St. Charles Episcopal Church - St. Charles, Illinois
Burial of Elizabeth Carpenter - March 19, 2011
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Hebrews10:39-11:3; 12:1-2; John 14:1-6
The Reverend John L. McCausland
It's a commonplace at funerals for people who have lived as long as Liz Carpenter - ninety-eight years - to say their passing marks the end not only of their own life but of the era they represented. Yet that is most certainly true in the case of this, Liz's beloved parish, St. Charles Episcopal Church. Liz was the last of this parish's founding members, a formidable group indeed, a number of whom were not only still alive, but very much still in control when I myself arrived as their new rector, back in 1985.
I remember the interview with the search committee, of which Liz was a member. I was just 18 months out of seminary and St. Charles Episcopal was looking to replace its founding rector, the beloved Frederick Ludtke, after a tenure of thirty-three years. "How will we explain to the congregation that we've hired someone so inexperienced?" asked Liz, when the turn to question this interviewee came around to her. (Liz never beat around the bush.) It must have been the Holy Spirit that led me to reply, "Tell them you got me cheap." I think that answer must have satisfied Liz, because, as many of you know, she was never one to turn down a good bargain.
As any new priest will, I made some changes in worship after I arrived. These did not always set well with Liz, but she always came to talk to me about whatever upset her. She would sit down in my office, open her purse, and announce, "I have a little list." And we would go down her list, point by point, me explaining what I was trying to do, Liz asking questions until she understood. And she was an amazingly good sport about these innovations. One Lent, I talked about the sacrament of Confession, and, behold, Liz came to make her confession - the first in all her life as an Episcopalian. Some young members started a meditation service, sitting on cushions up here in the sanctuary. Liz took part - though on a chair, not on the floor. It took several years, but finally I was not the new rector, but Liz's rector. And so, in her instructions for this service, was included the request I return to preach. It is my pleasure and my honor to do so. Elizabeth Carpenter was a rare soul, in so many, many ways. We all miss her sorely, but now she belongs to the Lord - and is probably sitting down at this moment in his office, taking out her list of things that bother her about the way affairs are conducted in heaven.
Let me say something about these men and women who comprised the founders of this church, back in 1948. It was right after the Second World War, a time when America turned in relief to family and church and all things normal, after a decade and a half of depression and war. St. Charles was a manufacturing and farming community back then, just beginning to turn into a suburb. Liz Carpenter was 35, working in medical records at Delnor Hospital, with a husband and two young children. These founders were not, for the most part, wealthy people. The wealthy people went to St. Mark's in Geneva which, as Liz was fond of pointing out, contributed not a penny to starting the congregation in St. Charles. The first step in their church-planting plans was to open a thrift shop, the dollars from which sustained the new congregation through its early years. There were many bake sales, many potlucks, that went into the building of St. Charles' Parish.
This story is not at all exceptional for congregations started in the postwar era - or for the people who founded them, like Liz Carpenter. We call them now the "great generation." They were great in their dedication to building and strengthening the institutions and fabric of the America for which they had sacrificed and fought. They cared about what would build up families, what would give (to use the words of later commentators) social capital or "thickness" to their communities, and stability to their lives. This was not a "reality show" or a "dance with the stars" for them. It was not "virtual reality," life experienced through the media. It was bricks and mortar, the old "thee and thou" Book of Common Prayer with your name in gold on the leather cover, given to you at Confirmation and carried in your hand to church each Sunday. It was doing your duty, standing up for right, kneeling for prayer and raising your hand whenever asked to volunteer for your church and your community.
Things have changed . . . haven't they? Last spring Wink Bangs sent me an email update on Liz's health. And it made me realize that I was at that moment just the age that Liz was when I came here as rector in 1985. Like Liz, and like so many of you here this morning, I have seen so many changes in the world and in the church in my lifetime - even in the not quite thirty years since I was ordained, the almost twenty years since I left here.
Last Saturday I was at a stewardship institute back in my diocese of New Hampshire - an annual event led by our enormously talented canon for congregational life. One of the things Canon LaFond told us is that we have exactly eighteen years (I don't know where the number came from, but it seems right), eighteen years left when we will still have people who come to church and give to church because they believe it to be their duty, the thing expected by God. There are fewer and fewer such people even now - the generation of Liz Carpenter, the generation that is passing. In eighteen years they will be all gone. And then, said Canon LaFond, it will all depend on our ability to sell. (He didn't use that word; but it's what he meant.) The church will have to bid for support, make its case, like Public Radio and the YMCA and the rest of the non-profit world.
If that is so, we will have witnessed a complete reversal of the dynamic of Liz and her generation. They did what they did - built this church, supported it, did its work, tolerated its new prayer books and hymnals and its untried fledgling priests - they did all this because they put God first, not themselves. They didn't go church shopping to find a church that suited their likes. They built a church in their community because they knew Christ wanted his followers to plant churches. Yes, sometimes they lost their way a bit in the thickets of thrift shops and guilds and proper decorum (the time Liz admonished a young man that "we don't cross the aisle to exchange the Peace at Holy Cross"). But their day-by-day dedication was founded on their deep, unquestioned commitment to God and to the church. If, indeed, we are losing that, then it seems to me we are losing what is the essence of the Gospel.
Liz would have nodded her head hearing me say that in the "old dispensation" it was not thought proper to deliver a eulogy at a funeral - to concentrate on the life and accomplishments of the deceased. Funeral preaching was to center on God, on the Resurrection, and on our hope in the life to come. So if we have talked about Liz, and these others of the great founding generation, we have done so because their lives were founded on these very things: God, the Resurrection, hope in future parousia. They knew that bricks and mortar here led to glory hereafter.
For as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us:
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. By faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. . . . Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfector of our faith.
We thank Elizabeth Carpenter, and all the others in the cloud of saints who surround us, for the heritage they have left us. And we pray that we may build on their foundation for those yet to come. God bless you all, God bless this parish, God bless Liz Carpenter, entered now into glory.