Preached at the memorial service for Rita Kresha, Good Shepherd Berkeley, September 7, 2019

Readings: Isaiah 56:1-5; Psalm 23; ! John 3:1-2; Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-2; Matthew 9:20-22

Rita herself chose the readings we have just heard, and I can’t imagine a more perfect array of scriptures for this gathering, this service of loss and remembrance, of farewell and trust and hope.

I knew Rita for many years in the context of the church, principally this congregation of the Good Shepherd. And I knew her as someone who had an intense attachment to the church—and also an ongoing quarrel with it and its imperfections. 

She cared deeply about the message of justice that we heard from Isaiah:

Thus says the Lord:

Maintain justice, and do what is right;

for soon my salvation will come,

and my deliverance be revealed.

She treasured every sign that the church might be moving closer to its true nature and was bitterly disappointed by every failure.

But her devotion was not simply to justice as an abstraction. It was a devotion rather to the love of God—the love that callsus to justice in its quest to be realized in this world. You’ll notice that Isaiah here picked out the outsidersas the great focus of God’s promise: the foreigner, the eunuch—every sort of person who might feel ill at ease in the church because the church is so often ill at ease with them. Isaiah’s central theme is God’s message of love and trust offered to everyone, however much they may feel pushed to the margins.

I think that message of love and trust was central for Rita. It was what kept her attached to the church even through times of quarreling with it. Or, more fundamentally, it kept her attached to the God the church tries, if haltingly at times, to worship and proclaim. 

I suspect there were times in her life when Rita deeply needed to sense the presence of the Good Shepherd our Psalm speaks of. She needed encouragement to believe that struggle (and sometimes defeat) are not the whole of human life, that the love of God can and will still find us. And I could see moments when she did indeed find that presence here in our shared worship. 

Perhaps, like many of us, she found some difficulty in acknowledging how deeply God loves us despite our sometimes erratic and unloving ways. God seems to have some trouble getting that idea across to us. Because we have so much trouble believing it. But it is the bedrock of all our faith, our trust, our hope. Even when we feel like the remotest of outsiders it is still there and it can be relied on. And it’s this that gives us the power to live more justly and more humanely.

This is exactly what the Wisdom of Solomon is saying, too. “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,” no matter how much it may seem that we have been abandoned or that the love of God has fallen short.

Our gospel reading tells the same story, pared down (in Matthew’s telling of it) to its barest elements. A woman who’s sick because of a hemorrhage that has lasted for twelve years—and ritually unclean because of it—comes up furtively behind Jesus, perhaps afraid to present herself and her problems to him face to face, afraid of being turned away. She just wants to touch the hem of his garment and get away. And Jesus turns to her, not to berate her, but tell her that her faith, her trust has made her well. It was her act of daring, however frightened she was, her act of hoping that God loved her, that brought about her new freedom. 

And such a change should not surprise us. What is human life but change? And change of the most fundamental sort. A child of four cannot conceive what it is to be twenty. A person of twenty has only shadowy intimations of life at forty. At forty, we cannot know who we’ll have become at sixty or seventy. We are always entering a new world and always changing and being changed. Only God’s love for us remains the same.

In the same way, we cannot know what lies beyond death. But there is a hope—our indefinite, but strong hope in God. Because, as John says in the First Letter, we know ourselves to be children of God, graced again and again by God’s love and therefore we can move forward without fear. It is true, as John says, that “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” But the love of God for us assures us that, when all is revealed, “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” 

The Lady Julian, many centuries ago—in the time, indeed, of the Black Death—put the same thought in other terms: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” I think there were times in her life when Rita found it very difficult to believe either the first letter of John or the Lady Julian. But, in the end, trust won out. 

It used to be that people might say of some one that she or he “had a good death.” It’s not a current phrase. It’s not a very clear one, for that matter; it could mean many different things. But Rita, as I have learned from those nearest her, found in her last months in this life, a peace—with herself, with those around her, with the Good Shepherd—that had sometimes eluded her in the past. 

Death lost its menace for her. The fear of losing God at last gave way. Her hope grew strong. And she wakens now into the light of God’s love, held in God’s hand.