Rector’s Note: My Lord what a Mourning-5.29.25

Last Saturday we held the funeral for parishioner Larry Sibley, our long-time member, teacher and friend. He planned his funeral carefully – from the readings to the hymns – and there was a great deal that he was teaching and proclaiming in the service. I thought I’d share my sermon here to capture some of the lessons that I stumbled upon in preparing the service, especially for those who couldn’t attend.

I also invite you to read and reflect on the Scriptures that he chose for the day. At the end of this article, I include a few reflection questions that we placed in the funeral leaflet, in honor of Larry’s long tradition of guiding us in deep listening to the Word revealed in Scripture.

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant, Larry. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.

Funeral Sermon for Larry Sibley, 5.24.25

A few weeks after Larry died, his daughter Andi invited me to the house to look through Larry’s books and take anything that I liked. This was an almost overwhelming invitation. A library says so much about who someone is and what they love; it’s the narrative neighborhood they lived in, filled with the friends they visited often and those they hoped to get to know better.

I selected several volumes in a rather haphazard way, hoping that Larry would guide me a bit. One of those books was The Theology of the Old Testament by Walter Brueggemann.

Don’t think that I read it between then and now. But I did manage to find it and open it in preparation for this sermon. In it, Brueggemann says that in the Hebrew Scriptures God is mainly described and revealed through people’s testimony about who God is. There is a great deal of crying out, testifying, proclaiming, dialoguing and bantering, and that’s the way we piece together who this God is who Israel loved so much and struggled to understand. Sometimes God is talking. Sometimes the people are talking. “The utterance is everything,” writes Brueggemann. (122)

The voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I answered, ‘What shall I cry?’” recounts the narrator in today’s reading from Isaiah 40. In Revelation chapter 7 we heard a great crowd that no one could count cry out. And in the 10th chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus starts by saying to us, “Very truly I tell you…”

And each of these cries, these tellings, is a testimony about who God is and what God wants for God’s beloveds. And I have to believe that this is Larry’s testimony to us as well.

Larry chose these readings carefully a long time ago in preparation for this day. And perhaps the best way to experience Larry’s nearness to us is to draw close to them and listen to what Larry is uttering through them and through the stories that we tell about him.

He says as much in the “Notes on the Liturgy” that he wrote to be included in the leaflet.

“The Shepherd theme ties all these selections together,” Larry wanted us to know. “You will notice several references to Baptism in the hymns and prayers. And, as we gather at the Lord’s Table, we will be nourished by Christ’s death and resurrection and anticipate the coming supper of the Lamb in God’s final kingdom.

”So, I invite you to pay attention to all these layers in our liturgy today, because Larry loved to explore the layers in things – relationships and religion, poetry, art and music, nature, scripture and most of all, worship. He found God in the depths of a single long look or a return over and over again to the same place. He found worship ceaselessly revealing and delightful.

Larry chose the layers for us today. Which makes me wonder, what is he telling us about who God is and where God is and who Larry is and where Larry is among us, right now?

Clearly, he wants us to consider the relationship of the shepherd and the sheep, and to look deeper into what these analogies describe.

And when we do, we find that God is one who feeds, gathers, carries and who leads. God is one who restores, provides, brings rest, protects, anoints and makes the divine self a dwelling.

We find that God is one with Jesus, the Christ, who is both shepherd and lamb, a gatherer and a gate through which his beloved may come and go.

God is a comforter from beginning to end, who wipes every tear away and guides us to life abundant – which is helpful for us here to remember. This is what the Scriptures cry out to us today — that the whole point of the story is for people to have God’s life and have it abundantly.

This is a story that Larry dedicated his life to understanding and to telling, from getting his undergrad in philosophy at the age of 23 to going to seminary and being ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was a chaplain, a professor, a writer, a Bible study leader and a campus minister. He was a husband and father and foster father. He sought God among the many layers of interfaith experience and understanding.

