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, 4 August 2019

Readings of the day: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Who went to Mass today to hear a discouraging message? I will venture to say that few if anybody here today is here to hear a discouraging message.

Yet do we not hear just this, a real “downer,” from the Book of Ecclesiastes today: “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher… All is vanity.” All your toil “with wisdom and knowledge and skill”; your work, even if you work extended or irregular hours for some perceived good to yourself or to other people, our society, our country, or our world: All this means nothing. All the benefits of our hard work will be left behind “to be enjoyed by another.”

“All is vanity,” sorry. The Jesuit priest and columnist for the newspaper The Catholic Register out of Toronto, Fr. Scott Lewis, who taught me in a course at Toronto’s Regis College, says (I think rightly) in his Register column, “God’s Word on Sunday,” for this week that “the author of Ecclesiastes will never win a prize for being the most joyful or hopeful individual in the Bible.” In fact, Fr. Lewis says, the Jewish Rabbis a few centuries after the writing of Ecclesiastes who decided on which books to include in the Bible were leery of including Ecclesiastes in the Bible as we know it today for a number of reasons: Ecclesiastes is too discouraging. Its message could have been written for anybody already cynically dissatisfied with life enough to have been waiting for an authoritative message to support their cynicism. Ecclesiastes’ message is not particularly religious. The Book of Ecclesiastes barely mentions God.

For good or for ill, though, the Book of Ecclesiastes and its “vanity of vanities” message are in our Bible. But if we fast-forward to the chaotic 1960s, thanks to The Byrds’ 1965 single, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” it would seem that the message of the cynical teacher of Ecclesiastes has gained new receptivity. “To everything… there is a season… and a time to every purpose under heaven”: Today, over fifty years since “Turn, Turn, Turn” was released, its lyrics are engrained in the memory of many people. Is this maybe because, in the 1960s (I think this is true of any time period), people were reflecting on both the joys and the chaos of the time, individual and social successes and problems, by asking the foremost question, “What does it all mean”?

If we fast-forward again to our own just-as-chaotic time, are we not still asking similar questions? What does our life on earth mean? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or anything? After all, the people who die with the most wealth, or having worked the hardest or the longest, still die. “Vanity of vanities,” it would seem still today, “All things are vanity.” Yet, at least by my observation, Ecclesiastes—not usually the reading we hear today, but the “to everything there is a season” reading, from Ecclesiastes 3—is a staple at Catholic funerals, when people are, I would think, searching for some message of hope or meaning in our own lives and in the life of our deceased loved ones.

These questions are age-old: What is the meaning of our life on Earth? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or our acts of justice and kindness toward others? Why bother, anyway, if “all is vanity”? Our Psalm today, the letter to the Colossians, and the Gospel of Luke all speak to these enduring questions we have about the meaning of our earthly life and of our activity during it, although maybe not with the same cynical edge as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes.

Our Psalm speaks to the finiteness of our life on earth; our life that is “like grass that… in the morning… flourishes and is renewed [and] in the evening… fades and withers.” Still, for the Psalmist, our earthly life and work within it have great meaning and dignity. We ask God, through our Psalm, to bless our lives, however short, and our work: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”

The letter to the Colossians invites us to prioritize “the things that are above… not… things that are on earth.” The context of Colossians is both a form of laxity in the practice of Christian faith that had developed within a few decades of the earthly life of Jesus, and a response to that laxity. The more time passed after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, we might understand, Jesus’ disciples got increasingly impatient for Jesus’ promised return to Earth at the end of time. The longer Christian disciples waited for Jesus’ return, the more they became lax or ignorant about accumulating material goods that, while not bad in themselves, risked distracting them from placing their foremost hope in God and in eternal life. The letter to the Colossians’ response to this laxity is radical, even for its time. Colossians asks its hearers to think of themselves as already dead: “For you have died, and your life is hidden in Christ with God.”

In case we think that this call in Colossians to think of ourselves as already dead is morbid or simply bizarre, I invite us to think of our own baptism. Our Church’s Rite of Baptism is full of references to death: Death to our finite earthly life so that we may rise to eternal life with Christ.

But do we not experience in our world today the same tension that would have inspired the letter writer to the Colossians to invite us to think of ourselves as dead to this finite world in order to place our priority and our hope on God and eternal life? On the one hand, do we not hear from some people even today an Ecclesiastes-like despair, without the context of the world and spirituality of the author of Ecclesiastes, who lament the “vanity”; the lack of any meaning in this earthly life? On the other hand, maybe more often today, we hear the “evil twin” of this despair of any meaning in our earthly life; we hear a “prosperity gospel” mentality that encourages greed and material accumulation, even under sometimes Christian pretexts. This “prosperity gospel” holds that either the material poverty of the poor is a curse from God and wealth a blessing, or social justice and an equitable distribution of earthly goods do not matter anyway, because God will make all our inequity and injustice right at the end of time, no matter how justly or unjustly we act now.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus offers us, I think, a counterweight either to a mentality that despairs of any meaning to our life on earth or to the “prosperity gospel” view, which, similarly to its evil twin, holds this earthly life to be of no meaning but, in doing so, encourages greed and social injustice, all too frequently under a religious mask. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus encounters a man who asks him to order his brother to divide his inheritance with him. In refusing to do as the man requests, Jesus turns to “the crowd” and warns them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Jesus does not say that the possessions themselves are bad, or even that the man he encounters at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading is unjust in demanding his share of his inheritance. For us to understand Jesus as teaching that material possessions are in themselves bad, or that this man’s demand for his inheritance is in itself unjust, would miss the point of Jesus’ teaching. Such an understanding would be inconsistent both with the balance of Biblical teaching and with our Church’s historical teaching on the meaning of our earthly life and on justice concerning earthly possessions or wealth.

Neither Jesus, in our reading today from Luke or elsewhere in the Gospels, nor the author of Ecclesiastes—especially if we read Ecclesiastes beyond his cynical-sounding “vanity of vanities” lament we hear today—nor the letter to the Colossians, nor the Psalmist consider all wealth, all human work, or earthly life to be in themselves meaningless. Instead, Jesus and the authors of Ecclesiastes, Colossians, and our Psalm ground all meaning of earthly, material wealth, of labour, and of life itself, in God.

Human wealth, labour, and even our work toward individual charity and social justice have great meaning and dignity, but only if they are grounded in God first. If these are anything but God first—might first, nation first, wealth first, or me first—they become empty, meaningless “vanity of vanities.” Only by placing God first in all we possess, do, and are may we have eternal life, the life of ultimate meaning. And only with God first does our prayer, that of our Psalm, have any meaning for us here and now: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”