Janet is With Jesus

 

Janet is with Jesus. That’s the title of the last chapter of her book.

 

I like to think about our lives as God’s story writ large in a series of chapters.  Dear Janet’s book is filled with fascinating and mundane chapters, just like the books about your life and like mine.  But as I thought about Janet’s life my understanding of our lives being lived in ‘chapters’ took on a new meaning. Janet is a Grandma and one of her two grandsons is named Jon. When Jon was a toddler, still learning to talk, Grandma would read stories to Jon.

 

When Janet read stories to Jon, she always finished the book by declaring, “All done.” If you know Janet you can almost hear her quiet, sweet voice go up a few pitches as she closes the cover, raising her hands from her lap, smiling at Jon saying, almost singing, “All done.”

 

Grandma was so persistent in her practice that these simple words became Jon’s first words as a child, “All done.” You can imagine him mimicking Grandma, sitting in his high chair having finished his cookie, smiling at his Momma and Daddy and for the first time saying the words in toddler speak,  ‘All done.’

 

Yesterday we bade farewell to Janet, a small gathering round her grave, family and pastors trying to make sense of life and death.

 

One is tempted, in our limited human understanding, to look at Janet’s body in her casket and say, almost sighing, ‘All done.’

 

But we would be wrong to do so. Because we know that the story we have been reading of Janet’s life is not over. No. God is still writing her unending story.  The next to last chapter, concluding at the graveside, is all done. But the last chapter, the really wonderful last chapter, the chapter than never ends, has just begun. For that chapter, which describes how Janet is enjoying her inheritance of the new heaven and the new earth, that chapter, is never all done.

 

Because Janet is with Jesus.

Death, Birth and Epiphany

I was deep in the middle of thinking about the death of Stephen.  I did not know Stephen well. But I knew that he was a kind and compassionate soul, whose thirty years on this earth were complex. I was trying to figure out how to say well, “But, while death is the final battle in this life, for those who die in God’s merciful arms, we have the promise that death has been defeated.”  It is an easy message to write; it is a hard message to deliver to the grieving.  Either way, honestly, their young son and brother is gone, absent from them. For now.

In the middle of that thought the phone rang and it was another mother I had been praying for earlier that day. The mother announced, “Our baby was born today!”  And so we talked about the birth process, and all that went with it, and how, in the end, when Evelyn was revealed, the room was filled with joy.

As we talked, I told Mom, “I am so excited that Evelyn is an Epiphany baby.” That didn’t get a big reaction. I explained that Evelyn was born on January 6, the day the Church celebrates Epiphany, the revealing of Jesus to the world as the long-awaited Messiah; the day when the Wise Men show up with gifts. Evelyn will be celebrating as long as she lives Epiphany as it should be, with the exchange of gifts to celebrate birth.

As I turned back to my funeral message I was still thinking about Evelyn, how exciting it will be to baptize her, to tell her that Jesus is her brother, and that God has marked her as his own forever. Which led me to think about Stephen’s baptism, some thirty years ago.  God gave a sign then too, to Steven and his parents: “this child is my own forever.”  It is good to remember baptism’s meaning. Perhaps this is why, on the first Sunday after Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, because baptism is a time of revelation, of discovery. Baptism is an epiphany.

Epiphany is a season of discovery. Discoveries made as baby Evelyn cascaded through the canal into the light; as Stephen was drawn from the darkness of his own hospital room into the Light of the presence of God-With-Us.  Discoveries are still to be made, by you, as you look for God’s revealing light through the “thin places” that separate earth from heaven.  Jesus is still being revealed and discovered. The wise set out on a journey of discovery in this season, praying for eyes to see Light and Hope revealed in dark places.  Let the journey begin, o wise ones.