Month: May 2014

Memorial for Zunie Ridley

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Sermon delivered at the memorial for Zunie S Ridley

November 24th, 2013

zunie

 

Long before I was ever a priest or a minister, before I ever went to seminary and before I preached my first sermon, I was her grandson. I struggled so with what I wanted to say today, because I kept trying to say it through the voice of Father Kevin, the priest who has presided over more funerals than he can keep count of, but I can’t do that today. I can’t be that right now. Right now I am just another member of the family. Right now I am here to represent everyone who ever loved this woman and I am here to tell you what we are all feeling.

 

Our hearts are broken, but they aren’t troubled.

 

Our hearts are broken for everything that she meant to us: she raised us…she raised all the neighborhood children. She loved us, she cooked for us, she taught us how to pray, she spanked us occasionally (some more than others). She was our rock, she was always there. She was the one we played pranks on, went shopping with; she scratched our backs, squirted us with water pistols, she made us laugh, she sang with us, she took us to church, she argued with us, she watched baseball with us and went to the movies with us. Our hearts are broken, because she was a part of this world for 92 years and not one of us here knows a world without her in it.

 

Our hearts are broken, but they aren’t troubled.

 

They aren’t troubled because of what she is leaving us. She is leaving us with traditions that keep us connected with her: traditions like using blue lights outside our house every Christmas after someone dies, traditions like icebox fruitcake and corn casserole, and cornbread dressing. She is leaving us with so many wonderful stories from her life: setting her pants on fire while she was welding in the shipyards in Brunswick Georgia during the war, stories about going to the drive in with granddaddy and her mother and having to lay down in the back seat because she was pregnant with my mother. Stories about the Lashley place, the Arline place, the Joyner place…all those places where she grew up that I could never really keep straight. She left us with her love for life and her love for her family, but for me today, the most important thing that she left me with and the number one reason that my heart isn’t troubled, is that I know that she worshipped a loving God. From the day that she was baptized in the creek outside the Pine Park Baptist church, she worshipped a God whose principle commandment was to love and she tried to live that commandment. She wasn’t an every Sunday churcher, she wasn’t a bible expert either, but she knew how important faith was, genuine faith, faith that comes from truly loving God and truly loving other people.

 

When Jesus was talking to his disciples and telling them that he had to leave they were devastated. They couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving them, but he reassured them by saying don’t let your hearts be troubled. I am going ahead of you to prepare a place for you. We will be together again. I believe that Jesus keeps his promises. He promised that he would rise again from the dead, and he did, he promised that he has a place prepared for us, and that in that place we will all be together again. It is that faith that is getting me through this right now. Saint Paul said that he reckoned that the pain we experience in this world and in these bodies is nothing compared with the glory that we will experience when we reach the other shore. Grandma knew a thing or two about pain and suffering. All my life I remember her suffering from some ailment or another, but that never really stopped her. She never lost her joy and love for life.

 

As I stand here today, I am looking at lots of faces that are suffering. We are sick, we are tired, we have pain. But I am reminded of a saying that I saw while I was on pilgrimage this summer: Pain is something temporary, glory lasts forever. Our bodies are broken sometimes, but its ok, we can get past it. Our hearts are broken, but they aren’t troubled, because we know this heartbreak is only temporary.

 

This service today is really for us, not for her. We are the ones who are suffering now, she is in glory. Her pain is no more.

 

After granddaddy’s funeral so many years ago, I had a dream and in that dream he walked up to me and looked me in the face and just gave me a hug. But the face that I saw wasn’t the face that I had ever known in my life, it was the face of him as a young man who was happy and healthy again. Ever since I had that dream I have had this belief that that is what we become when we reach the other side: our happiest, handsomest, prettiest, healthiest self. Today would have been his 93rd birthday. When we were thinking of which picture to use today I wanted to use the one on the cover of your program, because although it isn’t how she looked three days ago, I do believe it is how she looks today, and I believe that that is the face that will be greeting us when we get there ourselves.

