The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 28, 2009

Requiem for Ted Triplett Lewis
Isaiah 25:6-9
2 Corinthians 4:16--5:9
John 14:1-6

The reason the Bible is Holy Scripture, a Word that endures, is that it speaks truth to us. “Lord, you have been our refuge, from one generation to another,” the psalmist reminds us.

Before the mountains were brought forth,
or the land and the earth were born,
from age to age you are God.

You turn us back to the dust and say,
“Go back, O child of the earth.”

For a thousand years in your sight
are like yesterday when it is past,
and like a watch in the night.

You sweep us away like a dream;
we fade away suddenly like the grass.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;
in the evening it is dried up and withered.
........
The span of our life is seventy years,
and though men be so strong that they come to eighty,
yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow,
so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.


This is truth – is it not? – truth we don’t like to hold in the front of our minds, so for much of our lives we slide the fact of our mortality into the back of our minds. We would just as soon forget the truth, or deny it. But Holy Scripture will not let us. Scripture insists that we remember.

Still, we don’t have to hear it from Scripture to know the facts. Our mortality is all too present. Ted Lewis dies, and we are reminded of the truth: the days of our age are seventy years – in Ted’s case, a little less. The Scriptures speak truth: we are mortal, a fact that is confirmed by our experience. Ted dies, and we will miss him here. Barbara, of course, will miss her husband; Sally and Geoff and Greg will miss their father; their children will miss their grandfather; and all of us will miss a dear colleague, friend, and brother in Christ. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, and it is natural that we should weep at the death of ours.

But that is not the final word. Geoff has spoken movingly of his father’s strong faith, and of the fact that he and Greg and Sally “always knew that they were part of a family,” part of something bigger than themselves. And they have all shared with me some of the memories of that family life, memories such as the history lessons Ted delivered on family trips, memories of his love of travel and his encouragement that they experience new cultures, meet new people, and try new things.

Among a long list of exhortations they received from their Dad were these, all of them in the imperative: Dream, travel, eat, drink, pray, and live. Be a leader: be involved in your church, your schools, your profession. Laugh out loud at movies, and snore out loud at sleepovers. Play hard with your grandkids, even if it hurts sometimes. Sing in harmony. Love your job, love your friends, love your family. Go to church and carry a Bible. Never stop learning. Take care of those in need. Carve a turkey with extraordinary care, as if performing surgery. Eat corn on the cob two rows at a time, from left to right.

Now I wouldn’t know about the turkey and corn on the cob. But all the others conform to the Ted I knew as well. I do know about the snoring, because Ted and I often slept in tents next to each other in Haiti, but Ted blamed the snoring on me. We were in Haiti, of course, along with Father Morgan and others of you here today, because Ted was thankful, as all of us are thankful, that Christ’s Church recognizes no boundaries of nation or color, because Haiti is a place of great need, because the need of our brothers and sisters in Christ there beckoned us to share it with them, and, in Ted’s case, because part of the need there is something that Ted was particularly well equipped to help with.

Ted was a rheumatologist, and a pharmacist and internist before that, but I cannot imagine that any of his medical practice gave him more joy than what I watched him do in Haiti. The healing he delivered there ranged from the everyday to the critical, from helping relieve small children of worms and instructing their mothers on diet and preventative care to the saving of more than one life. One week I recall vividly. A young girl was brought to Ted one day after she had been seriously burned by a large pot of boiling water. Day by day that week Ted carefully undertook the debridement, and I have never forgotten Ted’s smile the following year when a healthy young girl presented him payment for his services with the gift of her famous smile.

Debridement, the careful removal of unhealthy tissue. It is a healing practice that Ted consistently used far beyond medicine. Debridement is what Ted did when he saved my life here twenty years ago. Not physically, but spiritually and emotionally at a time when our parish was torn by strife. It’s all about that singing in harmony he insisted on. In church and community life, it’s called reconciliation, spiritual debridement. Such ministry is high on the list of Ted’s virtues, right up there alongside laughing out loud and always expanding one’s experience and never ceasing to learn. Just two months ago, Ted and Barbara attended the Camden Conference on World Affairs in Maine, and Barbara told me that Ted came home with over two-hundred dollars worth of books about the healing needed in world affairs. Ted drew his enormous energy for reconciliation and healing from within, from the healthy tissue of his own spiritual life, and he shared it at every opportunity.

Bishop O’Neill’s presence today attests to his gratitude for Ted’s gifts to Christ’s Church, both here in the Diocese of Colorado and in Haiti. Father Morgan’s presence attests to all the rum punches he and Ted shared in Haiti, and to his gratitude for their friendship and for the twenty years of ministry they shared there. Barbara and Sally and Geoff and Greg and their families are here because, well, Ted was husband and dad and granddad of their family, beloved friend and head cheerleader. I know that your presence here witnesses to your gratitude for Ted’s friendship and his gifts to you, just as I want my presence and words today to testify to my gratitude for Ted’s long friendship and gifts to me and to the people of Our Saviour Parish.

Whether as Senior Warden of this parish church or member of the Standing Committee of the diocese, or as President of the school board or Director of Medical Education at Penrose Hospital or Medical Director of the Colorado Haiti Project, or as husband and father and grandfather, or as permanent fixture at his grandchildren’s sporting events, or simply as one’s good and reliable friend and head cheerleader for life and hope, Ted was the Energizer Bunny. That’s Energizer Bunny with a Type AA personality powered by gigantic rechargeable Lithium batteries who touched more lives positively in his sixty-six years than do most ordinary mortals.

