Funeral for Billy Judkins St. Mark's Episcopal Church, June 30th, 2023, 2 pm

Funeral for Billy Judkins St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

June 30th, 2023, 2 pm

As Billy is dying, his son, Hunter, comforts his dad by saying to him, “Did you ever think you would live to be 93 years old?”

 In fact, in just three months, on September 13th, Billy Judkins would be 94 years old. I invite you to go back to 1929, the year of Billy’s birth. The influenza epidemic kills 200,000 people. Herbert Hoover is inaugurated as our president. The stock market crashes on October 29th and heralds in the Great Depression. Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy, Anne Frank, and Martin Luther King Jr. are also born that same year. Billy is 12 when World War II starts on December 7th, 1941. He is 23 when this church, St. Mark’s, is founded on January 6th, 1952.

In the 1950s, Billy serves in the Air Force in Korea and afterward completes his college degree at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he meets Dana. Billy had been a member of the Church of Christ until he marries Dana, an Episcopalian from New York. They come to St. Mark’s from Christ Church in the late ’70s. This is about the same time my husband and I and our family also come to St. Mark’s. I would sing in the alto section beside Dana.

Billy was very active at St. Mark’s on the vestry, junior warden, greeter, and usher. Billy and Dana were married for over 62 years. Together in 1990, they started Judkins Insurance and Financial Services Inc. Agency.

Dana died five years ago, in 2018, after cardiac surgery at the age of 85.

One of Billy’s best friends is our emeritus deacon, Len Griffin. They would take amazing road trips together. When Billy moves to northwest Arkansas less than a year ago, Hunter reminds us that his father immediately makes another connection to a man in the nursing home named Harley. By then, Billy can barely hear, and Harley is almost blind. They pool their resources and spend much time together. Hunter practiced medicine in Alaska, but moved back to Arkansas to help his mom and dad about ten years ago. When Billy moved closer to Hunter,/ Carol, Hunter’s wife, and Hunter sneak beer and barbecue to Billy at the veterans nursing home on Saturday. This was his favorite meal. I hear that there will soon be a barbecue and beer wake at Hunter and Carol’s home in Northwest Arkansas to honor Billy when they return home.

I often visited Billy and most enjoyed his stories. His favorite story was about a near-death experience. He had gone to the hospital to have surgery on his carotid. That night, bleeding developed in his neck, which started blocking his airway. By chance, an ENT physician is in the hospital late that night making rounds and saves Billy’s life with an emergency tracheostomy. For Billy, this was a near-death experience where he describes floods of light around Jesus, who is there reassuring him that all will be well, all will be well. After that encounter with dying, Billy said he did not fear death.

The Presbyterian minister, Frederick Buechner, has written often about the death of his own father and brother. Buechner would say to Billy’s family that you can say goodbye as each of you do at the veterans nursing home, but at the same time, you carry Dana and now Billy with you in your heart, your mind, and your stomach./ You do not just live in a world, but there is a world that lives in you./

 Buechner’s experience is that these larger than life figures of our childhood,/ live on./ They take death in stride, for the most part,/ because although death ends their earthly life as we know it, it can never end our relationship with them. They are alive in the resurrection,/ but without a doubt, they are also still alive in us through memories of good and bad times.

Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer;/ it is a looking out into an altogether different kind of time where there is no time./ It is a new heaven and a new earth./Led by the good shepherd, those in the resurrection are changed and become more Christ-like. Those who have died live in another kind of time where everything that ever was/ continues not just to be the same, but to grow/and change./ They, in some mysterious way, are alive in the resurrection and also still alive in us. In their  new resurrected life, we will slowly begin to understand in new ways the people we loved, the people who loved us, the people who, for good or ill, taught us things./ In some mysterious way/ they come to understand us—and through them, we come to understand ourselves and them — in new ways. / As we begin to remember them, they will be changed, and we, in turn, are changed. This has been Buechner’s experience, and  also has been my experience.

Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just we are haunted by ghosts,/ because they are not ghosts, but a cloud of witnesses./ Those in the resurrection we once knew/ are not just echoes of voices that have now ceased to speak. They are saints in the sense that through them, something of the positive power and richness of their life in the past/ now continues to touch us, but in new and different ways.

They have their own business to get on with now, I assume — “increasing in knowledge and love of You,” says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in your kingdom,” which all sounds like business enough for anybody.

We can imagine all of us on this shore fading from them/ as they journey ahead toward the new shore that awaits them, but it is as if they carry something of us on their way/ as we assuredly carry something of them on our journey. Perhaps this is why we are gradually called not only to remember them as they used to be/ but to see and hear them in some new sense. Remember how even Jesus’ closest friends such as Mary Magdalene and those on the road to Emmaus did not immediately recognize the risen Lord. If those in the resurrection had things to say to us in the past, they also have things to say to us now, and what they say may not always be what we will expect/ or the same things we have heard from them before. Be open to this experience.

  Buechner writes this is some of what he thinks those in the resurrection are saying to us.///“When you remember us, it means you are carrying something of us with you. We have left some marks, our fingerprints on you, just as we, Dana and Billy, have left our fingerprints on our family and friends,/ and on St. Mark’s,/ fingerprints of who you are/ and who we are. You will summon us back to your mind countless times. This means that even after we die, you can still see our faces and hear our voices and speak to us in your mind and in your heart… and someday/as in the resurrection of our Lord/you will see us again/ face to face…” in the new and overpowering light of Jesus, the risen Christ.

Today we celebrate Billy Judkins’s life in the house where he came to experience Jesus/ and the Good Shepherd’s promise of this new life in the resurrection.

Frederick Buechner in The Sacred Journey A Memoir of Early Days, Harper One reprint edition (October 1991)

Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark, HarperOne; Reprint edition (May 21st, 1993)

Joanna Seibert

5A Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26, Interruptions, June 11, 2023

5A Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 Interruptions, June 11, 2023

It is five o’clock Friday afternoon at Children’s Hospital. A young child with vague symptoms presents to the radiology department, just as I am almost out the door to go home after a long week. A routine ultrasound shows a large abdominal mass that most assuredly is cancer, the bad kind. I try to tell the mom we need more tests, walk them to the Emergency Department to her pediatric resident and staff, and suggest next steps./ The patient who presents at five o’clock on Friday routinely has a serious illness. Their mother has just gotten off work and notices something wrong when she hugs her. My day at the hospital is extended. I soon learn in my medical practice to pay attention to these interruptions. Another physician who calls or comes to see me usually has something more important than the issue I am working on. I hope I was as available to medical students, but probably not always.

I identify with one of Henri Nouwen’s stories.

While visiting the University of Notre Dame, he meets with an older professor./ As they stroll the campus, the professor tells him with a certain melancholy, “You know, my whole life, I have been complaining that my work is constantly interrupted/ until I finally discovered that my interruptions were my work.”1

Living a life of interruptions is not easy. I always have a to-do list, like most of you. I rarely get through it. There was a time in my practice, as I became more successful, when my thoughts began to be filled with hubris. “I am a very important doctor. I need someone to screen these interruptions. I will call them back at my convenience.” I soon learn I miss opportunities to help or heal or learn more crucial information about a child I am evaluating if I don’t stop to listen.///

Jesus’ life is one of constant interruptions. I don’t know how he does it.

Today we hear one more story of the constant daily intrusions into his life./ Our story starts out with Jesus interrupting Matthew as he sits at his tax booth.

The Pharisees then ungraciously interrupt their dinner by critically asking the disciples why Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors. Note they make triangles/ and do not ask Jesus directly. But Jesus hears them and interrupts their triangulation, suggesting their clock is wound up backward. He quotes words from the prophet Hosea that we just heard (6:6). Jesus’ mission is to heal wounds, show mercy, and forgive sins, not minister to those who think they are well.

