Celebrating the Life and Witness of Karen B. Safstrom

I took this photo at Karen's Celebration of New Ministry at CTK- Epiphany and told her it took
two bishops, one Episcopal (Doug Fisher)and one Lutheran (Jim Hazelwood) to keep her in line. 

Today it was my honor to preside and preach at the funeral service for my friend, The Rev. Karen Safstrom. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, we held a small private service at Miles Funeral Home in Holden for family and close friends. At a later date there will be a Memorial Service to celebrate Karen's ministry led by the two bishops shown above. Printed below, with the permission of Karen's family, are my sermon notes from today's service. 

My name is Rich Simpson. From 1998-2013, I served as the rector of St Francis Episcopal Church, just around the corner from here.

At some point, I am honestly not sure when, this person used to show up on Saturday nights at our 5 pm service. And I knew she was clergy because, you kind of always know. That’s how I first met Karen who was there quietly but not quite anonymously. And that’s how I learned that she was a Lutheran pastor but at the time working primarily as a pharmacist.

After some time passed – I really don’t remember how long that lasted, but it happened that I was looking for a new Associate Rector. I immediately thought of this Lutheran pharmacist who would appear from time to time on Saturday nights, and the rest is history. I won’t spend a lot of time telling you that she was an amazing colleague and I had so much respect for her; I trust that everyone here today knows that already. She was a hard-working, gifted, pastor. The congregations she served, across two denominations and most recently at Christ the King- Epiphany in Wilbraham, were the beneficiaries of those many gifts. Karen was made for that job in Wilbraham, being fluent in both Lutheran, her native tongue, and Episcopalian, her second language. And among the many griefs I feel these days one is that she put in the hard labor in the vineyard there, where there will be much fruit resulting from her faithful work. 

Because of the pandemic our options are limited today. This liturgy is spare, but I pray that it is enough for now at least, to get us through this day and this week. I was going to try to put together something that was kind of Lutherpalian. But to be honest, after I asked a Lutheran friend to send me the Lutheran service, I really couldn’t find anything that felt like it needed to be changed. We really do share not only “bonds of affection” for one another but we are very close cousins liturgically.

There was, however, one difference I decided that I liked very much in that Lutheran liturgy which we have used today, and I admit to you that I experienced a kind of “holy envy” about it.  It’s in the precise wording of that welcome which helps us to get clear on why are we here – wherever we may come from:

We are gathered to worship,

to proclaim Christ crucified and risen,

to remember before God our sister, Karen,

to give thanks for her life,

to commend her to our merciful redeemer,

and to comfort one another in our grief.

Those active verbs are what funerals are for, and we sometimes get confused about that. But in truth we come together to worship, to proclaim, to remember, to give thanks, to commend, and to comfort. Those verbs bind us together today.

Even in the face of the death of one so young as Karen was, we gather here to worship and to proclaim the good news of Christ crucified and risen. We picked a double-gospel reading today to make this point. Both of these readings may be familiar to many of you, but I’ve never heard them read together as we did a few minutes ago. Yet they are part of one long day as the fourth gospel writer tells the story: from early Easter morning when it was still dark out until the end of the day when Jesus comes to breathe on the disciples who are locked in a room. (And then, because Thomas was out getting milk, we get the postscript of what happened one week later.)  

We gather here to proclaim that the Lord is risen indeed. This does not make the death of those we love any easier. But it may take away a little bit of the sting to trust that love is stronger than death, and to know that life is changed, not ended, when our mortal bodies give out. Even in the midst of the unfairness and sadness of it all, we dare to make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

But don’t take my word for it. I came across a sermon that Karen preached in this very place, almost exactly two years ago, at the funeral of her friend, Melissa Tuttle, on June 27, 2018. In that sermon, and I know that some of you were here to hear it, Karen quoted one of her heroines, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. Karen said:

In her book Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People I think Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber describes what this love can be like for us when she shares the story of her friend who was not a fan of Christianity telling that she was having a crisis of faith because she suddenly found herself believing in Jesus. Nadia’s response to her friend was (and pardon the swear word, but I know Melissa would want me to keep it in), “I’m so sorry, but sometimes Jesus just hunts your ass down and there’s nothing you can do about it.” That’s what God’s love in Jesus is like. It finds you no matter where you are or what you do to avoid it. It accepts us for who we are however flawed or screwed up and won’t let go of us or give up on us.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just Melissa who wanted to keep that word in there, let’s be honest! The God who “hunts our asses down” is the God that Karen gave her life to. That love found her, and it would not let her go. (I will just add that I’ve heard both Nadia and Karen preach and both are good, and Karen surely held her own.)

