funeral homily

A friend of mine died -- a friend I've known for more than two thirds of my life. I went through confirmation with his son, and now I minister to his family, from the other side of experience. It's by grace that I'm back in Calgary and able to sit with the family in our grief.

But funerals suck.

Sermon for the Funeral of Erich Scherer
Friday, May 01 2009
Text: John 11:21-27 (Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:2-7)

I don’t want to be here.

Like many – like all of us gathered today – I don’t want to be here. To say ‘goodbye’ to a dear friend: a husband, father, grandfather; I can’t list all those relationships that Erich made in our lives. But I can tell you this, from my own heart – Erich was a good friend.

He was one of the first group of people from this very church who encouraged me to walk the path of ministry; to pursue the life of faith I saw and so greatly admired in his own example.

Erich was a farmer. He nurtured and tended crops – I nurture and tend to people. I only hope to be as good a minister as he was a farmer.

Oh, but it’s hard to say goodbye. I can’t pretend to you that I think this is part of God’s plan for our lives, or that Erich’s death was God’s will. I think that this is horrible time, a time of grieving and pain and sorrow.

It’s important to give those emotions their space; they’re expected, and normal. No matter how as Christians we view death and the life beyond, we still grieve. And we will, for quite a time to come. Grief is normal.

It is normal for us, it was normal for Jesus.

Jesus went to the funeral of his friend Lazarus, a man so close to him that he was described as ‘the one whom you love.’ Jesus arrived four days too late to cure Lazarus of his illness, too late to perform the same miracles of healing that he had done before.

And Martha, the sister of Lazarus, was pointed in her grief: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”
Even as we may be inclined to say, “Lord, if you had been here, Erich would not have died.”

Like Martha our grief brings us to Christ in whom we trust and we too are pointed in our grief. This isn’t fair. But even as turn our grief – and all it’s baggage – to Christ, we are reminded of the same thing as was Martha. We are reminded of the cornerstone of Erich’s Christian faith, his powerful faith in the promise of Christ that we will, each and every one of us, rise again with Christ in the Resurrection – that is the promise of our baptism.

When I visited Erich in the hospital the first time, I asked him if he’d be going home. In his own dry sense of humour, he smiled at me at pointed ‘up’. More than anything, my time spent with Erich reminded me of both his love for his family, and his trust and faith in the promise of God.

And it is with that same trust, and love, and faith that we gather here today. Both to begin the process of saying ‘goodbye’ to a dear and trusted friend and also to remember the faith that kept and sustained Erich in his life and now we trust rewards him in his death.

That Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and the life, and that those who believe in him, even though they may die, they will live.

That is the promise of God to Erich, to his family, and to us: that we will one day see the vision of the prophet Isaiah fulfilled, on the day that death is swallowed up for ever and every tear that we have shed is wiped from our eyes by the very one who will take our hand and lift us up out of the valley of the shadow of death.

In the day of the new heaven and the new earth, when everything old has passed away and spring dawns upon the Earth even as it did when Erich tilled the soil, God will dwell with us, and our mourning and crying and pain will be soothed. And we will rejoice with Erich again, our bodies whole and perfect, in the presence of our Savior.

Because through Christ that we have the promise of new life. To all who are thirsty, to Erich, to us, we have been given water as a gift from the stream of the water of life: the very gift of Jesus Christ to us through grace.

Erich is God’s good and perfect child, even as we are. Even as we mourn, may Christ strengthen our faith – forged in love and formed through our own relationships – that we may rest in the promise of God.

That in that new creation, death will be no more, because we live and trust and have faith in the Living God, and God who has come down and lived among us and tasted grief and death. The Living God, who shattered the bounds of death on that first Easter morning so that we too may feast in the Resurrection.

The same God who will raise us up on the last day, to rejoice with Erich that our joy has been made complete, when the memories of our sorrow and pain are washed away and we are reunited with all those whom we love in the presence of Him who loved us first – loved us enough to face death himself so that we may join him in Resurrection.

May Christ walk beside us as he walked with Erich. May Christ lift us up when we stumble, as he bore Erich up in times of pain and struggle.

May we share Erich’s faith, that in that New Creation we will all be whole, and perfect,

And loved.

Amen.