In Memoriam: Joe Wooten

“For this is the will of my Father, that every one who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Joyful, funny, friendly, soft-spoken, a man you couldn’t help but like…who else could we be speaking of on this day than Joe Wooten? I have been privileged to hear from Joe’s family the many stories of his humor and joyful countenance. I have heard from many others of his friendliness, his generosity and his helpfulness; whether at his work in the First Bank of Boaz, his participation in the “Thursday Night Choir, and in his founding and support of his parish church.

All of these impressions have coalesced in my heart, in the two years I have known Joe, and especially in the past week. And as I’ve listened to all these stories and tried to take them all in, the word that rises up in my heart when I think of Joe Wooten shall always be hope. True joy depends on hope, because this broken world can too easily suck away our reasons for joy. That could easily have happened to Joe. He and his loving sister, Nan, had to suffer a broken home. So, Joe had a reality-check early in life.

Reality checks can harden peoples’ hearts and leave them bitter about life, but not Joe Wooten. Instead of focusing on what he had lost, by God’s grace, Joe was able to find joy and love where God gave it to him. He found joy in loving grandparents and uncles who helped raise him, as well as Nan. Joe found joy in boyhood friends with whom he spent many nights camping out in their special place. So, how could Glenda help but fall in love with this bright-faced young man whom she met while he was at Jacksonville State and she was at nursing school? And how could any of us help but feel more hopeful whenever we met him?

Of course, Joe knew that that hope, amid the reality-checks of his youth, was not an accomplishment for him to take pride in. It was a gift to Joe from the gracious God who always loved him. And where else could such gratitude lead but to more hope? So it was in Christian hope that Joe and Glenda, along with Bob and Maryetta Terrell, and other hopeful souls, blazed a trail from the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Guntersville to the founding of Christ Episcopal Church in Albertville. It takes a lot of hope to leave a financially secure parish, and start a new church that has to meet in a room over the local hardware store.

But God blessed the hopes of all those founding families. An unused Episcopal church was found in Piedmont. And so Joe and the other families found a way to move that church sixty miles, up the mountain, and replant it on East Main Street. It was in hope that Joe and the rest of the parish restored the old church and gave it new life. And this summer, as I enjoyed lunches out with Joe and Glenda, his hope for his parish family remained strong.

The Bible readings for today were selected by Joe. And it is of hope that they speak. “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things…And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples…He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces.” So, the prophet Isaiah wrote thousands of years ago of his hope for Israel, and his reason to hope in the LORD.

Of course, to hope in God is to frequently have our hopes adjusted. Isaiah’s hope was for an Israel that would triumph over her enemies. When Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, that hope had to be adjusted. Two years ago, Joe and his family were forced to adjust their hopes. Joe and Glenda were looking forward to retirement, as were their children, Jody and Michelle: a more relaxed way of living, the leisure to travel and visit, to deepen relationships. All of that had to be adjusted.

It would have been easy for Joe to lose hope in his God, to rail at the unfairness of it all. And in truth, the God who wrestled with Jacob, would not have abandoned Joe if he had decided to have his own wrestling match with God. But that’s not what Joe did. He fought the cancer in his body. He continued to work at the First Bank of Boaz until his retirement. Joe and Glenda looked for any experimental treatments that might give Joe more time. And Joe did not complain. He did not lose his good humor. He never had a harsh word whenever I met him. He never said, “Why me.”

It was his strong hope that gave Joe the time that he had, far more than the odds would seem to have dictated. Where did such hope come from? It came from his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who says to us today, “For this is the will of my Father, that every one who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Jesus speaks of this resurrection to come in the middle of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, that great meditation on the nature of the Lord’s Supper. And so, just before these words, Jesus tells his fellow Jews, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” And just in case they missed his point the first time, Jesus puts the exclamation point to it when He says later in this chapter, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

How is such a thing possible? Sadly, how Jesus is present to us in the Lord’s Supper is a question that has divided Christians more than united them. We Episcopalians try not to speculate too much about such mysteries that are in God’s pay grade, not ours. But we do believe that the bread and wine are outward and visible signs of God’s grace. And we believe that the particular grace which God gives in Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people, and received by faith.

Joe had that faith. He knew that the Son of God was as close to him as the bread and wine on his lips. Joe trusted that Jesus Christ was as present with him as He was present with His first disciples nearly 2,000 years ago. As Joe faced physical death, he knew that the Son of God had already gone before him, was walking with him in the way of his cross, and would be waiting for him in the land of Resurrection.

And so Joe walks with Jesus today, in that wonderful mystery, the Communion of saints. Saint Joe now stands before the throne of God, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I wonder which of his many jokes Joe decided to try out on God first. Whichever one it was, I’m sure that God delights in his son Joe. And just as our friends here on earth pray for us, so our friend Joe now prays for us before that throne. And he will always pray for us, until we rejoin him before that that throne. Until we see him again before that throne; and until “the last day,” when we all shall be raised up, let us be comforted by, and share, in the hope of Saint Joe Wooten.