The Late Pamela Leiper

PAMELA LEIPER

The Three Theological Virtues: Faith, and Hope, and Love

A SERMON PREACHED BY THE MOST REVD DR PETER CARNLEY AC

AT THE FUNERAL OF PAMELA LEIPER AT ST DAVID’S CHURCH, APPLECROSS

 ON SATURDAY 3 MAY 2025 AT 10AM

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

It is a privilege to have been asked by Pamela to preach the homily at this service.  Pamela was very clear and characteristically directive about what should or should not happen on this occasion.  There were to be no long and repetitive eulogies, indeed, no eulogies at all; and certainly no slide show of photographs showing her doing things with people whom many of us would have found it difficult even to identify.  As she herself said ‘if people don’t know me by now they wouldn’t be here!’  And there was to be only the one reading at a straight-forward service of Holy Communion.  She apparently wanted things shortish and positively to the point.

My allotted job is therefore not to talk about Pamela so much as for Pamela.   I am to try to articulate the chief points of what I think she might want all of you to hear this morning.

I dare not, of course, deviate far from her wishes. I guess I am not the only one to have noticed the porcelain ornament on a table outside her door at the Alfred Cove Care Community, with a sentence inscribed on it that says: “The views expressed by the husband in this house are not necessarily those of the Management.”  Nevertheless, though I have to speak for Pamela rather than about her, there is a sense in which her funeral directive itself paradoxically says a whole lot about her.  That she was concerned that this service should not be overly about her, actually speaks loud and clear of the self-effacing concern for others that flows from an unwavering commitment to the call of the Christian Gospel. In other words, it speaks of Pamela’s implicit commitment to the Gospel imperative to love God and love one’s neighbour in a way that is other regarding and not self-regarding… in a way that is forgetful of self.

There is no question that Pamela was a woman of profound faith - uncomplicated, unwavering, and uncompromising - not in the sense of a self-conscious sectarian belief in the rightness of her views over against those of others, but in the carefully considered conviction that, at the end of the day, love of God and love of neighbour is what really matters.  So, if I am to say something on her behalf about the importance of faith, faith itself is to be understood less as a notional assent to a catalogue of  beliefs of an abstract and  propositional kind and more as a basic trust in the actual awareness of the constant presence of the love of God, concretely experienced in our lives as what gives life its purpose and ultimate meaning.

This kind of steadfast faith naturally led Pamela into a very positive and active involvement, in tandem with Geoffrey, in the institutional life of the Church which they have sustained for decades – whether in this parish of Applecross where they were present from the start in Bill Riley’s time and have seen eight Rectors come and go, or at Diocesan Council and Synod level, and as they closely followed and supported developments in the institutional life of the national Church.  I think of their supportive involvement in the saga of the 1980’s that led to the ordination of women in 1992, for example.

But this formal institutional involvement in Church affairs is to be matched by their enthusiastic support of participative programmes designed to deepen spirituality. I think especially of their close involvement in the Cursillo movement which has played an enormously important role in their lives.

Of course, life for most of the time is very matter-of-fact. God gives us the freedom to be, to manage our own affairs and to get on with the demanding business of living.  Even so the matter-of-fact is regularly punctuated by those moments of disclosure when we become poignantly aware of something more. I am thinking of those moments when we suddenly find ourselves not just observing a beautiful scene in the natural world, but somehow being stopped in our tracks by it, even captivated by it, and in a sense addressed by it as it beckons to us, and invites us into a kind of communion with itself.  This is the fundamental religious sense of the numinous, from the Latin nuo “to nod or wink”.  When some thing or some scene of the natural order in a sense winks at us and beckons to us to take notice of it, to take a particular interest in it, or see it as somehow important for the rest of our lives, we suddenly realise that what is objective to us is somehow also a subject with us as its object, inviting us to have to do with it. It is then that we understand what St John means when he speaks of “the Word, through whom all things are made.”  This is the Infinite insistently breaking into the finite world.

And, of course, this happens supremely between persons; when we spy a person “across a crowded room” on some enchanted evening, and soon find ourselves in deep conversation with them, someone who in a special way arouses our interest or attracts our attention. Sometimes, of course this does not just involve the turn of our heads, for we find ourselves captivated by them, and end up making a mutual interpersonal commitment for our whole lives.

So, if Pamela bids us to hear something about faith this morning, the kind of faith that she would want us to reflect upon is faith, is not understood  as a notional assent to a set of abstract, propositional beliefs, but as a basic trust in the presence and nearness of the movement of the Spirit of God as we live our lives, and the ensuing commitment to the constant claim of the Gospel of God upon us.

If Pamela was herself a woman of such faith, she was also a person of hope,  which is forward looking faith. What we glimpse of the Spirit of God in the present, often only fleetingly, and regularly with a sense of incompleteness, is in the Christian understanding of things always but a promise of what is to come. This is not just wishful thinking because it is grounded in the concrete experience of love which harbours the conviction that life in space and time is not the end but a preparation, anticipating entrance to the timeless eternity of God. We all face the absolute certainty of our own death, and we all come to it with our own individual hopes and fears, our own personal perceptions as to what might or might not lie beyond it, and of life’s ultimate meaning or otherwise. In this circumstance Pamela would want us today to hear the words of assurance of John 14 which she chose as today’s reading, clearly expressing Jesus’ promise to go before us to prepare a place for us.   Pamela without a doubt entertained the certain hope that where he was she would be also, reunited with her beloved Penny. Her word to us today, is “let not your hearts be at all troubled about that.” 

