Decree

Sermon for the Funeral of Phyllis Gillespie

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas Episcopal Church

April 20, 2013

 “Decree”

Welcome, each and all, to this service celebrating the life of Phyllis Gillespie.

Welcome, also, to this service of celebration of the resurrection.

These two things are really just the same thing –

  A way to mark Phyllis’ death which is really also a way to mark her resurrection.

Christians – followers of Jesus – make powerful and heady claims over death.

We do not do so lightly or irreverently,

  But with full voice and in believing hope.

Not as a way of avoiding the reality of death,

  But in fact as a way of facing it, head-on.

We believe that just as God raised Jesus from death,

  So too will God raise us from death.

That “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ.”

We believe that we came into this world from out of something –

  That God, who has always been, made us, so to speak;

  And we believe that when we shall pass from this earth,

    It will not be into nothing that we go,

  But that we will rest in the perfect contemplation of our Creator.

So you are here for two celebrations, two parties: a life that has been lived,

  And a life that somehow, beyond our capacity to see or understand, lives still.

A passing-from. A passing-into. A party in either case.

And our service of burial is nothing more than a pausing at the threshold,

  And an acknowledgement, with great joy,

  That because our Redeemer lives, so, too shall we.

Great mystery of mysteries, so shall we.

Disclosures!

I met Phyllis recently. Saw her a few times.

Really, really liked her energy and her spirit.

Even said something like, “Phyllis, where you been all my life?”

Saw the fight and the fire in her eyes.

Took her a milkshake back on Maundy Thursday, about three weeks ago,

  And we chatted about death, casually, like you’d talk about anything –

    Making a grocery list or an appointment to have your car serviced –

    And she said, “I have to get out of the hospital. I just have to.”

“I have got to see my grandson grow up.”

And I said I thought that if death did come, she could still watch Arlo grow up.

That it would just be different.

And she took a sip of milkshake, and she shook the cup at me,

  As if to say, Not acceptable.

Somewhere along the way, though, she fell victim to an aggressive cancer

  She had so successfully eluded for several years.

And then something pretty extraordinary happened,

  Which was that she got to be in charge of making her own decisions

  About how the end of her life was going to go.

She was forced – no doubt forced – to turn all of that energy to get rid of cancer

  Into a posture of how to live with the facts:

  Into an energy to direct the decisions for her benefit, yes,

    But also for the benefit of Bob and Ashley and Andrew and Arlo

    And Wally and Stephanie and Joe and Jennifer and Cheryl

    And her nieces and nephews and her many, many friends,

      And Antti from Finland, and other exchange students from Switzerland and Sweden.

For all their benefit.

She turned the death-dealing poison of cancer on its ear

  And she said, Cancer, you old fool. Even if you have me, you’ll never keep me;

  Even at the grave I’ll make my song – Alleluia, alleluia.

She called her shots – at least three of them, and I’m going to tell you what they were.

Here, I believe, is the first shot she called.

She opened the door wide for God and did not hesitate.

She confessed and prayed, and she took the right hand of fellowship

  And she quaffed the Blood of Christ and ate the Body of Christ

    All from a little kit that we carry from the door of the church to the hospital bedside.

And it touched us both, radically and deeply.

It was like remembering. “Holy food for holy people.”

And she went down square to that temporary resting-place of death

  In which both she and I are sure she no longer resides.

The second shot she called was to direct the manner and timing of her death

  Until she no longer possessed consciousness,

    And she was possessed of consciousness quite close to the end.

This is, as I say, extraordinary.

Most people have little to no choice in the matter when it comes down to it,

  And we go off scrambling, looking for any paperwork they signed years before,

  Or trying to remember any conversations we had with them.

We interpolate their wishes based on the past:

  What did he say back when his best friend was on life support –

    That he did or didn’t want that if it were him?

  Or, Does she want comfort measures only, or everything that can be done?

In other words, we play high-stakes guessing games.

