Sermon for the Funeral of The Rev. Joyce Hardy

Sermon for the Funeral of the Rev. Joyce Hardy

Given by The Rev. Sam Loudenslager - Isaiah 61: 1-3, Psalm 139: 1-11 and John 11: 21-27

Christians gather at funerals to remember the one who has died, to give thanks for their life and to commit that person to God. While I’ve been ordained for twenty years, I’ve always been able to avoid preaching at a funeral but I couldn’t avoid this one. Frankly, this really isn’t a sermon. It’s an opportunity for me to share with you the impact Joyce has had on me and in this world.

Venerable is the title given in the Episcopal Church for people who serve as Archdeacons in a diocese. I was curious about what the definition meant so I looked it up. I found that “venerable” means “commanding respect because of great age or impressive dignity”. definition tells us a little bit about Joyce because she certainly commanded respect. But Joyce was more than venerable. The past two weeks I’ve thought a lot about Joyce. She was my teacher, my example, my friend and she was a force to be reckoned with if you got in her way when she was about God’s business in the world. But she was much more than that. She really did exemplify for me what it meant to be a deacon. That’s still not really it. She exemplified what a Christian looks like. A person who follows Jesus and sees Jesus in the poor, the people in prison, those on the margins. Not only sees them but loves them and cares for them. Those who are angry and mourns the death of a person who is pleading that they can’t breathe.

Joyce’s death has been hard for the people of this diocese, hard for her family, hard for her friends, and hard for the community of deacons not only in the diocese of Arkansas but throughout the Episcopal Church. Reading her obituary and remembrances of Joyce on Facebook I was reminded that Joyce began her professional career as a teacher. As I recall she continued to teach until a few years back. She taught high school. She taught at the university level. She taught at Camp Mitchell to young people who would spend some of their summers there. She taught everywhere. It was one of her passions. She taught me and many of the deacons in this diocese what it meant to be a deacon; to point out the needs of the world to the church. She also had to educate some priests and likely a bishop or two.

A few years back, Joyce, Dennis Campbell, Cindy Fribourgh and I would try to get together on Fridays after work to drink a glass of wine and just catch up. These were some of the times when I saw Joyce just relax. She would smile and laugh a lot. She would get excited when she would talk about an upcoming trip to New York or New Orleans. On one of these Fridays I discovered that Joyce was a huge Bette Midler fan and was excited about a trip to Las Vegas, I think it was, with a high school friend to see Bette Midler perform—and this wasn’t the first time. I was surprised that she was such a fan.

Joyce didn’t offer a lot of her past to other people. It isn’t that she hid things. She didn’t talk about herself unless you asked. I knew that Joyce was from Oklahoma but I don’t think that it was until I read her obituary that I discovered that she was ordained a deacon in Oklahoma in 1985 and came to Arkansas in 1989. When I met her in around 2000, I just knew Joyce as the person who ran the deacon formation program for this diocese.

After I was named as Archdeacon for the diocese, I attended a national conference of Archdeacons. I discovered how long Joyce’s shadow really was. Deacons from all over the Episcopal Church would come up and tell me about how Joyce had gone out of her way to help them develop the deacon formation process in their diocese.

Joyce accomplished a lot. She was critical in starting the deacon formation program in this diocese. But she was critical to the lives of so many. A couple of people sent me notes about the impact Joyce has had on their lives. One described Joyce as “an icon of the episcopal church in Arkansas. She saw gifts where others saw blemishes. She saw ministry where others saw the filthy, the unsavory. She sought and served Christ in all others and respected the dignity of every human being. She was one of the good ones.” Another person shared an encounter with Joyce at Camp Mitchell when she was eight years old. She said that Joyce had told the children that “she had been attacked once and was very afraid afterwards so she kept her front porch light on because it made her feel safer. Late one night there was a knock at her front door. Joyce looked through her peephole and saw an injured woman. After being with the woman for hours Joyce asked the woman why she had come to her door. The woman said “it was because she had her light on.” Joyce had kept the light on out of her fear, but the light had also been a signal to others that hers was a safe place.” That’s God at work in the world.

When Bishop Benfield announced Joyce’s death he said that Joyce “was the best advocate for the poor of almost anyone I have met. The very people whom society often tends to hide or forget about—well, they were the people who were first and foremost in Joyce’s life.” This week I was talking about Joyce with Bean Murray, another deacon. Bean said that Joyce helped all of the deacons understand our ministry and our call to ministry. Joyce helped teach Bean that her call was to “trouble the waters”.

In case you didn’t already know, I guess I should point out that politics was an important side of Joyce. She was a voice for those on the margins – the poor, minorities, those in prison, the LGBTQ community. I think her obituary described her time in Tulsa as a teacher as a “political activist of the highest order”. She would like that description.

One of the things that makes today hard is that the larger community isn’t able to gather today in person to remember Joyce. She would have loved to be surrounded by all those in her life. I know that the deacons want to be here to remember her. I asked them to give me one word to describe Joyce. They described her as devoted, austere, a facilitator, committed, dedicated, and tenacious. I would add that she was surprising.

While Joyce didn’t open up about herself, if you asked her a question she didn’t hide anything. I knew she had been dealing with rheumatoid arthritis, I didn’t know about cancer until the bishop told me sometime last year. When I was meeting with her not long after, I asked her about it and she talked about it. I think it was at that meeting that I found out that Joyce was an Uber driver. I must have looked surprised because she started laughing and said that she enjoyed it. It gave her the opportunity to talk with people she wouldn’t have talked with otherwise. I shouldn’t have been surprised.