Beatrice Joy McMillan Funeral Sermon – Psalm 40, Romans 8:24-25, 28 & John 11 May 6th 2023 / Joy and Hope

Beatrice Joy McMillan funeral Sermon - Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Saturday April 6th 2023: Season of Easter / Psalm 40 "Joy and Hope"

          I waited patiently for the LORD;

                    He inclined to me and heard my cry.

          He drew me up from the pit of destruction,

                    out of the miry bog,

          and set my feet upon a rock,

                    making my steps secure.

          He put a new song in my mouth,

                    a song of praise to our God.

          Many will see and fear,

                    and put their trust in the LORD.

          Blessed is the man who makes

                    the LORD his trust,

          who does not turn to the proud,

                    to those who go astray after a lie!

          You have multiplied, O LORD my God,

                    Your wondrous deeds and Your thoughts toward us;

                    none can compare with You!

          I will proclaim and tell of them,

                    yet they are more than can be told.

          In sacrifice and offering You have not delighted,

                    but You have given me an open ear.

          Burnt offering and sin offering

                    You have not required.

          Then I said, “Behold, I have come;

                    in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

          I delight to do Your will, O my God;

                    Your law is within my heart.”

          I have told the glad news of deliverance

                    in the great congregation;

          behold, I have not restrained my lips,

                    as You know, O LORD.

          I have not hidden Your deliverance within my heart;

                    I have spoken of Your faithfulness and Your salvation;

          I have not concealed Your steadfast love and Your faithfulness

                    from the great congregation.

          As for You, O LORD, You will not restrain

                    Your mercy from me;

          Your steadfast love and Your faithfulness will

                    ever preserve me!

          For evils have encompassed me

                    beyond number;

          my iniquities have overtaken me,

                    and I cannot see;

          they are more than the hairs of my head;

                    my heart fails me.

          Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me!

                    O LORD, make haste to help me!

          Let those be put to shame and disappointed altogether

                    who seek to snatch away my life;

          let those be turned back and brought to dishonour

                    who delight in my hurt!

          Let those be appalled because of their shame

                    who say to me, “Aha, Aha!”

          But may all who seek You

                    rejoice and be glad in You;

          may those who love Your salvation

                    say continually, “Great is the LORD!”

          As for me, I am poor and needy,

                    but the Lord takes thought for me.

          You are my help and my deliverer;

                    do not delay, O my God!

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends and family of Beatrice Joy McMillan. Our readings today were chooses from passages Joy had marked in her Bible, the whole of Psalm 40 was highlighted, the Epistle reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome was a passage marked in her Bible too,[1] and from the Gospel of John chapter 11 she had marked the part where Jesus and Martha are speaking together where Jesus says, “I Am The Resurrection and The Life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. [Joy also had marked what came next when Jesus asks Martha] Do you believe this?” [In Martha’s response to His questions] She said to [Jesus], “Yes, Lord; I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”[2] All of this Joy had marked in her Bible.

When planning the service it was remarked upon that people don’t mark up parts of their personal Bible if those spots don’t mean something to them. (If you need it take this as permission to mark those parts that are dear to you in your personal Bible) Keeping this in mind it’s clear that Joy shared the same hope that Martha had, hope that there would be a resurrection on The Last Day and hope in this same Jesus Christ, the long expected Saviour, The Resurrection and The Life. Of course when Martha had this conversation with Jesus about her dead brother Lazarus, Jesus had not risen Lazarus from the dead yet; Jesus Himself had not died upon the Good Friday cross of His crucifixion and He had not risen from the dead in His Sunday Resurrection that first Easter Sunday, and The Last Day had not yet come. Regarding all of these things Martha’s hope was a hope in things unseen. Now, Jesus did raise Lazarus from the dead which Martha saw with her own two eyes and heard with her ears and touched with her hands, and Jesus was crucified, died and was buried and was risen from the dead, the knowledge of which was manifest in that time and was really undeniable; all of this we Christians believe, this we have recorded for us in Scripture as a witness, a witness Joy held close to her heart, but what had not yet come for Martha and what has not yet come for us is The Last Day and the general resurrection of all the dead, so when it comes to that—and because some of us desire to see things with our own two eyes—we like Martha are still given things to hope for, we like Joy and Martha hope for things unseen by our eyes at this point in our life as was the case in theirs. The verse right before the one marked by Joy in her Bible from Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians says that we “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly [for the fulfilment of our adoption into the family of God, and for] the redemption of our bodies.”[3] And so we wait, as Joy waited.

Dear ones, Jesus was Joy’s friend in life, and He remains her friend in this new chapter of her life in Him. Joy is one who eagerly waited for the fulfilment of her hope in the unseen promises of God. This brings us around to Psalm 40. There are many things of note in this Psalm that we heard this morning related to the unseen Christian hope that Joy lived and which she shares with you today as an encouragement. When I arrived here in 2006 Joy was still active in the community and congregation she was coming to Bible Studies she was organizing wist tournaments, yet over the years her ability to be active diminished but her ability to wait for the Lord did not. Even in these last years when there was little she could do she was able to wait in hope. And how does Psalm 40 benign?

        “I waited patiently for the LORD;

                 He inclined to me and heard my cry.

         He drew me up from the pit of destruction,

                 out of the miry bog,

         and set my feet upon a rock,

                 making my steps secure.

         He put a new song in my mouth,

                 a song of praise to our God.”

