I was honored and touched some months ago when Jared wrote and asked me to preach at this morning’s memorial service for his mother, Yvonne, a longtime active member of All Saints. I did not know Yvonne well, but Jared’s and my paths have crossed a number of times over the years. I know Jared from his service as the first youth representative to the vestry here, also from Camp Stevens and Washington National Cathedral, where he serves as a faithful and dedicated eucharistic minister and lector. It may seem like I’m stalking you, Jared, but I am simply grateful for our long connection through the life of the church.
Jared and his brother Todd have now lost both their parents in tragic circumstances. Their father Larry died in 2016, his life no doubt shortened by the effects of a near-fatal car accident several years earlier. Yvonne died last July, just months after relocating to Washington D.C. to be close to Jared, Nadia, and Theodora. The tributes we hear today give us all a fuller understanding of Yvonne, of her life and achievements, and of her abiding commitments as teacher and community leader. I am here to say just a bit about the scriptures we’ve heard and how they may speak to us in the wake of Yvonne’s passing.
Death is traumatic for so many reasons, chief among them I think because it seems to cut off so many possibilities. Yvonne’s moving to Washington followed years of care here in California from Todd, and her new life in D.C. offered the promise of a renewed and deeper connection with Jared and his family. Eight months after moving east Yvonne suddenly died. Those hopeful possibilities seemed to vanish overnight.
It is the faith and witness of the Christian community that those possibilities still exist—that death does not have the last word about us or about those we love. The earliest followers of Jesus learned that to their surprise at Easter. While I do not presume to understand or explain exactly how this works, I do know that Christianity always holds out the hope of a future where wounds are healed, losses recovered, and relationships are brought to their fulfillment. We know that the pain of separation is real. We hope, in the words of Julian of Norwich, that all shall be well.
That certainly is the point of the first reading we heard, from the prophet Isaiah:
On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. [Isaiah 25]
Isaiah is not pushing false optimism here. He spoke in a time of great personal and public suffering, so this hopeful proclamation comes out of a profound understanding of human sorrow and loss. As one of my great seminary Bible professors once said, biblical prophecy was not about prediction or reform; it was about seeing what was actually there and giving voice to it—and having seen and verbalized it, finding the strength to live into it as it is. And what Isaiah saw and spoke was something true about God and us. Even when things seem lost and hope is cut off, we abide in the embrace of a love that will bring our lives to fulfillment. The one at the center of creation knows us, loves us, and means to help us finish our stories. What seems like a tragically foreshortened journey will, in the end, become a banquet.
The God we know through Isaiah and in Jesus can transform death and loss into life and blessing. God makes this transformation not through power but through love, the real source of all that is. Most of the time we walk around in our daily lives unaware of the depth of the love that surrounds us. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.” Again, prophets tell us how things really are. It looks now as if aggression, selfishness, and hate have the upper hand. But that’s only how things look through a glass darkly. But when we see reality “face to face” we know that death and its sidekicks do not have a lock on the truth. As Paul himself realizes at the end of our passage, it is faith, love, and hope which abide. “And the greatest of these is love.” Even when it seems that all is lost, behind and beneath everything a love abides that holds us close and calls us forward in hope.
You and I live in a culture that tries to turn love into a gooey abstraction, a greeting card sentiment devoid of any real content. But for our biblical thinkers—for Isaiah, Paul, and Jesus—love is something specific and real. It abides in the gritty reality seen and spoken by the prophets. We hear that most crisply in our Gospel for today [Matthew 25]. Here is how Jesus puts it.
Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.
Love is concrete service to someone up against it, someone who suffers as a result of human or cosmic injustice. To say that does not dismiss family or romantic love. But it does ask, as George Regas used to say at weddings, that our marriages and families broaden to include the world. We serve the ones we love and we serve those who are oppressed by life and its systems. It is a false choice to separate my love for my household from my love for the world.
And of course what we know of Yvonne was that she did not buy into that false choice between home and community. She loved her sons and their households. And she loved and served the world—as teacher, as activist, as colleague and friend. Her life was a fabric woven with the strands of family and community love. She loved her children and she loved the world. In serving one she served the other. Her life gave witness to a single, continuous truth. “When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.” In the words of Seamus Heaney, “Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth fighting for.”
Prophets show us how things really are. In that sense, Yvonne Hughes’s life was prophetic. She found ways as teacher, as spouse, as parent, as community leader to live in to the values she cherished. And she showed us, by example, how we can live lives organized around justice and mercy, too.
And in that sense, the Eucharist to which we now turn is prophetic. It is the meal Jesus gave us to which all are welcome and where all are equal. It shows us how things finally are, and it calls us to exemplify mutuality, generosity, and justice in our own lives.
As Paul says, we see things in a mirror, dimly. Certain people and certain lives show us reality, as the prophets do, face to face. It is all, finally, about love—a love that seeks justice and mercy not just for us and our households but for all. The love we see in the life of Yvonne Hughes and the people and values she cherished is the way things really are. It is a love there behind, before, and ahead of us. It is a love that will not let us go. It is a love that will gather, feed, and bless us all both now and when everything is finally said and done. It is a love we can together know now as we gather around Jesus’s table and give thanks. Amen.
