Sermon for Burial of Roberta Richardson DuTeil - 9.6.25 Singing the Mele of your Soul

Sermon Begins @ 34:15

Ho’omakaukau…

Are you ready?

This is the typical way that we begin a mele or a hula in Hawai’i, and the response is, “ae,” which means “yes.”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

A mele - besides being the first part of Mele Kalikimaka, or “Merry Christmas – is the hawaiian word for a song or chant.

On this day as we prepare to lay our Tutu to her final rest - with Gratdaddy at last – I’m moved to preach to you about the Mele of your soul.

Now, there are three particular things that I want to focus on: first, a mele may use many symbols, but it usually has one overarching theme or puana. Second, if your life is a mele, fear may tempt you to change the theme of your song. Third, every mele has a final verse.

I want to suggest to you today that

God has placed a mele inside of each of our souls, a secret chord made for each of us, a song that can only be sung by each in turn.

And, in God’s wisdom, God has provided us with examples of people so in-tune with the beautiful sound that permeates the universe, that if you sing your mele in harmony with them, the beauty – in the end - will surpass all your understanding,

And you will know that nothing in all of creation can separate you from the love of God, not even death.

So let’s begin; Before Queen became a colloquial term for anyone you are trying to build-up, we – in Hawai’i – had powerful kings and queens.

Our last sovereign monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, was a gifted poet, storyteller, and songwriter. 

She wrote about 200 mele during her lifetime.

Her most famous composition was Aloha ‘oe, which she wrote while returning to Honolulu from a dinner party in 1877.

What made the Queen particularly gifted was her ability to use symbolism to represent people and things poetically. She loved to sing about flowers, the island breezes, the wildlife, and more;

But each word meant something more than just the pikake, or the lani, or the makani.

This came in handy during the political upheaval and takeover of the islands and her captivity by government officials in 1893.

Queen Lili’uokalani began using her skill with metaphor to communicate to her people through her mele, printed in the hawaiian print newspaper.

On house arrest in Iolani Palace, she would write songs in hawaiian to let her people know she was okay and that she did not desire bloodshed in retaliation for the coup; most famously in what became known as the “Queen’s Prayer.”

In these love songs to her people – in her mele – she reflected not only her unwavering spirit of aloha, but also her deep Christian value of non-violence.

She teaches us to be strong and just in the face of injustice, as Jesus taught us in the lead up to his crucifixion.

The refrain common to both: “Forgive them.”

Her mele in harmony with the one who created and then became a part of that creation.

Queen Lili’uokalani’s witness also shows us the power of having a strong and faithful mele to sing even when – or maybe especially when – we face the hardest of times;

Because she was separated from everything that she had ever known, and yet she held firm with authenticity, she didn’t change her song, when many facing her circumstances might have chosen a different path.

Which leads us to our second insight; fear might tempt you to change your mele.

The Apostle Paul tells us that we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear and then promises us that nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God.

Now, I don’t know about you, but over the past few months since we lost our Tutu, and over this past week as I’ve felt anew the weight of people and things lost to time, I have been wrestling with this idea of separation and what it has to do with fear.

As I’ve reflected on my own feelings of separation, it has occurred to me that it might be one of the scariest things that we face as human beings, on an emotional level.

When we are young, we look for our mother in a grocery store, but all we find are strangers, because we wandered a little too far and got lost.

We cry and wail until our mother finds us and soothes us with an embrace.

As we get older we go to school and we have to take the first step on a journey toward independence; we begin to separate from the beauty childhood.

We leave for college or trade school or to set out on our own;

We get married or move along down our own path seeking to find ourselves;

We come home and things have changed. We have changed.

In adulthood, we each begin to fashion our own identities.  We pick up some new things, we keep some of the old, and maybe we find that a long the way separation has also included a divide in how we each think about the world, and so we may feel separated from those we love.

We learn over time that there are some places that we cannot go back to - not the way they were - though we long for them desperately; and that feels like separation.

Maybe it’s a childhood home that is no longer really ours and we feel untethered from a place where roots were planted, or places as simple as a two story Burger King have been replaced as the world keeps turning in our absence.

And then there is the great separation. What C.S. Lewis called the Great Divorce; 

The separation that comes through death, where we have to say goodbye to people and things that were once our center of gravity.

Tutu knew this kind of separation all too well.

Our Gratdaddy - Fr. Claude to most of you - passed away in 1997.  For almost 30 years, our Tutu lived with this great separation.

It became a part of her song. But, despite the loss, her theme never changed, the love never faded.

Until her last day, Tutu was still talking story, telling about her Claude and what she always called “our ministry.”

The last time I was with her in person this past year, we were sitting in her living room.

She was in her chair, and as we sat there together, she looked across the room where some mail and books had gotten stacked up, and she looked at me and said, “Christopher, would you move those things, I can’t see Claude.”

So, of course, I obliged.

When I moved the books, there was her framed photo of Gratdaddy that so many of us have seen a million times at her house; not the young swashbuckling priest out to save the world, but the man with whom she reached the golden goal, more than 50 years of marriage.

This picture must have been taken right before we left Hawai’i in 1993. 

You can still see the roguish sparkle in his eye – that sign of wit and intelligence that was part of his ethos – but you can also see the barest hint of the Parkinson’s disease that took him from us so slowly.

Looking across at this picture together, Tutu smiled and said, “Oh there you are, hello sweetheart!”

Separation was bitter, but there was no fear in it. Roberta Richardson DuTeil believed in the promise and it played out in the mele of her soul.

