Please Click Here for Sermon Video
Ah yes, the eulogy. It’s not easy to give a eulogy. The word literally means good word and to eulogize is to speak good things about someone. In most cases, finding nice things to say about a person you’ve known since way back when is not a difficult thing. The task is to try to limit what you say and still come out summarizing who this person was.
As a minister, the task of eulogizing a person at their funeral often falls back on me. Usually, I get a family together a day or so before the funeral and get them to start telling me stories about who this person was. I don’t tell any of their stories in the eulogy. That gathering simply gives me a sense of who that person was and then I try to say how God worked through this person to love or to bless her family, friends, and even whole communities. Some people are so saintly that I can say that God gave us glimpse of himself through this person.
But then there’s that odd funeral when trying to find something good to say…weellllll…better talk about something else. I‘ve had to do that twice in 26 years of ministry, twice too many. I’ll tell you about the first time. I was in my first year of ministry down in West Virginia and I hardly a clue what to do for a funeral anyway. In seminary, they wisely taught us to avoid eulogizing people if at all possible because our role at a funeral is to proclaim resurrection in Christ. In our tradition, in our theological tradition the service we do at death isn’t a funeral service nor a celebration of life. In our Book of Common Worship, it’s called a Service of Witness to the Resurrection. We’re supposed to talk about resurrection. That’s why if you come to a funeral that I conduct you won’t hear me talking about going to heaven when you die but rather I talk about resurrection in a new creation. You will also notice that I didn’t take my seminary professor’s advice as I will always say something about the person we’re commending on.
Anyway, here’s what happened. It started when the local funeral director called me and said a family wanted the Presbyterian minister to do their father’s funeral because Grandma so and so from way back when was a Presbyterian and that’s what they thought they must be. Being the only Presbyterian minister for miles around I agreed. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the family to agree to meet with me for storytime. It simply would have would have been just too difficult for them. One of the daughters led me to suspect that her father wasn’t all that great of a man. I also asked a few people who might have known him or at least of him and they all agreed he wasn’t the finest example of a human being. So, I was left with a mess on my hands. I had to do the funeral for a man most people regarded as “Hell bound”. My usual funeral plan wasn’t going to work because I had no evidence that God had blessed this family through their father and he certainly hadn’t been a person you’d look at and say God is like that.
Well, showtime. I stood there and did the service before his two daughters and son as they wept. I sensed there was a lot of unfinished business there. So, instead of eulogizing I talked a bit about how to deal with grief and that death is not the end of things. As I expected, they didn’t pay me. No matter. What really wrenched my gut with that funeral was that I was unable to tell a grieving family that their father was a blessing to them. That’s pretty messed up. This man’s funeral had no eulogy. I am saddened with the thought that this man’s life may have lacked God’s blessing and therefore there was no reason for his family to bless God and be thankful for their father. If assumptions or should I say judgments are correct, this man was one of those people that make it hard for us to say that Jesus Christ is Lord for if he is Lord, why would he let someone be so hurtful to his own family. We have all known people like this and I’m sure that is a question we’ve all asked. I don’t know the answer.
Well, this is Ascension Sunday. Today we celebrate that Jesus the resurrected one has ascended to the right hand of the Father and from there reigns in the power of the Holy Spirit; and by power I mean the power that comes through the vulnerability of self-denying, self-giving love. We would like to believe that the way God reigns in his creation is through blessing the good and cursing the wicked. But, thinking of the man I spoke of earlier, we want to ask why God didn’t get that man for causing so much hurt. I can’t answer that question, the justice question; but with respect to how Jesus reign’s in this world, I can say that Jesus’ reigning in this twisted world is going to look like his death on the cross. The cross was his throne and he reigns in unconditional love. Jesus shows us how God rules in his creation by suffering for us and with us whether the suffering comes as just part of life or because of the bent and twisted will of others not to mention our own.
To that weeping family I could have said that Jesus was with them in the sufferings they have endured from being the children of that man but I had no details to point to. I could have said that their expectations of God should be that somehow God was going to take all the hurt that man caused them and instead of letting it remain as senseless hurt, use it as the means of blessing them and others. The blessing will primarily be experienced as knowing God and God’s love, which tends to heal and change us so that we might be a blessing to others in their suffering. The reign of Christ is that he will bless us by being present with us in our hurts and then making those hurts to be the means by which he blesses us with new life in himself and then others through us. He reigns by suffering with his own and healing us in such a way as we wind up knowing God himself, being healed and changed by God, and them being part of God’s blessing to others.
Well, if you are wondering why I’m talking about eulogies and blessing, I have no short answer to give you other than at the end of our passage from Luke he says that the disciples were continually in the temple blessing God. The Greek word for blessing is eulogia – literally, eulogy. The apostles spent their days after Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father in the temple eulogizing Jesus. Ascended to the right hand means what it sounds like. Jesus is God’s right-hand man so to speak, the one through whom God does what God does in God’s Creation which is to save and heal his Creation and those in it. What Jesus did as he ministered back then, is what God continues to do through the people of Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: healing, restoring, reconciling, resurrecting in the power of self-giving love.
Immediately after Jesus ascended, the disciples went back to Jerusalem to eulogize him. The evidence that Jesus Christ has ascended and reigns in this world is that there are those who know him and can eulogize him because he has acted in their lives for healing, reconciliation, restoration, indeed given new life to them by the presence and good work of the Holy Spirit. These people know they have been in the presence of God and blessed by God and the wish to witness to that, to eulogize.
The Trinity works in our lives and through us by means of blessing us so that we are a blessing to others. Jesus, the Son blesses us by letting us know that he is the one who suffers with us, who prays continually for us, and reveals the self-giving love of God to us. This blessing bears its fruit as we get involved with being Jesus’ blessing of others. If we’ve got a friend at work suffering through a divorce, or grief, or whatever, this means we will be inclined to be part of God’s blessing to them by suffering through it with them. Be the one who is intentional about being there and listening. Be the one who gives hope and encouragement. Be the one who helps people to forgive and reconcile. Be a living eulogy of Jesus, the proof of his ascension and reigning. Be part of his good healing work in the lives of others. Amen.