Instead, Phyllis had the chance to say what she wanted,

  But I think in this case she would also say, if she were here, that the takeaway

  Is to not wait: to get your affairs in order and to keep them current,

    No matter how healthy or young you may be.

Because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Here’s the third shot she called – powerful, and final.

She left last words to ponder.

Stephanie took many notes at the bedside, and some were handed to me.

And I joined them with other notes I’d taken over the past few days,

    And I remembered a conversation I’d had with a chaplain at St. Luke’s

    And pretty soon there was this lovely litany of instructions and ideas.

Listen to this. These are her words and no one else’s.

Not words from beyond the grave, but from the bedside:

  … “Celebrate my life. Do not grieve.”

  … “Sprinkle my ashes over beautiful flower beds somewhere. Not buried.”

  … “Thank you to my family and friends – you were all there for me!”

  … “Ashley, I am the proudest mother anyone can ask for.

          Especially my sweet Arlo.

          I hope he grows up just like his father and grandfather.”

  … “Bob, go fishing anywhere in the world, and don’t be sad.”

I hope you heard what I heard when I said just now what she said then:

  “Celebrate.”

  “Proud.”

  “Don’t be sad.”

  “Thank you.”

Are these the words of a person who didn’t love her life?

The words of some sullen, slinking grouch?

By no means.

They sound to me for all the world like the words of a person who embraced her life.

A person who went to San Antonio with friends

  And instead of finding sun and heat found it cold and rainy,

  And so, inexplicably, swaddled herself in bubble wrap and fell asleep!

A child who so cherished her new shoes

  That she kept them always close at hand, even in bed!

A person who rattled a half-consumed milkshake at her parish priest,

  As if to say, I’m not done living and just try and stop me.

Lots of good stories like this, to mark this life.

There are, and will doubtless be forthcoming, more stories of Phyllis.

More good memories.

Some will be about Phyllis calling her shots. Some won’t.

A lot of them, I suspect, will be about hospitality and friendship.

We might do well to ask ourselves

  What any of these stories might have to teach us:

    To show us about our lives, hidden in God …

    How to live more harmoniously …

    How to walk the earth …

      And how, finally, to leave this life.

You might know that recently Phyllis and many friends

  Had moved out of playing bridge a little and over toward mah-jongg.

It’s a game played with tiles.

If you want, you can take everything in it purely at face value. Probably many do.

But when you start to look at the markings on the tiles,

  You find on them a world of symbols.

And in his seminal text on mah-jongg,

  A.D. Millington summed up what he believed

  To be that game’s ultimate philosophy.

He wrote that

  “[The symbols on the tiles] serve to remind the player

    Of the ... virtues which he should possess.

    They also remind him of the spirit of the game,

      Which no player should ignore,

    And of its purpose, which is to develop the mind

    To search after Truth and to conform and reconcile itself –

      Serenely, yet not in an attitude of indifference, resignation or fatalism,

      To the decrees of Heaven.”

“To conform and reconcile [the mind] serenely … to the decrees of Heaven.”

Now is this not what we have seen and heard here today?

Of one who reconciles her mind, serenely, to the decrees of Heaven?

And does not Jesus Christ himself “conform [himself] … to the decrees of Heaven”?

Yet it is for us an ultimate philosophy, a high calling:

  Whether calling the shots or having the terms dictated to us,

  To remain faithful to the One who makes us,

    Calls and shapes us to conform,

      And finally, at the last, grants us rest and refreshment past the veil of death

      In a way we cannot begin to understand.

[For] “Now we see things imperfectly,” St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians,

  “Like puzzling reflections in a mirror,

    But [in time] we will see everything with perfect clarity.

    All that I know now,” he wrote – All that I know now –

    Is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely,

      Just as God now knows me completely.”

For us, for now, this somehow has to be enough to keep us going.

For our sister Phyllis, for whom we now pray, it is done and over with. A fact.

For this we have great joy, just as she had hoped. So thanks be to God!

Funeral for a complicated friend

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

John 6:37-40

“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.