DEATH WILL HAVE NO PART IN IT: A Eulogy for Amy Harvey

(delivered on1/22/22)

There’s a common platitude at times such as this. As platitudes are, it’s meant for comfort, for normalizing something that feels so abnormal. It’s meant to ease the pain of the reality we are facing. And I don’t want to shame anyone for it, many of you have said it this week, many have said, “Death is just a part of life.” And in some ways, besides the obvious contradiction, it’s right. In this life as we know it, death is a common, unavoidable part of it. But the truth is, the ache in your heart and the ache in mine are the muffled cries that this is not the way things are supposed to be. This is not normal. Death, by its very definition, is not a part of life.

See if you believe in stories like the garden of Eden and the fall of man, you believe that God breathed life into the nostrils of mankind and did not intend for it to end, you realize this is not what was intended. And really, if all that is not true, then grief, mourning and heartache are just a strange reactions, mostly unique to human animals. But you know deep down this is not true. Whatever qualms we have with religion or church or with God, we cannot argue with the unnatural emotions of grief and heartache that many of us have right now. And we are right to do so. Because Jesus created us for life, and life abundant, and life eternal.

Many of you know the story of Lazarus, he was a friend of Jesus. One day someone told Jesus that his friend was sick and about to die, and they urged him to come heal him. But he didn’t. He waited two more days, and by the time they arrived at Lazarus’s home he was dead. And when his sister Martha was clearly grieved that Jesus hadn’t come earlier, she said “If you’d gotten here sooner he wouldn’t have died.” But Jesus said to her

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he (or she) dies, yet will he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

And then, it’s amazing, Jesus of Nazareth, called Emmanuel, God with us, knowing full well that in just a moment he would speak the words that would raise him from the dead, stood before the tomb of his friend and he wept. He modeled the words he spoke on the Sermon on the Mount “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” See, for Jesus, to mourn is to grieve that the world is the way it is, that “death is just a part of life,” but it should not be so. But to be comforted is to know that one day, this reality of pain and death and loss will not be so.

And so today, and surely for many more, we mourn. We mourn the loss of the life of this woman so overflowing with life that just to be near her meant you couldn’t help but get some on you. She lived a life of loving outcasts, and weirdos, those who didn’t have a place to belong, and even you normal people, if there are any. As I mentioned before, I had the great honor of being her son-in-law (though she never made me feel like an “in-law”). At first I was just another weird kid that was falling in love with her daughter, showing up at her door to drop off a book to show it. But so quickly she welcomed me in, made me feel so loved and liked, and understood. I never felt like an outsider or a weirdo with her. She made me feel so loved, so completely accepted and liked and seen. Her dear friend in an email this past week said “I think I can safely say she could not have loved you more if she’d given you birth herself.” And she was right. I felt that. And I think many of you felt something like that when you were with her too. That’s why you’re here. She was so full of life, and she was so full of love.

And here at her end, it is only her love that remains. In the book of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes:

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Now, Amy would be the first to admit that she didn’t always love well. She would be the first to say that for much of her life she lived for herself, what she wanted and felt, like all of us. But if you knew her later in life you know the change that happened when she turned from vain things to serve the living God. And at the end of her life, all else that she loved was slowly stripped away.

When she began her long battle with cancer she first lost the ability to decide freely what she wanted to eat, then she lost the freedom of doing what she wanted to do. Then eventually she was unable to cook for herself, to take care of herself. She lost the ability to create beauty, which she loved so much. Then she couldn’t run which she loved so much, then couldn’t walk. Then eventually, in her final days she lost her ability to speak or communicate. But when all was stripped away, the only thing that remained; faithfulness to her God, hope of a life eternal with him through his perfect, if not mysterious plan, and love for this good, kind, loving king Jesus who created her, who had worked his life-changing love in her, and was drawing her home.

It can be hard to understand why he would allow things like this to happen, when we have our ideas of what we want, and what’s best, what’s most loving. We all have our ideas of what God should or shouldn’t do. But when Jesus waited two more days while his disciples were urging him to go heal Lazarus and save his life he told them “Lazarus is dead. And for your sakes, I’m glad I wasn’t there, for now you will really believe.” Sometimes it takes moments of grief and loss like these to wake us from the slumber of everyday life, where we take for granted all that we have that will one day be stripped away. It forces us to look more deeply into our lives, and maybe ask again why we’re here. What it all means.

So in the coming days and weeks, whatever yearnings come up in your heart to seek, follow them. Whatever questions, ask them. Whatever pain, guilt, anger, fear, regret, whatever rises up in you, submit them. Give them honestly to God, whether you fully believe in him or not. And the very one who made you and wants his life for you says to you “Draw near to me, and I will draw near to you.” And when he pours his life in you it does not stay inside. It fills you up and spills onto the world around you. Amy had that kind of life.

While she lived with us for a couple of stints in the past year we ended every evening with her granddaughters singing “we’ve got so much to be thankful for”. And we do. I am so incredibly thankful to have known Amy, and to have been her son-in-law, and for my daughters to have known and loved their Gaga. But we’re not going to sing that song today, though I was tempted to make you. Today is a day of remembering, grieving, mourning. And blessed will you be if you do, if you mourn the loss of this dear woman’s life, and the loss, one day, of all those around you, and your own. And you will be blessed if that mourning leads you to look to Jesus and say “God I know that the pain and the anger and hatred and death that are so present and common in this world and in me, should not be so. I submit my life to you to be remade as your son, your daughter, as your servant, in your kingdom.” And if you say that to him, he will say to you as he said to Martha, *“I am your resurrection and your life, and because you believe in me, though you die, yet shall you live. Do you believe this?” Amy believed this. She believed this and loved this king until her dying breath. And now, though she has died, yet will she live with him forever.

And that’s what Amy wants you to know. She wants you to know that she loves you. And she wants you to know that the God that she served loves you and wants to give his life to you, if you will give yours to him. She wants you to know that the love and hope and joy that she had even in the midst of so much suffering, can only found in Jesus. You won’t find it within yourself, or in science, in money, in other gods or prophets; but in Jesus, who said I came so that you may have life, and have it abundantly.

So I urge you, and Amy wanted you, to take hold of this time of grief to reflect and consider how you are spending your life. Because today, like every day we have a choice. Will we spend our lives only on things that will one day be stripped away when it’s our turn here? Will we continue to perpetuate and participate in all of the brokenness and death that now are just a part of reality? We don’t have to. The spirit of the living God wants to fill you with the love and life that come from submitting yourself and following him. Because believe it or not, one day he will return to bring his good kingdom that now we see only as in strange reflections in a mirror, but will one day come in full, washing away all pain and grief and loss (and anger, greed, and strife), bringing true, full and eternal life. And death will have no part in it.