Abide with me: the faith of our ancestors

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

The writer of these words, Henry Francis Lyte, was a Scots-Anglican clergyman. He wrote them a few weeks before his death in 1847, of tuberculosis, after preaching his last sermon. He rested, took a walk on the beach, then retired to his study, and emerged with the words in his hand.

Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Abide is a beautiful world. It means to “act in accordance with” (as a rule or decision that we abide by); or, in its older use, to dwell. In relationship to time, abide means to continue to be; that is, not to perish; to stay with. The Greek word for abide, menó, gives us our word “remain.”

The use of the word “abide” in relationship to Jesus is found only in John’s Gospel. It calls to mind John’s first chapter, where it says “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The Greek for “lived among us” is a rare word that literally means something like “pitched his tent among us.” This is the incarnational God, God coming to us, living among us. But Jesus tells us--this is for eternity. I will never leave you. I will abide with you. 

Joshua is talking about keeping God close too. The people have just come into the promised land, after forty years in the wilderness following their liberation from slavery under Pharaoh. But their beloved prophet and leader, Moses, has died, and not come into the land with them. And this land is strange and new. It’s full of people not at all like them. Has God just dropped them off and moved on? No, for, God has said, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” And the covenant is what makes this so. God’s covenant is an abiding relationship, like a marriage. If the people say yes to it, following its laws, serving the Lord, and putting away all other gods, then God will dwell amongst them. And so Joshua sets an example to them, by inviting God to dwell in his household.  

Our readings are set in times when the world was tenuous and the people did not know what they could count on. In Joshua, the people were strangers in their own land. Paul’s letter talks of the “armor of God,” not as a call to militarism but because this was the only battle the Ephesians were called to fight amidst harassment and persecution. It is a call to stick together, to live into their faith in Jesus. John’s Gospel was written at a time of conflict between the traditional Jewish community and the Jewish Jesus followers. In it, Jesus is preoccupied with helping the disciples understand that life with him continues in the Spirit after his time with them in the flesh comes to an end. He says, what is mortal, passes. What is consumed for the body, as mere food and drink, is digested and leaves you. But I will not leave you. If you believe in me, if you make a place for me, I will abide in you. And I will give you life.

I think it’s hard to appreciate sometimes, in our comfortable lives, how much our spiritual ancestors’ lives were sustained by the hope their faith gave them in times of suffering and struggle, and what strength they received by allowing God to abide in them.  

When I think about that kind of faith I think of my grandparents, who were Presbyterian missionaries in China from 1910 to 1948. They sailed to China directly from their honeymoon, and made their lives there until the Chinese government kicked them out. They ran a boy’s school in Kiangyin, a village about 90 miles up the Yangtze River from Shanghai.

Ella and Andrew Allison--just before sailing to China

They arrived in China just before the last emperor was forced out, ending 2,000 years of imperial rule, and plunging China into a decades-long leadership vacuum. Letters—mostly my grandfather’s—tell the story of faith abiding amongst the chaos and unrest:

• A letter from 1922 mentions floods and famine. Kiangyin is without its “regular physician,” and there’s a need for six more.
• In 1925, the Chinese Civil War has broken out and comes to Kiangyin. The mission station “was at times in the midst of the fighting; rifle balls were constantly whistling by and large shells from the forts were hurtling overhead. Many of the bullets penetrated our houses, while others were picked up on every side…” They took as many from the Chinese Christian community as they could fit inside their gates.

Some of the school-children from Kiangyin. My dad is on the right, looking in the other direction. Mid 1920's?

