Homily for Tuesday, 21 July 2020– Barbara Schmidt Funeral Mass

Readings of the day: Ecclesiastes 3:1-7, 10-11, 14; Psalm 23 (music setting); Revelation 21: 1-5a, 6b-7; John 14:1-6.

This homily was given at the funeral Mass for my paternal grandmother, Barbara Janice Schmidt, at the Church of the Assumption, Powell River, BC, Canada. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her.

“Sure and certain hope”: These words from the Prayer of Commendation, the last prayer of a Catholic funeral Mass, which we will hear and pray together in a few moments, have always been deeply moving to me. “Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our sister Barbara, in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she will rise with him on the last day.”

My dear family; sisters and brothers gathered in Christ our Lord to remember and pray for eternal rest in our Lord for our mother; our grandmother; our great-grandmother; our friend; our sister in Christ, Barbara Janice Schmidt: Is it not somewhat bold to pray (or to suggest that we are praying) “in the sure and certain hope” that God will receive our Barbara into eternal life? Is our hope, as long as we live this life on this earth, ever fully “sure and certain”? Or are we maybe more like the Apostle Thomas of our reading for this celebration from John’s Gospel; Thomas who responds with great uncertainty and alarm to his growing awareness that Jesus is about to be taken away from him and the other Apostles to die, rise and ascend to heaven? Are we not much like Thomas who, even though Jesus reassures his Apostles, “Where I am going, you know the way,” replies, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way”?

Like Thomas, our uncertainty and our grieving are not signs of weakness or lack of faith or hope in eternal life, whether for our beloved Barbara or for ourselves. “How can we know the way?” is a humble recognition that “sure and certain hope” is more about the journey to eternal life with our God, to heaven, than about the destination. When we commend our faithfully departed to the mercy of God, “in the sure and certain hope that… all who have died with Christ… will rise with him on the last day,” we, like Thomas, pray in one sense for our God to build on the hope and the faith we already possess but that have not yet reached their fullness.

Our God, mysteriously, has called his and our beloved Barbara home to heaven in these extremely uncertain, even unsettling times. We gather here, with many more of our relatives and friends (whom I want to acknowledge with special gratitude) joining us from afar thanks to modern technologies of communication, amid a worldwide pandemic with no known cure or resolution yet, to celebrate, remember, and pray for eternal life, not only for Barbara but for ourselves. We would not be here now, especially amid the uncertainty and the unsettling nature of our world, if we did not hope; if we did not have faith.

Our faith in God’s saving grace; our “sure and certain hope” can and must coincide with the uncertainty inherent in living in this world; with our cry, like that of the Apostle Thomas: “How can we know the way”? It is only if we have the courage; the hope; the faith; the humility of the Apostle Thomas—courage, hope, faith, and humility that were certainly modeled for us by our beloved Barbara Janice—that, by allowing ourselves to plead with the Lord, “How can we know the way,” we may be open to and take heart in Jesus’ reply: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.”

Throughout Grandma’s life, “How can we know the way” met “sure and certain hope” in ways that were open and took heart in our Lord: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” How so? A beautiful dialogue between “sure and certain hope” and “How can we know the way”; between God and our Barbara Janice, began just over ninety-four years ago. It continued on a farm in Rochfort Bridge and in a one-room schoolhouse where she taught in Jalna, Alberta; and then in Oakland, California, where Grandma met, married, and raised a family with a dapper U.S. Air Force veteran, Clem, Grandpa. And when God called Clem home to himself at a young age, Grandma’s dialogue with God, “the way,” led her back to Rochfort Bridge; to the farm where she cared for her father in his later years. In the meantime, “the way, the truth, and the life” led Grandma to raise five children—John, Raymond, David, Anne Marie, Nanette—to hope in God the way she did.

I suppose we could fill pages, and I could speak here forever (we almost certainly do not want that!), about the lifelong dialogue between God and our Barbara Janice: “How can we know the way”? “I am the way and the truth and the life.” This dialogue; this encounter; this life of Barbara Janice in God and his Christ, which we have witnessed and we celebrate here today, has been God’s sign to us in this earthly life of the reason for our “sure and certain hope” in eternal life, for Barbara and for ourselves.

In many ways, our Grandma’s life on this earth has mirrored the wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes from which we have heard this morning. There is, for Grandma and for each of us, “a time to give birth and a time to die” and, in between these, “a time for every affair under the heavens.” Why does the wise “teacher,” the author of Ecclesiastes, teach us that “there is an appointed time for everything”? He teaches us this so that, as he says, God may fill our hearts with what is “timeless,” so that by our experience of this truth, God “may be revered.”

