Last week someone in our parish died. I don't generally post funeral sermons, but in this case I there seemed to be some things in it that I thought others might benefit from reading.
The death was sad, the situation complicated. I'm still working through it.
Sermon for the Funeral of Anne Blackburn
By The Rev. Torey
Lightcap
Saint Thomas
Episcopal Church
January 18, 2013
“Wisdom”
My friends, may grace and goodwill be
with you each and all this morning,
… Peace from the very bottom …
And may these things come and flourish among us
As a sign of hope in this weary and broken world.
May Christ himself be our honored
guest today
While we begin to walk in earnest with the reality of this present
moment,
As we seek to give Anne Elizabeth Blackburn back to God, who gave her to
us.
If our service today seems
complicated,
Please know that it is actually meant to convey a simple message:
A beautiful and lasting and true message,
About resurrection and about Easter.
And if it uses a lot of words or
obscure symbols,
Please know that it is trying
to say something in a very plain way,
About the love of God for all of God’s good creation.
It’s human nature to want to provide some sort of form, some ritual, for this day,
And this is what it looks like in Christian circles: at least, in The
Episcopal Church.
It’s human nature, because death
makes us run to a place of grief,
And grief has its natural expressions and phases.
A deep friendship, when someone dies,
can produce a deep grief,
But sometimes even the death of a passing acquaintance, a professional
friend,
Can knock the air out of us, get us way down, make us want to scramble
for the truth,
Bring us into a room like this wanting to understand and pay respects.
Grief over a death can make us wail
and tear our clothes,
Or retreat into our homes and lock our doors, shutter our windows,
And produce great tears and sighs:
O those deep, painful breaths of confusion and disorientation.
Grief over the death of a loved one
or a friend or a co-worker
Can churn up within us so many questions, so many terrible, nagging
questions:
… What did I/we, do, not do … say, not say?
… What might have been done in a different
way, or not done at all?
… Doesn’t it all seem so unnecessary?
… Was it preventable? Was it inevitable?
… What, if anything, have we learned, and what
do we do now?
Perhaps of all questions, this last
might be the best.
“What do we see now that we didn’t
see before?” “What do we do now? How
to live?”
Because this death is something that
has already happened; it happened;
We can’t reverse it. So now
what?
Over the last few days, many wise
people have been generous with their wisdom.
(You can always tell a wise person
because he or she is generous.)
Wise folks have asked themselves,
“What can we take away from this?”
What is the learning that emerges
from the body of the grief?
If we can’t have Anne in life
anymore, is there anything to be gained now, in death?
(Another mark of wisdom, in addition
to generosity,
Is that people are bold enough to ask themselves very hard questions
At terribly inconvenient times.)
So, what have we learned?
What is the collective wisdom?
Here’s what I’ve heard.
For one, it’s that old expression: That
it is better to have had someone in this life
Than not to have had someone;
That it is better to have had Anne and grieve the loss
Than for her not to have been here at all.
A daughter, a mom, a grandma.
When
she was well, God be praised, her family was her delight.
And did you ever see Anne with Edwin?
Of course you did!
Maybe it would have just been easier
to ask if you had ever not seen her
with Edwin!
Of all she was, of all she did, of
all the good and all the bad mixed in together,
Of all her life, her hope, her deepest charity,
It was etched there on the surface of her relationship with her father,
Whom she always called “father.”
(I can hear her saying it.)
It is, to me, the very best of her.
It was a visible love and respect, an
evident love, an abundant love.
A sign of unity in a culture of
estrangement and isolation.
If you want a memory to cling to,
it’s a good place to start.
The last time I talked with Anne was
Sunday the sixth of January.
She was leading Edwin out of the
sanctuary; they were on each other’s arms.
She said they were going out to buy a
Scrabble dictionary
Because he’d played the word “zoot” – as in “zoot suit” –
And she didn’t think that was a word all by itself!
(I thought it was a clever way to
score 13 points – 36 on a triple word score.)
See: No matter her state, her place,
Whatever happened to her in death,
Whoever she was when she slipped away early Monday morning –
She would have counted this life incomplete without the assurance
That at the very least, at the very bottom, Edwin would be well.
