Jeff Wright’s Funeral Sermon
When we face a time like this, or when we look back on the last year of Jeff’s life it is important for us to ask: What is our hope? Death is never and should not be easy. If it is we are ignoring the reality. Something has taken someone we love away from us. There is a distance that we can barely perceive and life is a little less for it. C.S. Lewis talks about this when he is talking about friendship love, Philia in Greek. When we grow close to someone they bring something out of us that no one else does. We mourn in this moment the distance from someone we love but we also mourn an aspect of ourselves. This is why simply saying someone is in a better place doesn’t actually solve the problem and thank goodness that this is not the limit of our hope.
So what is our hope?
Well, lets start with our hope in this world, in this life. We look around us and we see a broken world full of hostility, suffering and death. The distance between us and our neighbor can feel so grand, because it often is. Because of our lack of action and faith, the greatest distance has always been between us and God. Yet, God crossed that distance and was born among us in Jesus Christ. He walked beside us, suffered with us and died the worst death we could ever imagine. Even before getting to Easter, we can already see a great hope: God can cross any insurmountable distance. The distance you feel to your neighbors, the distance you feel to those who have died, the distance you feel with God - all of that can and has been overcome through the powerful loving presence of Jesus and now His Holy Spirit.
Think about that, what is the distance between life and death, if the one who created everything and is bigger than everything dwells close to us. We truly believe that neither life nor death can overcome the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This brings us to Easter, where Jesus truly did overcome everything. The very worst humanity with its evil and violence could throw at him. All the suffering emotionally, physically, socially, and spiritually that anyone could dish out and Jesus took it underservingly and willing. Then he entered into hell and in 3 days overcame it all. He rose from the dead and with him hundreds of saints who had gone before him, because what is death, suffering or decay to someone who has God. We have everything we need when we have God.
Right now in this life, we can and do feel the distance, but when we have God we have more than just hope, we have the realization that this distance is already crossed. This brings me to our hope for this inbetween time for Jeff, Jean, Bee and all those that went before. The Bible often speaks about this time, when we are waiting for the resurrection and full realization of the Kingdom, as a time when those who have died sleep in the bosom of Jesus. We even get some images of faithful followers dwelling with God or being called up. This is truly a better place. At this time, we can trust those who have died to God our good shepherd, but that doesn’t mean we say goodbye. It’s not even a see you later. It’s more like they have gone into the next room over and changed their clothes. Think about it this way, if they are with God and we have with us, even in us, than what is that distance between them and us. We distance is only there because of our lack of faith and imagination (and I don’t mean imagination in the fictional way, I mean imagination in our ability to create an image). No one of faith is too far from us when we have God and the best thing we can do to feel closer to them is to be closer to God - though we should just want to be closer to God anyways.
Finally, what is our hope for the time to come. We get this beautiful image of the time to come in Revelation 21. A heavenly Jerusalem decked out in beauty descends upon the earth and God visibly dwells with us there. As he comes he utterly destroys all that is wrong. Death, suffering, and crying disappear when the God of life dwells with us. There is no more need for the sun, because he is purer and more revealing than any other light. The sea which is a Biblical symbol for chaos is no more. In this great resurrection and recreation we are invited to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
At this time we do feel the brokenness and death, but Jesus has already overcome it, he has already crossed the distance and he will make all right. We only need to hold on in faith and hope.
