Mom's Funeral

May 19, 2018,

St. James, Las Cruces, NM:
Funeral for Helen Marie Swanson Detwiler

Opening

Thank you to the interim rector and the people of St. James for the invitation to preach the homily at this – my mother’s funeral. I really didn’t have to think very hard about my answer to the question about whether I would like to preach. I knew, I know, that it meant a lot to her that I was a priest.
After saying “Yes,” – at the next moment, I must tell you, I thought “What in the world am I going to say”?
These past 4 years, as I have been traveling about North and South Carolina, supplying on Sunday mornings in churches that need a substitute priest, a number of folks have asked me if I repeated my sermons? I answer them with a clear response, “No.”
That is clearly the case today. The truth is, I have never preached at my mother’s funeral before. I don’t have any sense of how to do that. So this is all experimental.
We have just heard the gospel proclaim that there are “many mansions” in God’s home. There is room for everybody, no matter what they look like, act like, no matter their status. That’s a Gospel message I can easily associate with my mother.
The Gospel as I understand it requires that we be willing to stand out in order to stand up for what Jesus would have us be. It is in fact as difficult as threading a camel through a needle’s eye to be a Christian that just fits in or does what is expected. That I understand that about the Gospel – I owe to my mother.
For her the real change in her life came with an adult conversion experience – I have found that is true of many of us. She became an Episcopalian and at that point we in her family began to do things differently.
Christmas Eve became associated with being up at midnight and later. Christmas gifts weren’t opened until we had been to midnight mass. Advent customs, Lenten practices. We learned from Mom that we needed to be prepared to stand out and to be different.
She didn’t just give me life, she led the way to my life as a Christian and a priest, an Episcopalian for better or for worse.
She was an anchor for living – for a life of faith. What a gift she was.

Gospel stories

One gospel story I associate with Mom is Mary and Martha.
If anything she was a “Martha”. It was that part of her that made it important that her boys know how to sew and cook. If you don’t know the New Testament story it’s about two sisters – both of whom were close to Jesus. One of them was busy with the tasks of “hospitality” in welcoming Jesus into her home. The other was intent on soaking in the teaching – the spirituality – of what Jesus had to offer.
The tradition – as much as the text in the Bible – has interpreted the text to mean that it is more important to soaking up Jesus’ teaching than to be worrying about the placement of the silverware on the table or where the punch is going to come from. “Who is more important, Mary or Martha?”
For a long time I have thought that the passage is really about the necessity of both women. You don’t get Martha without Mary. And the other way around, too. And I owe that thought to Helen.

The Gospel has profoundly to do with Hospitality to the stranger

There was always an outsider present at holiday meals. In our household growing up you never got a simple family meal when it came to special meals. As far back as I can remember, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, – you name it – were days that there would be a visitor. Sometimes it was someone we didn’t know. Sometimes it was somebody who didn’t have anywhere else to go. Always there was a Martha who had prepared the table and the meal and there was the Mary who had connected with the person in some kind of spiritual or emotional way. Both Mary and Martha were named Helen. We called her Mom.

Women at the tomb

One of the features of the essential Christian witness and message – namely the Resurrection of the Crucified One – one of the features that is remarkable – remarkable to the point of being astonishing, is that it was women who were the primary witnesses to the Resurrection. The recorded story relates that they went to anoint the body, to follow up on essentially “women’s work.” They became the primary witnesses to Easter. They were the ones sent out in the first place with the news that would change the world. My experience of my mother is that if she had been in that place and time, she would have been one of those women. She would have been one of the women with the moxy to go to the tomb. She was a pioneer feminist - - even though in her final years she would have been horrified by that designation.

Music

It’s clearly the case that at dinner parties one needs to have appropriate music. I’m sure there was good music playing at Martha and Mary’s place. You may even have some favorite Easter music – it turns out some really fabulous music has been composed through the centuries and millenia for the proclamation of the gospel. Music is a vital part of what it means to be human. And it is a vital part of what Christians do as they come together to proclaim the gospel.
Well, Helen knew of the vital role that music plays in our lives, and so it is no surprise that she was convinced that her children needed to learn music. Playing music is one of the earliest of my memories. I know that it is an essential element in my siblings lives. And we owe much of that, I am convinced, to our mother. Ultimately I think there’s nothing more spiritual and god-like than music. We’re singing songs in church today, in honor of Helen, even though she didn’t particularly like singing hymns. We’re doing it to give thanks to God who is the author of our salvation. I know she would approve of that. Thanks be to God.

Jesus the healer – I might say Jesus is a Nurse

For much of her 90 years Helen was a nurse. One of the things I took some delight in this past week was looking through some photographs of her as she graduated from nursing school. She was a healer, one who gives comfort. One who cares for others.
And so, too, it is that Jesus is in many ways above all a healer. A wounded healer. “By His wounds we are healed.” Jesus the healer? Jesus the nurse? Jesus the physician who knew more than the professional physicians. Jesus the one who reached out the forgotten with hands of compassion and love.
Jesus and Helen, they knew one another, and in more than just little ways, she was like Him.

Our living earth

To her final days she was a nurse even to the environment around her. She picked up trash on her walks in the neighborhood. She trimmed hedges on the walk not just for herself but for all those who followed her. She once had us erect for Christmas a “living tree.” It was a little tree with a big huge ball of soil around it. I think it is still living in the back yard of that house on Dudley St. She was the neighborhood “bird lady” – but she was the neighborhood icon for recycling and concern for the natural surroundings. She did what Jesus would do.

Yeshuah

In the end, we are gathered in this place, to pray these prayers, to offer these hymns to God, because Jesus came to be a “Savior.” His name itself means in Hebrew, “God saves,” and for Helen that it was God who came to save her was the only thing that ever really mattered. Her faith in this one didn’t waiver. Her focus on being reunited with all that mattered was dependent on the “one who saves.” There’s no doubt in my mind or heart that Jesus was her path to God.

Closing

Love

And so it was into Jesus’ arms of love that she finally fell. Into the arms of a loving, living, God. As I think every mother is, in some sense or other – the model for love. She was a model of love for many. It’s a cliché and it oversimplifies even as it reveals – but there is more than a little bit of truth in it.
And like every mother that I have ever known, she has demonstrated our frailty as human beings, or our habitual ability to fall short of what we ought to be. It is for that very reason that she models for each of of us our need to serve one outside of ourselves, to reach for one beyond ourselves, to find ourselves in the grasp of a love greater than ourselves. Though that love beyond us may go by many names, I learned of it from the one I called Mom. The name Jesus embraces the love of all. Helen embraces all of you today, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.