First Joy loved to sing, so today we sing! And in the end Joy’s waiting for the LORD was accomplished with great steadfast patience: She displayed hope and trust that in The End the LORD would draw her up and set her upon a rock, making her steps secure: and what is this rock? A better question is ‘who is this rock?’ It is Joy’s friend Jesus. You hear this same sort of language all over the Psalms, like you hear for example in Psalm 62 where King David likewise confesses with confidence:

        “For God alone my soul waits in silence;

                 from Him comes my salvation.

         He alone is my Rock and my Salvation,

                 my Fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.”[4]

In this Jesus her hope was secure, and bit by bit through life that hope became more and more unshaken, and now that hope is no longer an unseen hope. And if in the end it was unshaken it certainly is unshaken now, for Joy no more hope is required, for she is with the LORD.

Now we in our frailties have our worries, and there was one worry that Joy had: her greatest fear was that she would forget how to pray. So let’s think a little bit about prayer: This Psalm, Psalm 40, has a couple interesting things to say about prayer. Did you catch the part that said, “In sacrifice and offering You have not delighted, but You have given me an open ear.” The You there is the LORD. This Psalm really shines after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God the Father’s only begotten Son, for after Jesus’ victory over death and the grave through His cross and passion there are no more sacrifices needed, He is the once for all sacrifice to gain forgiveness for us[5] and for this reason the LORD delights in our prayers and the LORD’s ear is always open to hearing our prayers just as our ear is open, by His grace, to hear His Holy Word. If you read the section in the Large Catechism on the Lord’s Prayer you’ll hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther teach how in Psalm 50 God says to us, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble and I will deliver you.”[6] He then points out what Jesus teaches when the Lord says in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, “Ask, and it will be given to you; … for everyone who asks receives”[7] Such promises, Luther says, certainly ought to encourage and kindle our hearts to pray with pleasure and delight.[8] Joy was one whose heart was kindled with a burning desire to receive the good gifts her Heavenly Father had in store for her in Christ Jesus His Son. Therefore, with Joy in mind, you then are likewise encouraged in your prayers. She only worried about losing the ability to pray because she loved to pray so much. Now, dear ones, we pray with our lips, and with our mind and with our heart and as Romans chapter 8 teaches He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We can trust then that the Holy Spirit always heard the prayers of Joy’s heart, even if you could not hear them from her lips in these last years, and even still that same passage from Romans teaches that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For [when] we do not know what to pray for as we ought … the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”[9] The Psalms are hymns, they are songs, and they are prayers: Psalm 40 then is Joy’s prayer and today in the hearing of it we pray this prayer anew with her. A pray that point to Jesus and the hope that is in us, the hope that Joy held dear. Think now on how this Psalm ends and what this prayer means;

        “But may all who seek You (that You there is the LORD)

                 rejoice and be glad in You;

         may those who love Your Salvation

                 say continually, “Great is the LORD!”

         As for me, I am poor and needy,

                 but the Lord takes thought for me.”

Hear that again, and think of Joy:

        “As for me, I am poor and needy,”

What does Jesus teach? “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[10] Psalm 40 continues,

                  “but the Lord takes thought for me.”

These precious words conclude:

        “You [O LORD] are my help and my deliverer;

                   do not delay, O my God!”

We all may have our times of impatience in this life, we regularly want thing to happen on our personal timetable, we want things to go as we think they should go, we do not always want to wait “patiently for the LORD,” to wait for “all things [to] work together for good … according to His purpose.”[11] And what we are often tempted to think of as “delay” in The End truly will not have been a long time in view of eternity and everlasting life. So while it may have seemed like it all took a long time, Joy now has the very thing she had hoped for: Jesus her Lord and her friend has heard her prayers and delivered her from death into everlasting life in Him. We end then with the words Jesus spoke to Martha, we end with the question Jesus asked her, this passage Joy had marked in Her Bible; and this now becomes the words Jesus speaks to you, the question Jesus asks you: Jesus says “I Am The Resurrection and The Life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” This is what Joy believed, this is for you too; “wait for the LORD,” as she did with patience; faithfully hope in what is now unseen as she did, trusting that the perfect patience, and perfect hope is found first and foremost in Christ Jesus. This faith, with its hope on Christ, now flows to you as a gift just as it flowed to Joy. By the grace of God she now stands on the other side of the banks of that river of faith as one who has been delivered, as one who now sees: “faith [dear ones] is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”[12] And as Saint Paul teaches, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; [Saint Paul says] then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”[13] Joy is fully known by her Lord and she now knows the Lord fully and sees Him face to face. Amen.    

Let us pray:

Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Romans 8:24-25, 28, “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience … And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
[2] John 11:26-27
[3] Romans 8:23
[4] Psalm 62:1–2
[5] Hebrews 7:26–28, "For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest [in Christ Jesus], holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for His own sins and then for those of the people, since He did this once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.”
[6] Psalm 50:15
[7] Matthew 7:7-8
[8] Part III, The Lord’s Prayer - Large Catechism, The Readers Edition of Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, Pocket Edition, Concordia Publishing House 2005, pg. 582.
[9] Romans 8:26–27
[10] Matthew 5:3
[11] Romans 8:28
[12] Hebrews 11:1
[13] 1 Corinthians 13:12

Photo Credits: Main Photo provided by Mount Olive and Joy's Family; detail of man reading Bible from pexels; detail of the painting The Resurrection of Lazarus by Bonnat in 1857 from wikipedia; detail of woman praying with Bible from pexels.