Homily delivered by the Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright in memory of

Mary Elizabeth Watson Gibney

April 25, 1922 – May 28, 2010

Church of the Good Shepherd

June 4, 2010

We have just heard two warm, personal tributes to Betty from son, John, and grandson, John.  I will certainly not try to add to what they have said, except to note that I witnessed some of the qualities they mentioned, even in Betty’s diminished state – her sense of humor, for example.  These qualities radiated from her like embers still glowing, even as the fire was beginning to go out. 

My role is to represent the Church of Jesus Christ, in which Betty was baptized; the Church in which she was nourished by word and sacrament; the Church which now commends her to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life. 

It is no small thing to lose a parent or grandparent.  Many a person has contemplated the death of a mother or father with a certain confidence – I can handle this; it will be okay – only to discover that the finality of the loss turned out to be far more devastating than expected.  Christian faith acknowledges the significance of the loss of these ties that bind and gives us permission to grieve.  Christian faith gives death its proper respect.  It acknowledges that death is a contradiction of the good life that God intends us to enjoy.  God is a God of life.  The Holy Spirit is a life-giving spirit – “the Lord and giver of life,” as we say in the creed.  It is precisely because God is a life-giving God that St. Paul refers to death as “the enemy.”  Jesus Christ reigns and will continue to reign “until he puts all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”[1]   Death always arrives as a stranger to God’s good creation.  This is true, even in the case of someone like Betty who has lived a long and meaningful life; and whom we wouldn’t want to see continue in her diminished state. 

And yet, while Christian faith gives death proper due, it does not allow death to have the last word.  I think of John Donne’s poem, “Death, be not proud, though some have called you so. 

Donne’s sonnet sounds just the right note: the death and resurrection of Christ have altered forever the meaning of death.  Easter morning means that death is a defeated enemy – the death of death, as Donne puts it so unforgettably. We sleep; we awake into a resurrection life that we can only imagine. 

When a loved one dies, especially a parent or other family member, many people find comfort from material objects the person owned.  Oddly, it is often the quotidian, commonplace objects that convey the essence of the person – an article of clothing, a note in the person’s handwriting, a tennis racket, a hat.  These concrete objects enable us to feel connected to the person. I suspect that Betty has left behind such objects and that they will come to mean more and more in the coming years. 

I am here to bear witness to a special kind of concrete object that connects us to Betty, namely, the Church, the Body of Christ.  It was in these pews that Betty sat, Sunday after Sunday; at this altar rail where she received Holy Communion; into those offering plates that she placed her envelopes (even that Easter Sunday when she forgot them and got a speeding ticket trying to retrieve them before the Offertory).  Is the Church of Jesus Christ: a building? – Yes – and more.  An institution? – Yes, and more.  Why more?  Because the Church is a concrete object unlike any other.  All of the other objects are meaningful precisely because she uses them no longer.  But the Church is the one concrete reality in which she continues to live. 

The Church, the Body of Christ, is Christ’s continuing presence on earth.  If Christian faith means anything at all, it means that the risen Christ is present with the faithful as we gather and with the faithful departed, “who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we forevermore are one.”[2]