funeral sermon She died in her 95th years Eleanor Colaianni

Funeral Eleanor Colaianni

April 28, 2017, St. Mark’s Emmaus Luke 24: 13-31

“O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our sister, Eleanor. We thank you for giving her to us,..to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. Amen”1

This morning as we carry the ashes of Eleanor Colaianni in and out of this sacred space, we are sacramentally carrying her back to God. We know she is already with God, but this funeral liturgy allows us in effect to shout out a prayerful petition to God, “God, get ready! Here comes Eleanor! A sinner of your redeeming, and a lamb of your own flock. You have given her to us, and now with gratitude for the gift of her life, we are returning her to you.” Our prayers are like prayers with the offering, “We give thee but thine own,” except in this case the offering is not money but the life of one we love.2

Eleanor died late in the evening of the second Sunday in the Easter season. That Sunday we heard how Christ in the resurrected life continues to come to all of us over and over again in community through locked doors and windows. In two days we will hear again the gospel Danny just read about two disciples leaving Jerusalem after Jesus’ death to go back home to Emmaus away from the trauma they experienced/ who meet Jesus on the road but do not recognize him. This morning we all as well are friends walking the road to Emmaus, coming to St. Mark’s, trying to find a safe place to process the long life and death of our dearly beloved friend. Like those on the road, we want to talk to each other about our friend, Eleanor, who touched so many lives.

It is indeed an early Christian tradition to tell stories about the one who died as her body is on its pilgrimage to its final burial place. We tell stories because Christians believe that death changes/ but does not destroy. Death is not the period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma where Eleanor in death enters a new relationship with God AND a new relationship with us. Our experience is that God does not give us a loving relationship like hers and then let it stop abruptly with death. The relationship is still there/ but in some different form. We tell stories about Eleanor to continue that relationship as we see through the prism of her life, both in glad and sorrowful memories, refractions of the grace and love of God.

Eleanor died in her 95th year. I invite you to go back in your imagination to that date July 4, 1921, the day Eleanor was born on our nation’s 145th birthday. Eleanor indeed believed that our whole country celebrated her birthday each year as well.  The first World War had barely ended two and ½ years earlier on November 11th. The 19th amendment, allowing women to vote was ratified just a year earlier in August 1920. Eleanor was eight when the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929. She was 20 years old when World War II started on December 7, 1941. She was 31 when this church, St. Mark’s was founded on the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1952. In fact, Eleanor and her family were almost founding members of St. Mark’s joining in 1955 when St. Mark’s moved into the Wilcox Building. She joined the St. Mark’s choir the next year, serving faithfully for over 53 years in the soprano section.

Colaianna in Arkansas means music,/ and Eleanor was a huge part of that tradition,/ singing in the St. Mark’s choir,/ playing and teaching piano and playing the bassoon in the symphony. One of her favorite composers was Chopin, whose music Tim played today.

As you have heard from her granddaughters, we will so miss our friend.

Do our Anglican tools of scripture, tradition, and reason help us at all in processing this long life/ and now Eleanor’s physical departure from us, always too soon?

What does Scripture tell us about death? The New Testament describes how Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus. Our mentor is telling us that weeping is what we should do. At his own death Jesus asks God, “God where are you?” He is telling us that doubting, arguing, feeling abandoned are feelings just as Christian as feeling held in God’s arms. Today we hear part of the Easter story. We know in our minds that Eleanor is now experiencing resurrection, but there is a part of our hearts that still wants her here with us physically to tell us in her very subtle way what we need to be doing and how much she loves us.

What does our Tradition tell us about death? There are many sermons and writings by people in our tradition who also have experienced the death of someone they dearly loved. Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William Sloane Coffin Jr, and John Claypool all preached about the death of close family members.  All of these towers of faith were shaken to their roots. As they looked for hope, they wrote profusely and vividly about what did not help them in their grieving. One of the universal dead end theologies for these preachers was the often-quoted phrase that the death of someone like Eleanor’s was God’s will. This is not the God of my understanding, and it was not theirs.  After the death of his son in a car accident when the car went off a bridge into the water, William Sloane Coffin preaches, “my own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that my son die; as the waves closed over his sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” I know this family felt God’s heart and presence with them as they lovingly surrounded Eleanor this weekend around her hospital bed in ICU.

All of these preachers finally do find comfort in scripture, but it is different scripture for each of them and not the usual one-liners that we all try to say to comfort one another. I think Eleanor would tell us to read and look for it, but the words will be different for each of us, but God will speak to us just as he did on the road to Emmaus when “he interpreted the things about himself in all the scriptures.”3

And so what does our reason tell us about death, which includes what is our own experience about grief and death?  Just like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, our loved ones who have died are not only in a new relationship to God but also to us. We may only recognize their presence at certain times.  Death changes but does not destroy our communion with the saints, those we love. We all have shared experiences of knowing the presence of loved ones after they died, doing things we knew we never had been able to do before because of some presence very near to us guiding, still caring for us. The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament gives us a wonderful description of this experience. As Elijah is about to die, he asks his beloved companion, Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha responds, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” Elijah says, “You have asked a hard thing.” You know the story. As Elijah ascends in a whirlwind into heaven, he leaves for Elisha his mantle or shawl. That will also be our experience. Eleanor has left us a mantle that all of us here will be wearing, carrying with us. Eleanor like Jesus is resurrected and will be with us always throughout all eternity. Her presence no longer depends on time and space.

When our loneliness is so deep that we cannot see or feel anything else, our reason, our experience, our tradition, our scripture tells us that though our pain is true, it is not the ultimate truth, Beyond all our pain is the beauty, truth, and love of God in Jesus Christ, which never dies,

 that love which surrounds us with all the saints, who are with us throughout all eternity.

 And so finally today our scripture is offering for members of Eleanor’s family and her friends an image/ to hold onto/ as we process her death. The image will be a road,/ the road to Emmaus,/ the road we travel when our loneliness is great,/ because we will so miss the person who taught us about unconditional love,/ but… suddenly at some time, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus,/ the one they thought they had lost /is there by their side,/  with Jesus and all the saints with her. Sometimes he/they/she may be difficult to recognize. But we will know them when we invite them in/ by saying that prayer Eleanor so often heard at the closing of the many Evensongs she sang with this choir, “Lord, Jesus, stay with us /for evening is at hand/ and the day is past; be our companion in the way,/ kindle our hearts/ and awaken hope,/ that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture/ and the breaking of bread./ Grant this for the sake of your love.”4,5 Amen.

1Burial II, BCP 493

2Thomas Long, “O Sing to Me of Heaven: Preaching at Funerals,” Journal for Preachers, 21-26, vol. 29, no. 3, Easter 2006.

3Jeffrey J. Newlin, “Standing at the Grave,” This Incomplete One, pp. 121-130.   

4Gary W. Charles, “The E Prayer,” Journal for Preachers, 47-50, vol. 29, no. 3, Easter 2006.

5Evening Prayer II, BCP 124.

A Different Thomas

Easter 2B St. Mark’s April 23, 2017Thomas John 20:24-28

What a privilege to be at St. Mark’s on the Day School Sunday. I have fallen in love with each of these amazing children and feel it a privilege to be with them at chapel and share a story with them. So today in their honor, I would also like to tell you a story. Every second Sunday in the Easter Season we hear about Thomas, affectionately called doubting Thomas. However, I would like to share a different story about Thomas given to me by Herbert O’Driscoll1. Let’s walk into this gospel and imagine we are Thomas to see if we might hear another story./

You are in a strange city. You are not a city person. Your world is the countryside, the lake far away to the north. You followed someone you loved and admired/ and worshipped him, but now that person is dead. His death has been very public and political, and you know nothing about politics.

You have no family or friends here in the south. You are on the run and have no place to go.  Soon, people will again be out in the streets as the Sabbath ends. You will become more exposed because it is obvious from your speech and clothes that you are a stranger from the north. As you wander aimlessly, you realize that the person who is the reason for your predicament is lying dead in a borrowed grave less than a mile away, and you do not dare go near there. You have already risked your life for him. When Jesus decides to come south to the home of Mary and Martha after Lazarus died, you are the one who blurted out, “Let us also go, that we may die with him,”./

Wait,/ there is one place that may be safe. You remember the upper room in the house where you shared a meal the night before last?  It is the one place known to all of you, the one place where you are most likely to find the others./ Yet, you cannot make yourself go there.

