I want to tell you a story.
My uncle Ray had many stories to tell, and I want to share with you one that he wrote, a true story, a story of love and of sacrifice.
This is the story of Dr. J.B. Thomson, who served as the doctor of Worthington, my birthplace, a town in the southwest corner of Minnesota. Dr. Thomson died in the summer of 1899. At that time, Worthington was a tiny village not yet 30 years old, a little dot on the high, windy prairie.
What follows is a large portion of my uncle’s report of what happened to Dr. Thomson:
“It was a morning in the late spring of 1899, just months ahead of the new century. W.E. Stoutemyer, who lived in a large farm house with a broad porch on the north edge of the village [of Worthington], came to the doctor’s office. Mrs. Stoutemyer — Emmagene — was very ill. Could Dr. Thomson come at once?
“The physician climbed in a buggy beside the anguished husband and within an hour he had examined his patient. If he was fearful he never betrayed his fears, but he took quick action. Emmagene had smallpox, he said. The house was under quarantine. Everyone present, including M.E. Lawton who had only stopped by a short while before, was forbidden to leave the premises.
“The prospect of a smallpox contagion haunted the American frontier. It had brought panics to some communities. The smallpox vaccine was known: Edward Jenner administered it for the first time precisely one century earlier, in 1796. But thousands of children and men and women had never received vaccinations. Few people went to doctors for preventive health care. There were many people who believed ([who] feared) vaccinations would cause illness, not avert it. There were also many immigrants from Europe.
“Dr. Thomson included himself in the quarantine order, although there was time and opportunity for him to leave. He could bathe himself, sterilize his clothing. He had only small contact with the patient. But the doctor appreciated that the rest of the family had been exposed. There would be more patients almost certainly, and they would need the ministrations of a physician in their pending bouts with mortal illness. Dr. Thomson sent word to his office that he would not leave the Stoutemyer residence. Perhaps to himself he said, ‘Damn—why did I never get a vaccination?’
“Despite the doctor’s best efforts—he was at her bedside through all hours—Emmagene Stoutemyer died on June 6. By this time young Susan Stoutemyer was in her bed. Soon her two sisters, Nettie and Jennie, were overtaken by the disease. Their grandmother, Mrs. L.M. Brooks, became ill. There was concern through all the community as reports were shouted out from the dooryard, and there was fear: who had been in contact with the Stoutemyers? Had other children been with the girls? Where had the Stoutemyer family been exposed to the pox?
“Finally, inevitably, Dr. Thomson became ill. Two nurses who had acquired immunity to pox, Ida Newkirk and Mrs. Haas, volunteered to enter the quarantined house and to do what they could. Little Susan Stoutemyer gave everyone hope. She recovered.
“On Thursday (June 22) word came out that the doctor was very low. It was feared he might not survive the night. But he rallied and there was optimism. ‘It was thought his vigorous constitution would throw it off,’ the Advance reported. On Friday the young man was stronger and through the weekend it appeared he would soon be well. Then on Monday, in the hours before the early dawn of that fourth day after the summer solstice, J.B. Thomson contracted what was diagnosed as hypostatic pneumonia. By 9:30 he was dead. He was buried that same evening with only the Stoutemyers and the nurses present, for he had warned again and again that everyone must be kept away if the contagion were to be contained.
“The burial site is in the Stoutemyer family plot [of Worthington Cemetery]. Dr. Thomson, who died on June 26, was buried only a short distance from the grave of Emmagene Stoutemyer who died 20 days before. The doctor was thirty years of age.
“The story reported in the [Worthington] Advance and told at Worthington through years—it is largely forgotten now—is that the doctor’s father made a single visit to Worthington and that it was he who ordered the grave stone, although he never viewed it. The old man was not indifferent, people said. He was so grieved he could scarcely bear to be near the place. He went about the business of having his son’s grave marked. He chose a polished stone of rainbow granite and of more than modest price. Then he was gone.
“And so the story ends. The Stoutemyers remembered the grave, remembered to carry flowers to it and to keep it tended. But they have now been gone for many, many years. Today there is only the inscription to be pondered by passers-by:
“‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
Today, we are living in a world with uncounted hordes of Dr. Thomsons. My niece is a physician in New York, and while her particular job does not have her on the front lines, she told her mother that for those who do work in ERs and ICUs, in field hospitals and clinics, going to work is like “walking into a fire.” Daily we see news reports of people taking their own lives into their hands just by going to work.
And tonight we gather, in the only way we can gather these days, around the story we know so well, the story of our Lord and Savior teaching us what it means to love your own who are in the world, and to love them to the end. Some churches, in a time when handwashing has taken on profound significance, are encouraging folks sheltering at home to do a ritual of handwashing as part of their family prayers tonight, in place of the usual Maundy Thursday footwashing. But that misses something crucial in the teaching of our Lord, who, as hymn writer Brian Wren says it, is found not on his mercy seat, but kneeling at our feet. Washing feet is not about cleansing, but about service. It is not about being made clean, but about being made a servant. Our Lord teaches us to be like Dr. Thomson: to go into the house where suffering and death dwell, and to help the people who are in there.
Now, I will quickly and firmly add this: in a time of pandemic, the image of Dr. Thomson entering a house and contracting smallpox is an inspiring one, and rightly so! But it is not the only way to follow our Lord’s commandment, that we “love one another.” Sheltering in place is also a powerful form of love. In my uncle’s story, the villagers of Worthington, some 120 years ago, faithfully practiced social distancing. They took seriously the quarantine rules. Like us, they lived at a time when fears were rampant across the land: people feared the vaccine, and not just the pox. Maybe even the vaccine is dangerous, they fretted. The vaccine was fine, but all this fear and ignorance meant that thousands were vulnerable to disease and death. And so the little town stayed home, and stayed alert. This too is a way to love one another. This too is a way to lay down a way of life for one’s friends.
Jesus gathered with his friends in what tradition calls, enigmatically, an “upper room,” and what we can think of as something not much different than the apartments and houses we inhabit tonight. It was not Number 10 Downing Street, a prestigious address (though even the resident of that address is now sick!). The upper room was not a gilded chamber in a soaring cathedral, or even our beloved church sanctuary. It was just a room with a gathering of close friends, a room like the one you are in right now, a room you could have found in the Stoutemyer house, where a man laid down his life for his friends.
Tonight, we gather in our upper rooms and we offer our prayers for our friends, for all who suffer the effects of this virus, for all the healthcare workers who walk into the fire, for all of God’s human family. Tonight, we love those who are in the world, and we love them to the end.
This is what we do when we follow Jesus, our Lord and master, our physician and our foot washer.
This is what we do when we love one another.
***
Preached for the online service for Maundy Thursday, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, April 9, 2020.
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Photo: Main Street in Pioneer Village, an outdoor museum of 19th-century prairie life at Worthington, Minnesota.