As we contemplate the nature of Christian hope, I think Pamela might give me a tick and say “Thank you for that, dear”, if I were to add a rider to the final words of her chosen passage… where Jesus is reported to have said: “No-one comes to the Father, but by me.”  Many mistakenly interpret this in an objectionably exclusivist sense, as though members of other religions are entirely lost and without hope.  But, it is important to note that Jesus did not say, no-one comes to God except through me. Rather, his promise was more specifically that no one comes to the Father, an understanding of God, except though me. More importantly, no one comes to the concrete knowledge of God precisely as loving Father except “in Christ” mediated through the Son.  In other words, we know of God as a loving Father, and the promise of the ultimate warm embrace in the everlasting arms of God understood as a kind of Father, precisely through the uniquely explicit teaching and self-giving of Christ the Son. 

So Pamela would have us hear something today about the importance of faith, and something about the nature and importance of our Christian hope.  Then there is Love: Faith, hope and love, these three… and the greatest of these is love.  Love is the greatest because faith is our faith, and hope is our hope, but the love we are talking about is God’s love, the uniquely unconditional self-giving defined in the historical Jesus but not confined there. For as St Paul says, ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the holy Spirit who has been given to us’.  

Sometimes children complain that a parent errs by loving one of their siblings more than the others. I guess it is not uncommon for parents to be accused of having a favourite.  But in fact, we do not love one person more or less than another, rather we may love them all equally, but always differently. After all, we are all uniquely different people, and if love is self-giving then it will differ according to the uniqueness of the self who gives and the self to whom the gift of self is given. Those near and dear to Pamela whom she loved. Geoffrey and her daughters of whom she was justly proud, and their extended families, and her grandchildren, all experienced her love… but differently. –

Indeed, the unique self-giving love of God that we remember to have been incarnate in the historical Jesus is always mediated to each of us in the shared communion of the Church in an infinite variety of ways. Naturally, in the fellowship of the Church our lives will have intersected with Pamela’s in a  multiplicity of hugely different permutations.

Let me share with you one of mine:  There was a time when in the cause of raising money for new initiatives in youth ministry we held an art exhibition at Archbishop’s House. I had one hundred artist’s boards prepared, all 9 inches by 5 inches, the size of the cigar box tops that the Australian impressionists of the Heidelberg school painted on, and sent them all around the country to leading artists – like John Coburn in Sydney, and Robert Juniper in Perth - for each to paint a picture for us.  A couple of boards were sent to each of our schools for the most promising art students to paint on, and I dared produced a couple of paintings myself.  When the time came to auction all these at the opening event, after people has been primed a with a few drinks, Geoffrey took an interest in one of the paintings I had done and quickly initiated a spirited bidding frenzy. To my astonishment my humble offering soon passed the one thousand dollar mark, even more than the painting by John Coburn!  Geoffrey did us a great favour in terms of money-raising, but in the end he was himself out-bidded and had to settle for another of the paintings in the exhibition that he was less interested in.  I knew that he was disappointed, so in the following week or two in order to say thankyou I produced another painting to give to Geoffrey and Pamela ..,.as a kind of consolation.  It was a little picture of a large pond with silver-blue water, on 13 acres of land we had at Nannup where we planned to retire.  Beyond the yellow stubble of the paddock around the pond there was a row of gumtrees that lined the bank of the Blackwood River, and in the foreground some rustic and not all that attractive Sun-scorched Doc Weed, so-called because of its alleged medicinal qualities.  This was some 25 or 30 years ago.  To my amazement, a few months ago, when I dropped in on them to see how they were settling in at their new digs at Alfred Cove where they had been able to take a few cherished possessions, there it was, along with the painting that had been actually bought, hanging on the wall opposite Pamela’s bed, directly in her line of sight.

I like to think that as it hung there, especially in these last days, it functioned more than just a token of friendship, but that as she contemplated the tranquil pond, and the shine of light on its silver-blue water, with the line of lazy gums in the background, and the Doc weed in front, that she may have glimpsed something of the Spirit of God beckoning to her in and through these matters of fact, addressing her, and inviting her to have to do with something more - the Word through whom all things are made.

But this  is not to be compared, however, with the direct and immediate mediation of the love of God to her by those near and dear to her, Geoffrey, Fiona and Julia, and by so many others who visited her, and those who ministered to her and cared for her, especially in the recent weeks and days, but in the case of those closest to her right through significant sections of  her long life of four score years and heading towards ten more, for this was the love that grounded her faith and triggered her ultimate hope of more to come.

We have also to recognize the mediation of God’s love to each of us perhaps in different ways, even in momentary, fleeting and incomplete ways, in encounters of Christian friendship and neighbourly care in and  through the texture of human life, and particularly in the communion of the Church, which we also interpret in faith as the Communion of God: in the moment of eye-to-eye contact in the Greeting of Peace at the eucharist, for example, or even in a passing word over a cup of coffee. And of course, today we are supremely conscious of and thankful for the way in which Pamela herself mediated that love to us as our lives intersected with hers - literally in an infinite number of different ways. Had this not been so, after all, we would not be here. 

St. John Chrysostom, who was Patriarch of Constantinople in the 5th century, in commenting on belief in the Communion of Saints which we affirm every time we say the Creed, once said: “Those whom we love and lose, are now no longer where they were before… they are now wherever we are.”

We hold Pamela dear in heart and mind as we send her to her eternal rest in the infinite love and peace of the everlasting arms of God the Father, mediated to us in the words and continuing work of Christ the Son, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.