You realize you don’t want their company right now. You have come to see every one of them in their utter humanity. The ox-like dullness of Peter, impetuous, loud-mouthed, unreliable,/ the crass self-interest of James and John, the sheep-like passivity ofthe rest, their inability to grasp anything of the vision Jesus offered and lastly there is that utter treachery of Judas Iscariot. Judas is your name as well, but people have nicknamed you The Twin to distinguish you from him. Disgusting, even your name is disgusting! Everything about you and your group is disgusting. You cannot help but remember the cause you gave yourself totally to which transformed your life, giving it purpose and meaning. You had such great hope for it all. In giving yourself to it, you now find yourself, and all of that utterly destroyed. You do not want to hear echoes of familiar voices or reminders of past days. /////

You are now near the house where you suspect they have gathered to wait in hiding for the remainder of this awful Sabbath to be over. You could just walk those last steps,/ go up the outer stairs, knock at the door, and whisper, “It’s Thomas.” But instead you turn and risk yourself again to the city streets.//

We fast forward to a week later.// You can no longer live with this loneliness and fear, so you surrender and decide to risk joining the other disciples and most probably your own death.  The first one you meet at the door is your friend John.  He immediately blurts out,” Thomas,/ Jesus is alive and appeared to us on the evening of the first day of the week when you were not there”! They all try to persuade you of what has happened in your absence. You feel only more contempt for their naïve and magical thinking. But with no place else to go, you stay with them, against your better judgment./ You are hungry, tired, depressed, and want to go back home to Galilee. Even the women cannot console you./

 Then just as the light of dawn breaks, Jesus appears again. He walks right through the doors and walls of the room! He comes directly to you and says,/ “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt/ but believe.”// You stretch out your hand as if to touch,/ and your broken heart is healed./////

Frederick Buechner believes there is no other story in the Bible easier to imagine ourselves into/ than John’s story about Thomas.

 John is writing near the end of the first century to people like us who have never seen Jesus in the flesh. A child who is five on the first Easter, the age of some of St. Mark’s day school children, is close to seventy when John writes his gospel.2

 Herbert O’Driscoll’s midrash1 suggests that Thomas, possibly an introvert, chooses not to join the other disciples after Good Friday because he wants to be alone to deal with the depth of his loss. Far from being a doubter, the description forever attached to his name, Thomas is the consummate disciple, the one who gives himself utterly to Jesus.//

 Those of us who have given ourselves deeply and generously to a cause can often withdraw from participation when something changes and our passion diminishes. We decide we no longer want to be associated with the relationships that issued from that passion that once gave meaning to much of our time and energy. We find ourselves blaming everything and everyone connected to the cause or church or organization or relationship where we have been harmed./

If you read church history or spend much time in a church, unfortunately you will know this so often happens in the life of the church and the world. A vestry, choir, or school board member, Sunday school teacher, outreach leader, (even clergy) ends years of service and is never seen again. They have been through very difficult times and issues, and have performed with magnificent competence, but something happens to break the bond with congregational or community life. There may still have a personal spiritual relationship with God, but now there is an aversion to the life of the worshipping community.

Sometimes this may result simply from burnout. We are tired of trying to resolve endless struggles between differing opinions and factions. Sometimes the cause is deeper. Perhaps we have a sense of disappointment with the church, a feeling not so much that we must leave it as if somehow the church has left us. Perhaps we expect the church to have less unpleasantness than we find in other worlds we move in, our home or our professional life. Perhaps we expect people to behave differently, be more forgiving, more able to love each other. Little by little we come to see the church as the problem, or at least a large part of the problem. And so there comes a day when we discover that life is perfectly livable without something we once treasured and even loved. /

It is sad that this link to a church community is often severed precisely at a stage of life when we most need a worshipping community where we can find friendship that is freely offered, support when we need it, and a purpose in living.//

The gospels tell us that Thomas desperately wants to believe in Jesus. When given the chance, he blurts out his steadfast faithfulness as he kneels before the One who comes to all of us through our locked doors/ as Thomas looks up and says, “My Lord and my God.”

For Thomas and the rest of us, this return to our faith community is the pathway to encounter the Risen Christ.  We must always remember that Jesus cares so desperately about people like us,/ like Thomas,/ who get burned out or lose faith in our community that Jesus does a total rerun of his first Easter encounter with the disciples just for those of us like Thomas who leave for one reason or another,/ but in our desperation finally return. Jesus is calling specifically to us/ as he speaks over Thomas’ shoulder/ looking directly at us/ and says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."//

 This is the first of many Easter gospel stories about where we find the resurrected Jesus,// in community./ Thomas’ story marks our opening to a new stage of faith and church life. Up until Thomas’ story, our New Testament faith came in the human face of Jesus’ physical appearance. Today the risen Christ meets us in the hearing of his word/ in community. /

As it was for Thomas,/ may it also be for us,/ in this faith community.

1 Herbert O’Driscoll, “The Encounter,” Four Days in Spring, pp. 96-100.

2Barbara Brown Taylor, “Believing in the Word,” Home By Another Way, pp. 114.

Which Part for Holy Week

April 5, 2017 Wednesday before Holy Week    
John 10:31-42
“And many believed in him.”

 In four days, we will begin one of the holiest times of the Christian year, appropriately named, Holy Week. In preparing for this time, our tradition suggests the sacrament of the reconciliation of a penitent. Tonight, I share with you the rough draft of my confession of the ups and downs of my relationship with God looking through the lens of the Stations of the Cross that you followed this Lent as well as this upcoming Holy Week. /

 On Palm Sunday, we will read the passion gospel in Matthew, and Good Friday we will hear the passion gospel from John.  I imagine myself as so many of the players in this extraordinary drama. Come with me and see if you as well have a part to play.  I have been Judas and betrayed Jesus for politics and money.  At the same time, I have also had the privilege for sixteen years of preparing Christ’s supper.  Jesus has washed my feet.  I have sung hymns with him on the way to mountaintops.  I have publicly declared Jesus as my God in front of large groups of people.   I have prayed with Christ and fallen asleep either literally or by staying unconscious to the present moment. I have figuratively cut off ears defending him in my zeal.  I have been Nicodemus coming to him secretly at night and speaking out for him in ways that would keep me safe.  I have given false witness against him by making my plan his plan.   I have been Peter and denied my God more than three times. I have spat on him and mocked him by my actions. I have been Pilate’s wife receiving dreams that tell me that God is among us.  I have been Pilate and washed my hands of situations where I should have spoken out for what I knew in my heart was wrong.  I have been Barabbas, the criminal who was freed, and did not have to face the consequence of my sins. I have been privileged to wipe the face of God present in so many others in pain. I have perhaps been Simon of Cyrene and carried another’s cross for brief periods of time.  I have been among the women who followed Jesus from Galilee and looked helplessly on his crucifixion from a distance. I have been the thief on the cross crying out for God’s mercy in my distress.  I have been the other thief on the cross still trying to tell God what God should do to relieve my pain. I have been the centurion at Jesus’ death, finally recognizing God in the lives of so many only after they have died.  I have been Joseph of Arimathea and found a resting place for him. I have been one of the women at the empty tomb still looking for God. I have been Mary Magdalene in the garden, searching for God and not recognizing him. /

I close with an invitation to journey again this Holy Week with the rest of us sinners.  I hear there is a surprise ending.

Joanna Seibert, deacon

Jesus Calls an Audible

Epiphany 7A Matthew 5:38-48   Holy Spirit, Gulf Shores, February 19, 2016

If you are a football fan, you know that an audible is a play called by the quarterback at the line of scrimmage to make a change from the play that was called in the huddle. Peyton Manning, who played 18 seasons in the NFL, considered one of the greatest football quarterbacks of all time, became notorious for shouting "Omaha" just before the play is about to start. "Omaha" is his audible call for a sudden change in plans. Whatever play he or the coach may have called, now he is deciding to reverse the play. If he had planned to go to the right, he now is going to the left. /

These words, "You have heard it said... but I say to you" in this section of Jesus' teaching in the gospel of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is a first century rhetorical style of audible. With these six "antitheses" Jesus’ commands a world view change in the thinking of his audience, completely opposite of the world standards, a reversal, or radicalization of the pre-existing game plan standard for the day. Whatever the tradition was, whatever the strategy had been, Jesus is now calling an audible, a reversal of the original plan.1 If anyone strikes us on the check, turn the other check, if anyone wants our coat, give him also our cloak or cape or poncho as well, if anyone forces us to go one mile, go the second mile,/ give to all who beg from us, do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from us./ ThenJesus ups the ante even further by telling us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. If that is not enough, Jesus finally ends it all by telling us to be perfect. 

 How can ordinary people like you and me, not saints or world spiritual leaders learn how to follow Jesus’ new commandments, especially about people we perceive as our enemies? I think I can best explain this by sharing an award-winning story by writer and poet Raymond Carver called A Small Good Thing.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver shows in his excellent short stories the “almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, the Holy Spirit” in the worlds he writes about. In this short story, a young mother, Ann, goes to a baker to order a special birthday cake for her son’s eighth birthday. She chooses a cake decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a spring of white stars and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name Scotty would be in green letters beneath the planet. But before she can pick it up, the next day a terrible thing happens: Her boy is hit by a car and slips into a deep coma. She and her husband, Howard, spend several frantic days at the hospital, forgetting of course about the birthday cake.

