Transcript of the Sermon

It has been a long and a hard road we've travelled with Jo over these many months. From the first diagnosis of Hodgkin's Cancer, through the aggressive treatment regime which took her lovely hair away, but not her spirit, to those frequent bedside vigils in I.T.U. where she confounded medical science for so long and along the way so many people have become part of the Jo Williams story.
 
During that exhausting journey, I think we've experienced two profound and contrasting emotions. The first has been obvious suffering; the second healing. The first grief, the second hope. The first fear, the second, faith. Both elements have been present at the same time as we've watched Jo battle (and boy did she battle bravely) as we cared for Jo, as we prayed her back from death ten months ago and then prayed her into heaven last Monday evening. In a very obvious sense they're with us, both of them today. The grief, the acute pain of loss, that empty hole in the world once filled uniquely by Jo's laughter and Jo's smile. Jo's way of seeing things. That's gone from our world. But also we have at the same time that quiet strength which faith alone in Christ alone can give to the weary and the sad. The conviction that we do not grieve as those who have no hope. You see without the sadness, we would not be authentically human and without the certainty we would not be authentically Christian. Just because we believe that one day God will wipe away all tears from our eyes doesn't make those tears unnecessary now. Faith is not a ticket to a pain free life. We've discovered that with Jo, but faith does transform our understanding and experience of suffering.
 
We can't deny, can we, that the tangled threads of Jo's story leave difficult questions hanging unanswered. Why so young? Why the illness and why for Jo? Why did we have her back so dramatically for 10 months only then to watch her slip away when she was that close to a real recovery. So the questions continue and we may each have our own personal theories as to why depending upon our background and our experience. The medical opinion, the spiritual opinion, the moral opinion.
 
I know for you Roy, Sue, Beth and Simon, those were precious months together - times that you would not otherwise have enjoyed. Times to talk as never before, every day for hours on end. That journey from Newport to Cardiff. Oh you must have paid your parking ticket over and over again.
 
As for me, well I saw in Jo Williams how Christian faith can make a difference - right where it really matters in the midst of suffering and fear. I think we Christians can be prone to talk glibly, perhaps too easily about what it means to be a believer in Jesus or how tough it can be to trust Christ, but I think many of us haven't really got a clue, have we? Do I trust in Christ when I'm trapped inside a body that cannot move? Jo did. Do I trust in Christ when every breath is a battle for me? Jo did. Do I trust in Christ when wired up to machines? Jo did. Do I trust in Christ when all my independence and so many of my freedoms and my future are taken away from me? Jo did. But I've observed something else, that in the tapestry of life, even our sorrows are woven with threads of joy.
 
Yes in visits to Jo, we laughed together. We watched sometimes those hideous movies of hers and oh we talked when we could. We discussed the life of Highfields. Jo was very good at telling me how I should run Highfields. She was excellent at telling me what was going on. I used to love to go to see Jo to find out what was happening in Highfields. Those were precious moments. We got excited. You remember Christmas Day, we got excited when she managed to speak to me normally in her own voice. I expected a dalek to talk to me, but it was Jo. Jo all the way. Jo without those noises and bleeps and wires and drains and drips. Even through those early terrible days when Jo would lie motionless and breathless - not even able to move her lips, we learned to talk to each other by twitching noses, by raising eyebrows, by blinking and smiling.
 
But there's one other thing that strikes me as I look around this packed building and the overflow just across the way there. All the lives that this 33 year old woman has influenced and touched, because we know, don't we, that her story has travelled around not just the wards of U.H.W., but the globe! Jo always found it I think hard, to believe that so many people were interested in her. Sue, as only a Mum could, recounted to me those occasions from time to time when Jo was a bit down over the years, and she said to Sue, "Mum, no-one will miss me when I'm gone. No-one will love me, Mum." "Well Jo - are you looking at this." Jo would be amazed and pleased about all the fuss, but what she really wanted was for people to hear not so much about her and her remarkable courage, but about her remarkable Saviour - Jesus. When Jo wanted to tell me something important, she sort of had a definite facial expression. I called it Jo's serious face. I can imagine her now telling me with that serious Jo face. "Right, you make sure you tell people what's what." That's why the text which is on the front of your order of service brochure and the reading from Sarah is so Jo. "For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain."
 
