DEFIANCE

The following notes were the bulk of a homily I was invited to deliver at the Memorial Service of Jan Wood Rorie at the First United Methodist Church of Batesville, Arkansas on July 8, 2015. Jan was the sister of my brother-in-law Bruce Wood.

One the places my travels through America would take me at least twice a month was a small town in northwestern Ohio not too far from Toledo called Defiance. On my first trip there I sort of expected to find a belligerent combative group of citizens with their jaws set and their fists raised high ready to take on anyone would dare try to control or influence them. Of course I found just the opposite.

But the origin on the name interested me.

I found out in time the town was named after a military fort (Fort Defiance) which in turn took its name from the blustery claim of General Anthony Wayne who stood at the confluence of two rivers and saw the locations strategic advances in 1794 and said, “I defy the English … and all the devils of hell to take it!”

Our presence here today is, among other things, an act of defiance.  We gather to honor Jan, to remember her and share those memories with each other and in so doing to be grateful to her and to her Creator for helping shape us in ways large and small into who we are today.  And we come to defy.

Because at times like this we find ourselves walking tightrope strung between two posts. One post can perhaps be called ‘nihilism’ – a belief often unspoken that claims none of this really matters because the end of all our living and all our striving and all our efforts to make the world and our communities a better place don’t really amount to a hill of beans. It all ends with decay, destruction, the ash heap, death.

And the other pole is a kind of fantasy often put forward (sorry to say) in places like this that says, ‘Look – don’t worry about death. It’s just a portal – just a passage – a kind of hallway – to a much happier place. Don’t be anxious. Death is just an illusion, only worrisome to those without faith. Don’t worry – be happy’.

So on our tightrope we turn in both directions and say a Defiant ‘NO!’  Death is real and its powerful and it breaks our hearts into pieces. It clouds our eyes and crushes our courage at times. It leaves us feeling helpless, lost and alone.

And we turn in the other direction and say another Defiant ‘NO!’ to the Evangelists of Despair – those who invite us to give up, to quit trying, to surrender to the decay and death that soaks into every corner of our lives.

It does matter. Jan’s life and her love and her successes and her failures do matter. Her being, and her being with us, is how we got here. Jan is precious thread in the tapestry.

Bible scholars call him ‘Qohelet,’ but we know him as Ecclesiastes. But I think we should call him 'The Weaver.' He knew that all the life business we go through which seems full of opposites really make up the threads of a unified, integrated tapestry. So he wrote, in his own act of defiance, theses words ...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
  a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
    a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
   a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
    a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.