A Funeral Homily For Edward Van Ginkel

 

Preached at All Saints, King City, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, Saturday, 26 May, 2022

 

“I am the resurrection and the life.   Those who believe in e, even through they die will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

 

Where are we?   This may seem like an odd question with some obvious answers.  We are in a church.  We are at a service of thanksgiving for Ed.  We are with Aileen and her family to show our love and support for them.  Yes, all these things are true, but more can be said about where we are. 

We are in the love of God.  We are in the presence of the living Christ.  We are in the church, the gift of the Holy Spirit.   In short, we are in the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is unlimited love, unquenchable life, and inexhaustible power.  The kingdom of God is where Jesus speaks the good news of the Gospel.  The kingdom of God is a place where death has no dominion.  

That there is no place for death in God’s kingdom can be a difficult truth for us to grasp.    Even for those of us here today who are believers, knowing as we do that Easter is just a few weeks away now, this truth is difficult for us to grasp.   It’s difficult to grasp for poor Martha, in our gospel reading.  When Jesus asks her if she believes that he is the resurrection and life, she responds somewhat evasively.   “I believe you’ve come from God”, she says in effect, “I believe that you’ve been sent to do something”, but she can’t quite make the connection that she is standing in front of Jesus.  She doesn’t seem fully aware that she is in the presence of the inexhaustible and all sustaining life and love of God.

We can afford some pity for Martha.   Martha is crushed by the enormity of her brother’s death.  A faithful Jew, she would have known the bleak honesty of the psalmist, who we heard say that our life is a fleeting thing, that our days “pass away quickly and are gone”.   Such was the understanding of the Hebrew scriptures.   The prophet Isaiah wrote that we are grass, and we wither when God blows on us.  Isaiah and the psalmist would have agreed that only God’s word is eternal.

Today many find it difficult to believe in God, but we still believe in death.   Like Martha, we can be crushed and oppressed by our own experiences of loss.   Our culture sees death as an ending, the cessation of life, the end of embraces and loving words and glances, the ceasing of habits and rituals and all the things that make us love those dearest to us.   We are taught that death is an awful thing, a terrible tragedy, and so the culture does its best to hide death from us.

Jesus tells us differently.   He speaks to us from the kingdom of God.   Jesus reframes the words of the psalms and the prophets.    Jesus replaces the bleak honesty of Psalm 90 with good news.   His breath is not death but life, the very breath of life that Ezekiel saw being the valley of dead bones to life.  The very speech of Jesus is life, his words are, as John noted at the start of his gospel, the eternal word of the eternal Father who comprehends and inhabits the whole cosmos, from whom everything came into being.   Earlier in John’s gospel, Jesus says that ⁵¹Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.’ (John 8.51). 

Later in John’s gospel, Jesus tells his friends “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. ²In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”.   As always Jesus is speaking from the kingdom of God.  His father’s house is the whole cosmos, it is the vast eternal domain of God, the source of life.   We need to always remember this essential truth about Jesus, that he is the all-sustaining, all-nurturing, all-renewing life of God, was clearly understood by the first Christians.   Paul writes that “all will be alive in Christ” and that Christ came to destroy the last and final enemy, death.   In Second Timothy we hear that (2 Tim 1:10) Jesus has “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”.  

At this point it’s fair to ask, if Jesus is resurrection and life, who stands to receive this gift?     Since Jesus asks Martha if she believes, is there a minimum level of belief that Jesus is looking for?   When Jesus says “whoever keeps my word will never see death”, what sort of commitment is Jesus looking for?    Asking these questions is fair game, though the questions themselves come from a place of anxiety, certainly made more anxious by the psalmist’s fear of God’s wrath and indignation.

Again, we need to keep in mind that the psalm is paired today with the good news of the gospel, that the psalmist’s own anxious questions are answered out of the fullness of God’s love.   Why does Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead?   John never tells us anything about the extend of Lazarus’ belief or the depth of his faith.  He only tells us that Jesus loved his friends, Lazarus and his sisters, and had compassion for them.  Dallas Willard is surely right when he says that love and life begin from God and come to us as God’s initiative.  As Willard says, “God has invested in us, has a purpose for us, and likes us.  God has the resources to keep us in existence and to cause us to thrive”.

Today there is no need for anxiety on Ed’s behalf.  I don’t believe that God for a moment denied him God’s endless love and inexhaustible life.   I can’t speak from any knowledge of Ed, whom I did not know, though I love and give thanks for the story of Ed’s final reconciliation with God.   Whatever issues Ed may have had with God and the church in his earthly life, I am confident that Ed’s reconciliation opened into an even more profound and complete understanding of God’s love and God’s friendship as Ed was transformed from an earthly existence into a spiritual one.

Where are we?  We are in the kingdom of God, a place of God’s inexhaustible love and eternal life, where death is no more.  My prayer for us all is that God in Christ Jesus grant us the understanding to know that death, our final enemy, is no more, Mau God grant us the grace to live and grow old without fear, knowing that we will be united with Ed and with all those we love in the fullness of God, who is life and love without end.