That's originally a statement by a man trapped not in hospital, but in prison - Paul, the great Christian missionary. He was there because he'd been telling people about Jesus and the authorities wanted to keep him quiet. "In chains for Christ," that's how Paul saw his situation. He didn't know whether he would ever again see the people to whom he was writing. He might die in prison, he might be executed or he might be released. He wasn't sure. What he was sure about, was his commitment to Christ. So he says to the Christians that he writes to, "look don't panic about me. For to me, to live is Christ" and that was Paul, and that very much was Joanne Williams. She wore as we say, her faith on her sleeve.
 
We've seen a few of the things that Jo liked in life. She liked doing, she liked creating. She liked Rugby, music and films. Jo was very normal. But there was only one thing she lived for and that was her faith in Christ. Somehow, like a stick of rock, the name Jesus ran right through Jo Williams and anywhere you broke her, and boy, did life break her sometimes, you'd find her faith, her love for the Bible and her commitment to the message of Christ.
 
Jo was like very few people of her generation absolutely 100% comitted. She gave herself totally. Not that she was perfect. She had her faults, her blind spots, like us all, but here's the thing. She lived for Christ. She'd made Jesus the centre of her life. Why does anyone trust their life to Christ like that?
 
Well for two reasons. Because of who Jesus is. Paul incorporates in this letter probably what was a Christian hymn sung from the very earliest days of the Christian Church. It's there in Chapter 2 and from verse 6. It's a hymn about Jesus. It's a hymn to Jesus and the song begins like this. "Jesus who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be held on to."
 
That's why Jo gave her life to Jesus because of who he is. It is the uniqueness of Jesus Christ that inspires devotion, love and commitment. There is no-one else like him, no-one who gets anywhere near him. Jesus is more than a hero to follow, more than a great figure of history, more than a moral teacher. Jesus is God and that's why people like Jo live for him. But the second reason because of what Jesus did.
 
The hymn goes on to describe all that Jesus did when he left the glory of heaven for our frail, fragile earth "being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!" Jesus let go of the distinguishing marks of his power and became weak and humble even to the point of death on a cross.
 
That's why Jo lived for Christ because he died for her. On the cross he died that her sins might be forgiven. He died to give her a fresh start with God and because of that she handed her life over to him. Just like the apostle Paul. He came to that point when he realized "religious person that I am, moral as I am, the only way I can be right with God is through faith in Christ." He tells us that in the third chapter of his letter. That's what made Jo a believer. That's the only thing that can make any of us a Christian.
 
For to me to live is Christ, because of who he is and because of what he's done. But there's something else and that something else transforms our service today from a lament for a daughter, a much loved daughter to a celebration of hope, from a funeral to a party in waiting. For to me to live is Christ, but Paul hasn't finished, "to die is gain."
 
To die is gain says Paul. To die is gain says Jo Williams. Of course it's gain. It stands to reason. If you've been living for Christ, then what can be better than being with Christ for ever. If Jesus has been the whole point of a person's life, then death brings us right into His very presence and that was always the dilemma that Paul found himself in and he expresses here in the letter. He was caught between two very powerful desires. The desire to stay around, to carry on telling people about Jesus and the desire to be with Jesus. So he says in the reading that we had. "I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far." Of course it is better by far! Jo has now got what she wanted and what she lived for.
 
