Sermon for Roberta "Tutu" Richardson DuTeil's Funeral in Texas

Sermon Begins @ 46:47

I just want to start this morning with something that will blow your mind just a little bit.

Tutu lived to be 103 years old… amazing!

With us today we have lots of our beloved little ones, quite a few who were born after Tutu turned 100 years old.

God willing, maybe one of them will live to be 100.

Before Tutu, there were women and men who also lived to be 100 years old, eyes that may have beheld Tutu as a baby that stretched back from 1922 to 1822.

If that’s the case, have you ever thought about the fact that the distance between you and Jesus is only 19 people? 19 people of faith that have lived, persevered, and brought Jesus’ love directly to you.

I don’t know about you, but that blows my mind.

Tutu and Gratdaddy have a treasure trove of love letters, mostly from the time that they were apart during the War. And Gratdaddy would always sign the end of the letter, Love 3, because God was always a part of their love story.

When they first got back to each other after the War, they went to a little Episcopal Church together that Sunday and one of the lessons for the day was Psalm 144, which we read a few minutes ago.

The story goes that during that reading, Gratdaddy underlined a particular verse for Tutu, and the results of that verse are here with us today, and they’re everything that the two of them would have wanted.

“May your sons be like well-nurtured plants, and your daughters like the pillars that adorn the temple.”

In honor of the love letters, I hope you don’t mind if I make this sermon a love letter of my own.

Dear Tutu,

I can remember the first time that I heard the Short Course.

Of course, anyone who spent more than ten minutes with you would hear about the Short Course…

I’m not going to say you were proud of it… but what’s a different way to say that that doesn’t use the ‘p’ word?

You considered the Short Course the seminal work of you and Gratdaddy’s ministry together, and I’m always love to hear you say “our ministry,” because you were the wind beneath his wings.

Now, I have to pause for a minute, because other people are listening to our letter, who may not know about the Short Course.  Don’t worry, yet, I’ll tell them.

The Short Course was a Christian education class that Gratdaddy used to give for members of the church.  New members, who were just learning about who Jesus was and how the Episcopal Church thought about him;

Members who had been around for a while.

Gratdaddy believed that you could always learn something new about Jesus.

For years, as I was growing up in Kailua; first up by Kalaheo High School, and then - by some wild providence - across the backyard from you and Gratdaddy, I had heard about the Short Course.

But, I knew it as a loose print book with a plastic spine binding that my Slane grandmother had helped to type up, and that everyone always talked about.

I didn’t really know what was in it.

When I got into college or maybe a little bit afterward, you gave me a copy for my very own.

If I’m honest, I promptly put it with all of the other things that I would read someday. 

I don’t know how it happened exactly, but with a great effort, and Allen Buffington’s expertise, the old audio recordings of Gratdaddy’s Short Course were put on CDs and I, like many of your grandchildren was the grateful recipient of those recordings.

What I remember from the first time that I put the CD in was, “oh I remember that clicking sound that Gratdaddy used to make, I remember his voice, though the recording made it a little bit higher.” But mostly I remember this overwhelming feeling of home;

Not in – like – the house, or “this is the city I live in” kind of way, but like I was hearing something that I knew to be deeply true, and something that had lived in me for my whole life.

What I realized was that even though I had never cracked a page on the Short Course, it was already there, laying dormant like C.S. Lewis’ “deep magic,” or like a truth that reverberated in my soul and in harmony with world.

And that was really because of you, and it was also because of Uncle Duke, and Aunt Susie, because of Uncle Bob, and because of my mom, all living out the Short Course and often vociferously repeating things that were contained therein.

Gratdaddy was already beginning to decline from dementia when I was about 8, but his ethos had been so ingrained in the family that his love for Jesus and Jesus’ Way of Love was already living in me, waiting to burst out.

I begin this way, this morning, because for many of your grandchildren and maybe even some of your great grandchildren, who have read or heard the Short Course, they may have had a similar experience.

But especially for all of our family who only heard about the Short Course, or are just hearing about it for the first time right now;

This sermon lives in them, even if we would use different words, it is there waiting to burst out, waiting to bring love back into the world, waiting for love to be the light that the darkness of this world cannot comprehend and cannot overcome.

There are so many things that I could pull out for from the storehouse of treasure that you and Gratdaddy gave us, but this isn’t a Short Course class, so I’ll have to choose just one.

But which one?.. Okay not the Charlie Price comma “everything that is, seen and unseen.”

Oh that’s a good one, but no, I did that as part of my “things my 103 year old grandma wants you to know” sermon series already a couple of months ago.

Maybe trespasses, one is a verb and one is a noun, they should sound different… no, no, you would love that if I told everyone, but …

Okay… yeah, this is a good one… that might actually just work…

Tutu, I want to tell you what you and Gratdaddy taught me about love.

