Promises

A Funeral Homily

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

There is nothing I can say to make this right. Because it isn’t right. And do not listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

Tracy was just fantastic, wasn’t she? Musical, creative, passionate, involved. She was an utter social butterfly in the best possible sense of the term. She loved her boys, deeply. Always took care of her family, always went the extra mile. She and Chris had the sort of marriage that we often find in storybooks. They never had a bad day, he said, never fought, never went to bed mad. What a witness.

If you’ve ever been to their house, you know how full of life it is. There’s a stained-glass window over the door. One of the living rooms has a permanent drum set. And evidence of family is everywhere, evidence of joy is everywhere. It is full of music, full of adventure, full of the lust for life. And that doesn’t just happen. That doesn’t fall into place by accident. Such a home is built, and built of love. It bespeaks patience, gratitude, and a calm center in the midst of a happy chaos.

The music for our service today is some of Tracy’s favorite. It’s not too many times that one comes into a church to the dulcet tunes of Led Zeppelin. But Tracy worked on this piece with Janell for months. And it gave her a newly developed appreciation for her husband’s unique musical tastes. “Autumn Leaves” is a piece that she played for her recital—we’ll be hearing that shortly—and since Tracy loved her jazz, we will be going out this afternoon in classic New Orleans style. Her spirit is truly here with us.

Everybody liked Tracy. We knew her from her music, from her family, from the fact that she was game to show up for things like medieval Twelfth Night parties, jousting her son with a Nerf lance. I got to know her in part because of her care for her in-laws, her concern for their welfare. She knew that they were being well cared for, of course, but she also knew that they liked visitors, and that they appreciated regular Communion. So she invited me into their lives. That’s Tracy in a nutshell.

Talent, enthusiasm, compassion, joy. Heck of a legacy. Heck of a life. We didn’t have the years with her we would’ve wished. But she truly lived in the time that she had.

It was such a kick to the gut when we heard. Such a bolt from the blue. Sometimes funerals are a gentle farewell at the end of a long and full life. And sometimes they’re just a gash torn right through you. We have a reflex in times of tragedy, a knee-jerk reaction, to try to justify it, to explain it all away. And this is natural, understandable. But it’s also selfish. Because what we’re really doing is trying to convince ourselves that this couldn’t happen to us.

I’ve seen, for example, someone lose a child, then receive a sympathy card that reads, “God must have needed another angel.” And maybe some would find comfort in that; if so, who am I to begrudge? But someone else sees that and thinks, “Well, then, what kind of a monster is God?”

No matter the time nor the clime, we all have within us that deep intuition, that universally human moral sense, that bad things are not supposed to happen to good people. They’re just not. The way it ought to work is that only good things happen to good people, and bad things only happen to bad people. That would be just; that would be fair. And we know that the world doesn’t work that way, but we also know that it should.

And so we play the blame game. “What did I do wrong, that I would suffer this?” Because if we did something to cause it or deserve it, then it’s not just blind catastrophe. It’s more like justice, like cause and effect. “If I hadn’t done this—”, or “If he hadn’t done that—” then none of this would have occurred. Or so we say. “Teacher, who sinned that this man was born blind?”

But that’s not how our world works. Look no further than Jesus. Here we have the only perfect human being ever to have lived, literally God in the flesh, and just look at what we did to Him. He didn’t deserve it. There’s no justice there. Bad things happen to good people because it’s a broken world, period. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. And neither does fate. This day wasn’t written in the stars. It wasn’t God’s will that this should happen; God doesn’t will evil; He can’t. If He could, then He wouldn’t be God. He would simply be the biggest devil.

It is a broken world, and we all know that it’s broken, that things are not the way they were meant to be. Something like this, it’s wrong. Death is wrong. We were not meant to be separated. We were not meant to mourn. Deep down we know this. We don’t need people to explain to us how terrible things aren’t really all that terrible. And we certainly don’t need people to insist that when bad things happen it’s somehow karmic, like we deserved it. No. What we need is salvation.

We need a God who can come down here, down into the mud and the blood, and to stand with us, to suffer with us, to laugh and work and sing with us. We need a God who can say, “I am with you. I see you, I know you, I love you. And I will not let this stand! I will not let death have the final word, will not let it claim you. You will find Me in your wounds. You will find Me in your grief. You will find Me in everything that you suffer because I suffer it with you, I suffer all of it with you.”

For you see, we are Christians here, and as such we believe strange things, scandalous things. We believe that God is one of us, that He came down here to bring us home—to teach us, heal us, comfort us, liberate us, and raise us up from death. Everywhere He went He brought forgiveness. Everywhere He went He brought new life. And He made it clear that poverty, pain, sickness, death—these are not the will of God. These are enemies of God, to be defeated, to be conquered by compassion.

And we killed Him for it. We murdered Him for going around forgiving willy-nilly, acting as though He were God. But even that couldn’t stop Him; it could barely slow Him down. He forgave His murderers while we were murdering Him. And then He did the damnedest thing. He took into Him all of our pain, our rage, our grief, our violence, took it all upon Himself, all into His flesh, and there He drowned it in the infinite ocean of His love—so that hell itself was filled to bursting with the life and light of God, and all the dead raised up to life!

That is what we worship here: not a god of violence, not a god of death, but the God who conquers all with love, who consecrates even the grave. His is the love that undoes hell, the life that outlives death. He sees what we suffer and says, “No!” And as strange as it is to confess, our salvation has already been accomplished in eternity. From the perspective of heaven, we have always already been there, with Christ; beyond space, beyond time, beyond death. It has only now to play out here below.

Martin Luther had a little daughter, his favorite child, Magdalena. And she died of the plague. He sat with her the entire time. And when she finally passed, hearing her father’s promise that she was going to a better Father, they brought in her little coffin to her room, and Luther couldn’t take it. He finally broke. He ran out of the house, out onto the lawn, but he could still hear them, still hear the strike of the hammer as they nailed shut the lid, and he whirled around and roared: “Hammer away! She will rise on Doomsday!”

That’s the Christian faith. To face the worst this world can throw at us and shout out our defiance. Because we know the God we have. We know the One who went before us to conquer death and hell. And we know that as surely as He is risen, we too shall arise! And God, we wish we could see it, don’t we? We wish it would happen today, that the world would be made right today. But Jesus doesn’t force. Jesus simply heals. And He never, ever looks away. Where was God on Friday? He was right there in that car. Tracy was never alone. Witness the final promise of Revelation:

The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them … He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away … Behold! I make all things new!

This is all I have to give to you today: Jesus Christ. Not platitudes, not justifications, certainly not any sort of explanation. Just Jesus Christ. Christ has died; Christ is risen; Tracy lives in Him. And nothing, nothing, least of all death, can ever snatch her from those loving and crucified hands. And we will meet again someday. For if Jesus has taught us anything, it’s that death can have no dominion over love.

This 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.