Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
From Lament to Confidence and Celebration
Sermon by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
At the Funeral of The Rev. Dr. John Tyler Harvard
June 6, 1947 - March 27, 2005
St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church, Douglassville
March 30, 2005
Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33; Psalm 42:1-7
2 Corinthians 4:16 - 5:9; John 6:37-40
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
In bringing ourselves to say those words here and now we place ourselves directly in the center of the Christian paradox. We stand here with John Harvard's family, diminished and grieving. Yet almost the last words we will hear tonight will be from Bishop Mark: "All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia."
Part of the paradox is that while we cling to the truths of our religion, all of what we do here remains difficult-and I am very much counting on your prayerful support right now as I try to share a few things from the scriptures we have heard. I am also going to try to engage our thinking a bit more than we usually do at an emotional time because the intellect was the place where John played so joyfully and so well. Let's follow the scripture lessons, and try to move with them from lament to confidence to celebration.
I. Lament
So we lament: the pain of this awe-full moment is built-in to our DNA. It tells us something about God. At the foundation of the world, God made a self-limiting choice. The emptying of self that we see in the cross is not the exception to God's nature-it is there from the beginning. For us to exist, God laid aside omnipotence. In creating beings who can make choices, God accepted limits and the possibility of grief. In hoping for the joy of our love, yet allowing us the possibility of choosing unfaithfulness, God accepted limits and the possibility of grief. This is the tremendous mystery: by the sacrifice of these self-imposed limits, God made love, beauty, and courage possible-and in doing so God risked the pain of rejection, rebellion, and the trashing of the planet.
We are made in the image of God. When we love, we risk. Because we have the possibility of ecstasy, security, and connectedness in our relationships with each other, we have built into our relationships the inevitability of loss, of grief. The tremendous mystery is that neither God nor we would doubt that it is worth it. We could avoid the pain we feel tonight if we had been made without vulnerability to joy, love, and wonder in each other, and nobody would want that.
So when the lesson we heard from Lamentations says God does not willingly afflict, maybe that means that this is the best God can do given what God chose at creation. Because the love of friends, spouses, children, family, and community is to be real, we necessarily come to these moments when we know a bit what it is like to be God, as the serpent so ironically promised. At these moments we enter a bit into the pain and limitation that God accepted in creating a world where there is choice and love, and the inevitability of loss.
So the pain we feel tonight is an expression of how greatly God blessed us in the person and life of John Harvard. Because God gave us so very, very much in John as husband, father, brother, priest, teacher, and friend - because God challenged us so charmingly through John both to think and to believe, to cherish both ritual and Spirit, to be real about our mission, to have passion about our commitments-because John brought so much, we come here tonight tasting the depth of our own loss as we also grieve for John's months of suffering and also for the intense loss the Harvard family endures again so soon after the death of John's mother.
But I say this conscious of John looking over my shoulder, perhaps fingering his bow tie. Managing as he did to combine a keen and inquiring intellect with a committed relationship to Christ, I know he would say to me at this point, "Thank you for the lament; now please get on with it."
The it John would want me to get on with is what gave his life meaning and purpose: the Psalm that the family chose for tonight speaks of a thirst for God that dominates our being. Very few people in my experience have let go of those systems of defense and denial that keep us looking buttoned up, cool and secure, not particularly needing God. We get used to living without acknowledging our thirst for God. John was both too smart and too plain for that. He knew he craved God, and wasn't lazy about seeking God. Even in his last days, I never came away from a conversation with John without being enriched by what his mind and heart were doing in tandem. If ever there were a case of faith seeking understanding and relationship, it was his.
So if we are to memorialize John by any act or gift, perhaps the best way is to do so is to let go of whatever in us that resists the beautiful madness of loving God with heart, soul, and intellect. If you want to remember John, free yourself to know your hunger for God.
II Body and Spirit
Families tell us a lot in their choice of lessons for weddings and funerals. The second reading Susan has chosen is blunt, and has none of the cosmetics we associate with funerals. It jars us as it refers to the body wasting away. That is very hard to hear in these circumstances, and in choosing it the family showed courage and realism. Their choice forces us to confront the fact that this language would be entirely too much to bear if it were not for the contrast St. Paul draws.
As the apostle puts it, in the middle of the most terrible moments of life we experience ourselves walking towards God's future in the power of Holy Spirit. I am struck as I recall that my first conversation with John after his diagnosis was about how he would walk toward God through the coming ordeal with the Spirit as companion.
For John Harvard the Holy Spirit was not an idea, or a name for group consciousness or the herd instinct of church leaders. For John as for St. Paul, God's spirit was personal, accessible, present, and energizing-and also wild and unpredictable enough to lead him and Susan to a range of endeavors that spanned foreign mission fields, parish work, and teaching the young people who will be leading this country in a generation.
Because John sensed God's spirit dancing through the minds of his students, he reserved a special delight for the stories he repeatedly told of seeing them turned on by ideas in as the Spirit nudged the mind. The charismatic aspects of his faith were integrated into his life, so John didn't trade on or sensationalize his life in the Holy Spirit-it was far too real for that.
The Spirit of the Lord fills the earth. Each of us is someone in whom God hopes to do miracles. I enjoy the memory of how John talked about his children - fathers have a special way of doing that, of course. But John was different in that he did not usually brag about them - at least not all the time: rather, I heard him saying he admired them, which is something very different, something that reflected his theological belief that God is ever creating wonderful beings, and that parents are particularly called to recognize that in their offspring. Your father liked you as fellow humans.
III. Centered.in Christ
I have to acknowledge that I am John's beneficiary in a peculiar way: John was the original importer of family systems theory to the life of the clergy of this diocese. That school of thought is one of the things that make the Diocese of Bethlehem a wonderful place to work, up to 70% of the time. 70% is the magic number the theory assigns to our maximum ability to be centered in our interactions.
That centeredness is not an irrelevancy. The gospel of Jesus Christ is in large part the ability to face all of life not with those cranky illusions and denials we call certainty, but with the confidence that comes from faith and hope. What passes for certainty in religion is rigid and fragile; faith and hope are supple and enduring. There is an enormous difference. It would be a betrayal of him not to say as clearly as I can that John's faith and hope were precisely what the gospel passage puts before us. We belong to Jesus, and he is not about to lose us, no matter where the road leads. Nobody who looks to Jesus will look in vain. And the risen Christ will raise them in the same stupefying way that he is risen.
That is the core of Christian proclamation, so I want to reflect on Father Harvard's last sermon.
Those of us who do pastoral work or labor in health care know that very often there is a mysterious quality as to just when people die, about when they release themselves to God's care, whether they are conscious or not. I remember that two of the founders of this country, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died on the same July Fourth, and by the very timing of their deaths silently uttered famous last words about the meaning of their lives. It is in no way a preacher's cheap shot to point out that John Harvard, this creative and engaging teacher, yielded his spirit on the day of the Resurrection. With little energy left to frame a discourse, very early, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, John made his point again.
I wondered for a moment if this conspicuous timing of John's death would now make every Easter a burden to his family. I don't think so. Easter has here been illuminated as a last gift from someone who always said what he meant and meant what he said. Can we give his last sermon an Amen? That choice is ours to make.
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.
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