FUNERAL HOMILY

FUNERAL HOMILY- HERBERT A.HASSE
2.Mac.12:43-46; Rom.8:31-39; Mathew 11:25-30
Come to me all you labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Every one in this world labors .. for what ? We all labour for love. To love and be loved. I dress up well so that people may appreciate me and I get loved, noticed. Everyone in this world strive for this. All our life is engaged for this. And only at death we get rest from this constant labor. Only Jesus can free us from this because he is Love. We don’t have to work hard to earn his love. He says take my yoke upon you. My yoke is easy. To get being loved by Jesus is easy. It is easy to please the Lord. Just obey him. You can never please anybody perfectly in this world. Even if you give all you have, others’ love for us is not guaranteed and it would wane at some point in time. But not the Lord’s. So Jesus calls us – come to me. The Lord called Herbert to him and provides him rest. And Herb is happy about it. But we miss him. Why do we miss him ? Because he was loved by us. We don’t miss anybody who has been wicked or evil to us. So the feeling of being missed is a good feeling in one sense.
When we look at a ship standing at the seashore looks large and big. As the ship goes further out in the sea, the size of it grows less and less in our sight. And finally when it goes quite far into the sea it might look very small and we know it is very vulnerable, means it has the danger of being sunk. Our life is something like this. When the ship is close the shore it is our young age. But when it goes further out it is like being in old age. Just like the ship goes further and further and goes out of sight – we grow old and finally we know at a point in time we will die/disappear from the sight. The ship’s going out of sight doesn’t mean it is no more. The ship exists in the same way it was before but at a different location.
Human life is like this. Herb’s death is not the end of him. He continues to live. The Preface of the Mass states "Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended". We can be close to Herb by praying for him and he will be close to us by praying for us. The church is in three states really, the saints in heaven, the souls in purgatory being purified before entering heaven, and we, the living here on earth. We believe that we are all united, we the living, the souls in purgatory and the saints in heaven, all united around Jesus’ cross and resurrection. This is the communion of saints that we profess our faith in the Apostles creed.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body and life ever lasting.
Even though you don’t find any reference to purgatory in the Bible, the church believes that it gives a testimony of God’s love. Bible says nothing unclean enters heaven. And the bible says at another place that every one, even the just, commits sins at least 7 times a day. So if everyone commits sin how can anyone enter heaven. There should be a state where we can get the impurities cleaned – and so the church believes that it is the state of purgatory. This belief of the church is based on the Old testament belief which we heard in the first reading from 2 Maccabees. They offered sacrifice for their dead ones. We have gathered here not so much to talk about Herb, but to pray for him. We believe that our prayer here can help Herb where he is now.
Paul says that Jesus stands at God’s right hand and pleads for us. Yes there is a judgment and our sins are the evidence against us but Jesus is representing our cause. We can imagine Jesus saying something like this to the Father, “Father, this is Herbert. I died for him. Yes, like every human he did sin, but I am pleading for him now. I am asking you to disregard those sins because I died for him. Instead of looking on his sins I am asking you Father to look on me, your Son, dying on the cross for Herb and for everyone. I have paid the price that had to be paid for his sins.” We could have no better lawyer to represent us before God our Father than his Son Jesus who died for us. The second reading gives a list of things that will not come between us and the love of God and it says neither life nor death will come between us and the love of God.
In the program card it is written “ Herbert born on …. And born to eternal life on… death is our birthday. In the early church the day on which one died was regarded as one’s birthday, because on that day one is born into eternal life with God. This lingers on in our church because we celebrate a saint’s feast day not on the day of his/her birth but on the day he/she died. Our life here is short and it is represented by a dash. Born in 1919 – 2009. So our life is a short one in comparison to the eternal life.
When we consider that we are chosen by God and precious to God, then death is a going home to our loving Father. John in his first letter writes, “In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love.” (1 John 4:18) When we know that death is our loving Father calling us, who has chosen us from all eternity, therefore there is no room for fear, fear is driven out. (Imagine your tensions and anxiety when you are told to move to another Nursing home /independent living. If you love the life here, if you are loved by everyone here, you wouldn’t want to move to another place. Even if the management of the other Nursing home tells you that it will be very good. A child in the womb is so comfortable there and once is born it misses the pleasant condition it enjoyed there. That is why a child cries as soon as it is born. This is the feeling all the dying people have at the time of death. Denying the life after death is like a child in the womb there is no life outside its mother’s womb.
For those of us living we do not know how much time is remaining for us here on earth. There is a gap between this life and the next. A caterpillar could never tell how beautiful it would become as a butterfly with beautiful wings. The unborn baby could never understand what a gap there is between life in the womb and life in the world. So are we . We don’t know how much time is there for us remaining to be born to eternal life.
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus we hear Abraham telling the rich man that no one can go from heaven to hell and hell to heaven , nor any one is permitted to go back to warn the living. This condition of the soul can be illustrated by a simile. Imagine a pond. At the bottom of the pond little grubs were crawling around. They wonder what happens to their members who climb up the stem of the lily and never come back. “I wonder what its like up there.” They agree among themselves that the next one who is called to the surface will come back. The next little grub that finds itself drawn to the surface by nature crawls up the stem and out on the surface on the lily leaf. It was really bright up there. It had been so dark and murky down below. They won’t believe this. Suddenly something begins to happen. The grub begins to open out. The grub spreads out two huge beautiful colored wings and becomes a beautiful dragonfly. It never imagines that this could have happened. It thought it would remain a grub forever. It flew back and forth across the pond. It could see the other grubs in the pond below but they couldn’t see it. It realized there was no way it could get back and that they could not recognize such a beautiful creature as ever having been one of them.
Our human condition is also something like this grub and dragonfly. Though they both were one, but two different stages of the one and the same being. We see a lot of other similar examples in this world. Like how a seed becomes a plant. One has to die to be the other. This same phenomenon happens in our life too. Herb doesn’t need to know all these things now, because he already knows. But we do need to know because we need to prepare ourselves and get ourselves ready for this transformation that is due in our life. Though this memorial is for Herb, it is primarily for us who had seen him and shared our life with him. He wants us to remember that the stage he is in now we also will be one day. The memory of Herb is fond for us. His kind nature, his simplicity, cheerfulness, and his soft spoken nature, everything speaks to us that he had been a happy man, ready for his encounter with the Lord at this ripe age. Our tribute to him is well paid and his memory is well made when we pray for him at the Eucharist. Lets pray that his gentle soul be received into God’s eternal peace.