Plant It Home

On family history and what matters in the end

Preach you the Word and plant it home

To men who like or like it not,

The Word that shall endure and stand

When flow’rs and men shall be forgot.

“Preach You the Word” LSB #586, v.1

There’s a wonder and priceless gift in knowing where you came from. Implicit in that phrase is an answer of geography. Real people live in real places, which can be visited and walked, even as those places inevitably change. The dirt still remains, and you can hold it in your hands, and it is in a very tangible sense shared earth, a small plot of home soil.

But where you came from is inextricably bound up with who you came from, those fleshy immortal souls you know and those you don’t. That’s why history is so personally interesting. It tells us of whom we come, those real, breathing, talking, feeling, moving people who came before us.

During recent summer travels, our Olson family—all of us—was able to be at a family reunion for the first time in a handful of years. The Uchtman (pronounced “YOOT-man,” for those who want to know) family is my mother’s clan, and she and her siblings are the children of Merrell and Lucille. The siblings rotate hosting an annual gathering for their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren who can attend. We met at the place where the reunion has been held for some time, at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Bremen, Illinois, a little blink-or-you’ll-miss-it hamlet in the southwestern corner of the state near the Mississippi River. At one time, when my oldest aunt was in high school in the mid-1970s, at least three generations of the family lived within ten miles of each other and of the church.

St. John’s was long known by its founding name: Evangelische-Lutheranische St. Johannes Kirche. That’s still the name you can see on the front on its building, which was constructed in 1981 after a straight-line wind destroyed the older one. My parents’ wedding was the last one held in the steepled church. My dad drew a picture of it many years ago. It still hangs in their home.

If you look closely, you can see the church name above the door.

I know St. John’s was founded in the 1800s, and I’ll have to update here when I get an actual date. Suffice it to say the church has been around a long time. And yes, its heritage is thoroughly German. German services happened well into the 20th century, and my mom can remember adults conversing in German after services and at fellowship times in the 1960s (probably so that kids like her couldn’t understand them, she admits). The church was a part of the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) until that group joined other Lutheran synods to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the 1980s. Now it’s a part of the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), an association of break-off ELCA churches that takes more moderate theological positions than, well, the Sparkle Creed, the latest infamous ELCA moment that’s been highlighted on social media. So while St. John’s has had a number of female pastors in recent years, it won’t take a homosexual or transgender pastor, as far as I know. No, I can’t figure how logically the one position can be tolerated without an eventual capitulation to the other, but that’s another conversation.

My sainted grandmother Lucille, who I’ve written about before, was saddened and somewhat confused in the early 1990s when my parents stopped communing at her church when we visited, and when we, her grandchildren, didn’t commune once we were confirmed. To her, a woman whose children had been baptized and confirmed at St. John’s, and where her husband had been buried, nothing much had changed there except that the congregation had been gradually shrinking and ageing since its height in the 1960s and 1970s. It made my parents and us kids sad, too. Thankfully, they had learned enough of what was happening in greater Lutheranism to know that bad things were coming, all a continuation of what had begun in the Seminex walkout in 1974. I honestly thank God that Grandma was so grounded in the Bible, through her daily reading and being steeped in the Word, so that any trickle-down historical criticism and teachings that doubted the veracity of Scripture largely passed her by. But the changes remained regardless. Without the Word in its truth and purity, the Gospel is lost, not immediately but by a process of attrition and neglect. It is a sad heritage of St. John’s, and of too many churches.

The “new” church, the one I remember from my early childhood to today. The hall is just to the west of the church building.

