This is more or less what was preached at a Requiem Mass for Frances McLean. A couple of folks have asked for the text. I couldn't help adding a few bits and pieces which better reflected the whole day and not just the sermon at the Requiem Mass. Think of it as a retrospective sermon.
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A funeral sermon for Frances McLean
November 7th, 2008
The Church of Saint James the Less
Penicuik, Midlothian
The words which the Bishop recited as he led Frances McLean’s coffin out of the church were those of devout Simeon who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. As Luke tells the story, Simeon has now arrived at the end of his life and the child Jesus is brought to him. What he says is this:
Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.
Simeon was promised one thing only and has now received it. Words like his speak of ‘sufficiency’ and, in my way of thinking; sufficiency has a lot going for it. You might not leap for joy to see the word ‘sufficient’ scrawled across the top of an exam paper or on a written appraisal of our work but I think sufficiency is badly under-rated.
We balk nowadays at eulogies – with their long lists of achievements – being read at funerals in the church. They’ve gone out of style, haven’t they - eulogies? You get the feeling that when such lists of achievements are being read out that we are swimming upstream and are battling what everybody in the church already knows, which is this: that rich or poor, famous or unknown, languid or troubled – we all go this same way!
The same sentences from the Burial Office – which Tony read on the night before the funeral as Frances’ coffin was carried into the chancel - are going to be read at our funerals one day. Our coffins, made of solid cherry wood with real brass handles, or made of veneer or canvas-covered chip-board are going to be covered with the same funeral pall in the church and will give the same visual effect as any other coffin. Frances was buried at Rosebank Cemetery on Pilrig Street near the 200 soldiers on their way to the front lines in the First World War who died in the Gretna Train Disaster, in the same graveyard as her grandfather and great grandfather and in the company of saints and rascals from two centuries of Scottish history. Gravediggers – Council employees in yellow coats – could be seen hiding behind trees puffing on their cigarettes until we’d gone. It was just one more burial to them.
We’re all together in our deaths. It is a great leveller.
Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the woman and our feelings for her, and even though there are remarkable stories that can be told about her, what the bishop said in his prayer at the Commendation referred simply to her participation in the Grace which God has granted to us in Christ:
Into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your servant, Frances. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming…..
I believe that when Frances asked her nurse on Wednesday whether she would survive this illness and was told, as directly as any nurse could possibly tell her, that she would not survive it - she must have put her head back on the pillow and said to herself
that she’d had enough.
There was sadness. I sensed it on the Tuesday afternoon when we spoke. There was solemnity. The bishop told me that Frances said ‘goodbye’ to him on Wednesday after lunch with a great sense of occasion and finality. You see,
She’d had enough.
What does that mean? Not that she had no strength to fight it (we can’t know what she was thinking about that) – but that had you asked Frances if she’d had occasion to love and be loved, to apply herself to the world around her, to fill her generation and to meet Christ in the midst of the world’s people she’d have said ‘yes’. It was sufficient.
She’d had enough.
I hope this for you – first of all, sufficiency.
Do remember that funeral sermons, such as they are, are intended for the living and not for the dead. The question today is not only ‘
who was Frances’, but ‘
who are we’? Men and women, boys and girls who may well not be in a position yet to say that
we have ‘enough’
- that we live today in sufficiency – that we would be satisfied were our life to reach its end on the 7
th of November 2008. This poses for us a challenge. It could provoke in us something of an ‘ache’ and were we to walk away from the hospital bed, the church or the graveside resolved that we would follow the lead of that nagging feeling rather than fleeing from it, then the loss of our friend and the experience of gathering around her coffin or more accurately, the experience of gathering with her around the Lord’s Table could be a tremendous blessing and a new beginning.
Now - you know and I know that ‘sufficiency’ is not a word that adequately exhausts the subject of Frances McLean. It doesn’t end there of course – but it’s something that has to be said.
The image we all have in our minds when thinking of Frances is certainly not a checklist with one ticked and sufficient box but something more akin to a cornucopia – a horn of plenty – filled with fruit – a cup - running over. It has much to do with a sense of humour, with a very loud and boisterous laugh and with a series of active associations around the world of a woman in her eighties. It has to do with the stories we heard of Frances on her last trip to South Africa with Angela being surrounded by the children she helped bring into the world, by the nurses and students she encouraged – people who remembered her and looked at her as one who nurtured life and enjoyed the fullness of her relationships.
And so, this I hope for you as well – abundance – not in what you gather to yourselves but what you scatter abroad into the lives and beings of others. In the remarkable lives or ordinary saints like Frances McLean we get a sense of what can be done with our particular portion of life.
