was seen as a symbol of patriarchy and submission. Ephesians 5.22-23: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” But that is not how my mom and grandmas understood their prayer covering. And for several generations now many Mennonites have framed this instruction from Ephesians 5 within the context of the preceding verse: 21 “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
So now, core faith learning #2: It was a dark and stormy night…, although it had stopped raining. We watched through our living room window as Jack, the neighbourhood wino who lived in a rundown shoddily built house a block down the road, drunkenly made his way past our house, weaving from the middle of the road to the side, and then to the other, stopping frequently to catch his breath … or balance. Then it happened – Jack got a little too far to the side of the road, lost his balance and toppled into the shallow ditch where the rain had left a large puddle. He struggled to get up. We watched. He fought again to get up. We held our breath. Then we heard the garage door go up. We looked around and saw that my dad was no longer in the living room. He was backing his beloved Buick out of the garage, down to the street, stopping next to Jack. Dad helped him up out of the ditch and into the car, and then took him home. Our car reeked of urine for days.
Growing up, I saw my parents living out daily “what would Jesus do” long before it was a slogan. Hans Denck, a 16th century Anabaptist, said “no one can know Christ truly unless she/he follow him daily in life.” I saw this many times at home and at church. Knowing Christ meant following him daily. And following him daily led to greater knowing. So, I’ll call this second core value I absorbed as a child “To know Jesus is to know God.” Caring for others, especially the “downtrodden” and the “less fortunate”, to use language of my childhood — this was to know Christ, this was to follow him daily in life, and this was infinitely more important than material possessions. Helping others meant helping Jesus and showing Jesus our love for him. I experienced this as child playing under the quilts my mom and the “women’s sewing circle” would set up to stitch and quilt every second Wednesday to donate to the international relief and development work of Mennonite Central Committee. I also observed this in the Mennonite voluntary service unit that was an extension of our church, where a group of young adults lived together and worked in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the city. They would serve without salary for a year or two, the young women for the joy of service, the guys in lieu of military service. Maybe the guys had some joy inservice too. And my rural grandpa and grandma were the “houseparents” of a voluntary service unit like this after they retired.
Ephesians 3:14-19: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. 16I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, 17and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 18I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Following Christ is knowing Christ and his love. Faith lived daily in life is being filled with the fullness of God. That was my core faith learning #2, which grew out of #1: Jesus loves me this I know; the joy of salvation. And #3 is that as a child I understood intuitively that community was core to our faith and to being followers of Jesus.
Community. John and Mary were salt of the earth folks. Mary was my Sunday school teacher. John was part of the property committee. In short, they were very involved in the church. But they couldn’t manage money. John worked (sometimes) at an auto parts store that was on my way home from school and would save auto brand stickers for me – the kind that boys would put on their notebooks and bicycles. I had a really cool notebook cover. They lived in a small modest house a block over from us. When I was about 11, I was at my Grandpa and Grandma’s house and noticed a cheque on my grandpa’s desk. (I liked to snoop on his desk and my dad’s too!) The cheque was from John and Mary and the memo line said “June rent”. I remember it was at least September because school had started. So, June’s rent was late. I pressed my grandpa for explanations, but he just brushed off my questions, refusing to answer. Later I asked my dad, and he wasn’t so evasive, explaining that a number of years prior, John and Mary had fallen so far behind on their mortgage payments that the bank was foreclosing. So Grandpa and Grandma bought the house, and John and Mary were to pay rent for a number of years after which the house would be theirs. They never did pay it off, but that’s beside the point. They were part of a community who looked after each other. Mutual aid and responsibility for each other were assumed.
So community was core to our faith and to being followers of Jesus. Yet sometimes there were difficulties. One summer at Toledo Mennonite, there was conflict brewing, although as a pre-adolescent, I wasn’t aware of it. However, when someone in the congregation stood up one Sunday morning to “read a letter from Colleen and Obie”, I could immediately feel that this wasn’t good. The letter was from Colleen, the minister’s daughter, and her husband, saying that they were withdrawing from the church. It was over something I don’t remember, maybe never knew. I do however remember the tears and pain that Sunday morning. There was complete silence when the letter was finished. No one spoke. Then a few people began to sob quietly. After some time, someone said “could we sing a hymn?” Singing! What was normally a weekly communal experience of worship, edification and joy became my congregation’s communal expression of the pain and sadness of broken relationships among us. That hymn was a lament for and confirmation of community. As a community we understood we were called to be a new humanity, the household of God together, to proclaim Christ’s peace, with Christ as the cornerstone. When we failed, there was much pain and sadness.
