Third Culture Kids (burial office)

 

Third Culture Kids
15 August 2015 The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

By the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.,

On the Occasion of the Funeral of Bob Bienieck

Ashland, Oregon
11:00 a.m. with Sung Mass

Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33; Psalm 23 and 121; 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:9; John 14:1-6

Losing a loved one is hard.  C.S. Lewis, writing about his own feelings after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, said that he resented it when people asked him how he was doing—how in the world could he answer such a question!  He wanted to be left alone in his grief.  But he also resented them when they left him alone—how could they be so heartless and unsympathetic!  He says he was surprised by something that no one had ever told him: the deep, visceral emotion called grief feels much like another emotion, fear.  Losing a loved one is hard. 

St. Paul, in today’s epistle, writes the following,

“So we are not about to give up!  How could we? Even though on the outside it looks like things are falling apart for us, on the inside, not a day goes by without God renewing us in some way.   For our current bit of dark suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison.  That’s because there is far more here than meets the eye.  What we can see is here today, gone tomorrow, but the things we can’t see last forever.  For we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like temporary tents and folded away, they will be replaced by something more substantial, like a building, from God.  It won’t have to be set up again and again by hand, but rather is timeless, in the heavens.  For as long as we are in this tent our lot is groaning, burdened by a heavy weight. It’s not because we want to be free of this body, but because we want more of one.  We want our body that dies to be absorbed into a body that lives unendingly.  God is the one who puts this desire in us, by giving us the Spirit as a sure foretaste of it.  That’s why we seem so cheerful despite it all.  We know that being in this body means being away from God.  After all, we live by trusting and hoping, not by seeing.    That’s why we have confidence.   At heart, we would really rather be at home with God, away from this body.  But the important thing is pleasing God, whether we are at home or away.”  (2 Cor. 4:16-17).

Paul ’s teaching here at first glance seems to disparage the world in which we live, the world before our eyes.  Remember that when God made the world, God saw it and said it was good indeed.  Elsewhere, Paul very clearly says that he sees plenty of evidences 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, when it is hard 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.   Recognizing that all human life ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the world is changing and reliably unreliable.  What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is unchanging.  It is the vision of this in our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart” or “giving up.”

Paul 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 is advising a path of contemplation, of reflection, as a way of driving away despair, of being “renewed every day” so that “we do not give up.”

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

His argument parallels Saint-Exupery’s belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  

For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image is God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the world.  That is why in his writings he 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.    The Spirit in our lives is a foretaste and a guarantee of the great life in God to come. 

Bob was a teacher.  The basic job of a teacher is not to prepare kids for tests, or manage them and their time administratively.  The basic job is sharing passion for learning and the subject matter with the students.  The product of a teacher is not articles or books or lesson plans.  The product is formed and healthy human beings. 

A teacher’s task involves a lot of faith, of looking beyond the student you see before your eyes, and seeing what that person may become. 

And that is what our task today is:  looking beyond these ashes and memories that are sweet mixed with the bitterness of Bob’s illness and death, and seeing the “eternal weight of glory” that Paul talks about and is most assuredly what Bob is enjoying today.   

Bob and Sylvia have focused their teaching in international schools.  Most of their students are what psychologists call “third culture kids.”  Sarah is one, my four children are all TCKs too, having grown up in a series of overseas homes.    When in the U.S., they feel that they are not really part of the scene, that they are not really Americans.  When overseas, they feel out of the ambit of their host countries, that they are not Chinese, Thais, Arabs, or Europeans.  They have one foot in one culture, another foot in another, and both in neither.   

That also is what Paul is talking about.  We live in this world, but are not really of this world.  We feel like we are strangers and sojourners.   We especially feel this when suffering, or when in grief.  But the idea of heaven and being with God and Jesus seems very strange to us, almost too hard to imagine.  What Paul is saying is this:  we do indeed have a home, one that we have never seen, one that we were created for, but have not yet tasted.  We get little foretastes of it, little glimpses.  And it is more certain and trustworthy than anything we see before our eyes, any of the suffering or grief we experience now.  

Bob is no longer a sojourner and alien.  He is home at last. 

Thanks be to God.