While Jesus tries to finish the best meal he has had all week, he is suddenly interrupted again by a synagogue leader. He kneels before him, pleading that his daughter has died. “Come and lay hands on her, and she will live.” Jesus instantly leaves the table to go with him. Then suddenly, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years interrupts their abortive journey by touching the fringe of his cloak. Jesus turns around and heals her. “Take heart, daughter. Your faith has healed you.” Jesus then interrupts the customary paid mourners around the dead child’s home and interrupts the young girl’s “sleep” as he takes her by the hand/ and brings her back to the living./

Jesus meets people where they are, living or dead, not where he is. He operates in the present moment. No call waiting or call back later or make an appointment.

Again, how does he do it? He gets help. He has at least twelve followers. But after their three-year residency, they don’t seem ready to take their specialty boards./

We never hear about Jesus’ weekend vacations to recharge. We do hear about his attempts to sleep on boat rides, but he is again interrupted. But he does like to eat, always at other people’s homes. He reinforces how meals build relationships. Food nourishes and changes our bodies, but also nourishes relationships in some way that is not the same as simply sitting together around a table and talking./ Today, we also hear that Jesus eats with sinners like ourselves./

How does Jesus heal in these constant interruptions?

Miracle stories always produce more questions than answers.

Jesus touches, especially outcasts. His interaction is personal. His presence may be something like what I have experienced with a handful of people in my lifetime. When you talk with them, you feel like you are the only person in the room. You have their total attention. You begin to live in the present moment with them.

How does Jesus have the energy to do all this without a break in these constant interruptions?

Look more closely at the healing stories. Does Jesus say, “I have healed you?” Today it is “your faith has made you well.”

What about raising the child from death? Was it the faith of her father that brought about the miracle? Jesus never mentions for people to let others know that he, the great Physician, performs the miracle.

 Jesus models that he is so connected to God, the Father, that he has become a channel of God’s power to love and heal each person he meets, whatever he is doing.//

We are now aware that this resurrected Christ is also within us. This is huge. That power of love and healing is now within us.

How does Jesus stay connected to this love and healing power? We know how this happens. There are almost thirty verses in the New Testament where Jesus goes off to a quiet place and prays./ When I tire of the interruptions in my life, I know this is a true sign that I am not connected to God’s love, particularly in my prayer life. I must stop and reboot my rule of life.

My experience is that I have an agenda, but I am slowly, often painfully, learning that God continually meets me in the interruptions in my life that are not on my schedule. When I ignore a call from a friend or family member when I think I am too busy to talk, this is a sure sign that I am in trouble, losing priority of what life is all about. Interruptions are like stop or yield signs to go off script and listen for a grace note. Nouwen calls them opportunities for hospitality and novel experiences. When I return to a project after an interruption, I usually have fresh ideas. But that false notion keeps speaking in my ear that if I stop, I will lose my creativity or train of thought./

Interruptions remind us of how powerless we are. If we think we are in charge, interruptions remind us this is a myth. When I seal myself off and refuse to respond to anything but what is on my schedule, I become exponentially isolated. My world, my God, becomes too small. I become the center of the universe and fossilized. That is when I develop that high hubris titer./

 When we are open to the interruptions in our lives, we begin to see miracles happening all around us, in medicine, in recovery groups,/ healing, which interrupts lives when all seems hopeless. Those desperately caught in an addiction go into recovery. A child or adult survives an infectious disease like tuberculosis, diphtheria,/ or cancer that would have killed them fifty, ten, or five years ago. The child I first meet on a Friday at five,/today has a chance.

Interruptions always bring us back to live in the present moment, where God likes to abide. We become aware of what is happening directly around us in our life,/ instead of living into what is going on in our heads in the past or future.

One last story reminds us about the power of God’s love, the resurrected Christ within us that we now share when we live into the interruptions presented to us in our surroundings,/ living like Jesus in the present moment where miracles happen./ The resurrected Christ within us/ in each present moment/ reaffirms the incarnation,/ the Word made flesh./ We now connect to the presence of the Divine Risen One in our body.

Richard Selzer, distinguished Yale surgeon, wrote in his book Mortal Lessons about operating on a young woman with a cancerous growth on her cheek. Unfortunately, he must cut the nerve controlling the muscles of her mouth.