• By 1929, the civil war is so fierce that many missionaries have left China. The school is closed due to the fighting, but Grandpa writes of opening it again, despite an expected Communist uprising. There’s a famine in the north, and a cholera epidemic in Shanghai.
• A 1930 letter says the Nationalist government is pressuring church schools. Inspectors come by regularly to make sure students bow to the picture of the Republic’s founder, Sun Yat-sen. Grandpa writes, “if God’s will is to close the schools, there is still plenty of work to do."
• In 1931, terrible floods along the Yangtze wipe out thousands of farms. Japan has invaded Manchuria to the north.
• By 1932, Japanese destroyers are appearing on the Yangtze. The depression means less money is coming in; some missionaries are paying to keep the school running from their own salaries.
• By 1934, the cuts are affecting the jobs of Chinese workers. But in the girls school, “doors are wide open; people are ready to hear, waiting to be taught. The women are begging for more classes in the country. The school is overflowing.”
• In 1936, Grandpa has opened another mission station in the country. He gets around on a bicycle, often riding 70 miles in a day. He’s 57. 
• In 1937, rumblings of war with the Japanese are getting more intense.   
• By January 1938, the missionaries have retreated to the countryside for their safety. The Japanese will not let foreigners return to inspect their homes. 17 of 20 buildings have been destroyed in the station. Later, Grandpa writes that they’ve fled Kiangyin. They live in a boat with two other missionaries for 3 months.
• By 1940, they’re back in Kiangyin. “The people need us,” he writes.
• On Dec 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the Allisons are in Shanghai. The school my father had attended is operating as a refugee station. A missionary sends a telegram – “NEARLY ALL OUR BELOVED COLLEAGUES WHO WERE CUT OFF IN CHINA BY THE WAR ARE NOW ON BOATS TO THE U.S.” But in in another letter:  “Our nine left in Shanghai ask your remembrance.” Yup. The Allisons are still in Shanghai. 

The letters stop for a while, but sometime in 1942, my grandparents are put in an internment camp of some 1,000 souls near Shanghai. It’s in a bombed-out university, and they’re held in by two layers of barbed wire. They have to make it livable themselves. Seven couples share a room of 15x45 feet. After about 18 months, they are liberated and sent home to the US to recover. Their friends encourage them to retire.

Uh huh…Sure.

Here’s a letter from Grandpa in 1946. “They are glad to see us…We at Kiangyin have the proud distinction, which we exhibit somewhat as a barefoot does his sore toe, of having had the greatest destruction of property of any station…” There is so much damage they are not sure whether they can rebuild. But later that year, he writes, “Our school has opened with 300 boys and girls…A neat little church building, that will seat 600, has arisen on the frame of an old outdoor play-shed…Everyone is happy and busy.”

By now, Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist forces are in power.

In Oct 1948, Grandpa writes of “terrible times for patient people,” and of the people around him he loves so much. In Nov, there’s a mention of riots in Shanghai for food, and the need for clean water. Later that month, all Americans are advised by the US government to get out of China.

Finally, in Dec of 1948, a fellow missionary writes: “Because of conditions, it seemed wiser for Rev. and Mrs. Allison, who were retiring next summer anyway, to go on to the United States a few months earlier, and they are on the sea now. Their leaving was very hard on all of us, but we rejoiced, even as we mourned their going, over the great things the Lord had done through them through the years.”

And so it ended. The only property my grandparents ever owned was a summer cottage in the hills above the Yangtze River, which they lost to the Communists. They came home and their community cared for them. They probably received a tiny church pension. I remember looking in my grandmother’s closet and seeing only three dresses. They were not fed by material food. They lived in the spirit.

How many times were they asked like Jesus asked his disciples, “do you wish to go away?”  I am sure they considered it. But they must have answered—“To whom can we go? We are here with the Lord, who abides with us and gives us eternal life.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would have even waited to be asked if I wished to go away! I think I inherited a thimbleful of my grandparents’ faith. And the point isn’t to feel unworthy by their example. Rather, it’s to see their lives as testimony that God, abiding in us, really does animate lives. It’s true! My grandmother never imagined what would be asked of her. There was more in her than she knew, just as there is more in us than we know. That is, when we believe in the power of Jesus Christ and invite Jesus to abide with us.

This hymn was sung at my grandmother’s funeral, and I ask you to join me in the last verse.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heav’n's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Lectionary:  Joshua 24:1-21, 14-18; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

Preached August 26, 2018, St Gabriel's Episcopal Church, Portland OR