During this time, when they do return home to change clothes, they start getting angry phone calls from an unidentified caller who says, “Have you forgotten about Scotty?” and then hangs up.  They have no idea who might be calling them and become furious that someone would make abusive nuisance calls to them at a time like this. All of the anger that is accumulating inside them because of their son's terrible condition and the doctors’ seeming incompetence becomes directed at the caller. 

About the time they receive the news that their Scotty has died, they also figure out who is calling.  It is the baker.  They had not thought to call him about the birthday cake, and he is getting his revenge with his angry nuisance calls!  He had spent a lot of time preparing the expensive $16 cake and now will not be paid anything for it.  As soon as they realize that it is the baker, they drive in the early morning right to the bakery to let him have it, ventilating all the anger that accumulated as they watched their only child slip away.  “I’d like to kill him,” the mother says, “I’d like to shoot him and watch him kick.” It is after-hours, but they get the baker to open up his shop and immediately listen to his ranting about how long and hard he works. Then the couple goes after him, telling him what of course he did not know: that their son was hit by a car and killed. “Shame on you,” the father says, “Shame.”  I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but this is what happens next. The baker throws off his apron and invites the bereaving couple to sit down with him as he says how sorry he is, asks for forgiveness and tells a little of his own lonely story about how the grueling long hours of working by himself for other people’s pleasure has now made him almost not human, without feeling and concern for others. The baker gets coffee for both of them. He stands up and says 2 “You probably need to eat something. I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” 3 He serves them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven. They eat rolls and dark bread and drink coffee and begin to talk and listen carefully to the pain and loneliness each is bearing. They talk into the early morning and they do not think of leaving. /

So how is Raymond Carver modelling for us how we can learn to follow Jesus’ new commandments to love our enemies? He is teaching us that we learn by hearing details of each other’s story and especially by sharing our feelings about how we have been harmed.  We learn how we each became the way we are because of our many trials along the way. We move from victim to survivor.  We are healed by feeling a connection to the pain each of us has known, realizing we are not alone in our suffering.  /

 If you are having trouble with this idea, think about starting small. You start by connecting with those with whom you have difficulty that you may have the best chance of finding a healing relationship with./ Start with members of this very congregation that you may find difficult.4 Now certainly there may not be people in this congregation with whom you have difficulty getting along.  But just in case, / try this. Sit down just the two of you, preferably over a meal and tell your story and listen to the other person’s story just like the couple and the baker in Carver’s story. Share a meal together, pray for presence of Spirit. I did forget to tell you that the presence of the Spirit is the only way you can be reconciled, for finding a healing relationship is not yet a major part of our human DNA./ 

 Jesus is telling us, do not fight fire with fire. Fight fire with water, living water.6 Evil is overcome with good, not with a stronger version of evil. Jesus is telling us to break the cycle of evil and suffering. Let it stop with us. Break the cycle with the person sitting three pews ahead of you. Break the cycle with your estranged brother or sister. Break the cycle with your spouse or child. Break the cycle with the person you work with or your next-door neighbor. With God’s help, we can do it. Christians are called to be Christ-like, to counter evil with good, to allow the power of Christ, the Spirit to live within and through us out to others. / Is there any hope for us? No one can be Christ-like by sheer will power or discipline. Christ, the Spirit has to do it within us. Pray for this. Put yourself in the place where the Spirit can lead you. // And that is exactly why we are here, right now, at this place!  I do not need to remind you that this church called Holy Spirit each week gives us one more chance to begin this world-changing experiment. In a few minutes, all of us also will have the perfect opportunity to begin the process by sharing a meal together, a small good thing, shared with each other at this altar.

1 Phillip Quanbeck 11, Thursday, 2/20/2014.

2 William Barnwell, A small good thing summary, DOCC.

3 Raymond Carver, “A Small Good Thing,” Cathedral.

4 Edwin Search, “Reflection on the lectionary”, Christian Century, February 8, 2011.

5 Steven P Eason, “Matthew 5:38-48”, Feasting on the Gospels, Matthew, Volume 1, pp. 113-115.

6 Matthew Myer Boulton, “Matthew 5:38-48”, Feasting on the Word, year A, volume 1, p. 385.

 Joanna Seibert