Last night we celebrated the life of an
extraordinary lady. We told stories of how she affected our lives, and it was
good to cry and laugh together. Today we celebrate our shared faith, the very
thing that made Jill so special. It was that faith that gave her the strength
and the serenity to bear life’s burdens so very well. It is that faith that
will give us the strength to continue on without her.
Nancy and I have known the Willards about 18 years,
and in all those years I don’t think she was ever free of pain. But, while it
seemed sometimes that her battle was all consuming, it wasn’t what defined her.
It refined her. It never overwhelmed her and definitely never conquered her.
Her suffering helped to form her into the person she was, and it brought out
and highlighted the great strength within her, a strength that spilled out onto
all of us who knew her, allowing us to walk the walk with her. And we’re all
better people because of it.
It’s hard sometimes to believe the simplicity of
Jesus’ statement in today’s gospel. “Come, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” It seems so
simple, so easy. Just come to Jesus and the weight of all our responsibilities
will lift from our shoulders. Just say the words and life will get easy. But it
seemed the more Jill believed, the more she embraced Jesus’ suffering, the more
she suffered in return. All her prayers that God would heal her didn’t heal
her. Her suffering didn’t go away, just like that. It didn’t go away at all.
It is hard to understand why Jill was chosen to
suffer as she did, and it is easy to blame God. If anyone deserved to catch a
break, it was Jill. She did suffer greatly, and yet, she always had a sense of
deep joy. It was a joy rooted in hope. Jill had unbounded hope. Deep,
life-sustaining, irrepressible hope.
You know, I fell in love with Jill at a card game.
Paul, Jill, Nancy and I played a lot of cards when we were neighbors in Jeremy
Ranch in Park City, and we usually played progressive rummy. Invariably, when
it came to the final hand and Jill was holding a lousy hand, she would start
buying more cards. She bought and bought so many cards she couldn’t hold them
in her hand anymore. She had to use one of those plastic stands you stick your
cards in. That was Jill. Whenever she was dealt a lousy hand she started
picking up more cards. Maybe this is the one that will give me what I need to
make the hand work. Maybe this one will be the winner. Maybe this medication
will make me feel better. Maybe this surgery will do the trick. Unbounded hope
that life would turn out ok.
Just after she lost her eye, we were alone in the
living room for a minute, and she grabbed my hand and said, “I don’t know if I
can do it anymore. I don’t want to go there right now. I don’t want to think
about it right now.” Yet within a half hour she was back to her old stubborn
self, determined to make it work no matter what.
What could have fueled such hope? It seems
simplistic to say it was her faith that gave her hope, but it’s true. Jill
never saw her life as a burden or a curse. Rather, she accepted them as Jesus
had his own suffering, and offered them up as prayers for all of us with
complete optimism. She did her best to defeat her illnesses with great courage,
but she never let it change her outlook on life.
Fr.
Bob Bussen taught me that the prayers of a suffering person have the greatest
power, and their sick bed is holy, almost an altar. When we suffer we are the
most vulnerable, and we are forced to rely totally upon God. He used to ask
sick people he visited to pray for others who were sick, and vice versa. Jill
was the best example of how holy suffering can be. As Paul said in his final email update
the day Jill died, she has won her final battle. It was in surrendering that
she conquered.
Christians have always believed that suffering has
meaning, that when we offer up our suffering for someone else it has great
power. We don’t shrink from suffering when it is thrust upon us. Instead, we
take something evil and turn it to the good. Suffering is a fact of life,
brought about by the tendency of humanity to turn from the will of God. God
does not will us to suffer, he wants us to be like we were in the garden of
Eden, free from want and free from death. But God understands the reality of
suffering, and he himself came to us to share in our suffering. God used death,
the death of his Son, to destroy death for us all. God used the very thing that
kept us from him to bring us to him.
We
take this belief from the actions of Jesus Christ himself, whose own suffering
and death actually bring us salvation. Jill took that belief to heart, and
quietly and simply lived her life. The afternoon she came out of her last
surgery, the thing she was worried about most was that she hadn’t had a chance
yet to send a card to an old friend whose son had recently died. Jill chose to
give her suffering meaning by directing it away from herself as a prayer for
others.
I just read a book, Evidence of
the Afterlife, written by Jeffrey Long, a medical doctor who claims to be
an atheist. While in medical school he was struck by the fact that there had
been no formal research done on near death experiences, and so he performed a
ten year study on over six thousand people of all nations, races, ages and
cultures who claimed to have had near death experiences and out-of-body
experiences. One of his findings stood out to me. Virtually all the people who
had what were considered true dying experiences, you know the white light, the
tunnel, etc., also had an experience of a “judgment”. What they all had in
common was that they saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in an
instant, and what they saw was how all their actions and their inactions had
affected other people. Even people who they didn’t really know very well were
affected positively or negatively by what they themselves had done. It stunned
many of them to see just how important other people were in their lives and how
important they were in the lives of others.
Jill has prayed for everyone in this
room, whether you knew it or not. She prayed in her suffering that you might
not have to. She prayed for people she didn’t know and would never meet. And
people who had never met her prayed for her, too. She touched countless lives
through her prayer, her thoughtfulness, and her courageous example. If we are
to be judged on how we affect others by our lives, Jill has nothing to worry
about. And, if you thought she prayed hard for you before, just think what
she’s doing right now.
The greatest sign of God’s love for us is Jesus’
promise that there is more to life than this world alone. We just celebrated
the great feast of Easter, when Jesus not only said he was the resurrection and the life, he proved it. The
first words Jesus said to his disciples that Easter were “Be not afraid”. He
said them over and over again. Be not afraid, because in the resurrection the
promise of everlasting life has been fulfilled. We need never fear death again.
Jesus’ death has conquered death, and his resurrection is our promise of
eternal life. That is the hope that sustained Jill all those years.
We have no idea what is in store for us. The most
wonderful thing we could imagine wouldn’t be enough. Jill now knows the
fulfillment of that promise. She now sees God as he is. Face to face. And her
hope is now ours.