Grandma exemplified this truth; this reverence for the timeless God through the time-bound realities of our earthly life. For our Grandma, there was a time for great generosity with any time; any talent; any material wealth she had. Grandma experienced poverty, especially as a widowed mother caring for five children and her father, and never forgot this as she supported various causes throughout her life in favour of the less fortunate; the forgotten; the poor; truly in favour of the intrinsic dignity of the human person, from conception to natural death.

For Grandma, there was time for great tenderness and love. There was time for healthy and endearing doses of sassiness. There was time for joy; time for music and nature; time for devoted service at the rectory of this Church of the Assumption in Powell River for fourteen years. There was time for Grandma, in her waning years, to be cared for by family both here and in Vernon, and by the home care nurses of BC Interior Health’s Choice in Supports for Independent Living program, to whom I and our family are especially grateful. There was time with her beloved and many friends, relatives, her husband Clem whom we pray is now re-united with Barbara in heaven; time with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. There has been, and is, “an appointed time for everything”; “a time to give birth and a time to die.” And now is our time to “commend our sister Barbara” to God and the new life he offers her and will one day, we pray, offer us: A life “changed, not ended”; finite earthly life transformed by God into the infinite life of heaven.

I suppose, too, that, as we remember, celebrate, and pray for eternal life for God’s and our beloved Barbara, we might allow ourselves to envision what that eternal life might be for Barbara and for us. This vision might be something like the vision of St. John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation we hear today, the vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.” But let us not stop at envisioning “a new heaven and a new earth.” Instead, may we hear and take up God’s mission, entrusted to each of us, to build “a new heaven and a new earth,” beginning here and now, in cooperation with God’s grace.

How might we do this? Seek, first, the eternal life and the well-being in this earthly life of everybody. Seek and pray for this utmost well-being especially for people who have wronged us; people who are disadvantaged in any way; people who do not know or have forgotten their relationship with God; people who are sick; dying; alone; lost. Seek to be forgiven and to forgive for when we or our loved ones fail, as we all do by human weakness, to build one another up in Christian love and divine grace; for when we have hurt one another. Seek unity and charity (not necessarily uniformity, which is often a false unity), in our hearts; in our households and families; in our world. Seek to be generous and joyful.

These concrete actions were at the heart of the mission entrusted to our beloved Barbara: Grandma, Great-grandma, Mom, friend, sister in Jesus Christ. They are at the heart of how Grandma did her prayerful best to live, as a sign of God’s saving love for us. These actions are at the heart of our mission now as we pray for heaven for our Barbara and, one day, for ourselves. These are the ways in which we enter the dialogue between the “appointed time for everything” and “the timeless,” which God has put into Barbara’s heart and ours; between “How can we know the way?” and “I am the way and the truth and the life”; between us and God; between this finite life and eternal life, with “sure and certain hope.”

Homily for Sunday, 17 May 2015– Seventh Sunday of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 1:15-17, 20a, 20c-26; Psalm 103:1-2, 11-12, 19-20; 1 John 4:11-16; John 17:11b-19

“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us,” we hear today from the First Letter of John. Is this not one of the great “starting point” statements of our faith? What is the foundation of our Christian faith; of any faith; the reason why we are here; of why any one of us or anything exists? The foundation of all this is God’s love for us.

“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.” We know and believe as Christians, as one community of faith, that God delights in us. Is it so remarkable for our Scriptures to say that God loves and delights in us precisely because to say this is so problematic?

What do I mean by this? I do not wish to be pessimistic or to discourage us, but I ask: How many of us have experienced divisions and brokenness in our families; our households; our marriages, or knows somebody who has or is experiencing these realities? Many regions of our world know war, extremism, other forms of violence, hunger, and poverty, most often due to the concentration of resources in the hands of a few. But we need not go far to see the greed of a few while large groups of people (sadly still too often set apart by race, in these United States especially) are at a social and economic disadvantage, frequently through little fault of their own. We need not go far, right here in Greater Rochester, to see or hear of violence.

We live in a culture that, on the one hand, is revered for its work ethic and generosity and, on the other hand, is known for increasing division between left and right; between rich and poor; among races. Even in our Church, we see competitiveness over adherence to teachings of the Church, often as we understand them. Those of weaker conscience can find themselves condemned instead of having their conscience strengthened by the support of loved ones and the community of faith, to understand and live by the teachings of our faith more fully. And we know the scandal of division among Christians: Catholics; Protestants; Orthodox.