Her love for Claude was her window to God and nothing in all of Creation could separate her from that love.

We often fear separation, because it hurts and it can wound; can cause lasting pain or grief.

And when we fear, it may cause us to lose our way, to act out, or to change our mele as we seek to protect ourselves from hurt and pain.

Beloved, Transitions and separations in the life of a person, or a church happen and they can be scary, they may change our narrative, and worst of all, we may have no control over any of it, but they don’t have to rupture our theme.

In Jazz, they call it a blue note, a discordant moment and as long as it doesn’t take over the song, it can add an austere and haunting beauty of its own as it resolves back into the theme of the song.

In our reading from Job, we see a man who lost everything.

He’s lost his whole family and even his friends ask him what he did to deserve his suffering as they abandon him to his plight.

Even God seems to be distant as Job cries out to the universe for salvation from his suffering.

The only thing he has left is his own integrity, and it is from this place that he sings his own mele, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been destroyed even then in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself and my eyes behold, who is my friend and not a stranger.”

His theme was connection with God and though his story was changed for a time, he remained faithful to that theme.

Our gospel lesson talks about the separation of the sheep and goats;

A separation – I would point out – that though it appears to happen at the end of the age by Jesus’ choosing, was clearly already happening during the lifetime of each person.

“When did I see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger,” Jesus asks, “when did I see you naked, sick or in prison?”

It was during your life, when Jesus came to your house in a shape that you did not expect, or in a way that you did not want, and you entertained an angel without knowing it.

I would suggest to you that the theme of the sheep was compassion; a feeling that when people near you end up in a bad situation, there is probably a reason for it, the same thing could or has happened to me, and so the proper response is connection rather than separation.

For the goats in the story, either fear or callousness became the theme; a feeling that there isn’t enough to share, or that most deadly of words; deserve. what have you done to deserve my care?

My grandparents never made anybody deserve love. They understood the deep chasm between human prIde (spelled with a capital ‘I’) and God’s Grace;

They knew, as they both often said, that you’re often at your most unlovable, when you need love the most.

That when you’re at your lowest, you can either keep digging or throw down the shovel and seek restoration with a little help.

Gratdaddy lived that reality in his darkest days, Tutu stood next to him, and so they knew healing was possible.

That blue note allowed them to add a new symbol to their song, which went along with their theme of compassion;

HIS, a trinity of letters that stands for the Institute for Human Services, while subtly indicating the first three letters of Jesus’ Holy Name.

Because, though they would never thump you with a Bible before helping you, they always recognized that the mele of their souls was best sung in harmony with the great universal chorus of Jesus and his angels.

IHS has been a lifeline to this city for 47 years, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to Connie Mitchell and everyone (guests, volunteers, and staff) over the years who in small and large ways have sung a song of dignity for every human being that began with free peanut butter sandwiches in a store front.

Their life together was their mele that they gave to the world and to each of us.

My question for you today is this: what song will you sing?  What will be your theme? What is the mele of your soul, composed by the God who created you for Love’s sake.

If you find yourself in a place in your journey where you are committed to Jesus and his Way, continue your journey with a renewed spiritual imagination, knowing that His promise has released you from slavery to fear.

You will do great things, if you keep Jesus’ love close to you.

If you find yourself in a more tenouous relationship with faith, let me encourage you to always be a seeker.

Find one theme in Jesus’ life that makes sense to you and see if His way and his life teaches you something new and true, or resonates with something you’ve always felt deep in your heart.

And here’s a secret, when you get away from the noise and really meet Jesus, whether it converts you or not, you will find a friend for life.

So, we have seen that a mele, a song, can have many symbols, but usually has one main theme.  We have seen how fear can tempt us to change our theme.

Now, the final piece: Every mele has a final verse.

It has become customary in many hawaiian songs that the last verse goes something like this…

Ha’ina ia mai ana kapuana.

What it means is something like this, “go back to the beginning,” “repeat the refrain,” or “repeat the theme.”

In some ways it’s like saying, “that song was so good, I wanna hear it again.”

To me, this means that no matter what happened through the course of the song, the ups, the downs, the good days, the bad, the times we succeeded and our accomplishments satisfied and delighted us, the times that we failed and realized our dependence on God alone, the days when we clearly felt purpose and passion for our theme, the days when we let it slip through our fingers,

If it was a good song, well sung, it’s worth learning, and it’s worth repeating.

Roberta and Claude DuTeil’s lives were never just about peanut butter or a wind beneath wings, sermons in soup, or even ku’ukama street.

Those were the symbols of a life well-lived.

In the end, the importance of our mele is that our refrain will echo through eternity.

During their lives, my Tutu and Gratdaddy each heard the mele of Jesus and said to themselves, “that was so good, I wonder if I could sing my own version.”

And they did, they sang with majesty. (Probably the only song that Claude DuTeil ever sang in key).

And so can you. You can sing the mele of your soul.

Because, our resurrection hope is that at the end of our lives God will say to each one of us; to me and to you, “that song was so good could you repeat the refrain for me here? Will you set aside fear and separation? Are you ready to join the chorus of Holy, Holy, Holy and add the secret chord – that I gave you – in symphony with the Great Mele of creation; with a Queen, a Tutu, a Peanut Butter Minister, and the Carpenter who fashioned them all?

Beloved, I wish you strength for the journey, and I have one final question.

Ho’omakaukau?

Ae.

He Lanikila Ma Ke Kea

Amen.