Funeral Service

Rev. Mike Pratt, officiating

A SERVICE OF DEATH AND RESURRECTION
SUSAN T. RANKIN

June 14, 2002
Lewisburg United Methodist Church

THE SERMON

As I prepared for this morning's message, I thought of how Sue's life echoed the psalmist's when he said "I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.  May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD" (104:33-34).

Of Sue's many gifts, the gift of song is the one that often nourished us and undergirded her own life these past two years. I understand that many of you were unaware of this treasure until just very recently.

What you probably were aware of were her professional credentials and background. She was a CPA with an accounting degree from Ohio University in 1965. She worked for several companies as an accountant during the first ten years of marriage to her accountant husband, David.  The last 27 years she was Executive Director of the Frank M. Tait Foundation. That's where I first got to know her some twenty years ago when I was the Director of the Montgomery County Juvenile Court's privately-funded "Building Bridges Program." Sue was a big part of the philanthropy community.

As a devoted wife of 37 years she was a huge part of David's life. They met through an accounting honors fraternity at OU back in 1963. She was among the first women to be inducted and David tells the story of sitting between Sue and another women when they were inducted. The other women was married, and he remembers not liking Sue during that first encounter.

But there would be another chance meeting at a social fraternity not long after where Sue and her uncle, a fraternity alumnus, were sitting in front of David and his date. David's notice of her was certainly favorable that night and from that day on they have been inseparable.

Some of her closest friends know Sue and David through the Miami Valley Chapter of the National Cambridge Glass Collectors. Some of you know her as simply a dear social companion. Talking with Sue was easy and dining with her was so very pleasurable. She always made a gracious presence with her warm smile and infectious laughter.

Some of you may have golfed with her. Although not necessarily accomplished in her game, she does own a hole-in-one from nearby Penn-Terra Golf Course that occurred on June 6, 1995. What a thrill it was for her to take home the trophy she received that day.

Yet, like with all of us, her life was a mixture of joys and struggles. She was certainly not unfamiliar with suffering. Sue struggled with Crone's Disease for about 12 years, having even been misdiagnosed for awhile. It went into remission in 1980.

In 1998 Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy and received chemotherapy and radiation for six months. About two years after her treatments, in December 2000, the breast cancer reappeared in her liver. It was that occurrence and its insidious spreading that took Sue's life.

But suffering and disease didn't have the last word. It seldom was in control -- because Sue was encased in the love and assurances of her redeemer, Jesus Christ.

David said her first cancer was a kind of "wake-up call." During the summer of 2000 Sue happened to see my picture along with all the other area pastors in The Brookville Star.  She wondered aloud, "What is Mike Pratt doing out here in Lewisburg?"  So she came to church to see.

That first Sunday person after person came out of the sanctuary and asked me, "Who was that voice in church today?" They could all identify its location, but not the person. That is until Sue herself came through the receiving line. We found it to be the voice of an angel.

By the fall of 2000 she had joined the choir and had begun singing solos again. She officially joined the church the next summer. I remember so vividly that first solo because she came up to me after the worship service and in tears said, "Mike, do you realize that it's been 35 years since I last sang a solo. I have no idea why I ever left the church."

I remember telling her, "Sue, all that matters is that you're back home" -- back within the safe and protective arms of Jesus, the body of Christ we call the church.

It was a long road back. Yesterday, I learned that her first solo was at the age of five, captured on a '78 rpm record that the family is now trying to find a player to hear. As we reminisced, Judy, her sister, remembers Sue singing in the high school a cappella choir and how she was chosen to sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when they were traveling through her hometown of Philadelphia.

Like her mother, she had taken voice and piano lessons, and her mother always wanted her to be in the church and to bring her gift there.  Sue made our choir here in Lewisburg sound as if we were twice our size. She loved the old favorite hymns and that's why we're singing them today.

Sue didn't fully know how important her road back to the church would prove to be. Within five months of her return, the breast cancer reappeared and the last stage of her life would commence. And it began with the Lord at her side in the embrace of her new church family, representing Christ's body.

Amazingly in retrospect, most of Sue's precious life's singing in public would occur within the grips of cancer that would try to rob her of the very breath she needed to perform. Yet, even with her last appearance in church three Sundays ago, when it was all she could do to muster the energy needed to get dressed, her voice, that angel's voice, could not be quieted. People remarked that they could still pick it out as she tried to sit inconspicuously in the back of the sanctuary. She was singing, mainly with her heart, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and "Oh, How I Love Jesus."

She sang a solo in our Christmas Cantata last year performed with the choir of Trinity Lutheran Church, and at the Sunday service on December 16th her voice tried to belt out in solo "O Holy Night" and "Ave Maria." She said it was far from her best because she just couldn't get enough air. I still thought it was beautiful.

God, in all of God's mercy, had brought Sue back to the church, not only for her own sake, but for the sake of everyone who would become her family of God. She ministered to us. Her gifted voice and her tender presence charmed our souls, gave us strength, helped us to sort out what really counts in life, what we really need to cling to.

The Apostle Paul wrote in a letter to the church in Philippi that suffering for Christ becomes a "privilege" (1:29), making us better persons worthy of the "glory that will be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul tries to explain that earthly suffering is relatively short-lived compared to the promised rewards of the unseen heavens. "The temporary, light burden of our hardships is earning us forever an utterly incomparable, eternal weight of glory" (2 Corinthians 4:17, NJB).

Knowing how Sue suffered, how she clung to the promises, and how she sang praises to God to the very end, what a crown of glory she now wears!!

At last year's Community Candlelight Christmas Eve Service, when her breath should have been at its lowest point at the end of the day, God lifted her and her angelic voice out of her seat to give a rendition of "Ave Maria" to which even she was proud. It would be the last public solo of her life with us. Let us enjoy it again now and think about the eternal rewards of faithfulness, of living our lives in holy communion with the God who had gifted each one of us. Amen.

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