On behalf of Tawnya, Clara, George, Abe Jr., the rest of the family, and all Adventers, thank you for coming today to remember the life and witness of Carey, to share stories with one another, to fellowship a bit, and then to give thanks to God for His promises to her and to all of us who claim Him as Lord. We are grateful you took time out of your busy schedules to join us.
As part note and part commercial, I will warn you this is an unusual
service. Those who attend Episcopal liturgies frequently may wonder if I
lost my mind organizing this service. Those who attend Episcopal services
less frequently or other liturgical denominations may well be thinking this is
some kind of new abomination in the Episcopal Church. It is one of those
times when the non-liturgical folk will be no more uncomfortable than those
around them. Carey designed this service this way. She wanted Rite
1 Burial with a Rite 2, Prayer B Eucharist. She spelled it out that way,
and I was not about to disappoint her. Separately, they are good
liturgies, even great. I think because they are smashed together will
make it seem unusual to us, and especial Roger who is celebrating today.
One thing of which I am certain, though, few of us will forget it, and I bet
that was part of why she decided to plan her funeral this way.
As part commercial for Adventers but also for my brother and sister clergy in
other denominations, and even for those who may chose not to be buried from the
Church, one of the greatest gifts you can give your loved ones is to plan your
service before you die. You can spell out how you want to be remembered
and not force your loved-ones into some challenging work as they are mourning
your loss. Carey chose the liturgy, the hymns, the readings, and even
some of those who serve today. She reminded me three or four times to
include the personal blessing from her that is on Page 3 in your service
bulletin, as if she thought I might forget—I nearly did. She knew her
priest! If you find this speaking to you in her voice, it is. Think
about doing the same thing for your loved ones in the hopefully distant future.
Back to the main purpose of our gathering, the burial of our sister Carey, and
yet another commercial. Many of us, when we die, face what we call a
Gethsemane moment. Satan often tries to convince us in our last moments,
perhaps as the terror of death is building, that we are excluded from God’s
redemptive love. In our tradition, we visit and we have liturgies that
help us address those moments. Most traditions do. Please, for your
own good, share those Gethsemane moments with loved ones and clergy.
There is no shame in those moments. Our Lord Christ experienced THE
Gethsemane moment, when He asked His Father to allow the Cup to pass. But
He submitted Himself to the Father’s Will, even to the point that when the
crowd tempted Him, He chose to drink from the Cup His Father gave Him.
Carey struggled with two things at her death. She shared one, and the
family shared the other. The first was how terrified she was at the
feeling of suffocating as her heart and lungs filled with fluid. She worried
that such fear was beneath a good Christian. I had to remind her that God
did not give her gills. What she was experiencing was instinctual.
We cannot like breathing fluid any more than a fish likes breathing air.
It’s the way He made us. So, my prayer for her over her last weeks was
that she would not worry about the feeling. I have to confess I was
relieved to hear that she passed peacefully after a long day of family and
Bingo and not as one suffocating.
The other temptation she shared with her kids. She was worried that she
did not understand the Holy Spirit and the Trinity as well as she should.
She expressed that she was worried she might fail a test on the Holy Spirit or
the Trinity and be excluded from heaven. I told them as they gathered
after I had anointed her body and prayed for the repose of her soul that I
wished she had shared that worry with me. I would have reminded her that
God’s love and mercy was not conditional on knowledge or deeds or anything but
a desire to love and follow Him. I would likely have had her laughing at
the fear pretty quickly, too. What kind of hard question on pneumatology
would Peter be able to ask her that she could not understand? I mean,
Peter. And, on a more serious note, I would have reminded her that these
are Holy Mysteries. We cannot fully understand them until we receive that
new body and new mind to see God as He is. It is for this reason that
good clergy go to those who are dying. We know spiritual attacks.
We know that our Lord experienced them. It is our calling even to
shepherd our God-given sheep through the valley of death to that wonderful
inheritance He offers and promises us!
Speaking of that valley, those familiar with our liturgy will notice that Carey
did not follow the suggested verses in the funeral rites found in our
BCP. In particular, she wrote that she really wanted Psalm 103 instead of
those other suggested psalms, including everyone’s favorite, Psalm 23. In
fact, she gave me permission to change some things to convince me to include
Psalm 103, that’s how important it was to her. As I shared with Roger a
few nights ago, I had a sermon in my head on Psalm 103 so quick, I knew it was
a God-thing, maybe a Carey interceding thing, but definitely a God thing.
So, if you like to follow along in sermons and homilies, please turn to Psalm
103 in your Orders of Worship.
Psalm 103 can generally be broken down into four parts. There is the
blessing in verses 1-5, where the psalmist reminds his or her soul to bless the
Lord and not forget the blessings God has bestowed in life and promises in
death. Verses 6-19 is the meat or body of the psalm, where the psalmist
reminds hearers and readers of God’s character and activity in history.
Verses 20-22b I would describe as the cosmological observance of God. All
Creation, including the supernatural angels and powers, are called to bless
God. And the Psalm ends on 22c with the reminder of verse 1.
