In a throwaway world, it is good to have known someone whose life reminds us that there are some things worth keeping. In a society where last year’s fashions are pitched out and yesterday’s values are passé, it is important to have known someone who understood how to keep hold of the right things. Helen Hastings knew what was worth holding. Helen understood that you might let go of many things, but please, keep hold of what is truly important.
Around our church, we thought of her as the watchdog of our finances. She guarded with diligence the integrity of our resources. Some of our church leaders found, to their dismay, that she was not about to let them play fast and loose with money. She kept a close hold, not so much on the money itself, but on the way it was handled. The rigor she brought to her task was not really so much about money; it was about loving the right things, it was about integrity, it was about keeping faith with God Himself. Helen Hastings knew what was worth keeping. Helen understood that you might let go of many things, but please, keep hold of what is truly important.
The apostle Paul, writing to the young Timothy, offers us a perspective on Helen’s life and values. You see, I’m confident that some have misunderstood Helen; some have believed that money was all that she was about. But that would be a serious misinterpretation of her life. She was about so very much more than that. And Paul’s words provide clues to the things Helen really kept hold on. It wasn’t really about money; it was about loving the right things, about integrity, about keeping faith with God.
I
For example, there is that wonderful phrase with which Paul ends this passage – “take hold of the life that really is life.” The life that really is life. Life with zest and intensity; life with excitement and energy. Helen lived her life with intensity. Part of that intensity came from her determination to keep hold of old patterns. She clung to habits that had served her well. She once told me that she had kept every bill she had ever paid, and that if I needed to know what she paid for electricity in 1962, it was here somewhere. She kept to old patterns. And yet her zest for life also took her into learning new things, like computing, Allen, with curiosity and energy. She kept hold of the life that really is life.
Let me ask you: when you stopped by Helen’s house, for “just a minute”, did you ever leave after “just a minute”? Could you just transact business and leave it at that? By no means; she would invite you in, insist that you stop and talk a while. If you were bringing church financial business, she would take it from you, thumb through it and grumble, “These people sure do know how to spend money; what IS all this stuff?”. And then she would put it all down on the couch and say, “Aak. How are you doing, kiddo?” I think I came to see Helen just so I could be called “kiddo”! It doesn’t happen much any more!
What a zest for life! Warmly welcoming, although wary of new people. At this time of the year, our church goes through a leadership transition; all the committees elect new chairmen. She would call me up and say, “Who is this that signed this voucher?” I would say, “Oh, he’s the new chairman of such-and-such committee.” And she would answer, “I never heard of him. Who is he? Why can’t we just stick with (whoever last year’s chairman was)?” She loved to keep old friends, and would talk with me for hours about people who left our church long before I even got here. At first, she would seem uncomfortable with new people. And yet, once any of them came by 208 Dale Drive and she got to know them, they were quickly accepted, they were warmly affirmed, they were treasured. Helen knew how to keep hold of people; Helen put energy into her friends, and thus kept hold of the life that really is life.
What was Helen Hastings all about? She was about loving the right things, about integrity, and about keeping faith with God.
II
But not only does the apostle tell the young Timothy to keep hold of the life that really is life; he urges him to “keep the commandment without spot or blame”. In solemn and awesome words, Paul instructs his disciple, “In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you
to keep the commandment without spot or blame.”
Without spot. There she is! Helen Hastings believed that the rules were the rules, and you were to keep them. If you did not sign your voucher, she did not pay your bill. If you failed to show on that voucher the account from which that bill was to be paid, that voucher was sent back to you for correction. Never mind that she could have easily figured out on her own what the account should be; she expected you to get it right. Keep the commandment, keep the rules, without spot or blame.
But now when you look at this text closely, you ask, “What commandment was Paul talking about?” It’s not clear exactly what commandment we are to keep without spot or blame. Probably he was referring to Jesus’ great commandment; echoing what Jesus had said, that we are commanded to love the Lord our God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. Keep this commandment, the commandment to love, without spot or blame.
Some of my most priceless memories come from those times when Helen tried to keep the rules, but bent them so that she could keep the love commandment! Times when the importance of protecting money was overridden by the importance of serving others.
Helen cared about missions, for example. She so much cared about missions that she would say, “I just send the missions money automatically. I’m not going to wait for them to write vouchers. They’ll just forget. We’ve got to send the missions money.” She was keeping the commandment to love.
