Elsie Schweitzer Funeral Sermon – Colossians 3:12-17 May 30th 2025 / Keep on Singing

Elsie Schweitzer Funeral Sermon / Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Friday May 30th 2025: Season of Easter / Colossians 3:12-17, “Keep on Singing”

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

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 Elsie Schweitzer the first verse of Psalm 89 came to mind when thinking of Elsie:

“I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever;

               with my mouth I will make known

Your faithfulness to all generations.”[1]

This was only reinforced when Tara and Diane and I were looking at the photos put together for today. There were a series of photos put together with the phrase “a growing family,” underneath. The first from 1972 with Elsie and Ernest and their seven children, the last of these pictures shows the size of the family with children and grand children and great grandchildren taken at a reunion in 2024. And who’s smack dab in the middle of the picture? Elsie: and she’s surrounded by some of the youngest kids in the family. Here we see the generations. In that first verse, from Psalm 89, we have what God does for us and what we do in response to what He has done for us. When the Psalmist says “I will make known Your faithfulness to all generations,” they are not saying this about a relative like Elsie, they are saying this about the LORD. It is the LORD who is faithful; He establishes you in your faith and guards you against evil.[2] He has done this for Elsie over her 97 long years of life and He is faithful to you also. This is the promise. This is His steadfast love for you and for Elsie.  

Knowing this and trusting this brings our response and so the Psalmist says, “I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever.” When we first knew that Elsie’s time was growing short we had opportunity to be together and it was a bit of a surprise but when I started singing hymns to Elsie she joined in making the tune along with me, and when we sang the offertory, “Create in Me a Clean Heart of God,” she sang along knowing every word. One of the hymns we sang that day, with four generations of the family together there in the room, was “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” which we’ll sing at the end of our service. As you all know Elsie loved music, she loved “singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” in church “with thankfulness in [her heart] to God,” she loved playing piano with Diane as Diane played the organ upstairs, and people loved it too. She loved playing her accordion and making music together with others (we’ll see a bit of that in the hall after the service over lunch). And as we heard she played by ear and loved every minute of it along the way. So in our last visits, while departing, I would say to her, “Keep on singing.” And so she has and so she will.

Now today as we sing we can only imagine her voice joining us, as today Elsie’s voice is quiet. But our voices join in singing the “hymns and spiritual songs,” that she knew and loved and just as they were passed down to her generation Elsie has passed them down to you and in a way today she is still passing them down to you. These are songs about the “steadfast love of the LORD,” and it is Father, Son and Holy Spirit who stand behind them, who gave reason for her to sing. And yet the Psalmist says, “I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever,” well what about forever? Forever never ends and I just said today Elsie’s voice is quiet. So what do we make of that? Well Scripture teaches that in the time between our death and the Last Day—when all will be risen to physical life again in the Resurrection—the redeemed in Christ will sing as they await That Day and the Lord Jesus’ return. Saint John who recorded the Book of Revelation says,

“And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth.”[3]

The 144,000 there is a symbolic number: 12 X 12 is 144 and the number 10 is a number of completeness and multiples of 10 indicate ever larger numbers of completeness. So the 12 children of Jacob which make up by generation to generation the 12 tribes of Israel of the Old Testament and the 12 Apostles of Christ Jesus who represent the beginning seeds of the church which would grow and grow over the generations indicate the “great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,”[4] who stand before the throne of God. Today while Elsie’s voice is quiet to us it is not quiet, it is now part of that voice from heaven like the roar of many waters that Saint John heard in his vision, part of that voice like the sound of loud thunder, that voice like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, (and maybe like the sound of accordionists playing on their accordions) who now sing a new song before the throne of God. And on the Last Day when she is risen from the dead, and made new Elsie will sing together with all of us who are in Christ Jesus a new song without end. And so Elsie’s voice keeps on singing forever, keeps on singing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever.

What is the “steadfast love of the LORD” that Elsie passes down to you? Today is a day when the generations are gathered together, so just to make it clear to you all, the steadfast love of the LORD is this: “For God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Jesus says these words about Himself, and He continues saying, “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him” ... in order that the world may be saved through Him, saved through Jesus: you then are one who is counted as part of the world when it says that Jesus came to save the world.

But what does that look like? In our Gospel Reading we hear Jesus say about Himself, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.” Jesus says, “I know My own and My own know Me, just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to My voice. So there will be one flock, one Shepherd.”[5] Our Lord Jesus then is also the Shepherd of Psalm 23, He is with us every step of the way, and He Himself has saved us at the cross of His crucifixion as He gave up His life there to Redeem us, making Him our Redeemer: our Redeemer from sin, our Redeemer from death, our Redeemer from the devil, our Redeemer from the world, even our Redeemer from ourselves when we have become our own worst enemies in this life.

Dear ones there is one more spot in Scripture that drills down on the ultimate effect of the “steadfast love of the LORD” in action. Saint Paul in Galatians 2 writes, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”[6] Paul says this about himself but this is not only for Saint Paul, this what it means to be a Christian, to know and to trust that we have been crucified with Christ and that the life we know live in the flesh we live by faith in Jesus, the Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us. This Jesus does this for each of the generations, those who have come before us, and those who will come after us until The End, until The Last Day. And so we with Elsie are called to sing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever; to make known the faithfulness of our Lord Jesus to all generations.    

Knowing and trusting all of this meant that Elsie didn’t have to put herself first, because in Christ she was already redeemed and saved by His life and death and resurrection. She wasn’t expected to do it for herself, she wasn’t even expected to contribute to it by anything she thought said or did, and for this reason she could freely put you first, put everyone else first, because she didn’t have to put herself first regarding her faith and salvation. With all of this in mind and with the peace of Christ ruling her heart Elsie was able to put on, as one of God’s chosen ones, a compassionate heart, full of kindness, humility, meekness, and patience towards everyone she knew. Because of Jesus’ love for her Elsie was able to bear with you when life was hard for you or for her with a heart of forgiveness because the Lord was always forgiving towards her. And above all these Elsie was able to put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And when we think of music, the best music is music with harmony and not discord. First you want every note in the right place, and then if there is a wrong note anywhere you want forgiveness and a chance to be in harmony again.

So today we continue to pass down the music of God’s love from generation to generation, we pass down from generation to generation the “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in [our] hearts to God,” for all that the LORD has done for Elsie over her 97 years and for all He does for us in our years. And if you think, well I’m not much of a singer, I can’t play the accordion or the piano or the organ, I can’t even carry a tune in a bucket, be at peace, while it is true that the LORD has given us a mouth to sing He has also given us two hears to hear. And there are other ways to pass down the steadfast love of the LORD from generation to generation that don’t involve singing. Even still the encouragement to keep on singing is there. We do all of this trusting in the faithfulness of the LORD. In conclusion hear these words of encouragement, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it.”[7] 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] Psalm 89:1
[2] 2 Thessalonians 3:3
[3] Revelation 14:2–3
[4] Revelation 7:9
[5] John 10:11, 14–15
[6] Galatians 2:20
[7] 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24