Seminary Journal 2008 (August) - Virginia Theological Seminary

Not many of us have the foreknowledge
and the foresight to plant notes
among our possessions so that, in the
case of tragedy, they will be seen by
those whom we love. But in a far more
profound way, many leave messages
by touching the hearts of those around
them. Maxine Shelly Turner—Max to
many of her friends—certainly did.
She was a young woman who was full
of life, with all the wonderful contrasts
of a growing, vibrant person. She
delighted in the violin and chemical engineering.
She was tiny in stature and
yet exuberant as a swing dancer and a
practitioner of Tae kwan do. She had
an organized career path set out clearly
before her, but she was incapable of
keeping her room in order. (If she had
left notes, it would have been diffi cult
to fi nd them.) She was serious about
what she wanted and needed to do,
and yet could be playful and foolish.
For some reason the lyrics of a song
about an earlier event have been running
through my head in the last few
days. The song is about the victims of
another tragedy, the loss of 70 seamen
and offi cers from the American warship
Reuben James, which was torpedoed
in the North Atlantic in October
of 1941, in the months in which America
was still theoretically neutral and
had not yet entered World War II. Folk
singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song
about the tragedy that fall. The refrain
to that song—the words that keep running
through my mind—is this:
Tell me what were their names,
Tell me what were their names,
Did you have a friend on the good
Reuben James?
VIRGINIA SEMINARY JOURNAL AUGUST 2007
Our hearts have been torn apart by
violence and grief. And part of the
insult and injury of the moment is the
danger that the lives of real, living,
loving, vibrant, precious people will
somehow be crushed in our common
memory into a single number and
single moment of violence that will
hold our memories captive.
Luke’s little story of Mary’s heart
holds up for us the hope that it does
not have to be so. People do matter.
We can treasure the notes that Maxine
leaves in our hearts for our lives long.
Like Mary passing on stories of her
son to Luke, we can pass on and keep
alive the story of Maxine’s life.
That good news is founded on another
far deeper and far more profound
hope, a hope hinted at by the fact that
this terrible tragedy took place in Easter
season. It is the hope that it is not
only in our hearts that the memory of
Maxine is kept alive. The hope given
to us in Jesus Christ is that we as individuals
are all precious in the heart of
the God who created us, the hope that
God not only remembers Maxine, but
will show to her the extravagant love
that he has demonstrated in Christ our
Lord, and raise her up again on the
last day and give her life.
As we have heard from Paul’s second
letter to the Corinthians, that hope
buoys us up in the midst of sorrow:
“We do not lose heart . . . For the
slight momentary affl iction is preparing
us for an eternal weight of glory
beyond all measure, because we
look not at what can be seen, but at
what cannot be seen. . . For we know
that if the earthly tent we live in is
destroyed, we have a building from
God, a house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens.”
In the late 1960s Jesse Trotter was
the Dean of the Virginia Theological
Seminary in Alexandria, where I now
teach. He had a wonderful, intelligent,
athletic, college-aged son, who played
varsity sports at an Ivy League college.
His son fell into deep depression
and took his own life. His parents, his
friends, his classmates were all totally
devastated. As chance would have it,
his father was scheduled to preach in
our chapel soon after the death. When
the day came, many assumed that the
father would pass off his responsibility
to another member of the faculty, but
he did not. He climbed into the pulpit,
despair and sorrow and grief written
on his face for all to see. His message
was brief, a sentence long, but to the
point. “I have been to the bottom,” he
said, “and the bottom holds.”
No matter what the world throws at
us, no matter how deep the injustice,
how violent the sin, how wrong the
circumstance, in Christ we have the
conviction that it is not Sin and Death,
but God who has the last word. “For I
am convinced,” says Paul in the eighth
chapter of Romans, “that neither
death, nor life, nor powers, nor height,
nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from
the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
And until the day when we too see
Christ’s fi nal victory over death, we
will treasure in our hearts the memory
of Maxine Turner.
“His mother treasured all these things
in her heart.” Amen.
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