So Loved

 

 A Funeral Homily

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

So begins John’s Gospel, in terms to which any avid reader could relate. There’s something about the written word, the spoken word, the sung word, which allows us to transcend ourselves, to reach out across vast chasms of space and of time, to connect to other people, other cultures, other eras.

“I have lived a thousand lives,” wrote George R.R. Martin, “and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”

By the word do our thoughts take form and are sent out into the world around us. By the word do our wills shape our shared reality. The internal becomes external, the ephemeral becomes physical, all by the word. It is little short of miraculous.

In Greek, the word is λόγος, the basis for terms like logic. The Word of God is the logic, the meaning, the purpose behind it all: God’s thoughts made manifest, made incarnate, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of life and of breath. It is the Word of God that lets us know God for ourselves, to touch His mind, His love, His purposes for us. “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And that Word is none other than Jesus Christ our Lord.

Hervör got this. Hervör understood this. When we look back on her 90 years, more summers than there are keys on a piano, we see a life dedicated to family and to friends, to reading and to learning, to faith and love and fellowship; dedicated to her husband and her daughter and her neighbors. Book groups, women’s circles, stock markets, churchgoing, custodianship: these are the activities of someone fascinated with living, someone who can see the harmony, the beauty, and the logic in, with, and under this world: the divine in daily life.

Because that’s what Christianity is really all about: God becoming one of us, that we might then all become one in Him. The Word connects Creator and Creation.

Hervör picked our Gospel reading this morning. She said that her favorite verse was John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” John then continues: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Now let’s be clear on what this means.

God did not send an angel, a prophet, or a saint. God did not send an intermediary of any kind. God came down Himself! God in the flesh, God made Man. “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s what we mean when we use terms like Son of God or Word of God: not that the infinite Creator fathers children in the manner of Hercules by Zeus, but that Jesus is so completely, fully, truly One with who and what God is, that He Himself is God on earth: God come to forgive us, to heal us, to bring us all back home.

We murdered Him for it. Of course we did. In the most humiliating and dehumanizing way we could devise. But even that couldn’t stop Him. It could barely slow Him down. He forgave us as we murdered Him, forgave us from that Cross. And then the strangest thing happened—for even as He died, He defeated death for all. We cast Him down in to the deepest pits of hell, and there He conquered! He filled up hell to bursting with the life and light and love of God, the fire and the blood of God.

So there is now nowhere we can go, nowhere we can fall, nowhere we can flee, where Jesus is not always and already Lord and King and Christ and God. His mercy is inexorable, His love inescapable. “If I go up to heaven,” sings the Psalmist, “you’re there; if I make my bed in the grave, you are there. Even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” What can we do against a love like that, a power like that? Christ is coming to forgive us. We can’t even get out of His way.

This, my brothers and sisters, is our Gospel. This is our Good News. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the whole world might be saved through him.” That is the faith which sustained our sister Hervör. That is the faith which sustains us even now.

What a thing it is, to look in a grave, and to say that Christ is risen. Ours is not the naïve hope of pie in the sky by and by, but rather the defiant cry of the conquering King who has plundered and broken His foes: the devil, the world, and the flesh; sin and death and hell. His is the triumph of Goodness and Beauty and Truth. His is the Word that raises the lowly, that raises up even the dead.

This pillar of wax burning over Hervör is our Paschal Candle. We only light it on three occasions: at Easter, at baptisms, and at funerals. And this is to remind us that these three are one and the same. Hervör was baptized into Christ’s own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again; and into Christ’s own eternal life, already begun.

Somewhere in eternity, beyond the rush and fever of this life, Hervör is with David. Her every wound has been healed, her every tear wiped away, and every wrong she has ever known is now at the last set aright. She knows only love. And we are all there with her, in some sense. For if once you have entered eternity, you have always already been there. For now we get but glimpses of that fuller reality, foretastes of the feast to come, found in our Baptism, found in Communion.

One day we shall join her, at the wedding feast of the Lamb, when all our work is done. And we shall know the fullness of life and of joy, which God intends for all of His children, such that we could barely comprehend it here below. We will miss her. We did love her. But we will see Hervör again. Let no man say that the tomb is her end. For Hervör rests now in Christ. And nothing can ever snatch her from those loving and crucified hands.

Indeed, if Jesus has taught us anything, it’s that death can have no dominion over love.

This, my friends, is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.