It was a little over a year ago when I first met Imogene Price. I had just been blessed to receive the call to have the opportunity to serve with this church as the senior minister. She was a patient in skilled nursing at Greenbrier, and one of the first church members that I went to visit.

During my first visit, I remember introducing myself to her as her new pastor. She asked me a lot of questions. She wanted to know where I was from. She wanted to know about my wife, my children, even my parents. At the end of her conversation, I held her hand and we prayed. And like I always try to do in my all my prayers, although I was new and still learning names, I called her by name, asking God to be with her.

A week or so later, I went back to visit her at Greebrier. And I will never forget that visit. I walked through the dining hall, through the little common area Then, I took a right to go down the hallway. Her room was just a couple of doors on the left. Right before I knocked on the door, a nurse stopped me.

“Excuse me sir, are you Mrs. Price new pastor?”

I said rather proudly, “Why, yes, I am.”

I thought to myself: “She must have said some good things about me. There’s a new pastor in town and the word is out!”

“Well pastor, you need to know that her name is Imogene; not Emmagene.”

I thought, “Oh my goodness, I made such a poor first impression during my first visit that Imogene is complaining to the staff about me!”

And then I thought (I know I know this is ridiculous, but I thought it): “This woman is going to be rather difficult.”

I know. It is laughable.

While I was in seminary, I took what we called an “Exit Class.” It was a class that taught us all of the things we would need to know in ministry that we were not taught in our Greek, Hebrew or Theology classes. And one of the things we learned was: How to deal with difficult people, like I thought Imogene might be.

One day the professor said, “You pastors need to know that you are going to have some people in your church that are going to be difficult. They are going be grumpy, forever complaining. You are never going to be able to please them. But one day they are going to need a visit from you. And you are not going to want to go. But you are their pastor and you have to go. So, let me tell you what I do. I tell myself that if I go and see them, afterwards I can have some sort of reward. I say to myself, ‘If you go see o’l so-in-so, afterwards, you can drive to Wendy’s and get yourself a Frosty!’”

So, as I knocked on her door that day, after being reminded how to pronounce her name, I thought to myself: “Well, after this visit, I guess I will be heading to Wendy’s!”

Of course, I quickly learned during that visit that Imogene was in no way someone that I needed to be rewarded with a Frosty to see. Imogene was the Frosty. She was the reward.

I am being serious.

Serving on a church staff, sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do. Like, attend a church board meeting or a business meeting. And I would literally say to myself “If I can get through this meeting with Don Johnson, going over all these financials, I get to go see Imogene!”

And it quickly became very obvious that the reason Imogene wanted me to pronounce her name correctly after my first visit was not because she was not trying to be difficult. It was because she was trying to be family. And family members do not mispronounce each other’s names. Strangers do that.

Imogene asked me about my wife, my children, and even my parents, because she wanted to make my people her people. Imogene was the living example of Ruth’s love and devotion to her mother-in-law Naomi. Although they were related by marriage, they were more unrelated as Ruth was a Gentile and Naomi was Jewish.

After her husband and sons died, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem. It is then that Ruth says those wonderful words that we might remember:

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me (Ruth 1:15-18).

Imogene wanted me to pronounce her name correctly; because, although I was a stranger, she wanted me to be her people.

And this is how she treated everyone. She loved people with this special determination to make everyone her people.

I never once visited with Imogene when she did ask me: “Now, tell me what’s going on with you and the people at church?”

I shared with the family that what made Imogene unique is that unlike some people who are confined to a nursing home, in and out of the hospital as much as she was during this past year, Imogene never withdrew from the world. She never gave up. She was always very interested in what was going on in the community.

And that is because she loved the people of this community. They were her people. And she made the commitment, the promise, to love her people until the very end.

The good news for us today is that Imogene not only mirrored Ruth’s love for Naomi, Imogene mirrored God’s love for each of us.

We are God’s people. Thus, where we go, God will also go. Where we lodge, where we live, God also lives. And where we die, God is there.

And this divine love is so powerful, that not even death can separate us from it.

And the special good news for us who loved Imogene is (and we know it. We feel it even today even in this memorial service, even in our grief): That not even death has separated us from Imogene’s love for us. She loved us, and we know deep in our souls, that she still loves us. She will always love us.

Thanks be to God.