That is, I think, because Ted was deeply aware of the Scriptures’ truth – that we are mortal, which is a fact that reminds us that all life is gift, not a right. And then the Scriptures follow up with the reminder that the only appropriate response to a gift is gratitude. Gratitude is precisely what Ted offered by saying thank you to God, the Giver of life, which Ted did faithfully in this parish church week after week, as well as by offering his gratitude through the sharing of what he had received with those who had received not, which Ted did faithfully everywhere he went.

Ted and I talked several times about his funeral. “I have no unrealistic expectations about what’s ahead for me,” Ted told me two weeks ago. This was Ted the internist, the diagnostician, at work. Being a physician, he was a realist; he knew what was going on in his body, and what happens to the body when it suffers from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. “I have no unrealistic expectations about what’s ahead for me, except one,” he said – ”that I hope to be raised with Christ and share in his resurrection. I know I’m just temporarily occupying a house of flesh on loan to me,” he added. “My funeral is not about me; it’s about Christ.”

Ted knew, as all physicians know, that the healing they offer is only a measured healing, a healing for a time. For mortal life is lived in time, and Ted knew that, in time, the facts of life would catch up with all his patients and with Ted himself, as the facts of life do with all time’s children. So when that time came, it was, therefore, only a measured surprise to Ted that his own body began to fail. And Ted the diagnostician squarely faced the facts, the facts implied in the question he had asked for all the span of his years: “Who heals the physician, or any of us, when the physician’s bag is empty?” Life is not a right, but a gift, the physician knows with the psalmist, a fragile gift for which not only physical healing, but eternal healing, is in order.

Ted shared the faith of St. Paul – that in the face of our mortality “we do not lose heart, [because] our eyes are not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. We know that this earthly tent we live in is only on loan for a time, and if it is destroyed, we have an eternal house, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.”

And that is why Ted was always pressing on, always “forgetting what is behind, and straining toward that which is ahead.” Straining toward that which is yet to come is what Ted was doing when he bought two-hundred dollars worth of books just weeks before his death. And that is why, here in the middle of Lent, today is a festival day, a day for celebrating what is yet to come, a day for celebrating God’s eternal gift and promise of life, a day of celebrating Christ, and his servant Ted.

Ted insisted – Ted was one of the best insisters I’ve ever known; a persistent insister, but a gently persuasive one – Ted insisted that this be a joyful day, a harmonious day, not a gloomy day. Ted talked with me in the hospital two or three weeks ago about the hymns he wanted us to sing with him today. His initial list was twelve hymns long, totaling 68 verses. Ted, we just had to cut it a bit. We chose five of your favorites, and still managed 23 verses. We hope you approve, Ted. And if, for some of you here today, we’re singing and laughing too much, it’s Jesus’ fault. And Ted’s.

And that brings us back ‘round to the reasons we are gathered here in God’s Church today. We are here to remember Ted – husband, father, grandfather, and friend, and to remember all the years in which Ted blessed us with his presence as our brother in Christ. So give thanks today for all the fatherly advice he gave you, for the games he played with you, for all the time he spent with you, for the truths he taught you, for the tears and the laughter and the wisdom and the love he shared with you. We are here to remember Ted.

And we are also here to remember Ted’s faith, and to sing Ted’s faith with Ted. So sing with a heart as full as Ted’s.

Finally, we are here to remember that all life is gift. And when we remember that, when we remember that all life is gift, then we are enabled to see today in perspective. Today is really the way we would all want it, isn’t it? It’s the way it is supposed to be, whether “the days of our age are threescore years and ten” or “threescore years and six” – to have lived them in soundness of body and mind, and to die quietly and be buried from Christ’s Church in possession of a good name, surrounded by those who love you, your wife of forty-one blessed years, your children, your grandchildren, and good and faithful friends.

“Forgetting what is behind, strain on toward that which is ahead,” Ted taught with St. Paul. “Be involved with your church, your schools, your profession. Dream, travel, eat, drink, pray, and live. Love your job, love your friends, love your family. Play hard with your grandkids, even if hurts sometimes. Never stop learning. Sing in harmony. Laugh out loud at movies, and snore out loud at sleepovers.”

Maybe the reason Ted commends laughing out loud is that Ted was hard of hearing. In recent years, he heard words only with difficulty. But he could always hear laughter. And maybe that’s because laughter was his favorite sound. And maybe laughter was Ted’s favorite sound because, from the beginning, laughter has been God’s favorite sound.

And that’s why I am confident that Ted died with a twinkle in his eye and a song in his heart. It’s because Ted remembered that laughter is God’s favorite sound. That, you know, was why God told Sarah, at age ninety, that she was going to have a baby. God wanted to hear Sarah laugh. And she did. And then another part of the divine joke – laughter, Isaac – was born. The promise was fulfilled. And Abraham and Sarah knew then that the joke was on them, and they were delighted. And God was delighted. And all faithful people have been delighted ever since.

And that’s why we can sing, even today, as we will later, “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” Because the promise of God to us this day is the same as his promise to Abraham and Sarah – that we will laugh again.

And the promise of God to Ted today is the same.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.