The Infinite Moment
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.
Christians speak of God as Trinity: as one substance, one essence, in three true realities. I find that it helps to imagine God as a single eternal moment. In that moment God is, infinitely. God knows, infinitely. And God loves, infinitely. He is reality without limit, consciousness without limit, love without limit. And these three all are one. These three all are God.
The revelation of God to Man is that we are made in His image. In Him, we find that we are real, and therefore matter; that we are known, and so understood; that we are loved, and thus we have never truly been alone.
I tell you this, because this is how Helen has been described to me. She was a social butterfly, the life of the party. Everyone knew her, everyone liked her, everyone could count on her as their go-to gal. She was accommodating, helpful, caring. No-one ever met Helen and left feeling like a stranger. She guided new employees through orientation, and sought out people in person whom she had only known over the phone.
She loved her children, her grandchildren, her mother, her siblings. She loved softball and volleyball, in spite of being a klutz. She loved the orange poppies in her front yard, the pride and joy of Helen’s green thumb. She loved games and friends and socializing, loved her Finnish roots, loved her Vikings. This was a woman who knew how to love, and therefore knew how to live.
Helen made you feel like you mattered, like you were known, you were loved. And you were. That was real. What she gave to each of you, that was real. You mattered to her. She knew you. She loved you. And these three all were one. You saw God in her. Not because she was perfect. None of us are. But because the strength of God is made perfect in weakness. We love each other, warts and all.
Would that we all might aspire to this: to live in such a way, to love in such a way, that God shines through our lives; that people thus could see the Good, the True, and the Beautiful reflected in some measure in the love we show each other. Helen taught us that, showed us that: a legacy for which we all should aim. If the judgment of a life is the memory we share, then she has surely earned her laurels.
Her death was sudden, unexpected. We’ve barely had time to process. But I can tell you this much, my friends: that death has no dominion over love. Yes, Helen has died. Obviously, that’s why we’ve gathered here this afternoon. Yet we are Christians, and as such we believe strange things, scandalous things. First and foremost: we do not believe for a moment that Helen’s story has ended.
Christ has gone before us, through the tomb and pits of hell. And there He has conquered! He has filled the void to bursting with the life and love of God, the Spirit and the Blood of God, and so the grave becomes for us the womb. We wake from this dream of decay, into the real, into the eternal. And there at last we see the truth: that we matter, and we are known, and we are loved, forever.
Now, maybe some people think that’s hokey. I don’t care. That is promise of Jesus Christ our Lord. It might be the most ridiculous, scandalous promise that you’ve ever heard, but once you do hear it, it does something to you; wrestles with you; kills you and makes you alive again! It doesn’t affect everyone in the same manner, of course, but the Word never returns empty. He works with a life all His own.
I am sorry, truly sorry, for your loss. We are lessened by this parting. Yet we declare with defiance that Helen’s real life has only just begun. This separation now is but an eyeblink in terms of eternity. The day shall come when every wound shall be healed, every wrong set right, and every child of God raised up from the loamy earth of the grave. On that day there shall be rejoicing and reunion such as we cannot possibly imagine here below.
And until that day, we commit Helen into the care of the God who made her and knows her and loves her, infinitely better than any of us ever could; trusting that nothing and no-one, especially not death, could ever steal her away from those loving and crucified hands. Go forth therefore and give witness to the world that death has no dominion here.
Such 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.
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