Helen cared about people with special needs. From time to time one or the other of our church staff would get into a tight financial squeezes. More month than money, or an unusual bill, or a cash flow problem. It generally fell to me to interpret the problem and ask that somebody be given an advance or some other relief, and you know what would happen. Helen would complain to high heaven. “What does he do with all his money? How do we know she will work those hours; you make sure she comes to work the rest of the month!” With apparent great reluctance, and with lots of New England bluster, she would finally approve that early check. And then the very next week would ask if there was anything else we could do to help!
Don’t you see? It was never really about money with Helen. It was about keeping the commandment of love. She demanded rigorous accountability, and yet, in the end, was more than willing to bend her own rules in order to help. I remember the day that we needed to get our old copier repaired, and there wasn’t any money left in the budget for that. She told us that no, we could not get it repaired, we would just have to do without it, and that it was a sad day when we got rid of her old friend, the mimeograph, from which she used to send paper flying all over the room! Just do without the copier, she said. And then thirty minutes later she called back and said, “I have an idea. We have this needy fund (that’s a fund we have for people who need financial assistance to pay their bills). We have this needy fund; well, the copier is ‘needy’. Let’s pay for the repairs out of that!”
Keep the commandment, yes. But keep the commandment of love. That overrode everything else with Helen. Again, it wasn’t really about money with her. It was about loving the right things, about integrity, about keeping faith with what God had called her to do.
III
And so today we come together to celebrate, above all, Helen’s desire to keep hold of the one thing most important, the one thing above all others that is of paramount significance. We come together to celebrate Helen’s passionate desire to “take hold of … eternal life.” About her spiritual concerns let no one make a mistake. Let there be no ambiguity or uncertainty: Helen Hastings knew and loved her Lord, in her own dynamic way, and she kept hold of that relationship.
Helen was devoted to the Word of God. She listened to our prayer telephone message every day, and told me about it if I was late in making the message. And when I would lay out a period of Bible reading, working our way day by day through some book of the Bible and commenting on it on the phone message, Helen would faithfully follow that program. She would read that material. But now that does not mean that she would not complain; she would say, “Yikes. Joshua. I don’t like Joshua. All that killing. I am not enjoying this one. Pick something else!” But read she would, nonetheless, because she was devoted to God’s word and to her relationship with her God. She wanted to keep hold of eternal life.
Helen was invested in the preaching of the Word of God. After she broke her hip and could no longer attend worship, she asked me for copies of my sermons, so that she could read them. It became part of my Sunday morning routine to copy the sermon manuscript and put it in her mailbox; and if I were not the preacher of the day, or if I would forget, let me tell you, I would hear about it! She read those sermons carefully; and, speaking of keeping hold, she kept them in binders. She probably kept a better record of my preaching than I do. She wanted to keep hold of the things that will build eternal life.
Helen loved worship. Now she wanted that worship service to be short and direct. She would say, “The service should be done within one hour”. “Get rid of all that other junk and give yourself time to preach”. And yet she also loved that other junk, like music and prayer and Scripture reading and all the rest. Dan and Von and Janice – she loved to hear you sing. It helped her keep hold of eternal life.
Helen loved her Lord, without being stuffy or pious about it. Sickly sweet religion was not for her. She preferred to be just slightly irreverent. Did any of you ever hear her exclaim, “Oh, Tennessee?!” Maybe that was our private joke. It worked like this: the motto of the state of West Virginia is “almost heaven”. I argued that they are “almost heaven” only because as you go through West Virginia, you arrive in Kentucky, my native state, which IS heaven! And so Helen decided that when she needed to let off steam and be just ever so slightly profane, and since down beneath heaven there is you-know-where, she could say, “Oh, Tennessee!” “What the Tennessee is he doing?!” You figure it out! Helen knew that being stuffy and self-righteous was not the same thing as knowing the Lord, and she preferred to be just slightly irreverent in her language so that she could be profoundly certain in her soul. She took hold, she kept hold, of eternal life.
And so today we celebrate her life. We take courage from her witness. We learn what it is to keep hold of the things that are truly important. We learn to love the things that matter. We learn integrity. We learn to keep faith with God. And, above all, we know that her God will keep hold of her for all eternity.