Alice and Earl and Grace and Maxwell
and Collin,
I never heard the end of all the stories about you
Because there was no end, no stopping
her: no end to her pride in you.
Earl and Amy and Brian and Katrina
and Mark:
Take what comfort and counsel you can
From the words of her letter:
“Please know how very much I love you,” she wrote,
“And have always appreciated the gift of being a mom.”
These are holy things.
We’re left to sort through them.
More wisdom from the wise.
Someone said,
“If I can take any comfort from this,
It’s in knowing that Anne is not in pain anymore.”
This life is no free pass; it’s hard;
suffering comes and goes
And sometimes it makes itself a permanent fixture.
Faithful Christians understand that
sooner or later
Life will just walk right up and hand
you a cross;
You don’t have to go looking for trouble.
Bad things happen to good people;
Bad things happen to bad people;
Some suffer more in this life than others.
This is not according to what you
didn’t or didn’t do before;
It’s not about getting what you deserve; it’s not about life being fair.
The secret of life is to avoid pain
for as long as you can,
And then after that, when suffering comes, it’s all in how you respond.
I belive in Jesus Christ, who was
tried in a kangaroo court
And made to suffer mightily;
And I believe in a God who redeemed the cross and the grave
Not by spurning them, by disbelieving them,
But by turning instruments of torture into instruments of grace and
love.
Take comfort, now. Anne is not in
pain.
More wisdom from the wise. More
learnings for this life, for this time.
Someone thinking on the last few
months of Anne’s life,
How she seemed to withdraw, said to me, “It’s okay to change who you
are.”
And that resonated. Deeply.
“It’s okay to change who you are.”
A little scary, a little risky, yes,
but worth it if a change is what you really need.
It can be so, so hard to live in this
often cynical and dark world.
It can be so easy to go about it
Believing that we are somehow, fundamentally, alone …
That when it comes down to it, we’re left to live our lives all on our
own
And no one else will be there to pay our bill or soothe our pain or hold
our hand.
That a hard life is the only kind of
life we deserve.
We seem to slip into that kind of
cynicism, that kind of straightjacket thinking,
All too easily.
We’re cruel in our thoughts to
ourselves.
We may come to believe life is
“nasty, brutish, and short,” as they say, and what of it.
That, my friends, is a seductive
master narrative, but it’s not the whole story.
I believe in a God who made all
things and called them good,
And who then made a human being and said it was Very Good.
Don’t confuse the length of your life
or the quality of your life
With the fact that you were created to begin with,
And that God calls you good, Very Good.
I truly don’t know Anne’s thoughts
from these past few months and weeks,
Even though from time to time we talked in a kind of a small way about
this and that;
I’m not sure where she was in her head, and I regret not knowing;
Still, I would offer this one observation.
No matter how much our lives may have
trained us to believe that we are alone,
Or not good,
Our faith ultimately shows otherwise;
God is totally and evermore, everpresent;
God sees all that is made and blesses it, declares that it is Very Good.
And if we lack the vision to see the
world as God sees it,
Perhaps it is some comfort to remember how much
Jesus seemed to enjoy healing the blind.
So. Three pieces of wisdom.
That’s all I have to offer you today.
One: We had Anne for as long as we
had her,
And that’s better than never having her at all.
Two: No more pain.
Three: “It’s okay to change who you
are.”
Oh, and, okay, just one more thing.
Such a simple thing.
Anne wanted to give. She wanted to
give and give and give and give and give.
As her priest, I saw this up close
and vulnerable.
I sometimes found myself wondering, Where’s the line?
C’mon, Anne, save a little for yourself.
This is not flattery; neither is it
lies; for who would slander the dead?
You, too, in fact. You may have had an experience like this
with Anne,
When she was well,
Where you saw an open and undefended person offer so much of herself
For the life of others.
I want to say that this is what lived
at the center of this person,
And that if we only had a little more of such kindness,
I’m sure the world would be a much better place in which to live.
I call this wisdom, too.
So it seems fitting that her wisdom
has the chance to have the last word of this sermon.
For now, then, we continue in our
prayers.
Thank God for Anne; thank God for our
own lives;
May we mark this moment and remember it for ever,
As the completion of her baptism –
Coming together to share wisdom, and promising to live better.
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