Like many others over these difficult months, I've been caught between the dilemma. I've been caught between prayer for healing and prayer for heaven. Who are we kidding? To die is gain. The trouble with some expressions of Christianity is that they can look suspiciously like 'materialism', sugar coated with a bit of religion on Sundays - what I call Jesus light. Jesus without the really heavy duty stuff. Consequently in such anaemic versions of Christian faith, death can be a bit of a let down. It doesn't seem to be better by far. It spoils things, but not in real Christianity. Not for Jo. In real Christianity, the point of life is Christ and heaven and the eternal kingdom of God. Death in that sense is not a problem, it's an opportunity. It's a gateway to the great adventure of life that we were designed for from the very beginning. For death is not a full stop, it's a parenthesis, it's a comma. Now, such a view of death seems, doesn't it rather, foreign to many in our culture. So many of us are twitchy and uncomfortable on occasions like this. We don't know where to look. We don't know what to say or how to be. I heard of a hospital in America, not you notice here in Cardiff, but a hospital in America which described death as 'negative patient output'. You see, we're not sure how to handle death. It's very uncomfortable. Sometimes, we don't avoid death, rather we laugh at death. Woody Allan famously once said. "It's not that I'm afraid to die, it's just that I don't want to be there when it happens." But that isn't the way the Christian sees death.
 
Death has been defeated. The grave holds no terrors for the man or woman who can say "For to me to live is Christ." Why such confidence?
 
Well again because of who Jesus is and because of what he did! That song in Philippians 2 continues. "God exalted Jesus to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
 
You see the cross wasn't the end of Jesus. There's an empty hole in the ground in Jerusalem to prove it. The resurrection of Jesus is the great proof of who he was. God in the flesh. The God who knows his way out of the grave. The resurrection of Jesus is the great proof of what he'd come to do. To take on and defeat all the enemies of humanity, all sickness and suffering that leads ultimately to death. He defeated death, the great arch enemy. He holds the keys, then you see, to life and death.
 
"For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain." That's Jo's story and that's what Jo Williams would want us to know above everything else today.
 
And in the light of that let me say the following things in conclusion. Firstly to Roy and Sue, to Beth and Simon. It is better by far for her, not for us, not better for us of course. It's better for her. Not just because there are no more drains in her body, no more dark, lonely nights to endure. No more panic attacks to cope with. But because she's gone home to be with Christ, it's better by far. Hold on to that in the days ahead.
 
To the medical staff, those who showed such great love and devotion to Jo over these months in I.T.U and in the other wards. Thank you on behalf of her parents. Thank you for the love you showed Jo. Thank you for the dignity you gave her to the very, very end. Thank you for investing your time and skills in a weak and fragile human body. Thank you for reminding us that our human lives are infinitely precious. That we are not animals or machines. Thank you for doing all that you could and more. But you too must let Jo go for she was not ours to keep in the first place. She belongs to God. What you did was feed her, wash her, care for her. You diagnosed her physical condition. You treated her infections. You analysed those blood gases. But Christ loved her. Christ died for her. Christ was raised for her and Christ has taken her home.
 
To Jo's contemporaries, her peers, her friends (amongst them Christians and not yet Christians) - A question first. What are you living for? Christ or career. Christian faith or material comfort? The here and now or for ever and eternity? What makes you tick? What drives you and inspires you? What are you living for? To me to live is ... You answer that.
 
Jo, as we know, loved reading and watching films. Sadly she never got to see the Christmas block buster movie 'Narnia', that adaptation of C S Lewis' 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', but she'd read the book. In fact being Jo, she'd read the entire Chronicles of Narnia.
 
The scene at the end of the Last Battle sums up Jo's story so well when aslan turned to the children and said, "You do not look so happy as I mean you to be." Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away aslan." "No fear of that," said aslan. "Have you not guessed?" Their hearts leapt and a wild hope rose within them. "There was a real railway accident," said aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are as you used to call it in the shadow lands, dead. The term is over, the holidays have begun, the dream is ended. This is the morning" and as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion, but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them and for us this is the end of all the stories and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after, but for them it was only the beginning of the real story.
 
All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter 1 of the great story, which no-one on earth has read, which goes on for ever in which every chapter is better than the one before." (C. S. Lewis - The Last Battle)
 
That's Jo's experience right now. She's begun Chapter 1 of the great story, which no-one on earth has read.
 
So, as we come to sing our closing hymn, we can do so with the confidence that comes from knowing that to live for Christ is what life is all about and what death will bring us to fully.
 
"From life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny." That's our hymn!
 
Peter Baker
February the 28th, 2006
 
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