August 21, 2026
Luke 2:25-32 + Psalm 30 + Revelation 7:9–17
Funeral for Carole S. Weatherby + August 21, 2026 + Gloria Dei Lutheran Church
Pastor Bradley E. Schmeling
Joe, Bradley, Rachel and Brian, Kelly and Sarah, Carrie and John, Courtney and Chris, family, friend, people of God at Gloria Dei: grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus, the Risen One.
Raise arms like beginning to conduct a choir.
The conductor stands in front of the choir and raises her hands.
The organist holds her hands over the keys.
The accompanist waits for the intake of breath.
All just before the downbeat.
It’s like someone saying, “Do you want to hold the baby?”
And a parent places their most precious gift in your arms.
You hold the baby.
You sing the song.
You play the piece.
The trees clap their hands.
Our eyes have seen your salvation,
a light for revelation to the gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.
Blessing and glory and wisdom
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Carole spent a lifetime tending to the gift that had been placed within her body,
not to store up glory for herself.
She would not have assumed that she held the full glory of God in her being.
She just dressed like it.
To most of what I’ll say today, she would be embarrassed, thinking we don’t really know her or that we’re overstating the case.
Yet we all knew it was glory,
because she did the only thing you can do when you bear the fullness of God’s glory. You give it away.
You say to those who have been waiting a lifetime to have the heavens open;
to those just learning to match a pitch
or discover the difference between page 201 and hymn 201;
to those who need to hear, “You can sing. Come on, try it”;
to those who can’t sing at all but need to be in a choir;
to those who could not yet sing out loud about their own fabulous glory
because a church that wasn’t ready;
to those as grumpy as they come but need a generous advocate;
to those who can no longer remember their life but remember the song:
Here, you hold the baby.
When Mary placed the baby Jesus in the arms of Simeon, it was enough for him. He didn’t know the whole story. He didn’t know the liberation that would come, or the suffering that would be endured, or even see an empty tomb. He just trusted the promise that he would see, not only his people’s salvation, but the glory of God in the whole creation, in all people.
And there it was. Simeon held God’s future in his arms and somehow knew he had seen enough.
Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace.
I don’t think it’s overstatement to say that Carole understood what it meant to be entrusted with something beautiful. She was serious about it. Those of you who sang with her know that. She could be exacting. The note mattered. The entrance mattered. The phrase mattered. Certain hymns mattered, and certain hymns didn’t. She purchased the white vestments that we wear on Christmas and Easter because beauty mattered. The liturgy mattered. I suspect there were moments when some poor choir member thought perhaps the fate of the entire Christian church rested upon whether the altos came in correctly. But Carole would have been the first to tell you that none of it was about her, or even about the show.
“God is the audience.”
Not the person sitting in the third pew who has opinions about the tempo.
Not the person who thought the anthem last week was better.
Not that one guy who’s just waiting to sing, “Shine, Jesus Shine.”
Not even the musician who knows exactly how difficult what you just did actually was.
God.
Which meant you could work terribly hard and then open your hands.
Here. It’s yours.
She had this capacity to see something in people, sometimes before they could see it themselves. To make room. To advocate. To connect with people who were not necessarily easy to connect with. Her family says that was simply who she was. Rachel’s friends from high school remembered her kindness. After sending a very generous gift to the church, she would call and say that she was sorry it wasn’t more.
Her elegance did not diminish even when the rest of us had long since surrendered to Minnesota practicality. Her love of the garden and her tenacious love for the dogs.
A generation of children remember standing near her and learning to sing. Carole started Schola because children should know the songs. Not just cute songs for children.
The liturgy.
The hymns.
The music of the church.
Thirty children at one point, singing and recording together. I wonder how many of them remember everything she taught them. Children grow up. Life goes one. Those children hold their own babies. They might have forgotten a lot of what they learned.
But I suspect that there are, indeed, the fragments,
the pieces that had been placed in their hands.
A melody.
A line.
A refrain that appears unexpectedly.
Because songs are like that.
They hide in us.
You can go years without singing one, and then suddenly there it is.
And sometimes it comes back precisely when you need it.
Carole knew that, too.
After Rachel was in an almost fatal car accident, and was recovering, Carole took words from the psalm we sang today and taped them to the organ.
“Weeping spends the night, but joy comes in the morning.” It was her fervent prayer.
