They Are at Peace – a Eulogy for Eddie Adkins
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue gave this sermon at All Saints’ Episcopal Church
on Tybee Island, January 4, 2020
They Are at Peace
A Eulogy for the Rev. Edna Fishburne Adkins, Deacon
Wisdom 3:1-5,9 and Romans 8:14-39
“The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God” we hear in our first reading (Wisdom 3:1 in the Apocrypha) which goes on, “In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction, but they are at peace.”
We gather today in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to give thanks for Edna Adkins, knowing that Eddie and Bob are at peace.
But alongside this image of being in the hand of God, I want to add another. Deacon Eddie’s friend Cindy Klein, with whom she worked doing taxes told me, “She had this image of sitting in Jesus lap and she was looking forward to that.” That’s the image. Eddie in Jesus’ lap. Cindy added, “So I am kind of smiling. She got there.”
This is the main thing today. If you don’t break into a smile, if we don’t all laugh, we will have missed something vital to the life and spirit of Edna Fishburne Adkins. Because Eddie had the greatest smile and she knew and deeply felt the joy, the deep abiding joy, of Jesus.
She came by the love of God early in life. Baptized in an Episcopal Church in September of 1933, the month after she was born, she was a Book of Common Prayer loving Christian from her earliest days. She liked to play church as a little girl and she wrote in a spiritual autobiography when she sought ordination as a deacon that her family would remind her how she would carry the prayer book around with her even before she could read it.
And among Eddie’s very first recollections, she wrote, were of her grandmother telling her about God and how much God loves us. She said her grandmother always referred to her as a “precious child of God” and it was an image that stayed with her. An image that led to Eddie in recent years looking forward to sitting in Jesus’ lap.
Active in church as a teenager, Eddie took part in the young people’s service league and attended summer camp in the Diocese of South Carolina at Camp Saint Christopher every summer. As a senior in high school she taught a Sunday school at Saint Peter’s Church in Charleston. She was actively engaged in the Canterbury Club for Episcopalians at Winthrop College all four years, while continuing to teach Sunday school and to sing in the choir at Our Savior in Rock Hill. At that time, she felt called to serve God in the church but she said, “There just did not seem to be a place for me.” About all women could do in those days, she said, was to sing in the choir, to teach Sunday school, and to be on the Altar Guild. There was not much for a full-time church vocation.
In 1955, she graduated from college and began teaching first grade at Sullivan’s Island Elementary School. She married Bob the following year and a dynamic duo was created that would come to be a real force in time. She moved into being an Air Force wife, moving every 18-36 months. Bob was away from her when she was pregnant, but Eddie adapted to the challenge in corresponding by audio tapes. Her daughter Amee, looking back on it says, “She learned how to work hard to sustain connections.” This was an abiding skill of Eddie’s–maintaining significant connections.
As Julie, Charles, and finally Amee were born they all adapted and in twenty years on the move in France, Germany, California, and Illinois, the family learned life-long lessons of holding on to what matters and remembering the joy. They also dealt with the deep pain of tragic loss with two sons, Butch and Robert Jr., dying shortly after childbirth. Eddie saw in hindsight how her response each time had been to draw closer to God.
When the Adkins moved to Savannah in 1970, Eddie began to teach at Beach High School. She earned a Master’s Degree in Media from Georgia Southern and became the head media specialist at Jenkins High School. That same year she joined the Daughters of the King at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Savannah and she would later say the decision was life changing. The Daughters of the King is an order for women, primarily communicants of the Episcopal Church, who pledge themselves to a life-long program of prayer, service, and evangelism while benefitting from the support in this commitment from a worldwide community of like-minded women. That pattern of prayer and service came naturally to Eddie, but the discipline of it deepened her faith in Jesus in ways she could not see when she embarked on the journey.
Eddie’s daughter Amee remembers the impact as well. She told me, “That’s what turned me in my faith after I had experienced a lot of judgment in school.” When her Mom got into mentoring a group in Education for Ministry and began doing more with pastoral care, Amee said, “It gave me a whole new vision of what spiritual life is and can be. It was still who she had been as my Mom, but as an adult seeing how my Mom and Dad lived their lives, the joy they took in things; it changed me.”
Jamie Maury remembers the change it led to for him and for Dan as well. In fact, Eddie mentored, the Revs. June Johnson, Julia Sierra Reyes, and Jamie Maury, who are now all priests and the Rev. Susan Hill, who is a deacon. But this is just who Eddie was to the core. As Sierra told me, “She was truly a source of love. She was a big cheerleader for so many people.” She added, “With Eddie, everyone was seen. She truly was a deacon, Christ’s love in the world.”
Sierra also got insight into Eddie, when the deacon gifted Sierra with her books, sermons, and folders of notes. Sierra said that Eddie was a true librarian, so she had folders for every liturgical day of the year with notes, clippings, sermons, and bulletins. Sierra said, this is what every professor of Homiletics will tell you to do that nobody actually does, but Eddie would read with preaching in mind and file things away for the right day. Sierra already knew Eddie to be an excellent preacher, but in inheriting her files, she learned of the discipline that undergirded her preaching.
Jamie Maury remembers another source of strength was her strong piety, her spiritual disciplines. He said, “It was not just her dedication to church, but to God.” Jamie remembers, “It was not uncommon that if you got to the church early, she would be kneeling at the altar in prayer an hour before the service.”
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Bea Colley told me that Eddie would do things for people undercover, not wanting any credit. She said that she told Eddie that she wanted to go on a trip with friends. Eddie told her, “Let me know if you really decide to go.” She then said, “When I let her know it was set, Eddie transferred a time share for me and my friends to use. The biggest thing of all is I presented my card to pay for the condo and I learned it was already taken care of. I did not go accepting she was paying for it. I thought she was arranging an inexpensive rate. I did not see it coming. It touched me that she did that. Her gift was from her heart.”
Art Worden, who served with her many years here at All Saints said, “I have always been a Eucharistic Minister and she was kinda like my boss. She was like a force. She got things done without any effort at all. If she was there, everything just worked well.”
But let’s remember that she was part of a fantastic duo. To know Eddie is to know the love she had for Bob, they were a tag team, their ministries were side by side. Art says, “Bob and Eddie were the opposite of each other. They were each a force. He did everything in a quiet, supportive way. She was dynamic. She didn’t meet anyone she couldn’t talk with. They balanced each other out.”
Jamie Maury noted you need to think of Eddie as a team of Bob and Eddie. Bob was the silent doer at All Saints. Eddie set the pace for him. If something needed doing, she would get Bob to do it. Jamie said, “Eddie worked with Sam and Otto and other Vicars, but in many ways she was the glue as well as the energy and the spirit.”
But let’s please remember her straight. