A Curse and A Blessing: The Memorial Service of Jean Alison Holmes
Penrith, England, Saturday August 12, 2022
Notes I prepared and delivered in honor of my mother’s wishes for me to speak at her funeral. Due to COVID travel restrictions, I was not able to speak in person at her funeral service, although I did prepare a video recording that was played on the day. The following notes are some thoughts I handwrote in preparation for the small, family memorial service conducted a few miles from Penrith in the beautiful Lake District of England.
CURSE
Genesis 3:17-22, notably 19b-20 “For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” . . . “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.”
A word that Mum often used was a Swahili one–FUMBI–dust. Whether a cobweb or some ethereal particles on the carpet that needed disposing of. we would joke about the dust (pronounced in a Yorkshire accent) or the fluff (similarly said in Yorkshire tones).
God’s Word is very sobering in how it describes the universal human condition. Gen 2:7 “The LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground”–then, after disobedience to the clear and distinctly revealed will of God, the pronouncement of the curse (Gen 2:17) “…You shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die…”
Our first parents knowingly disobeyed the revealed will of their Creator and therefore brought disorder and death into our world.
Here, very starkly, in these human remains, is the evidence, the proof, of the outworking of sin, disobedience to God.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That is our universal and inevitable condition. We may ignore it, suppress it from our minds, party and hedonize it, to “not be so morbid about it”, but, like taxes, it won’t go away and we will eventually encounter it. Emily Dickinson’s words are so apt:
“Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me.”
That’s the curse.
BLESSING
But there is also blessing. What is it? Consider the next verse–verse 20: “So the man called his wife’s name Eve.” ZOE = Living, Life, Life-Giver. Staring inevitable death in the face, Adam is given faith to see that his wife will yet deliver life–first of all in their progeny: they will have sex and they will have babies–and ultimately in the the Seed of the woman, Jesus the Messiah.
Jesus, God in human flesh, was a perfect man–unique and sinless. Paul the apostle compares and contrasts this in 1 Corinthians 15:45. “The last Adam–Jesus–became a life-giving spirit.”
CURSE: By nature, each of us will inherit the curse of Adam–physical death.
BLESSING: By grace, each of us may inherit eternal life through the person and work of Jesus, the Seed of the woman, through the substitutionary work He did in living a perfect life on our behalf and then in His death, receiving an eternity’s worth of punishment so that our sins may be imputed to Him, and His righteousness to us.
As we sprinkle the remains of our mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, we remember her–lovingly–as the one responsible for bringing us into this world. And with thanksgiving to God for the good news of His grace that, through Jesus, He rescues sinners who repent and trust in Him alone–to Heaven.
I often told her, referring to the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, that my only hope in life and in death is that Jesus has lived and died for sinners such as I am , and I have no other hope than in Him.
This is a sober and sobering event–and I administer these words in a way as best I can to honor her wish that I should speak at her funeral.
We do not lower her body in a casket into the ground. Instead, we scatter these, her earthly remains, to be distributed by the winds of heaven from this location where the ashes of my father, Reginald Frank Holmes, were similarly scattered some nineteen years ago under the same sun–and we await the sure and certain promise that God, for whom nothing is impossible, shall gather and reconstitute and rejuvenate these very same particles this very dust… into resurrected bodies.
Are we sobered by this? Surely so!
But we may be joyful, too, as we consider how God wove the account of redemption into Mum’s life, so that she was born of God-fearing parents and how she was able to learn not only from her upbringing but through God’s Word faithfully preached that there is a way back for sinners to be reconciled to God through Jesus–and so we can conclude with the words of Fanny Crosby that she and Dad loved:
To God be the glory, great things He has done
So loved He the world that He gave us His Son
Who yielded His life and atonement for sin
And opened the life gate that all may go in
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Let the earth hear His voice
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Let the people rejoice
O come to the Father, through Jesus the Son
And give Him the glory, great things He has done!
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Several months ago, I received an inquiry about how to publish a book. It had a fascinating title: Ninety-Five Theses for a New Reformation–A Road Map for Post-Evangelical Christianity. With its depth and breadth of content, yet it’s surprisingly easy-to-read style (not to mention the author’s own poetic contributions–he is an accomplished poet) I needed little encouragement to help him in the process, and so we set to work to agree a design format and cover to present it with appeal, warmth, and gravitas. Don recently shared news of his book’s release under his own imprint, Semper Reformanda Publications. Here’s what he wrote:
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