Looking at her misshapen mouth in the mirror, she asks him, “Will this always be this way?” He replies, “Yes.” /She then nods and lies there quietly.

But her young husband quickly bends over her,/ smiles/ and says, /“I like it.”

Then he shapes his mouth to hers/ and kisses her to show that their kiss still works./ Selzer writes that in that brief moment, he is looking through an open window into the healing presence of the living God.

And, of course, he is. Because the work of the Great Physician comes to us in the twisted shapes and interruptions in our lives/ to shape his love/ to fit us/ and to pour/ his love into us.// May this healing power be yours.2

1 Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Image Books, 1975), p. 52.

2Samuel T. Lloyd III in “The Miracle of Healing,” a sermon at The National Cathedral, February 8, 2009.

Joanna Seibert https://www.joannaseibert.com/

12 step Eucharist Trinity C, Great Commission and the 12th step, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock Arkansas, 5:30 pm June 7, 2023

Trinity C June 7, 2023

Twelve-Step Eucharist St. Mark’s

Great Commission and the 12th step

Tonight, we hear the Great Commission from Matthew. On a mountaintop in Galilee, Jesus tells his disciples and us to go into the world and share the good news of God’s love reaching out to others. The last sentence is also crucial. He reminds us we will not be alone. He will be with us always to the end of the age. The resurrected Christ will always be beside, above, and inside us as we take this journey.

There is also a great commission in recovery. It is the 12th step: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” I also like the way it is put in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: “Our society has concluded that it has but one high mission---to carry the A.A. message to those who don't know there's a way out.” (page 151)

 Neither the 12th step nor the Great Commission is optional. If we do not continue to learn from the experience of other Christians and share God’s love which we have received, we become stale and isolated and do not grow. We stay in recovery by practicing the lessons we have learned in all parts of our life, and by telling our stories. When we stop connecting the 12 steps to all aspects of our lives and reaching out to others, we lose our sobriety. Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of AA, found out he could only stay sober by meeting with and sharing his story with others seeking recovery. One of the first persons he told his story to was a physician in Akron, Ohio, Dr. Bob Smith, on the Monday after Mother’s Day. I once visited Dr. Bob’s house and sat in the upstairs bedroom where the two men met in 1935 to begin a program that saved my life before I was born. Before any of you here were born. That afternoon in Akron in an upper room was a spiritual experience that could have some similarities to being on a mountaintop in Galilee.

Both the Great Commission and the 12th step call us to community. We are cared for and healed by staying connected and reaching out to others in our community. Those in recovery know we were not able to become clean and sober on our own will power after years of trying. Christians continue to learn about Jesus by hearing the message from the experience of others. Here again, we see one of the million ways God heals and cares for us as we reach out to heal and care for others, relating to others in community/ and simply telling our story.

Joanna Seibert

12-Step Eucharist Being Saved by the Good Shepherd, Easter 4A, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, May 3, 2023 5 pm

Being Saved by the Good Shepherd

12-step Eucharist Wednesday, May 3, 2023, Easter 4A

John 10:1-10

“Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

In Richard Rohr’s blog,/ James Finley talks about being saved as the paradoxical power that comes from admitting we are powerless. /When we take the First Step: “We admit we are powerless and our lives have become unmanageable.” The First Step is admitting…. If we admit,/ we’re admitted. If we don’t admit,/ we’re not admitted. If we admit, we live; and if we don’t admit,/ we may die. (Repeat)

Why is admitting so extremely painful when the very thing that’s so painful is the very thing that saves our lives?

Hitting bottom is what most often precedes admitting/ and makes admitting possible. It’s excruciating to admit that our lives have become unmanageable because we all need a sense of control. We all need to believe, “Look, I have handled so many other things. I can handle this.”  It is the admitting that is such a painful experience. The admitting brings us to a place where we recognize that it is not looking good/ if this is all up to us. If this is up to us, we see despair. Finley says the fact that we’ve risked despair opens up a whole new possibility because maybe it’s not up to us. Maybe/ there’s another way.  

