A Homily for the Funeral of Mary Perry
5 August 2010
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Focus texts: Isaiah 61.1-3 and 2 Timothy 4.6-8a
I spent the summer of 1979 as a student chaplain at Bethesda Hospital in Denver, a small psychiatric hospital established by two small Dutch denominations, the Reformed Church of America and the Christian Reformed Church. Although the hospital had originally been established to serve tuberculosis patients in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the advent of modern antibiotics and other therapies meant that the hospital needed to find a new reason for its existence. These two churches chose an ancient Christian vocation: the care of the mentally ill, a vocation often practiced by Christian monasteries and convents throughout the centuries.
As I remember it, the hospital had four units, one of those units a secure unit where adolescents received court-mandated psychiatric assessments as well as treatment. On our first day the student chaplains were asked to list, in order of our preferred area of service, the four units of the hospital. I was assigned to the adolescent unit. When I asked why I had been assigned, the supervising chaplain gave two reasons: (1) I was a trained and certified secondary teacher, something the unit needed, and (2) I was the only student chaplain who included the adolescent unit on his list.
I spent the first half of the summer helping these young people with their school assignments --- after all, education must go on, even in a psychiatric hospital! --- and acting as a chaperone (read ‘prison guard’) when there were outings. Since some of the medical staff were sceptical of the usefulness of a chaplain on the unit, my spiritual role was limited to occasional ‘values clarification’ sessions where the non-medical staff and I facilitated conversations about personal values and decision-making, often using role-playing as a technique for learning more mature behaviours.
By early July I was fed up and told my supervisor that I was going to resign. He asked me to go home and think about it. When I came in the next day, there was a note in my mail box from my supervisor. All it said was, “Read Matthew 25.31-46 and see me at 2.00 p.m. today.”
In this portion of Matthew’s gospel Jesus describes the day of judgement and how people are sifted into two groups, the ‘sheep’ on the right and the ‘goats’ on the left, and are judged by the ‘king’.
“Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” [Matthew 25.34-40]
I realized that my frustration was caused by my own expectations of what ministry should be rather than a response to the real needs of the young people I was serving. In so many ways they were hungry and thirsty, strangers and naked, sick and in prison. When I saw my supervisor at 2.00 p.m., I simply said, “I’m staying.” He responded, “I thought that you would.”
We live in a world captivated by a myth of celebrity where the extraordinary behaviour of the few is considered to be more real than the ordinary behaviour of the many. Many of our contemporaries have lost sight of a simple truth, expressed in Matthew’s gospel and in our readings from Isaiah and 2 Timothy: It is in the ordinary not extra-ordinary faith-filled lives of people such as Mary that the good news of God in Christ is most widely and most influentially expressed and embodied.
A couple of days ago I was watching ‘The Magnificent Seven’, that classic western in which seven gun fighters are hired by an impoverished Mexican village to defend it from a band of rapacious banditos. In one scene several young boys denounce their farmer fathers as ‘cowards’, but they are quickly taken to task by one of the gun fighters. He speaks to them of the courage it takes to work day after day to provide a home and food for a family, to bear the burdens of the young so that they might grow up, to see successes turn to failures and dreams into distant fantasies and yet never give up trying to do what is best for the family. “That kind of courage,” the gun fighter says, “is a courage that I do not have, but I envy those who do.”
Mary’s life has been a long and ordinary life in which extra-ordinary things have happened. Two children have been raised and have reached adulthood with the gifts to tend their families and relationships. Several generations of students and others have receive wise counsel as they have sought the education and wisdom necessary to forge meaningful lives of their own. Saint Faith’s and other congregations have been the recipients of the quiet but constant gift of Mary’s time, talents and treasure. In these and many other ways the hungry and thirsty, the strangers and the naked, the sick and those in prison have been cared for by Mary, this baptized child of God.
It is right to mourn. It is right to acknowledge the tear in the fabric of our lives, whether family, friends or congregation. Mary is no longer with us in the ways that we wish she were. But if it is right to grieve, certainly it is more truly right to give thanks and praise for a life faithfully lived, a clay vessel which bore the good news of God and shared that good news with many. It is truly right and a good and joyous thing to acknowledge a good fight well-fought, a race finished with grace and a faith kept to the end. May we, ordinary folk that we are, join Mary in living such a life so that the extra-ordinary love of God may be made known to others. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment