This is not the sermon that I intended to preach today. I had planned to preach about the storms in our lives and how we can trust Jesus to be there to protect us, how all we need to do is to have faith that Jesus will safely guide our boat “to the other side.”
That’s the direction my sermon preparation was taking me earlier this past week.
But, although I believe that those thoughts and ideas are true, those thoughts, those ideas, felt hollow, felt pat, when earlier last week we received the news that twelve-year-old Oliver Strong had died of aggressive leukemia at Children’s Hospital in Coral Gables.
And there is nothing to say. I mean there are no words to explain this saddest of all sadnesses. How do we make sense of such a devastating thing? We don’t, of course.
I first met Oliver when I interviewed for the position of Assistant Rector in January of 2009. Bob Coulombe was teaching Sunday School in a corner of the second floor, corner room in the Johnston Building next door (that used to be the Peacock Room) and Vilma brought Oliver and Edward to the class. We were a one-room school house back then. Oliver was one of our first volunteers when we reestablished our Youth Acolyte Corps in 2010. I remember when Bishop Frade was scheduled to make his annual visitation that year Vilma came and in her delightfully polite and sweet, sweet way asked “please, oh please, could Oliver be the Bishop’s Chaplain that Sunday. And he was, holding the Episcopal staff straight and proudly.
In the spring Oliver participated in the Seder we had in Holy Week, asking one of the four questions a child asks at the Passover meal, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” And as always Vilma was there with her wee camera, snapping photographs.
Oliver was very active at St. Stephen’s Church until his talent in sports began to capture his time and soccer kept him busy on the weekends.
Today we gather as we do every Sunday morning for our sacred meal and we share the grief of the Strong family. In the midst of such pain and sorrow we search for meaning and understanding. We are a community of faith, and that gives us a place to start.
We start with prayer. We pray for and with Oliver’s family and friends. For though I do not know why such tragic things have to happen, I do know the St. Stephen’s community and that means I am assured we will be with the Strongs for as long as they need us. We will surround them with our prayers, our love, our presence, with food, and whatever else might help in the days ahead.
So while I do not know what to say, I do know what I believe. I pray that I may say what I believe and believe what I say. While I can not even come close to knowing how a parent survives the loss of a child, as a mother I do know that the love between a parent and a child takes us beyond our mortal selves to the transcendent. Times like this bring w-a-y too close the fragility of life. Would you agree with me that we should never take our loving relationships for granted and that we can best honor Oliver’s life by loving those God has given us?
I believe that nothing, not even the sudden death of a child, is beyond the redeeming power of God’s love. But this feels like being dropped into an abyss – a lonely and frightening place.
We all walk near that abyss all the days of our life and we choose to look the other way. We walk with eyes averted, pretending there is no end. We hope against hope that everything we know will go on and on. Then it happens. We get hit in the face. Mother dies without warning. Father disappears. Divorce, sickness, death, separation – and we come face to face with the reality that sooner or later marks every human life. Then, then we search for answers and we come up short.
There are no answers. But, a big but, we have two things, we have each other and we have the testimony of a faithful cloud of witnesses.
The Reverend Jesse M. Trotter was dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary in the 1950’s. In his book, Christian Wholeness, Dean Trotter writes “When I was fifty-six years of age and busily at work as dean of a theological seminary, the absolutely unthinkable happened. My son John committed suicide at the age of twenty-two. From earliest years a fun-loving, rambunctious lad, he seemed to be heading in all the right directions. He spent five happy years at Choate School, playing on their undefeated football team in his senior year. His study at the Goethe Institute in Germany was followed by a scholarship year at All Hallows School in England. He chose to go to Princeton because of their style of football but he was not chosen to join the varsity squad in his sophomore year. Without football, he had to struggle to keep his weight down, even though he switched to rugby which he had learned to play in England.
His mother and I did not know he had begun to use “speed” or amphetamine-type drugs to control his weight and had gradually developed dependence. In November of his senior year he failed the Marine Corps physical examination because of high blood pressure, a consequence of the drugs as we were later to learn. Terminating the drugs abruptly, he forced himself to pass his mid-year examinations and then came home to us in an insidiously deep depression. He saw a psychiatrist for a month. Then, one April day as I entered the house at lunch time, a shot rang out. His mother and I rushed to the third floor. He had shot himself. He died in our arms. We were plunged into an agony of hours, of slow days, and long nights, of weeks and months, and of years. Now, years alter, the indescribable pain is gone. The sadness remains.
Our seminary community, our colleagues and students lovingly closed round us to comfort and support us. We unashamedly clung to them and to each other, and most of all, we clung to God. I learned now what [I had been taught intellectually in theology class so long ago]. Classroom [sermon] notions, ideas, concepts of God are fragile things. You can fall through all such notions, ideas, and concepts of God and you will fall into God. You will not fall into nothingness. There is divine ground and that becomes the ground beneath your feet. You stand, having done all, you stand because you are standing on the firm ground of God. God’s ever-loving arms will surround you. The bottom is firm. We live in the power of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
Will you pray with me?
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your
providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.