Memorial Meditation For Martha Shank Whissen, Age 105

Martha Shank 1914-2019
EMS yearbook photo

It was my privilege to have been Martha Shank Whissen’s pastor for over 20 years, and I was honored to have been asked to share some reflections on her life yesterday, as follows: 

I can’t help but be in awe of all of the history Martha witnessed as a lifelong member of this community and of this congregation. She was a woman of faith who came from a long line of faithful believers, many of whom are buried right here in this cemetery where she’s just been laid to rest. For over a century she’s observed and absorbed so much, and represents a kind of living archive of the story of how God has worked in her life and in the lives of her ancestors and fellow believers.

     

Which reminds me of Psalm 78, identified as a maskil, or a teaching psalm, with stories of the failures and the blessings experienced by God’s people. I’d like for you to hear the introduction to the psalm as though Martha herself were speaking it directly to us. 

My people, listen to my teaching.

    Pay attention to what I say.

I will open my mouth and tell a story.

    I will speak about things that were hidden.

    They happened a long time ago.

Things we have heard and know.

That our people who lived before us have told us.

We won’t hide them from our children.

    We will tell them to those who live after us.

We will tell them what the Lord has done that is worthy of praise.

    We will talk about God’s power and the wonderful things God has done.

Martha’s life is like a priceless collection of 105 plus years of parables and stories with teaching value that we can’t afford to ignore or to forget with her passing. Not that she wanted this service to be a eulogy to her, but to be about stories in which the main character is always God, how God has been at work in people’s lives like hers and the many others she lived with and learned from for over a century. 

Martha was born in a house less than a mile north of here which was built on the ashes of one destroyed by fire during the Civil War, a memorial to the devastation and tragedy of that terrible conflict.       

And when Martha was only a toddler, delegates of Virginia Mennonite Conference gathered at the white frame Zion church that stood here before this one was built on land donated by her Shank grandfather. With the horror of the Civil War still fresh on their minds, conference delegates on this spot wrote up a statement appealing to Congress, which was about to involve the nation in another terrible conflict, WW I, a part of which reads, “Therefore be it resolved, that we as representatives of the religious body known as Mennonites, who recognize the plain teaching of the Word of God, call your attention to the fact that we cannot engage in carnal warfare, and that, in the light of all good government, it is eminently proper that all matters of national dispute should be settled by arbitration.”  

These people of so long ago were way ahead of their time. Martha was cradled in their kind of wisdom, of a community of faith trying to be faithful to the Prince of Peace.  

Also, as a very young girl, her life was impacted by many of her friends and close relatives, young and old alike, who died of a deadly flu epidemic that was brought over by those who took part in that war, and she would have witnessed the grief of many a tragic and untimely burial here at the northwest corner of the cemetery. She was also very young when Eastern Mennonite School was established in the Park View area, intended to produce people who could truly be a salt of the earth and a light on a hill, now the home of a University and a sprawling suburb on land which was once pasture and plowed fields.    

She attended there as a young farm girl, and became the school’s oldest living graduate, and later went on to get a teaching degree at a time when not many of her female church peers had the opportunity or the courage to get into that kind of profession, especially teaching in the public school system, much less to later get a Master’s degree at Madison College. Meanwhile, she taught generations of children in Zion and other Northern District Sunday Schools and Bible schools. As her pastor, I was blessed by the opportunity to hear many of her stories, along with those of her late husband Clarence.

People like this are a reminder that all of us are a part of a larger continued story that doesn’t begin with us or end with us, but is but one part of one chapter of a drama that goes back to the “In the beginning” of Genesis itself, and continues on, generation after generation to the Revelation of a new heavens and the new earth. 

We all need to learn from treasures like Martha, and to immerse ourselves in the life stories of that great cloud of witnesses who have gone ahead of us, each a powerful parable of God at work in imperfect but faithful folks of faith and courage. While experience is a powerful teacher, we don’t want to learn everything by experience, but rather from people like our spiritual forbears that go all the way back to the stories of God’s people told in Psalm 78. We learn from their strengths and their weaknesses, their blessings and their failures. The entire Bible is a book about ordinary Martha’s who through faith became parables of God’s truth and agents of God’s grace.

So we conclude Martha’s maskil, the teaching psalm that represents her life, with the words with which J. S. Bach signed each of his musical works, “Soli Deo Gloria,” “To the praise of God alone.” 

That would be Martha's wish, and Martha's last will and testimony.

Prayer:

May we be ever willing to learn from those who are not behind us, and we ahead of them, but of those who are ahead of us, and we coming along behind, blessed by lessons we can live by and pass on to all who will follow us, to the praise of God alone.  Amen.