Blue Cord

I just found out yesterday that childhood pastor, Wiley I. Rutledge, had passed away on Tuesday. I know most of my readers probably won’t know Wiley, but I encourage you to read this post. He was a remarkable man, and I am sure his story will encourage you to think about the ways in which each of us can minister to those around us every day.

Wiley served at North Johnson City Baptist Church in Tennessee. This is the church of my earliest memories. My family attended this church until I was about thirteen years old. My mother was the director of day care and my now step-father was the minister of music. We left around the same time that Wiley moved to another church.

Wiley was a deeply committed Christian and an outstanding pastor. His pastoral skills were remarkable. He had a way of touching and inspiring everyone around him. The thing I remember most was his storytelling ability. He was a master at it, as is evidenced by his participation in the National Storytelling Festival. As a child, I loved his children’s sermons. He could make you feel like you were there, eating fish beside the Sea of Galilee with Jesus or handing a stone to David as Golath rushed upon him. I accepted Christ at a revival that Wiley preached, and he was the one who baptized me.

Just recently, I learned of a story that illustrates well the way that Wiley touched all those around him. In 1976, Wiley was travelling from Nashville back to Johnson City. He stopped at a restaurant on the way through Knoxville to grab some dinner. His waitress, a woman named Lynn Morgan, was an eighteen-year-old from Ohio who was struggling to get by. Wiley talked and joked with her while she waited on him. When he left, she found a poem that he had left for her. At the bottom, he had written, “Lynn, You are a pretty, pleasant, and efficient young lady. Have love, have joy, have peace. Wiley I. Rutledge 7/16/76.” The handwritten poem, entitled rent a car bulgaria“Through All These Years,” is available online.

Lynn kept the poem and treasured it. She would pull it out and read it from time to time. After the birth of her first child, the placed the poem in a baby book so that her daughter would someday read it. She didn’t know Wiley or where he was from, and she assumed she would never see him again. This past summer, however, she found a reference to his name in a column written by Wiley’s son, Mark Rutledge, who writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, NC. She contacted Mark, who arranged for Lynn to meet with Wiley on his farm in Gray, TN.

Wiley had Alzheimer’s during the last years of his life, so he didn’t remember Lynn. But it was a blessing to his family to hear this story for the first time. As his son writes:

For him, the ones he touched are lost in the fog of a disease that will eventually take his life.

For us closest to Wiley I. Rutledge, having one of those people step out of the fog and bring to light such meaningful moments with him is nothing short of a gift from God.

My sister, Sue Ellen, says the gift is God’s way of reassuring us that he remembers our father even if our father doesn’t remember him.

You can read the complete story, which Mark wrote for The Daily Reflector. It was published just two months before Wiley passed away. I don’t know about you, but the story has encouraged me to pay more attention to those around me every day.

To me and those who knew him, Wiley will always be a giant of the Christian faith. He was an incredible preacher, but the best sermon of all was the constant love of Christ he showed to those around him. As my step-father said in a letter he wrote to let us know of Wiley’s death, Wiley was “a tremendous preacher and storyteller, a song writer, a poet, a great father and husband, a beloved grandfather, and a champion for the cause of Christ in and outside the walls of the church. His legacy of quietly reaching the people of the ‘down and out’ of the community will never be equaled by any other in my opinion. . . . [O]ur loss, and certainly heaven’s gain. As my former pastor, I’ll miss him!”

Wiley’s obituary is available in the Johnson City Press Chronicle.

I am pleased to announce that my son and I have been cast as roles in an upcoming production of Oliver! The production is being staged by the Pentucket Players. I will be playing Bill Sikes, while my son will be an orphan at the workhouse and one of Fagin’s boys.

I am excited about doing the play and even more excited that my son will be doing it as well. Oliver! holds a special place in my heart. The movie version came out the year I was born and won five Oscars, including best picture. Oliver! was also the first play I ever did. At age twelve, I played a workhouse boy and pickpocket, just as my son will. My parents and brother were both in the play as well; my father played the police officer who shoots and kills Bill Sikes, the character I am now playing. The story is a compelling one, the characters are rich, and the songs are some of the best from any musical.

I did a lot of theater from grade school all the way through college. I have been in productions of The Sound of Music (3 times), South Pacific (twice), The Music Man, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, The Wiz, Camelot, Shadow Box, and several others. I consider the time I spent on stage some of the best training I ever had for teaching and preaching. I am thrilled that my son is going to get the same experience of being on stage.

The one downside is that the performances are the same weekend as the SBL meeting this November. I will have to miss Saturday and Sunday at the SBL, although I can make it to Sunday night receptions because our performance that day is a matinee. On the other hand, if anyone at the SBL wants to come north of Boston to see a performance, it is just a short train ride up. You can hear me sing and see me get shot, all for the price of admission. Conveniently, the performances are done at the Rogers Center for Performing Arts, which is on the campus of Merrimack College where I teach.

I just got final word today that I will be teaching two sections of “Introduction to Religious Studies” at Merrimack College this fall. Merrimack is a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in the Augustinian tradition. It is located about three miles from my apartment here in Massachusetts, which makes it much more convenient than teaching in Iowa (which I did last semester). Since I am only teaching two sections, I will be able to continue working as an editor on the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.

No, this is not a post about Scriptural underwear.

I am pleased to announce that a small booklet I wrote for the Bible Briefs series is out today. The series, which is published by Forward Movement Publications in partnership with Virginia Theological Seminary, is intended to provide short introductions to books of the Bible. My contribution to the series is Leviticus. The booklet is available free of charge as a PDF file at the Virginia Theological Seminary website. I am also scheduled to write the “volume” on  Numbers.

Steve Cook of Biblische Ausbildung is the editor for the series. Here are his gracious comments on the new booklet:

Recent scholarship is revitalizing interest in priestly literature of the Hebrew Bible such as Leviticus, rediscovering it as life-giving tradition that informed and complimented the prophetic word. To read Dr. Wilson’s new introduction to Leviticus is to appreciate anew God’s gifts of holiness, ritual, and wholeness. Wilson’s booklet gives the church an easy entree into scholars’ new regard for the Bible’s priestly theologies.

Just think – in one small booklet that takes about ten minutes to read you will learn more than most people ever want to know about Leviticus.

It has been almost three weeks since I last posted, so I thought I would let people know there is a good reason for my absence.

This whole month I have been busy writing articles for the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. I wrote about one hundred articles for it when assignments were first made, but last month they contacted me to ask if I would be willing to write a number of articles that other scholars had failed to submit on time. Since I had just finished up at Wartburg College, I agreed to do it.

Two weeks ago they decided that they needed additional editors working on the project as well, and they asked if I would be able to do that. I was more than happy to agree, so I am pleased to announce that I am now working as an editor on the fourth and fifth volumes of the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. No, I am not one of the big-name editors who are listed on the front of the book. Instead, I am just one of a number of editors who reads through the articles to format them correctly, double check citations, insert transcriptions, and make any number of other changes as needed.

I am thoroughly enjoying the work. Basically, I get to read Bible dictionary entries all day, which I do often enough even when no one is paying me. And since I have to read articles that I wouldn’t necessarily read otherwise, I am picking up a lot of new information.