Homily For Lee

Homily For Lee Frances Heller, Given At The Memorial Service On May 30, 2000 At The Chapel Of St. Andrew's Cathedral, Jackson MS.
By Rev. Susan Bock

I don't know just what our life is like "beyond the vale": whether we sit around the throne of God singing alleluias day and night, like the Revelation to John says. Or, if we feed the sheep all day, like a dying child once told me; Or if we watch old movies and catch up on all the reading we missed here. This would be my idea of Paradise! I'll leave it all to a loving God who can surely be trusted to work out the details for us.

I do know, for a fact, that one of the ways a person lives forever, is in our following her example and doing what she taught us to do. Here is some of what Lee Francis taught us before going on ahead of us to claim her final reward.

First, to be ourselves. To take up the very life and destiny, and use the particular gifts, God has given us. To live from the inside out, taking our cues from the Holy Spirit of God who richly dwells within each one of us.

Each of us is given as gift to this world, and there is no higher calling than to be the person we are given and called to be. To speak our truth. To carry our cross. To let our light shine, no matter what the cost, because the promise beyond the cost is that we will hear God's own voice saying, "Well done, good and faithful friend of mine. Come now, and enter your rest."

Second, she taught us to reach out in love to all those on the margins, suffering in any way, and to bring them close in to the heart of God. Lee was, herself, good news to the poor, the rejected, and the bound, and her words no less healing or prophetic than the words of Jesus when he said, "Blessed are you poor; blessed are you hungry; blessed are you mournful and you who are hated. For God is near to you in your very affliction, and promises to one day turn this world order right side up!

With Isaiah and Jesus, Lee Frances was no less than a prophet, who proclaimed that compassion is the highest order of human relationships, and God's deepest desire for them. Not judgement. Not fear. But compassion.

The community of Jesus Christ is not a gathering of those who best keep all the rules of religion. Rather it is a community of those who keep them, and those who try to make others keep them, and then, mostly, all the rest of us, who know ourselves to be sinful, weak, and poor, and that all we have to make us worthy to come inside is our belovedness in God. Lee reminded us of that all the time.

She taught us to keep growing, to keep stretching our hearts and minds so that we might come more and more into the full stature of love which was Christ's. Lee Francis maintained that delicate balance between taking a brave stand, and yet keeping her heart open and gentle towards new truth. She resisted organized religion right up to the end, whenever and wherever it was exclusive and hateful, even as she was becoming more deeply a part of it through her confirmation in the Christian community just days before her death.

Though her outer nature was wasting away, her inner nature was, and is, being renewed every day. When we are confirmed, the bishop lays hands on our heads and asks that we daily increase in the Holy Spirit "more and more". This is her life, still.

In the passage from Isaiah, we read God's vision for how we ill one day live together: It will be a feast for all people, with rich, fatty foods, well-aged wines, and God near enough to tenderly wipe away our very last tears!

Until that day, God gives us signs and reminders of the country of heaven. Lee Francis was such a sign and promise. A clear, true messenger of God's love for each of us. May we honor her and continue her life through our own courage to become the selves we are given to be, to speak the truth only we can say, to carry the cross only we can carry, to answer the call that only we can hear.

May we gather all God's people to God's heart through words and lives of compassion.

May we keep on growing all though this life which bumps right up to eternity, keeping our hearts supple and warm, so that God can stretch and shape and fill them with more and more love.

In her last E-mail to many of you, she wrote of her fall just outside the church on the day of her confirmation. "never have I laid in a street gutter. So I have now. From the gutter the Church looked beautiful with the morning sun shining on it highlighting a huge colorful banner of Christ which was hung on what would be the steeple. I never knew the banner was there. I had never seen it as I don't look up when I'm in the car. Anyhow I immediately saw the Spiritual application and my own testimony personified. In the gutter I saw my Saviour, Jesus Christ. From the gutter to Christ. St. Andrew's can now say they picked up a poor old soul out of the gutter, brushed her off, took her in the Church where the Bishop of Mississippi confirmed her and a new Lee Frances was born!"