Those women who came to the tomb early on that Sunday morning expecting to find death and to deal with that, were surprised by life. It came with the sound of Jesus’ voice, whom Mary first thought was the gardener. “Mary,” he said, and in that moment she knew. And that encounter changed her life for good. It marked her. Faith is a journey and it includes lots of doubts and questions and struggle. Karen embraced that part of it which I think is found in the Thomas story. God meets us where we are and Karen met people where they were too.

Karen worked hard to meet those for whom Church just doesn’t work and eventually that led to an exciting new ministry at St. Francis: unCommon Ground. I bet some of you know the kind of clergy (I know some of them myself) who kind of make you feel like they are so super-holy, so that maybe you feel you aren’t in the same league. You may look up to them, and maybe they are rock stars in the faith and they just can’t help it. But what I can say with confidence is that Karen was not that kind of pastor. That’s what she loved about Nadia, and Questioning Thomas and because of that, she gave permission and invitation and space to people to question and to seek and to engage and to grow.

I will miss Karen, beloved child of God. But perhaps even more I will miss that kind of embodiment of what ordained ministry can look like. She was good at so many aspects of ordained ministry: preaching and teaching, pastoral care and above all loving God’s people, even the difficult ones. She listened and she prayed. But I think her favorite part of ministry was in letting people be real with their questions and their doubts. She could do that because she lived it. In between, in that space of being both pharmacist and pastor. In between, in that space between Lutheran and Episcopalian. In between the space inside and outside of church walls. She lived in those boundary places and we are better for it. The Church is better for it. The world is better for it.  

So, trust me, I could preach long sermons on both of the back-to-back gospel readings and I could talk about Karen all day. But I am going to let that be enough, because I know I’m preaching to the choir today. When we lose someone we love, it is so painful and so confusing and challenging and there is such a hole left. But we pray that like Mary and Thomas that we come to see with our own eyes, so we too might cry out in our grief: Rabbouni! My Lord and my God! And that like Mary and Thomas and Karen we will know, and be known, by the one who will not let us go.

We gather and we proclaim so that we can hold our pain and our loss and our grief at the foot of the cross, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. We remember and we give thanks for Karen’s life so that we can commend her to the God who created her in love. But in so doing, I would be remiss if I did not say that before Karen was ordained she was baptized. She was daughter, and sister and aunt and friend and pharmacist before ever preaching her first sermon. Martin Luther understood that vocation is never just about the clergy and Karen got that, too. Anyone who has ever had two half-time jobs knows what a joke that is; it’s really two full-time jobs with half-time pay. Especially for someone as diligent as Karen. Yet I think it was living in that space, and especially in the times when she was bi-vocational, that I think gave her such insight and shaped the kind of pastor she was as she straddled those different worlds.

As we commend her to the God of love, we seek to comfort each other, and especially on this day we seek to be a comfort for Cynthia and for Lynn and Scott and Ryan and Lauren. In that same sermon that Karen preached here two years ago she also spoke about community and the need to be present for each other, family and friends who grieve the loss of those whom we love but see no longer.

It is so much harder to comfort one another in this peculiar time in which we are now living with social distancing. It is hard because so much of comfort is not in the words spoken but the ones left unspoken when a hand is placed on a shoulder, or we embrace with sighs too deep for words. We will do that again. But for today, we can still offer signs of comfort to one another. I pray that this space, however imperfectly, provides room enough for comfortable words and especially that Karen’s family feels comforted by this gathering. That does not take away the hurt and the sheer bewilderment we feel that she is gone. Yet relationships do not die when our mortal bodies give out. Love never dies. Karen offered so much comfort to so many as a faithful pastor. Today we do our best to channel some of that to comfort one another in our sorrow. We have gathered, we proclaim, we remember, we give thanks, we commend and we comfort one another. It’s a lot. But we don’t do it alone. We do it together, in the presence of our crucified Lord, who is risen indeed. Alleluia.