The Rev. Frank Logue
Trinity Episcopal Church
Statesboro, Georgia
April 6, 2002

Yes Lord, I Believe
Sermon for the Memorial Service for Hulda K. Kelly
Isaiah 25: 25:6-9; Psalm 130:1-6; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39;
Psalm 30; Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 116:1-8; John 11:21-27 

Please note that in an Episcopal Funeral service, the officiant is asked to address the congregation soon after the start of the service to briefly make them aware of the purpose for the gathering. Here are those words: 

Today, we gather in the midst of our mourning to celebrate the life of Hulda Kelly. Those of us who knew her and loved her are comforted by words of scripture, by each other, and by God’s presence among us as we come to terms with our loss. This service is designed to help both celebrate life and to ease the pain of mourning. It is a typical part of planning a funeral service for the minister to gather with family members to pick scripture and hymns for the service that reflect the person who has died. You should know at the outset of this service that today’s readings and less than typical hymn choices were made by Hulda herself. Hulda carefully planned this service from picking the portions of the funeral liturgy to use to selecting the readings and music. Listen carefully to the readings as you will hear, not hastily picked scripture by a minister who knows nothing of Hulda, but the words Hulda herself used to define her faith in God. And don’t miss the irony of this service either. Hulda hated it when church services went on forever. She disliked overly long scripture readings. Yet, she picked no less that four readings supplemented by three Psalms. Hulda designed for us today a service that she would have hated to sit through. But that was fine as she was quite certain this was one service she would never have sit through. 

The sermon: 

I now have the privilege of eulogizing Hulda Kelly. First, let me say that I hope you will laugh at some point during my brief words this afternoon. If no one laughs, then I will have failed miserably in offering words of remembrance for a woman who was surprisingly funny. She had a wicked sense of humor and a gift for finding something to laugh at in most any circumstance, certainly this one. 

I am amazed that she didn’t handle a eulogy herself. Hulda so carefully planned everything, from her obituary for the newspaper to the choice of singing O Little Town of Bethlehem that I was surprised that she left my sermon today to chance. We may later find filed away somewhere a funeral sermon carefully typed out by Hulda. If, or perhaps I should say, when we do, I’ll be sure to issue a retraction and send everyone here the sermon I should have given. 

If she didn’t like the sermon, Hulda would not have flinched at telling me so. Hulda was not one to mince words. She often came across as gruff, grumpy or crabby. That was partly because she was often, gruff, grumpy, or crabby. She never hesitated to tell someone exactly how she felt. You knew where you stood with Hulda, because she told you so. So, when she looked at me one day as I was leaving and said, “You know I love y’all,” I knew she really meant that too. You always knew where you stood. 

Hulda’s life was very orderly. At least that is how she planned it. She had a set schedule for her day, for her week and nothing unnerved her more than getting that schedule interrupted. From waking up at 4:30 a.m. to feed her cat Rhoda to watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the evening, she had a set time for everything. Drop in to visit her at the wrong time and she would be sure to greet your hellos with, “I expected you an hour ago. I didn’t know you would arrive during my time to read the Bible.”  

Hulda was orderly to the point of obsession. And thank God she was. Who else would have driven Bulloch County backroads to transform worn tombstones scattered among the weeds into a careful record with each headstone clearly transcribed? Who else could have sat over all those endless microfilms reels to decipher scrawled entries of some by gone bureaucrat into a neatly typed pages of entries? Our disorganized world may well need people like Hulda who yearn to reduce the chaos to order. 

So where are we now. We remember Hulda as someone who was funny, crabby, obsessed with order—not exactly a glowing eulogy for someone whom we are gathered to remember as Saint of God. Declaring Hulda as a saint is our task for this day. After all, scripture refers to all believers as saints and the church remembers the faithful departed as saints. So what does the Hulda we knew have to do with the Saint Hulda we proclaim today? 

Well, Hulda’s orderly life included a daily time for reading the reflections in Forward Day by Day and then reading the scripture readings the booklet gives for that day. Each day for the almost twenty years I knew her, Hulda sat and read the scripture in a pattern following the daily lectionary of the Episcopal Church. Following that course of reading meant that she read the entire Bible every two years and additionally, she reread all the Psalms every seven weeks. So when Hulda picked our readings for today, she did so as someone who knew her Bible. 

But I know from long experience that she did not read scripture unthinkingly. Hulda constantly questioned the scripture and wanted to know more about what she read. When I went off to seminary, Hulda wrote me with a question that had bothered her in her daily readings. She wanted to know why the word “Lord” was sometimes written out with small capitals and sometimes in all lower case. What was the difference in the Hebrew she wanted to know. I discovered for her that when the word was in lower case capitals, it stood in for the name of God, Yahweh, that Christian translators would no more write out than the Jewish translators who preceded them. It was with this correspondence in mind that I made sure that all the proper occurrences of Lord in the service booklet are in small capitals. That one detail is a symbol for me of her active faith.  

That first letter lead to more questions throughout seminary. She kept me busy tracking down answers to her theological questions. What does the imagery of horns mean in the Psalms? Why are there two creation stories in Genesis and what good are they today? What about poor Judas, why couldn’t he be in heaven too? Through three years of seminary, her questions were such a constant, that other seminarians became jealous, often asking about Victoria’s grandmother’s questions, wanting to find out the latest.  

Hulda was the best foil for whom a theological student could wish. She kept me focused on asking questions and expecting answers that lead to more questions. It turns out that she was just as grumpy with God as with anyone else. She demanded order out of God too. Hulda didn’t let God off any easier than any of the rest of us. She tried to confine God to Sunday morning early church, the Tuesday Morning Prayer group at Trinity and with her daily Bible reading time. She never failed to complain when the readings were longer than usual, or the preacher went on too long (as I’m doing right now).  

But Hulda could never quite contain God. God kept breaking out of the box. Hulda was shaped by the pattern of reading and prayer she faithfully followed. At the Reformation in the 1600s, the early Anglicans liked the saying Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, which is Latin for “The way of praying is the way of believing.” They did not create a common confession, but a book of common prayer, feeling that if we would trust ourselves to following a pattern of prayer, that it would shape our beliefs.  

This little bit of Reformation history met its test case in Hulda Kramp. A Baptist by birth, an Episcopalian by marriage, Hulda’s faith was shaped by decades of following a pattern of prayer. If you want to know what sort of faith it created in Hulda, read and reread today’s service booklet. You’ll find a common thread running through the readings, which all point to an active, questioning faith.  

In the Psalms, which Hulda knew so well from rereading them every seven weeks for decades, we get an ongoing pattern of crying out to God in distress and having God faithfully answering prayer. These are scriptures selected by a realist as they also speak of God hiding his face and the righteous being brought low before they are delivered. But Hulda knew and showed us through her choices that in the end, God is still there. When we reach the bottom, God is there. She promised us with the readings she picked that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and that joy comes in the morning.  

In the Gospel reading, Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even tough they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 

Through her own service today, Hulda, whose own sense of order called her to carefully plan this service herself, answers in her own gruff way, “Yes, Lord, I believe.” 

Amen.