Hints of Glory

Hints of Glory
Homily delivered at the Funeral of David Marc Tracy

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
27 January 2017; 2:00 p.m. Sung Burial Office and Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33; Psalm 121; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:10; John 14:1-6

God, heal us and give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

My own paraphrase of St. Paul’s message today is as follows:

“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer selves are withering away, our inner selves are being renewed each and every day. For our current bit of suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison, because we are looking not at what is before our eyes, but at what is hidden from our eyes; for what can be seen passes quickly away, but what cannot be seen lasts forever.   For we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, we will find our true bodies—not tents but a great building for our dwelling place, ever lasting in the heavens, made by God and not by human hands.  …  It is God who has given us hints of this bright future, by giving us his Spirit as a down payment of what’s ahead”  (2 Cor. 4:16-17; 5:1-5).

Paul is not trying here to disparage the world in which we live.  Remember that when God made the world, God saw it and said it was good indeed.  Elsewhere, Paul says he sees plenty of evidences in the world of God’s good intention and love in the world.  What Paul is talking about in today’s passage is how things seem when we are suffering and unable to see any good before our eyes. 

He says that what keeps us going in such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important things, the things that never change.  It is the vision of this in our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart.”

The word Paul uses for “losing heart” literally means “being beaten down by bad things.”    He contrasts our sufferings, changeable and limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance around the person of God.  This brilliance is the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, or substantial heaviness.  Paul says that our “momentary” sufferings are very light and insubstantial by comparison with this “weight of glory” around God, a timeless beauty that our sufferings actually are creating in us, unseen.  He says that the substantiality of God’s light is literally a “hyperbole beyond all hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless. 

It is important here to note that Paul is not trying to say that our sufferings are not real or truly bad.  And he is not saying the world is simply bad and needs to be ignored.  He is contrasting how things now appear with how things actually are and will be.

For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight of glory” or “timeless mass of Light” currently being created in us is actually the real thing, while our suffering, all too clear before our eyes, is but a dim shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away.    The image in our hearts of what God has promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down. 

Paul tells us to contemplate the “invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes” that do. 

It is really hard to say goodbye to David.  His illness was hard, and his passing harder.  Memories about him help us to see the underlying truth and goodness of his life, and this is the very unchanging truth that Paul calls “the weight of glory.”  For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image is God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the world.  That is why Paul dwells so much on  “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the Risen Lord.  It is why he talks so much about God’s loving promises, and so much about our experience of God’s spirit, that gives us hope, confidence, and joy. 

In the words of two African-American freedom songs, one a Spiritual and the other a Work Song, Paul wants us to “keep our eyes on the prize,” and our “hands on the plough.”  He wants us to “hold on, hold on.” 

For many of us, worn down by life and its sorrows, it may be hard at times to see the light.  But we must not resign ourselves to being beaten down, and we must not, in Paul’s words, “lose heart.”  The actor Tom Bosley (the guy who played Richie’s father on Happy Days) said, “Many people think that depression is something you just have to live with when you get older, but it’s not.”

David was almost always upbeat and positive, even in the face of hard things.  His sense of humor and irony helped him see through the darkness.   We might all take a lesson from him here, and recognize that growing weight of glory, the substantial gravity of light and joy around God, that is growing in our hearts, despite loss and pain.   

Thanks be to God.