Eleanor Heuchert Funeral Sermon - John 1 verse 14, 16-17 May 24th 2024 / Grace Upon Grace

Eleanor Heuchert Graveside Funeral Sermon / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Friday May 24th 2024: Season of Pentecost / John 1:14, 16-17 “Grace Upon Grace”

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. … For from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

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 Eleanor Heuchert. Saint John in our Gospel reading for today explains how from the fullness of Christ Jesus “we have all received, grace upon grace.”[1] Grace is a gift of God that we do not deserve and that we cannot repay. None of us have been suitably good enough to merit receiving it and once we have this grace of God given to us we are not capable of keeping it by our good works or by the devotion of our hearts toward God or our fellow man. While she may have had a challenging time articulating the depth of what this grace of God adds up to in her Christian life Eleanor certainly understood it for herself and this will likely be one of the reasons she so loved the words of the offertory we sung just before our sermon: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and uphold me with Thy free spirit.” This is a prayer for grace. It’s taken from Psalm 51 where King David, knowing his need for forgiveness and mercy, cries out with these words and you’ll notice that David is not pledging to God that he will create in himself a clean heart to the glory of God, no he appeals to the gracious and merciful nature of God, to the Lord’s steadfast love; that the Lord would be the one to create a clean heart in him, that the Lord would renew a right spirit within him, that the Lord would restore in him a faithful joy in the promised salvation of the coming Christ and uphold him in the face of sorrow and trouble. It is the LORD who is doing all the doing not David. Eleanor loved to sing these words of Scripture during our visits and she knew them and the tune by heart, she even sang bits of it with me in her very last days before her death.

Later in the Old Testament you find the words we heard from the Book of Lamentations where the prophet declares that, “the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; [that] His mercies never come to an end; [that] they are new every morning;” and then he says “great is Your faithfulness,”[2] dear ones that is not our faithfulness to God it is His faithfulness to us. These also were cherished words of Scripture that Eleanor loved to hear, and from all of her lamenting her health challenges and things not going exactly as she would have like in these past ten years following her dear husband John’s death, Eleanor nevertheless relied on the faithfulness of the Lord toward her and His grace and mercy in the face of her troubles. On the front of our bulletin we find the promise that God shall wipe away all tears from the eyes of His people, He’s the one who takes away the crying and sorrow and pain. This promise is made complete when He takes us to Himself to that place where death will never touch us again, into His heavenly home. We do not march there ourselves, we are not expected to climb up to the top of its mountain by our own effort; we, like the passage from Lamentations says, are to be people who “wait for him,” people who wait for the LORD and as we wait we are to be souls who seek Him and in all of this we are to acknowledge that it is “good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.”[3] Eleanor’s wait is over. She now lives in that place where “the former things have passed away.” Strokes and epileptic episodes and all the pain and uncertainties that come with them have passed away for her. She endured them with courage and great strength on this side of heaven leaning on the faithfulness of the LORD and His grace and mercy to get her through. Take note of this and live lives like this.   

This grace and mercy of the LORD is not some nebulous indefinable soup of emotions or ideas, remember where we started: Saint John in our Gospel Reading for today explains how from the fullness of Christ Jesus “we have all received, grace upon grace.” Dear ones, “God is love,”[4] and Christ Jesus is God in the flesh,[5] the very Word of God who “became flesh and dwelt among us,”[6] the very one who suffered in our place, and faced death, and died upon His Good Friday Cross that we might live, and upon seeing the risen Lord Jesus back from the dead on that first Easter Sunday Saint Thomas exclaimed “My Lord and my God!” and Jesus for His part took the worship of Thomas and did not correct him because Jesus was is and ever shall be in fact God in the flesh. He is the fountainhead of the grace of God towards each of us. Where none of us have been suitably good enough to merit receiving grace and mercy from God the Father our Lord Jesus—by virtue of His perfection in all things—had His heavenly Father’s favour; and while once we have this grace of God given to us we are not capable of keeping it by our good works or by the devotion of our hearts toward God or our fellow man, yet your Lord Jesus continued steadfast in the faith never stumbling in His words or deeds, always saying and doing the right thing, never even thinking a bad thought towards anyone.

Knowing that we could not do this for ourselves He did it for us in our place and this is, “the great love with which He loved us,” that “even when we were dead in our trespasses, [the LORD] made us alive together with Christ;”[7] and so Saint Paul in our Epistle confesses, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”[8] Eleanor was not one to boast in her abilities or in her faith because she knew the grace of God in her life and her trust was in the one who was always faithful to her throughout her long life, the one now faithful to her in death, and in the life which is to come.

As you reflect particularly on this considering Eleanor’s life of faith, remember “we are [all the LORD’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We do this not to merit our salvation but to the glory of God and for the good of our neighbour trusting that Jesus secured our place in His Father’s House lavishing upon us “grace upon grace.” I leave you with this little poem:

“Life is a book in volumes three;

                The past, the present, the yet to be;

The first is closed and laid away;

The second we are reading day by day;

The third and last of the volumes three;

is sealed from sight; God keeps the key”[9]

Eleanor continues to be in the LORD’s safe keeping and by the grace of God you are in His safe keeping too, hold fast to this and trust in His faithfulness towards you, set aside self improvement and seek instead the clean heart that by Word and Sacrament the Lord makes for Himself in you. His Word and Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion are where He comes to us and where we find in Him the peace and comfort that the World cannot give.[10] “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in Him”[11] not in myself and in no other but Christ Jesus alone. Eleanor knew this and by the grace of God held firmly to it all her days. This is not only for Eleanor, in Christ Jesus this is for you too. 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] John 1:16
[2] Lamentations 3:22-23
[3] Lamentations 3:25–26
[4] 1 John 4:8
[5] John 20:28
[6] John 1:14
[7] Ephesians 2:4-5
[8] Ephesians 2:8-9
[9] Freda Sauer
[10] John 14:27
[11] Lamentations 3:24

Photo Credit: Main Photo provided by family and Mount Olive Lutheran Church. 

Click here for John Heuchert's funeral sermon and for Wendy Heuchert's funeral sermon.