The Apostle Paul had a lot to say about Love;

(As an aside, this isn’t a normal reading for a memorial service or funeral. I actually asked for it to be included, because for one reason or another any time I read this passage, it’s the one passage where I hear your voice in my mind every time.)

Paul calls Love the greatest thing; greater than faith, greater than hope; Love is the foundation for everything that we are, every hope we have, and every bit of faith that we can muster.

Jesus tells us what love looks like in action in the gospel of Matthew; “when did we see you? you saw me in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the one who needed clothes, who needed healing, who was in prison.”

But what did Gratdaddy think, what did you show us?

Gratdaddy would talk a lot about the feelings of love.

Love is a feeling, and it creates feelings in us.

This is the most basic form of love.

Feeling love is a wonderful thing. It makes your heart feel like it’s burning or like gravity is pulling you toward something that you want to fall into.

Feelings of love are how all manner of relationships are started; parents and children, people who want to get married, finding the right church home, establishing life-long friendships.

The only downside to feelings is that they are ephemeral, they can change. What once was bright and wild and burning settles into something steady and warm; not as exciting, but more stable.

The feeling of love, then, is only a beginning. It’s not the fullness of how you become Love.

Okay what’s next? Love is an action.

Beyond the feelings, love is also what you do, how you show up, what you’re willing to give.

But love doesn’t give what “I want you to have,” it gives what “you need,” food, water, healing, a shirt off your back, or just noticing you, so you don’t feel invisible.

Often inconvenient, love requires that we put ourselves away while we tend to another; not selflessly, but unselfishly.

I’m not worried about me, when you’re in need; whether I think you deserve help, whether I think you brought it on yourself, whether I agree with what you’ve done or who you are;

Love as an action is patient, kind, does not envy, boast, but also it is not proud (which means it is not rooted in me or my ego). True love - in action – is like Nike, it just does it.

Love as an action is a wonderful and necessary thing. It does more than just the feelings of love require, and so it is a more advanced stage of love.

But simply acting out love will not get you all the way to becoming love.

The last step, I think, is something that our family knows because of who you and Gratdaddy were.

In our family, we learned that love is a response.

Beyond feelings and actions, which begin inside of us and emanate out;

Love as a response takes into account that the majority of what we go through in life begins outside of us, and then we have to figure out how to live and be in an imperfect world.

Almost all of our hurts and pains, our disappointments and dissonances, our angers and resentments in life come down to the difference between what we want or expect to happen in our lives, and what actually happens.

To respond with love means that you have set your anchor in a storm, and no matter what happens, what feelings intrude, what actions others do, what failures you experience; you choose love as the way that you will be in the world.

You will fail from time to time. You will react out of feelings of anger, disrespect, difference of opinion, feeling invisible, or uncared for;

But you can always return to Love’s way.

Tutu, this world has enough resounding gongs and clanging cymbals. It has all it can take of people prophesying this and that. It has more knowledge than any one person could ever fathom.

Paul pulls no punches; If you are not becoming love, you will become nothing more than these empty things.

if you do not have love, you have nothing and you gain nothing.

You and Gratdaddy taught us that if we will just surrender to Love, Love never fails.

If we respond with love, we will become love.

And when that happens, all of the clanging cymbals, all of the dissonant voices telling us what to believe, or what to think, or who we should be; all of the resounding gongs that vy for our attention and stoke up our grievances, all of the little battles we have with one another, we’ll become dissatisfied with them, because while they may feel true in a moment, we don’t see love in them;

The love of you and Gratdaddy; the Love of Jesus.

Tutu, you lived to be 103 years old. One of the most amazing things that we can think of.

You did it eating ice cream for dinner, watching sunsets on the farm, cheering for Bama football even when they were trying to take you to the hospital.

You did it climbing to the second floor of Burger King, riding Raami, lauging, complaining, doing puzzles, talking story.

You were the most permanent person or thing that any of us have experienced in this world, and even you – praise be to God for small mercies – even you have passed away from this world.

All things will come to an end, but not love.

Now, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to finish the rest by talking to our family and friends.

Tutu’s love lives inside of you, whether you have one cardinal memory of her, or so many that you could never fill up a whole bookcase.

Her life was a sermon, and I hope it continues to live in you until with grace her sermon of love bursts out into your life at an unexpected moment; when you feel her love, when you act out of love, when you respond with love in this broken world.

You are the 21st person in a long line of faithful people that has received the Good News of Jesus’ Way of Love and the salvation to eternal life that he has promised, don’t let it stop with you.

In 100 years, let it be said of your life, I don’t know how or why, but that was the most loving person that I ever knew,

And we’ll spread Tutu and Gratdaddy’s love to generation 22.

May all of our children be like well-nurtured plants and like the pillars carved to adorn the temple.

In the name of the Father who created us, the Christ who saved us, and the Holy Spirit who empower us.

Love 3

Amen.