Ephesians 2.12-22: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us…. so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, 16and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. 17So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 19So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
Of course, the two groups the letter to the Ephesians talks about – are the Jews and the Gentiles. I don’t remember any childhood awareness that the context of this passage was Jew-Gentile. However, I do remember sensing that we must be at peace with all people, both within the congregation and with all others. And I remember that any hostile words about other people were not permitted. I grew up without racist or religious prejudice that I can identify. There was to be peace with Jews and Muslims, with Afro-Americans and American Indians. I remember the strangeness and bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I heard negative comments about Catholics or Polish people or homosexuals at school or in the neighbourhood or by employees or customers at my family’s business. It was clear to me from an early age that as Mennonite Christians we followed a Christ who broke down hostility between peoples. We were to be reconcilers, peacemakers, as we all – all humanity – were part of the household of God. And in the community we were to be “members of one another, and live in love” as the Ephesians text for Aldred’s sermon two weeks ago so clearly describes. In doing so, we were “imitators of God”. This happened in community — a reconciling, dividing-wall breaking, peace-making, new humanity-building community. This grows out of our commitment to Jesus and to each other and is empowered by the Spirit at work in us. It’s not simply one added obligation of being a Christian, or some Mennonite “distinctive”, or a “teaching” we try to follow. It’s at the core of our identity.
And that’s the fourth and last core faith learning I deeply absorbed as a child, that “We are people of God’s peace,” and that forgiveness was the Jesus way, rather than insisting on justice or punishment.
When my second younger brother was born in 1962, his brain was destroyed due to a terrible medical error that deprived him of oxygen for the first crucial minutes of his life. His name was Paul. People in the city encouraged my parents to sue the doctor. My parents, in their grief, talked to the church who affirmed their thinking that “vengeance won’t restore Paul’s brain” nor “soothe our grief.” So, they did not sue. Six months later, the doctor, a well-known figure in the city, suddenly moved to another state. My brother Paul lived in a complete vegetative state, unable to move or speak. He died when he was 12 years old.
“We are people of God’s peace.” We are to love our enemies. I was probably no more than 9 or 10 when my Sunday school teacher arrived to the classroom one Sunday morning with this massive, old looking and old smelling book, turned to page 741, and proceeded to read: “in the year 1569 a pious, faithful brother and follower of Jesus Christ, named Dirk Willems…”. That is my first memory of the Martyrs Mirror and the story of brother Dirk who is so core to my Mennonite identity. If you don’t know the captivating story of how he saved the life of his persecutor and was burned at the stake as a result, many of my former Sunday school students and I will be glad to act it out for you after the service.
“We are people of God’s peace.” This meant that we didn’t go to war or help with war. In addition to the Dirk Willems story, I grew up hearing the story of my great-great-great-great-great Grandpa; his name was Christian Schmucker. My GGGGrandma’s name was Catherine. They lived in eastern Pennsylvania. One day, during the U.S. Revolutionary War, military officials arrived at their farm. These army bosses declared that all able-bodied men were needed to join the fight against the British tyranny, to fight the war for independence. As the story goes, my great-Grandpa Christian quietly refused, saying “I will not use a gun against any person.” The military recruiters tried using persuasion and threats, but with the support of GGrandma Catherine, he stood firm. He needed her support because he knew what would face him, because he had been in prison before, in Switzerland, in a castle dungeon. He had been thrown in prison there because he was an Amish-Mennonite preacher.
The military bosses left quite angrily. After a number of days, they returned, offering GGrandpa a “deal”: Grandpa only would have to drive his team of horses and wagon to transport supplies to the army. He wouldn’t have to fight himself or use a gun — just transport supplies to the soldiers so they could fight. But again GGrandpa refused. He said firmly that he would not participate or help in any part of the war. The military officials decided to make an example out of Grandpa: he was arrested, thrown into jail, and then sentenced to death in a military court for treason. In prison he wasn’t given any food, so Great Grandma Catherine had to take him food every day. And their 10 year old grandson — my great-great-great Grandpa — would go with his Grandma Catherine to take food to grandpa Christian during his long prison stay. Sometimes people threw stones at them as they carried food to Gr
andpa in jail.
Grandpa was sentenced to be shot and a day was set for the execution. But the execution was never carried out; other people in the community appealed to the authorities on his behalf. The appeal was heard and eventually Grandpa was set free.
Ephesians chapter 6: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13Therefore take up the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness.15As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.”
So all this I learned and deeply absorbed as a child about what it means to be a Anabaptist-Mennonite Christian. And it’s all so profoundly reflected in Ephesians…. Ephesians in the life of one Mennonite boy:
4. We are people of God’s peace.
3. The community of believers is core to faith and being followers of Jesus.
2. To know Jesus is to know God and means following Jesus daily in life.
1. Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Amen!