Sermon for Gera Andrews Memorial

 

What ever the father gives me will come to me.

And anyone who comes to me, I will not drive out.

 

These words are fulfilled in our hearing, for today you have come to God.   You walked in those doors and now God has you in his house, and God will never send you away.  So although you have come to honor Gera, and although you have come to remember her as one who left a mark on the world by her life and by her death, you are also honoring God and remembering God, and John assures us, in fact he promises us, that anyone who comes to God will never be sent away.  You have come to God and God will never let you go.

 

It is the saddest part of our human life that sometimes we have to let people go.  You may have observed and followed stories from Katrina.  Of the hundreds of Hurricane Katrina stories, none was more heartbreaking than the story of Hardy Jackson.  To escape the rising water in Biloxi, Mississippi, Hardy Jackson, his wife and child climbed to the roof of a house, but a 20 foot wave split the house in two.  Jackson clung to a tree and desperately held onto his wife, Tonette.  She knew that Hardy could not swim. Tonette  knew that if he held on to her they would both drown, she said, “Let go.  You can’t hold me.  He desperately tried to hold her but she slipped out of his grasp.  He watched as the raging water carried her away.  “Take care of our children, she called out.  Then he never saw his precious wife, Tonette, again.  Sometimes we can’t hold on to those we love. Sometimes we are not strong enough physically and sometimes we are not strong enough emotionally.  The parents who must let go of their cocaine addicted child and the wife who must let go of her husband who can’t remember her name.

 

There’s no cure for old age.  My mother is 81 and she is rapidly drifting away.  She has lost her sight, she has lost her mobility, she has lost so much freedom, and now she is in the hospital and we are losing her.  My mother may make it out of the hospital, but still, I have to start learning to let her go because she will go.

 

Today we are letting go of Gera, friend, soul mate, and co-worker.  She was, no she is so strong, so vital, so unnervingly honest, unswervingly committed, relentlessly loyal.  Gera loved bull riding and I see that as a metaphor for her life.  Bull riders hold on for dear life, and so did Gera.  She probably had little experience of letting go of anything or anyone.  At Nativity, Gera did not and would not let go of ECW, the Episcopal Church women.  And she did not and would not let go of Nativity Church.  She was a faithful communicant until death.  I admire Gera, she is so beautiful in these pictures, but really she is more beautiful than any of these because she doesn’t have botox beauty but beauty of soul. 

 

While we gather to let go of Gera, she teaches by her unswerving commitment and her relentless loyalty a lot about God.  For, God is the love that never lets us go.  The simplest, most freeing affirmation of our Christian faith is that God loves us and forgives us—no conditions.  We, like rebellious teenagers keep trying to demonstrate that we don’t need him.  We think we’re smart enough, knowledgeable enough, and good enough.  We claim to be self sufficient.  We don’t need God.  We are wrong.  The fact is we are broken, limited and afraid.  Yet in our brokenness, limitedness, indeed in our fear, God waits for us. God forgives us and loves us.  God lets us leave, but God never lets go of us.

 

God is not fly by night, temporary, fleeting, stopgap, momentary, transient.  God does not come to visit, God abides, God doesn’t drop in, God inhabits, God doesn’t pop in, God hangs tough.  God is the love that never lets us go.

 

Paul told us:

 

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

 

Gera, Gera, Gera…Do a little arm twisting up there and pray for us that we will know this love that never leaves us. Pray for us that we may have the grace of back bone, Pray for us that we will have the grace of chutzpah, the grace of spine, the grace of audacity:  The grace of boldness.  Pray for us that we may dare to be wise, dare to be believers.  Pray for us that we may never let go of the love that never lets us go of us.

 

Amen.