Our task when someone we love dies: 7-19-16

SPRINGFIELD, Vt. -- The First Congregational Church here began to fill up most of an hour before the 11 a.m. time for the funeral service of my brother-in-law, John Von Bargen (the beautiful urn you see here contains his cremains; his photo is at left).

 

It was a warm day, but the weather didn't really matter. What mattered was that by commemorating one of its own a Christian Church once again was going to proclaim its belief in redemption, in eternal life, in community, in life well lived.

 

It's one of the most important things churches do. Embracing the gospel story, we travel with the one who has died, travel through a time of remembrance and celebration, a time of retelling the gospel story, a time of song and prayer. And we accompany that person to the edge of the abyss, where we say farewell.

 

I will share with you today the sermon I preached at John's funeral -- at his request. In addition to my words, a close friend, his daughter and his son and his brother-in-law all shared words of thankfulness and remembrance. You can read in the obituary to which I've linked you a bit about John's life as an entrepreneur, a man who began his career selling combs out of a van and wound up founding a successful group of excellent -- polished, really -- jewelry stores in Vermont and New Hampshire.

 

What that obit won't tell you, however, was how John approached life, how he survived the death of his own wife four years ago -- at whose funeral I delivered this sermon -- and what an inspiration he was to many people. I hope my sermon gives you a sense of all that, along with my theological take on what it all means for those of us who survive when a loved one dies.

 

My texts were:

 

Psalm 121 (New Living Translation)

 

I look up to the mountains — does my help come from there? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth! He will not let you stumble; the one who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, he who watches over Israel never slumbers or sleeps. The Lord himself watches over you! The lord stands beside you as your protective shade. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord keeps you from all harm and watches over your life. The Lord keeps watch over you as you come and go, both now and forever.

 

And:

 

John 19:25-27 (NLT)

 

Standing near the cross were Jesus’ mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary (the wife of Clopas), and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother standing there beside the disciple he loved, he said to her, “Dear woman, here is your son.” And he said to this disciple, “here is your mother.” And from then on this disciple took her into his home.

 

Please pray with me:

 

Eternal God in Christ, as we gather here today we are brokenhearted and even angry, but we also are full of gratitude for the life of John Von Bargen. So in your mercy I ask you to take these inadequate words of mine and make them your word of comfort and challenge for us today, for I pray it in the name of your very word, Christ Jesus. Amen.

 

Thank you for being here to honor John and to celebrate his remarkable life.

 

I’m Bill Tammeus, John’s brother-in-law via my marriage to Leslie’s sister Marcia. And I have chosen two rather odd passages of scripture today, passages rarely used at funerals. But I have picked them because John himself was rare and because these passages provide the basis of some things I think it’s important to say about John and, perhaps more to the point, to say about us now that John has died.

 

Let’s first think about what the psalmist wrote: “The Lord himself watches over you! The Lord stands beside you as your protective shade. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord keeps you from all harm and watches over your life.”

 

Was the psalmist delusional or simply making stuff up to give God some good p.r.? What could he possibly have meant by saying that the Lord stands beside you — let’s say not you but John himself in this case — as his protective shade? What could it mean that the Lord keeps John from all harm and watches over his life? Isn’t cancer harm? In fact, the Common English Bible translation of this passage uses a stronger word than harm. It says “The Lord will protect you from all evil; God will protect your very life.”

 

I call cancer a harm and I call it an unmitigated evil. It killed Leslie and now it has killed John. Evil is the only accurate word for it. And, as I said to you when I spoke at Leslie’s service four years ago, we have every right to be angry about their deaths.

 

As we think about the psalmist’s wording, what I think it helps to know about writings and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible is that it was common for the writers to write as if what they were predicting or seeming to describe were already true, even though they knew quite well that in this fallen world, in this world infected with human sin and natural catastrophe, evil exists. But they were trying to show us a better world, a world in which God’s reign is full and complete.

 

So, for instance, we find the prophet Isaiah saying, in the midst of nothing but trouble for Jerusalem, these words of comfort: “Speak compassionately to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her compulsory service has ended, that her penalty has been paid.”

 

Isaiah was speaking as if all that were true when, in fact, it wouldn’t be true for quite some time, if ever. Is Jerusalem even today mistaken for nirvana, for paradise, for utopia? Not exactly. But that’s how prophets sometimes talked. And it’s how the writer of this psalm wrote as he imagined better times.

 

So even the psalmist knew that only someday, only in the sweet by-and-by, only when God’s reign comes in full flower will God never let our foot slip, will God always protect us from all evil, will God always protect our very lives. Even the psalmist knew that in this fallen world, with one damn thing after another, we cannot be — and are not — protected from all evil, especially the evil we ourselves may help to cause.

 

Nonetheless, we can imagine a day when that will happen, when God will in fact protect us each moment. We can imagine a time when we come into the presence of God and come to understand that we are embraced by the solicitous love of God, the very God who, having taken human form, loved us enough to die for us.

 

But for now, we are faced with the task of living with the reality of evil in our midst, of cancer, of heart attacks, of car wrecks and plane crashes and flying bullets, of bombs dropping from the sky, of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, of, as I say, one damn thing after another.

 

Why does such evil exist in our world? This is what theologians, and worse, call the old theodicy question. If God is good and loving and all-powerful, how do we explain suffering and evil?

 

The short answer is that we don’t have an exhaustive, satisfying answer to that question. The question of the source of suffering and evil in God’s good world is, in fact, the open wound of religion.

 

Some people seek an answer by blaming evil on human free will, some on Satan, some on God’s desire to test us, some on other causes. Every one of those explanations ultimately comes up short.

 

As I said when I spoke at Leslie’s service four years ago, all theodicies fail. So, in the end, perhaps our best answer is silence in the face of mystery — silence, just before we try to figure out how to live loving, compassionate, merciful lives even while we are being confronted by the reality of suffering and evil.

 

So the question we must ask ourselves today — especially today, when we gather to grieve John’s death and tell our stories about how we loved him and how he loved us — the question we must ask is how in the world we are to do that, to live loving, caring lives in the midst of evil.

 

What can give us wisdom and courage for the facing of these hours, for the task of comforting the afflicted, bringing hope to the despairing?

 

I think we can find one model for that in the story of Jesus on the cross as well as in what John Von Bargen himself modeled for us.

 

Jesus, in the very hour of his death, found his mother and a beloved disciple both at the foot of the cross. Wracked with pain and with close to his last breath, he nonetheless asked each of them to care for the other as mother and son.

 

By implication, Jesus was asking each of us to be a caregiver for others, to be present in the sorrow and pain of others, to be a channel of God’s grace, to be deep wells of mercy and comfort to people in need -- and we're all in need.

 

It’s a high and difficult calling, but isn’t that exactly what John did for Leslie when she was dying? Those of us who were present then witnessed in his willingness and ability to tend to her every need — medical, physical, emotional, spiritual — witnessed the very model Jesus asked us to adopt when he gave his mother and the beloved disciple into each other’s care.

 

John did not simply turn Leslie’s care over to hospice nurses or other medical professionals, though there certainly was a necessary role for them. Rather, he took the time to learn the intricacies of intravenous this and that, of how to deliver nourishment and water, how to move her in bed to make her comfortable — even how to make her a last celebratory drink she could share with friends gathered around her. When she asked for that round of drinks, what did John holler back from the kitchen? “You bet.” Of course he did. That’s what fabulous care-givers do.

 

John understood what we now must understand — that ministry is giving ourselves away to others in need. It is not meeting our own needs, not worrying first about our feelings. Rather, it is to be with each other in healing ways, just as Vicky and John’s children, John Eric and Julie and their spouses and children, his sister Mary, his brother-in-law and friend Rick Bibens and others were with John in that way at the end.

 

For John now all pain has ended, and as we move through the awe that death always produces we would do well to bear one another up, to be a healing presence for one another as we mourn this terrible loss.

 

Each of us has stories to tell about John — a few of which can even be told in public. We’ll hear some of those from others as part of this service today, though surely not all or we’d be here for a month or six. But I want to encourage you to tell your John Von Bargen stories to one another.

 

As we all do that, and as we continue to think about the mysteries of suffering, let us remember what Christians know and have proclaimed for nearly 2,000 years, which is that Jesus Christ has conquered death, and let us remember that John was marked as one of Christ’s own at his baptism.

 

So even though we are deep in grief today, we need not worry about John. He is even now being surrounded by the joyful and everlasting love of the God of hope.

 

The Eternal One, from whom all blessings flow, has welcomed John home, and for that we give thanks.

 

Amen.

* * *

 

HOW CAN WE RESPOND TO THIS VIOLENCE?

 

And what is the responsibility of people of faith when the world seems to go crazy with police killing citizens and citizens killing police, the latest being in Baton Rouge, where the gunman was a Kansas Citian? We can't all just go to Baton Rouge or to Dallas or to all of the other places where violence has erupted. And if we did, what would we do there? Pray and weep? Praying and weeping are worthy things to do, but they are not enough. Rather, we must be advocates of peace and justice in our own cities, our own neighborhoods. We must speak truth with humility, which is just what Kristin Riegel, the associate pastor of my congregation, Second Presbyterian, did on Sunday in her sermon.