And she left those words there. For years. They were still there after she retired. They were there when that Moeller organ was retired and went on to wherever organs go when they stop breathing.
I image Carole sitting there on a Sunday when all was not right in her world, in her family and friend’s world, in the church’s world.
The sanctuary filling.
All the music layered, in order, on the organ.
The presets locked into place
Her hands over the keys.
She played.
Not because everything was all right.
Not because a psalm makes terror disappear.
Not because faith keeps your children safe.
She played because sometimes all you can do is put the promise where you can see it and then put your hands on the keys.
Weeping spends the night. Joy comes in the morning.
Likely some mornings you believe it.
Other mornings you don’t.
But you play.
And somebody else sings.
And when you cannot quite carry the song,
the person beside you carries it for a measure or two.
And somehow morning comes.
Years later, the scene changed.
Her brain could no longer interpret the sound she heard,
this Letourneau sounding more like some abrasive, discordant, postmodern piece
than one Dietrich Buxtehude.
And then a move back to Ohio.
No organ console.
No choir waiting for Carole.
No bulletin filled with carefully chosen music.
So much of what she had known was becoming inaccessible.
But there was a piano.
Rachel said, “She couldn’t talk, but she could play.”
Her hands remembered.
The words can disappear.
Names can disappear.
The ordinary landmarks by which we locate ourselves begin to disappear.
And still, somewhere inside, the song remains.
The church is a schola, a school for song.
Placing something in our bodies, in our mouths, in our souls.
A little Amen or an Alleluia tucked away somewhere for a day when we might need it.
After a lifetime of Carole carrying the song, the song carried Carole.
There is something unbearably beautiful to me about that.
Especially today.
Because today we have come to the place where there are things we cannot carry anymore.
We cannot carry Carole back into life.
Death leaves an emptiness that we should not decorate too quickly with beautiful words.
Weeping spends the night.
Carole didn’t tape “Everything is fine” to the organ.
She taped a promise about morning.
And the promise we have today is not that we can hold on tightly enough.
It is that when our hands finally open, God does not let us fall.
Simeon didn’t drop the baby.
Yet something in him was set free.
Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace.
Carole held so much.
Children.
Ron.
Family.
Friends.
Choirs.
A congregation’s song.
The possibility of a new organ,
imagined long before these thousands of pipes ever filled this room.
She held the church from a green book to a cranberry book.
She held people who needed an advocate.
She held the music carefully.
And then, when it was time, she did something beautiful here, too.
She let someone else have the bench.
She cheered the next one on.
She loved what came after her.
The music was never hers to possess.
Here.
You hold the baby now.
I wish she could have been here to welcome David to this organ bench.
I wish she could hear what happens here next.
There are always things we wish.
One more conversation.
One more piece.
One more Sunday.
One more chance to say what we should have said.
One more chance to hear her laugh.
One more chance to sit at the table.
One more serving, perhaps, of Party Chicken or the Raspberry Vanilla Thing.
One more.
But Simeon does not get to cling to what was.
He gets the child.
He gets the promise.
He gets enough.
Now, Carole:
Go in peace.
Your eyes have seen salvation.
You were embraced by the Gloria Dei.
You have heard the angel’s song.
And you gave it away.
Now, even at the grave, WE sing our song:
Which is almost outrageous as it is elegant.
Alleluia.
How many times in her career did she sing that one word?
A word that doesn’t explain anything.
It doesn’t tell us why people suffer.
It doesn’t make death beautiful.
It doesn’t erase the night.
It is simply the song we have been given.
And so we sing it.
Because somewhere beyond the reach of our sight,
John, the writer of Revelation, hears a multitude no one can count.
All kinds of people.
All languages.
All creation gathered into praise.
Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might.
God is the audience.
And then, after all that enormous and gorgeous music, the vision becomes very small.
One face.
One tear.
Miraculously, each of us becomes the audience…to God.
God close enough to touch a face.
God close enough to be placed into an old man’s arms.
God close enough to become bread in our hands.
God close enough to hold Carole in arms of the Trinity.
The conductor raises their arms.
The organist holds their hands over the keys.
There is an intake of breath.
Here.
Do you want to hold the baby?
Yes.
For one beautiful, impossible, grace-filled life.
We held Carole.
And Carole held us.
And now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace.
The trees clap their hands.
The mountains burst into song.
The choir takes a breath.
And even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia.