Memorial Service for Joyce Chase
April 10, 2018
Zion Lutheran Church + Nampa, ID
The bible passage from the Gospel according to St. John, the passage that was just read as our Gospel reading, was one that was underlined and marked in Joyce’s Bible. It recalls the time when Jesus calls His first disciples to follow Him, and their reaction. They didn’t just sit on their duff and watch Jesus, but they got up, followed where He led, and told their family members and friends about that they had found Him of whom the Scriptures testified.
Jesus led Joyce to many different paths in this life. She was involved in many different aspects within our community. She travelled up until the last years of her earthly life, and her wit and personality continued to be a whirlwind. She had 5 children and numerous grandchildren and even great grandchildren. I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of her relationships with everyone, and neither should you. She was a complicated woman, headstrong and stubborn at times, loving and caring at others. She was not perfect, there is no doubt about it. She was a sinner. She knew it. She struggled with it. She confessed it. She was forgiven, and now delivered out of the vale of tears and suffering, to struggle no longer.
The last thing that she told me, right after she had received the Lord’s Supper for the last time, was that she wanted her kids to know Jesus and have peace. She wished that her kids, her family, her friends, who treat each other as brothers ought to, as Simon and Andrew, Philip and Nathanael in our Gospel reading. We don’t get to hear the family drama of these disciples, but instead, that they told one another of Jesus, made introductions to Jesus, that they followed Him despite the shortcomings and sins of the other disciples.
St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:17-21).
The Lord knows you as surely as He knew Nathanael sitting under the fig tree. He knows what you were feeling when you heard the news of Joyce’s death. He knows what you are feeling now. He knows the sadness, the frustrations, the anger, the loss, the regret, the doubts, the skepticism, the uncertainty. And it is for this reason that He came. Jesus came into the world to deal with all these things, and more. To take it all upon Himself, to have all your anxieties cast upon Him because He cares for you. To reconcile you to Himself, to reconcile you to one another, and on the great and mighty day of the Lord’s return, to reconcile you to Joyce and all those who die in the faith. Ultimately, He came to die so that death would not have the last word. But we live, we live in the reality of Easter, of the Resurrection, of Life itself. Peace. Joyce is at peace. Because of Jesus. Peace. The peace of the Lord is yours. Peace in a reconciling with God, be reconciled with one another.