All these divisions; all this brokenness in our world; among Christians; within our Church even, is because of sin in our world. We know “the love God has for us.” God’s love for us is the reason for our existence; why God has created anything; why God sustains this creation; keeps it and us alive. And we know our freedom to love God and one another as God loves us, or to misuse our freedom and so not to love as God loves us. And yet even when we do not love; even when we sin; even when we have created scandal and division in a world God created to be good, God still loves us. God delights in us and will always delight in us. How can this be? And how does this fact; this foundation of our faith that God loves and delights in us impel us to act as Christians; as Catholics?

“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.” We know and believe that God delights in us. We know and believe this because, from the very moment of creation, “God saw that [his creation] was good.” God pronounced us “very good.” When we fell away from God in sin; in not loving and delighting in God; in one another; in God’s creation as God delights in us, God sent us God’s only Son to live, to die, to rise, to ascend to plead our cause “at the right hand of the Father” in heaven. And the Son of God, Jesus Christ, promises to return in glory to complete God’s work of our salvation.

Here is our evidence of “the love God has for us”; that God delights in us! And the same Jesus who lived, died, rose, ascended, and will return as one like us in all but sin shows his delight in us most of all by praying with and for us. We hear perhaps the most magnificent prayer of Jesus with and for us in all of Scripture today in our Gospel reading from John. What does Jesus pray in what is often called his “high priestly prayer”; his prayer with and for his disciples; with and for us just before he suffered and died for us?

Two features of Jesus’ prayer in John’s Gospel; two things for which Jesus prays for us stand out for me in particular. What are they? Jesus prays for us: “Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one.” Jesus prays for our unity. And then Jesus prays to our Father in the same prayer, “Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.”

What would it mean for us to own this prayer of Jesus with and for us for ourselves? How might we “be one” as God the Father, Son, and Spirit are one? What does it mean for us to be consecrated; made holy “in the truth” that is the word of God? Does this not all seem extremely daunting to us: Achieving the ultimate unity that exists among the persons of the Trinity of the one God; being made holy in the truth of God’s word?

This is daunting for us, to be sure. But by God’s grace the unity and love among us that Jesus prays with and for us can be ours. How? Begin with prayer. Pray especially for the people with whom we disagree; the people who irritate us; the people who have even sinned against us. Pray for their good: “Lord God, who is all good and created us all good; who loves us although we are sinners, keep this person well and in your grace. Bring the person for whom I pray to the promise of your salvation for all whom you have created for yourself. Bring all people to deeper experience of the truth that you love and delight in us.” Pray a prayer like this not only once but until we can actively feel God’s love for the person for whom we pray being expressed through our words. Pray until our words become works of kindness; of charity; of opening up opportunities for dialogue with people who are different from us; who struggle in their faith or in living some of its teachings; who are of other faiths or no faith.

Prayer will not bring us to uniformity, so that we all agree on everything. But prayer as a community of faith and individually but for one another is at the root of unity around one central truth of our faith: God loves us; delights in us. And “we have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.” Prayer that becomes action for peace; for forgiveness; for unity; for an end to divisions and violence is our starting point for showing our world God’s love for our world; God’s delight in us and in our world.

“That they may be one just as we are one… Consecrate them in the truth.” This is Jesus’ prayer of utmost love for us; delight in us. Jesus invites us to pray this prayer for one another; to live this prayer for one another. If we live this prayer for one another, the First Letter of John says, God’s “love is brought to perfection in us.” Jesus promises as he prays in John’s Gospel that, if we live this prayer for one another; if we pray for one another; forgive one another as we need to be forgiven; dialogue with one another and avoid the temptations of gossip; hyper-competition, and passive aggression, we will have the same joy in one another as Jesus does in us. We will have this same joy of Jesus Christ if we overcome ideological divisions; divisions among Christians of differing traditions; racial divisions; all greed; all forms of violence. “I speak this in the world,” Jesus says, “so that they may share my joy completely.”

Jesus speaks “this in the world”; prays this with and for us “in the world” because he loves us; because God delights in us. God calls us to love and to delight in what is good in one another; what is of God in one another. God wants to bring his love; joy; delight in us to perfection in, with, and through us. This is the very foundation of our Christian faith; of Christian and human unity; of our joy and of our salvation.