About the Author: Sunday Sermons from Sell Chapel are written by Rev. Preston Van Deursen, Director of Pastoral Care at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown.
There was a fascinating true story in Time magazine about Melissa Deal Forth, 40, a film maker in Atlanta. It was about the day her husband Chris Deal died. It was exactly one year after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not save him, nights when she could not sleep. But Melissa was sleeping soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room and past the nurse’s station with its 360-degrees view of the ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3:00 a.m. by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being able to find Chris.
Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions. “Where have you been? Are you okay?”
Chris just smiled. “It’s fine,” he told her, “I’m all right.” His companion remained quiet, his eyes on the floor as though not wanting to be noticed. He was tall, dressed rather like Chris usually did, in a flannel shirt, new Levis and lace-up work boots that appeared as if they, too, had just been taken off the shelf. “There was no real age to him,” Melissa says. “No wrinkles. Just this perfectly smooth and pale, white, white skin and ice blue eyes. I mean I’ve never seen that color blue on any human before. They were more the blue like some of those Husky dogs have. I’ll never forget the eyes.”
Chris seemed to want to be left alone, and so she reluctantly agreed to leave. When he came back to his room, she says, “He was lit up, just vibrant. Smiling. I could see his big dimples. I hadn’t seen them in so long. He didn’t have the air of a terminally ill and very weak man anymore.”
“Who was that guy?” she asked.
“You’re not going to believe me,” Chris said.
“Yes, I will,” she answered.
“He was an angel,” Chris said. “My guardian angel.”
Melissa did believe him. “All I had to do was to look at him,” she says now, “to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had happened.”
She searched the hospital to find the man. There was no one around, and the security guards hadn’t seen anyone come or go. “After the visit, Chris told me his prayers had been answered,” she says. “I worried for a while that he thought the angel had cured his cancer. I realize now it wasn’t the cure, it was the blessing he brought with him. It was the peace of mind.” Chris died two days later.
In the 11 years since Chris’s death, Melissa says not a day has gone by when she has not thought about the angel and what he did for her husband. “Chris’ life could not be saved, but the fear and pain were taken from him,” she says. “I know what I saw, and I know it changes lives. Never, never, never will anyone be able to convince me that angels don’t exist.”
You and I are here today because we are convinced that we have been in the presence of angels. And they have touched our lives and we come to remember them.
Many of us still experience those we love within us everyday and they bring us comfort. I still look to my grandfather’s spirit for wisdom and strength
The Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians is one of the majestic passages in the New Testament. As he talks about heaven and the hereafter..he says
“You will see this inheritance with the eyes of your heart.” That is such a lovely phrase, “the eyes of your heart.” It is reminiscent of Pascal’s, “The heart has reasons the mind knows not of.” Pascal, the great French mathematician in the 17th century, right at the start of the Enlightenment, realized that reason, which in those days people believed would be invincible, had a limited realm in which to rule. It was effective only with the senses. It can work with what the senses can give it, what can be seen. But it was helpless to probe the depth of the mystery that surrounds this life
The mystery that surrounds us belongs to different modes of perception. That is why he said, “The heart has reasons the mind knows not of.” It is the heart that is able to see into that mystery. And it is why Paul said to the Ephesians, “I pray that God will enlighten the eyes of your heart, so you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and the power for us who believe.” You will know that inheritance through faith, through the eyes of your heart.
So I would like to ask each of us to close our eyes and look through the eyes of the heart…when we do we will see our loved ones with us and swath a Christmas present it truly is….
Let us remember the…
I want to close this special service today by telling you a beautiful story written by John R. Aurelio in his book COLORS! tells about a boy who came upon a hermit’s cabin hidden in the woods. The hermit was famous for doing good deeds for others. The hermit fed the boy and told him stories of the great saints and martyrs of the faith.
One day the hermit told the boy that he was going on a trip. Before he left, he wanted to give the boy something special. It was a knife. The hermit said to the boy, “One day this may open heaven’s gate for you.” Then the hermit left, and the boy never saw him again. The boy began whittling with his new knife, and he found it to be an extraordinary knife for carving. The boy decided that he would be a wood carver, and that he would carve statues of all the heroes in the hermit’s stories. The boy soon grew into a man who devoted his life to carving religious statues. His statues were vibrant and life-like. He spent his life honoring God with his work as a woodcarver.
One day, after finishing his most beautiful work, an elaborate altar, the woodcarver died. When he reached the gates of Heaven, he found them locked. He tried to pick the lock with his extraordinary knife, but it didn’t work. He was confused. The hermit had said that his knife would open Heaven’s door! The woodcarver didn’t understand.
Since he couldn’t get into Heaven, the woodcarver went back to earth. It was winter where he lived, a stormy and difficult winter. The people of the woodcarver’s town had used up all their firewood in heating their homes, and now they were only days away from freezing to death. They couldn’t cut down any trees, because only the king’s woodsmen were allowed to own axes. But the woodcarver knew immediately what to do. Using his special knife, he cut the arm off one of his statues and offered it to the people as firewood. The people were shocked that he would destroy one of his beautiful statues, and it broke the woodcarver’s heart to do it. But the he knew how much the people needed wood. Throughout the winter, the woodcarver cut up more and more of his statues to give away as firewood. Each time it broke his heart anew. By the end of the winter, his life’s work was gone. Then, the broken-hearted woodcarver found himself in front of heaven’s gate. This time the door opened easily. There was the hermit with all the saints whose statues the woodcarver had created. The dazzled woodcarver didn’t understand. The hermit explained, “Heaven’s gate is opened only through suffering.”
We have suffered the loss of those we remember today but our call is to continue to live and come together as community that we might put our arms around each other… that we might share in the pain of loss together but we might also encourage each other with eyes of hearts that remind us that heaven’s gate awaits because there are angels among us…w hom the eyes of our hearts can see.