I know nobody wants to hear a comprehensive sermon on Psalm 103, but I do want
to remind us all of Carey’s purpose in choosing this psalm for her funeral, why
I taught you a bit about her Gethsemane moment, and why I am certain God gave
me such a quick answer. Notice the first essential characteristic of God
revealed in the psalm. He crowns you with steadfast love and mercy and
works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. After that
reminder of God’s essential character, the psalmist launches into what we call
the Exodus and how God again and again forgives. The modern Exodus for
us, of course, is the Exodus from the consequence of our sins. Unlike the
psalmist and the prophets, we understand that the oppression that God was
really about removing from us was the oppression of death, which results as a
consequence of our sins.
The most important part of why we gather here this day is to remind ourselves
that God freed Carey from the oppression of death in the work and person of
Jesus Christ. Jesus drank that Cup, to use my earlier illustration in
Gethsemane, that she might be freed from her oppression! Better still, He
drank the same Cup that we all might be freed from the oppressor.
Adventers will tell you I often remind us that God used the Passover and Exodus
imagery to instruct us that He was intentional in that reminder. When
Jesus appeared in history, some thought Messiah would come to free them from or
conquer the Romans, but He came for far bigger purposes than many
suspected! He came that we might be restored to our Father who created
us, that the chasm created by our sins might be crossable.
But we also gather today, guided by Carey, to consider something else
about God that we often forget. Humans forget it so much that God caused
it to be told in Scripture and even in verse in the Psalter. Politicians
who self-describe as Christians are forgetting as they increase suffering on
the poor and working class among us. What
is the essential characteristic of God to which the psalmist and Carey point us
today? His mercy and steadfast love. That reminder carries us from
the introduction to the body of the psalm. That reminder carries us from
the body of the psalm to the calling of all Creation to bless the Lord.
And that reminder of His never-failing mercy calls upon us to bless the Lord in
our souls, in that very part of us which makes us us and contains the image of
Him with which He blessed each one of us in our own creation.
Sometimes it is easy to forget His steadfast love and mercy. At
Advent, we celebrate God each time we gather calling attention to His Death,
His Resurrection, and His Ascension before we partake of that nourishment He
provides us in the Body and Blood of our Lord. Before we even partake of
that nourishment, before we are sent back out into the world to do the things
He has given us to do, we repent of our sins. We remind ourselves
intentionally of the reasons for why He drank from that Cup described in
Gethsemane. We prepare ourselves in humility, cognizant of those sins of
which we are ashamed, or as Carey’s favorite liturgy proclaims, which we
bewail. We understand that had He not done His work on the Cross and in
the Grave, we would have no hope! And reminded of that hope, we go to
that altar or table and eat of His flesh and drink of His blood and head back
out into the world nourished, reminded of His mercy to us, to do His work,
proclaiming to those in the world around us His mercy toward us and His love
for all of us, all whom He has made.
As a priest, I encounter Christians all the time who think there is a
limit to God’s mercy. I encounter people who express, “I was one (a
Christian) once, but I have messed too many times.” “I used to believe,
but I know better now.” Too often we
listen to the lie. Too often, we forget to listen to the story proclaimed
in Scripture, to the life lived by Jesus, to His instruction and call upon all
humanity, and to the love which He bore each one of us on that Cross.
When we tempted Him to save Himself, when we tempted Him to come down and avoid
that Cup, He willed Himself to drink the Cup we deserved, that we might be able
to dwell with Him eternally.
I shared Carey’s moment as a last reminder of the love with which her
Lord bore her sins. Carey was a great confidante to many of us present;
she was a friend and advisor to many of us here. Carey had a hunger and
thirst for learning about God. Carey, though, was human and knew it
well. Even though she chose this service before she died, she still
wondered near the end of her journey whether she might not be good
enough. She worried there was something she had not learned, even though
she knew enough to remind us that God’s mercy was sufficient and
never-ending. She wanted to point us to the One whom she loved and who
loved her to the Cross, the One with whom she is gathered today and learning all
about those mysteries that eluded her in this life, and blessing Him for what
He did for her.
This psalm reminds us intentionally that the world is a horrible teacher
about the love and mercy of God. We humans sin and make mistakes.
We have tempers and hard hearts. Because we cannot forgive one another,
we find it challenging to believe that God can. But we must never allow
our experiences of life to shape what we think and believe about God.
Rather, we are called to remember His redemptive work in Salvation History, we
are called to remind ourselves that He teaches us how to perceive Him, how to
attune ourselves to His purposes. No matter what we do to separate
ourselves from Him, He is always quick to show us mercy when we repent.
He is always quick to remind us that He wants what is best for us. To use
the words and instruction of our Lord, He always welcomes the Prodigal Son or
Daughters when we remember ourselves and return to His arms of mercy.
My friends, it is hard to mourn the death of one like Carey. I
shared with her family that I knew they knew things about her that she would
not want shared, but it was a pleasure to celebrate a life such as hers.
It was a pleasure to see what she wanted spelled out in her last message to
each one of us. And while we will no doubt miss her at moments ahead,
during holidays or moments of crisis or when a core memories intrudes, we stand
at her grave singing our alleluias, confidant that one glorious day we will
join her in that great cloud of witnesses, remade as our Father intended us to
be from the beginning of all Creation. And like her, we will bless Him
for all those saving works He has done, but especially for the saving work He
has done in our own lives!
In His Mercy,
Brian+