The Second Step of the Twelve Steps is: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  To lead us to life,  an abundant life./

John of the Cross says, “When we can still see a little bit of light, we will resist guidance;/ but when we cannot see at all, we will stretch forth our hands and be led to unknown places where we don’t know how to go.” This is indeed what admitting can do for us. Admitting is poverty of spirit; it is experiential humility. The act of admitting, then, opens up this paradoxical faith.  

Finley believes all of us on this healing journey in relationship to our Higher Power will finally come to say to God: “You know, /I don’t know who you are, /but I do know who you are: you’re the one who saved my life./ And I don’t know who I am, either,/ but I do know: I’m the one you saved.”  

 James Finley in Mystical Sobriety, an online course with the Center for Action and Contemplation. https://cac.org/online-education/mystical-sobriety/

Joanna Seibert

Easter 4A John 10:1-10 Wendell Berry's Good Shepherd St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock 5 pm

Easter 4A John 10:1-10, Good Shepherd Wendell Berry

 St. Mark’s 5 o’clock

Good Shepherd from “The Desirable Woman” by Wendell Berry

Laura Milby is a minister’s wife in Wendell Berry’s short story, “ A Desirable Woman.” She is loved from afar by a young man, Tom Coulter, who is in her husband’s congregation called The Little Flock. Tom works on the farm of Naomi and Ernest Russet, also members of The Little Flock Church. Laura and her husband’s favorite place to dine on Sundays after church is at the Russet’s farm. You see, in Port William, Kentucky, the congregation members rotate feeding their minister and his wife every Sunday in their homes. Berry describes these Sunday dinners as “food heaped on the table as they/ (the minister and his wife) were urged to eat/ as if they were being fattened for slaughter/ or as if it were the known practice of ministers and their wives/ to eat only on Sundays.”1

Laura’s practice is to follow these dinners with a walk alone over the land owned by her hosts. This Sunday at the Russets, she happens onto two pastures and a row of pens in the lambing barn. In one pasture are the new lambs safely born and strong,/ and in another pasture are the ewes waiting to give birth to their lambs. She walks into the barn and sees Tom Coulter, who has just midwifed the birth of twin lambs. One baby lamb is lying in the straw, perfectly formed but dead, and the other is bonded and feeding on its mother, who is nuzzling and muttering to her live lamb.

Tom is the “hired hand,” but not the thief or the bandit, but a good shepherd who deeply cares for his sheep. As Laura sees Tom’s tenderness with the dead and live lamb, she suddenly is filled with love for the eternal “unthanked care of the good shepherd.2 The sheep merely suffer, live, die, and are oblivious to the care given them by the shepherd. They do not seem to appreciate the care they receive from the good shepherd, but still the shepherd passionately gives the care. Laura responds to this by saying to Tom, “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

Tom gives a boyish grin and says, “I thought you knew it, (but) I didn’t look for you to say so.”

Laura’s response is, “I would like to thank you.” 

They say no more, and Tom goes off to war to “lay down his life” and never returns, unlike the Good Shepherd.

Wendell Berry gives us an abiding image of the Good Shepherd, who deeply loves and cares for us. We, in turn, don’t ask for the care but receive it/ and, most often, are unaware of the care from this Shepherd who passionately and desperately loves us.

 The Good Shepherd tells us, “I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

 All the Shepherd hopes for is that we, like Laura, acknowledge the Shepherd’s loves, saying to him, “You’re in love,/ aren’t you.” 

But even then, the Shepherd sheepishly grins, responding, “I thought you knew it/, but I didn’t look for you to say so.”///

Laura’s response to the Good Shepherd should continually be ours, “I would like to thank you.” Gratitude. That is why we are here today, giving gratitude for how the Good Shepherd cares for us. That is at the heart of our service today. A life of gratitude can make all the difference in our relationship with the Good Shepherd, ourselves, and those around us. May these words daily be on our lips,

“I would like to thank you.” 

1Wendell Berry, “A Desirable Woman,” A Place in Time, Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership, p. 57.

2Ibid, p. 67-68.