We weren’t talking about theological decline, or anything close to it, at the reunion as we sat around the tables in the old hall at St. John’s. We were catching up with people who had known us since our births, or since we were very young—my aunt Kathryn known by her older sister Donna, my cousins Tim and Rick and Josh known by our oldest cousin Michelle (who doesn’t seem to age at all, even as her daughters are all grown up). In-law additions to the family like my father are still part of it, because of time and experiences and patrimony; his children and grandchildren sat around the tables, too. So many people don’t know their families, due to the brokenness of human beings, our frailties and blindnesses, and the temporalities of our collective memory. That’s one reason I appreciated our time together, and my mother giving a brief history of her parents, and their parents, and even grandparents. My generation’s children don’t know my—our— grandparents, Merrell and Lucille. How could they know about them, then, unless they heard about them from people who knew them?

My grandfather Merrell died suddenly in 1963 of appendicitis. In the few pictures I’ve seen of him, I see my mother. Boy howdy, do they look alike. Tall, blue eyes, straight nose. He and Grandma eloped when they married, prudently taking along their mothers to witness the ceremony and saving money that would otherwise have gone to a wedding. Merrell was a farmer first, like his father, and eventually an insurance salesman, and he loved to sing. Mom dimly remembers riding a Farmall tractor with her dad, them singing together, though she wasn’t quite four when he passed. He had a sense of humor; one aunt recalled a masked, silent man appearing at the door on Halloween before Merrell was home, my grandmother nervously asking him who he was, before my grandfather jumped out from the side of the porch to scare her and the kids and reveal the man as his cousin and co-conspirator.

One of the few pictures of my grandparents together. They couldn’t afford studio portraits. Photo courtesy of my mother.

Merrell also was generous, and he practiced the kind of neighborly giving that seemed to have been more common then. When some people couldn’t pay their insurance premiums, he would pay for them himself, accepting food or other illiquid goods instead. He did business with others who some people shunned. It is a sad fact that the town where my mom grew up was notoriously racist. There was a sign at the town entrance that said something like “N——r, don’t let the sun go down on your head.” Nevertheless, my aunts remembered Merrell buying and selling cattle from an area black family and playing with their children, presumably while deals and delivery were made. Very shortly after my grandfather died, a car pulled into the driveway, and my aunt, who was fourteen, went out to see who it was. It was a black man who Merrell had sold insurance to. He asked for my grandmother, and my aunt got her, and grandma invited him in. He said he couldn’t come in, but he wanted to give his deepest condolences to her for Merrell’s death, and express how sorry he was, as he thought very highly of him. The man wasn’t welcome at the two full-day visitations or at the funeral. So he had come to the house instead, to give his regards to my grandmother and to her children. My aunt cried when she told us this story, and she is not one to cry.

Merrell’s parents were Lutherans, and he was, too. I’m fairly certain he was baptized and confirmed at the same church where my mother and her siblings were baptized and confirmed, another fact I need to check. I don’t know what his daily habits were, if he read the Bible himself, or sang hymns with his children. I need to ask my aunts if they remember anything like that. But it is a comfort to know that Jesus knew Merrell, and my grandfather received the Word faithfully at church. This matters because Merrell was made in the image of God, and he was meant to live forever, though his body died at 36. And this matters to the rest of us, because we will all follow Merrell’s road, sooner or later.

My mother at her parents’ graves.

My grandparents were not flashy people. They were quiet Christians, sinners and saints both. I am so thankful that they were both raised to prize the faith given in their baptisms, enough to pass that along to their children. Good Christians know that only God gives faith, but His children can reject that gift, or let it wither or choke or smother, like so many of those seeds in the parable of the Sower. He so desires His reckless love, as the hymn quoted above says in another stanza, to be passed from generation to generation. Though people like my grandparents lived modest lives, enjoying simple pleasures like family dinners and working the ground, He gave them the priceless gift of Himself, one that will always endure and stand, even when flowers and even they might be forgotten. I pray this is the case for me and my house, too.

Our daughter walking to the cemetery behind the church to visit Uchtman gravesites.

Preach you the Word and plant it home

And never faint; the Harvest Lord

Who gave the Sower seed to sow

Will watch and tend His planted Word.

“Preach You the Word” LSB #586, v.6