The Funeral Sermon of My Littlest Parishioner - Gabriel

Into Your wounded Hands do we commend our souls, O Christ God, my Jesus.

Gabriel was concieved from the love of a Christian Father and Christian mother. He was diagnosed with trisomy 18, before he was 4 months in his mother's womb. Some doctors advised his parents to book an early "therapeutic abortion".  His parents decided to love the precious gift that was in the womb, inplicitly placing their trust in God. Gabriel was stillborn! He never saw the light of day, but through the faith of his parents, he sees the light of life. This is the sermon that I preached at Gabriel's burial.

In Christ's love,

Fr. Shnork

Psalm 139:13-18

13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.

Isaiah 49:1, 15, 16.

Before I was born, the Lord chose me and appointed me to be his servant. The lord says, Can a woman forget her own baby? and not love the child she bore? Even if a mother should forget her child, I will never forget you. I have written your name on the palms of my hands.

John 10:27-29

27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.

28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.

29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand.

Grace, peace and mercy be unto you from God our Father and from Jesus Christ (†) our Lord, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

God says to the prophet Isaiah that (your) name is written on my hand, the very hand of God from which no one can snatch his sheep, especially the littlest sheep of his flock--a little lamb like Gabriel.

This is because, Gabriel's name is written on God's hand--written with His own blood, the blood of the everlasting testament, the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ who although Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and immortal, was yet Crucified for our sin and died according to His humanity. He lovingly shed his most precious blood so that we who were dead in our trespasses might have eternal life. The life to which John and Annie* dedicated Gabriel from his very Conception, that God knit together in the womb. Gabriel, the person, did not see the light of this world, but he was yet "fearfully and wonderfully" fashioned by the hand of God. As Annie was sustained in baptismal grace, clinging to God's promises throughout her pregnancy, so did little Gabriel receive life giving and spiritual nourishment form his Christian mother whose prayers to God were echoed in her womb.

The trust therefore that John and Annie must have in God as Christians is not in vain, because the one to whose hands they have committed the soul of their little one belongs to the One who trampled death underfoot by his own death, the Risen Lord Jesus. The same Lord, who created the stars and the seas, the planets and the trees, everything on earth and all things in heaven, became a human fetus in the womb of the Virgin Mother in order to save the most precious of His creation.

Many people throughout time have asked why bad things happen to good people. The church has even prescribed a discipline to this theological question. It is called Theodicy. The Fathers of the Orthodox Church have answered this most disturbing question quite astonishingly. They have said that God allows certain sorrows to come into our lives so that we might flee from a false dependence on our own abilities securities, false sense of control. Being left naked before the Crucified God, our Savior Lord, begging Him, and crying out Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

When this happens a most astonishing thing happens. In a new and blinding light, curse miraculously turns into blessing, pain turns into joy, darkness turns into light, tears turn into smiles and death turns into resurrection. it is this reality to which the unbelieving world is blind and the reason why the heathen has no hope and why he clings to his sorrow. The faithful man sees that what seemed like the worst catastrophe in the world was really the door through which Christ issues an invitation to blessing and renewal as says the Psalmist, "Turn to me and live."

This afternoon, a pastor friend of mine will be officiating at a funeral for a woman of 100 years old. Her death at this age may seem natural, yet this death seems completely unnatural. Why? The Lord says that "all our days are but a hand-breath," our days are numbered. What remains constant is God's love, the Love out of which He created us and the Love through which He redeemed us because, "God is Love." Our Father's love revealed in Christ brings a blessed assurance. An assurance that is vouchsafed in His promise.

John and Annie, in the hour or so that they were granted to be with their child in the hospital, experienced the joy of parenthood, a gift that surpasses the passage of years, a gift that cannot be measured or improved upon despite the length of our days. Their love for their son is an image of the kind of love with which God holds us in His arms, except that no one can snatch His sheep from His Hands, those precious wounded Hands on which our names are written in His Blood.

Dear John and Annie you as Christian parents have brought your son to this Holy Church, filled with faith, hope and love, in order to entrust the soul of Gabriel to the loving embrace of our heavenly Father, knowing that "he will awake again."

For this reason we pray to God that in His loving kindness he draw nearer to the both of you in your loss or rather by His Spirit draw you nearer to him, so that he can comfort you with the peace that surpasses all understanding and speech. The peace that is sealed in your hearts by the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life by whose power little Gabriel will rise on the awesome day of Jesus' Coming in Glory, Amen.

†

* These are not the actual names of Gabriel's parents.