 

We still have work to do in this world: as a family and as Christians we have work to do: It’s not our time yet: there are still children to be raised and spankings to be given, dinners to be cooked and love to be shared. Our hearts are broken today and they will be for a while. We will get upset when we are reminded of her and all that she meant to us, but that’s ok we aren’t troubled because we know this pain is temporary. The loving god that she worshiped has washed away her pain and he will do the same for us as well.

Spiritmatters Monthly December 2011

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The hopes and fears of all the years…

If you think that Christmas is just about hope and love and light and happiness then you are setting yourself up for a huge disappointment come December the 25th. Despite all the carols played constantly over the radio, this time of year isn’t always the “Hap, Happiest season of all.” Let’s face it, December is probably the most stressful month of the year for most of us: the crowds, the shopping, the traffic, the parties, the Christmas lists, and that’s just if you are lucky. For some, the holiday stressors take on an entirely different dimension: fear, depression, loneliness, anxiety. The darkness of December isn’t always outside our doors; sometimes it’s within us as well.
We all have this cookie-cutter image of what a happy holiday is supposed to look like, but most of us know deep down that our celebrations are rarely, if ever, perfect. Despite so much commentary and complaint about the commercialization of Christmas in recent decades, the reality is that holiday stress is hardly a new thing. If you spend much time watching old Christmas movies over the next few weeks you may notice a theme throughout many of them: anxiety, fear and desperation. Consider the following list of holiday classics:
A Christmas Carol

It’s a Wonderful Life

Miracle on 34th Street

The Bishop’s Wife

Christmas in Connecticut

White Christmas

A Christmas Story
And yes even, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Each of these classic stories about Christmas includes at least one or more characters that are driven to their absolute limit by the demands that life places upon them this time of year. Even Charlie Brown was overwhelmed by Christmas stress and that was over 50 years ago! Anxiety and fear are not a product of this generation, they are a product of every generation. Things like the media and the economy might make our problems worse, but they certainly don’t create them. We are human; and humans, for whatever reason, get stressed out and depressed this time of year. Maybe it is the weather, maybe it is the darkness, maybe it is something more profound and mysterious, but whatever it is, it is real and we need to be willing to address it and deal with it. Trying to act as if Christmas is merely a happy time, and nothing more, is destructive and dishonest. If we take the time to look closely at our holiday traditions, we just might find that they actually do try to address the great range of emotions we feel this time of year. The next time you are sitting in a church and suffering through a boring sermon (it happens), grab the hymnal in front of you and actually read the text of some of your favorite Christmas carols. You might be surprised to find out that these hymns, which many of us think we know by heart, actually have a lot to say about the darkness and brokenness in our lives. See if you can identify which popular carols these verses come from:
“Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long;

beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong;

and waring humankind hears not the tidings which they bring;

O hush the noise and cease the strife and hear the angels sing!”
“For he is our life-long pattern; daily when on earth he grew,

He was tempted, scorned, rejected,

Tears and smiles like us he knew.

Thus he feels for all our sadness, and he shares in all our gladness.”
“Why lies he in such mean estate where ox and ass are feeding?

Good Christian, fear: for sinners here the silent Word is pleading”
“O Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,

Dispel in glorious splendor the darkness everywhere:

True man, yet very God, from sin and death now save us, and share our every load.”
“Where children pure and happy pray to the blessed Child,

Where misery cries out to thee, Son of the mother mild;

Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door,

The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.”
These songs were not written to be sung by children; they were written to be sung by adults who know very well just how painful and dark the world can be. I get very frustrated when I hear people say that Christmas is a holiday about children or for children. It is not. Granted, there is great joy and fun in having little ones around that still have faith in the magic of Santa Claus, but that is just the point: they still have faith, they still believe. It is the adults in the world that need to be reminded of the power of God. We are the ones who need to hear the message of hope; we are the ones who need to be reminded that God’s love can heal our brokenness. Christmas is stressful, and we only need to review the story of the Nativity (cue Linus with his blanket) to be reminded that it always has been. Our holiday celebrations may not compare to those we remember as children, but then again, we aren’t children anymore; we know full well how tough the world can be. We need Christmas in a much different way than our children do: we no longer have visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads.
Of course the holidays can add stress to our lives, but they can also give us the added hope and inspiration that we need to get through that stress and keep going. If we listen to every verse of our Christmas carols, we just might realize that they are about hope AND fear. If we revisit some classic Christmas stories, we just might realize that much of the stress that we feel this time of year isn’t unique to us or to our generation, but is a part of the bigger picture which is Christmas. Of course, we could just do away with the holiday: we could take down the trees and the lights. We could blow out the candles, turn off the carols and cancel the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. We could get rid of everything that is Christmas, but it wouldn’t get rid of the stress in our lives. Christmas can help us to find what light there is in a world that can at times seem very dark. Know that every emotion you feel this time of year (joy or sadness, fear or relief, hope or despair) is a part of the Christmas story. Perhaps Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal Priest in Philadelphia, said it best when he wrote this carol in 1868:
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by;

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light;

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Spiritmatters Monthly October 2011

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“No self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits.”
Growing up in the South, I have eaten my fair share of grits. They have always been a staple of my diet and even today I find myself reaching for the bag of grits on the shelf when I am looking for a hot comfort food that goes with just about anything. Many Northerners know about the South’s love affair with grits because it was a crucial part of the plot in the popular film “My Cousin Vinny.” Grits are a tradition in the South that European settlers learned from the Native Americans and in ages past many poorer Southerners survived on grits and not much else.
In the early 1900s, a horrible disease known as Pellagra (which is a niacin deficiency) became epidemic in the South, particularly in the poorer regions. Originally it was thought that Pellagra was caused by some germ or toxin in corn, but that explanation didn’t make much sense given that corn had always been a staple in the Southern diet. Why was this strange disease becoming a problem all of a sudden? Because the traditional method of making grits involved soaking corn kernels in lime water (the mineral lime, not the citrus fruit) before grinding them. This simple step makes niacin nutritionally available in corn, and therefore Native Americans and early settlers could survive on a diet of corn without many ill side effects. In the early 20th century, with the advent of so many new farming and milling methods in the South, the traditional method of preparing corn, including the preparation of grits, was replaced by what was thought to be a more sensible and faster method of just grinding the corn without soaking it. The results were disastrous: by 1916 approximately 100,000 Southerners had developed Pellagra and many died for the simple reason that they dispensed with an old tradition that they didn’t understand. The Native Americans didn’t know anything about niacin or specifically why soaking the corn in lime was important, they had just learned (undoubtedly through trial and error) that this was a step that needed to be taken.
I am always suspicious whenever any individual or group dismisses tradition lightly. It is a particularly nasty side-effect of so much wonderful innovation: we fall into the habit of thinking that the new way of doing things is always the better way, and it simply isn’t. Believe it or not, people have been having good ideas for a very long time. In our desire for creativity and innovation, we often forget the importance of wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge that comes largely from time and experience. If creativity is a spark, then wisdom is a slow-burning ember. We need wisdom because it keeps us from having to learn every one of life’s lessons the hard way. Tradition is one way in which the wisdom of our ancestors is handed down, but we have fallen into the belief that we must understand a tradition in order for it to be of value to us. We did not understand the purpose of washing corn kernels in lime water before milling them, but that doesn’t mean that tradition had no value. By dispensing with the tradition we were forced to learn the hard way just how important it was.
If the Pellagra outbreak in the South can teach us anything, it should be the danger of modern arrogance. Modern arrogance is the idea that we have only really figured the world out in the last 60 years or so and that every idea, every tradition and every practice of previous generations should be regarded with suspicion or condescension. Modern arrogance teaches us that people in the past were superstitious, ignorant and backward and that we, in contrast, are more enlightened and more clever. It just isn’t so. Next time you look at a medieval cathedral remind yourself that this building was built without power tools and calculators. How many of our modern buildings do you think will still be around in 500 or 1000 years? I am all for progress and innovation, but it should be done with humility and respect paid to tradition. We forget that traditions have had to stand the test of time, which is usually a far more severe judge than we could ever be. Give traditional ideas and methods a chance and don’t easily dismiss them. We may not understand everything our ancestors did, but that is probably more a sign of our ignorance than theirs.