He loved the Word – the written word, the sung word, the proclaimed word. How many of you still have handwritten letters that he sent you over the years? And he kept the ones you wrote to him, his family told me, because they found them among his papers and cherished possessions.

Larry was a shepherd for college students, for interfaith friends, for colleagues and family and fellow parishioners. He and Lois fostered 32 newborn infants between 1996 and 2008 for Bethany Christian Services. Indeed, he was a very good shepherd.

“The voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I answered, ‘What shall I cry?’”

After Larry had that fall that put him in a wheelchair for a while, his family took him to the ocean. They wheeled him to the boardwalk where he could look out on the water. A woman came by, and she and Larry got to talking, as you can imagine would happen. The subject turned to the Bible, and the woman, looking out at the view, wondered why the Bible said there would be no ocean in heaven. She was referring to Revelation 21:1 where it says, “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” Why would there no longer be a sea, when the ocean is so beautiful and full of life? she wondered. Why wouldn’t they want to have an ocean in heaven? And Larry explained to her that to the ancients the sea was a place whose depths hid evil, housed demons and were a source of great terror. But the ancients loved rivers because those gave them life, he explained. Rivers offered sustenance and transportation and didn’t hold leviathans and demons.

Andi couldn’t shake that image of Larry doing what he was born to do all the way at the end of his life. “An old man in a wheelchair on a boardwalk and still preaching the gospel!” she exclaimed.

“The voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I answered, ‘What shall I cry?’

”Toward the end, when Larry got sick and was taken to the emergency room, he told everyone who came into his room the same thing, Andi said, “from the surgeon to the person who emptied the trash.”

“This is all an orchestra. And God is the conductor, and God wrote the music, and it’s all in God’s control. It’s all in God’s hands.”

Larry loved music – he studied it in childhood and adulthood. He played the organ and the piano and studied the violin in high school. He loved hymnody, which is why you’ll find that he squeezed hymns into just about every nook and cranny of this liturgy. He went into his final days confident that he was part of a divine song, written and led by the master conductor, and that he himself was in God’s hands.

He had special instructions for some of these songs. Like the spelling of Mourning in My Lord What a Mourning, which we’ll hear after this sermon. The spelling that Larry requested is found in some early versions of the song, which was likely written in Philadelphia by several freed Black residents, including AME Church founder Richard Allen. And we who are mourning Larry can find another layer that he is inviting us to ponder — the world that is lost when the stars begin to fall. And the one that is gained.

I didn’t know Larry long – not as long as most of you, and not nearly long enough. Every Sunday he would stop next to me on his way out of the church and say, “Well, another day in heaven!” And then he’d remind me that in the Eastern Church that was what worship was, an experience of heaven.

But it soothes my own mourning that he felt that acutely here at St. Peter’s, where he and Lois had been members since the late 1980s. At the last Lunch Club meal that he attended, we sat at table together and had a long talk. He told me that getting to sleep comfortably at night could be difficult at this point in his life.But not on Sundays. After a Sunday spent in worship at St Peter’s, he could get to sleep pain-free. That was the power of heaven.

In honor of Larry, I encourage you to keep looking among the layers within all he set before us today and all he left each of you with individually. Take the leaflet home. Re-read these scriptures that he picked just for us today. Consider all the other things he wanted to point out to you that I missed. In honor of all the Bible study guides that Larry wrote over the years, including a few he created for St Peter’s when he couldn’t hold the conversations in person anymore, I’ve offered a few reflection questions for you to consider on page 11.

And while you’re at it, hum those hymns this week or belt them out. Let them sink deep in you and rise when you are visited by mourning. And when you do, remember:

“This is all an orchestra. And God is the conductor, and God wrote the music and it’s all in God’s control. It’s all in God’s hands.” Amen.

Readings:

Isaiah 40:1–11Psalm 23Revelation 7:9–17John 10:1–18

Reflection Questions

• Consider the many shepherding verbs and descriptions that show up in today’s readings. Which ones have you experienced?

• What do these readings say to you about who God is to Larry and who God is to you?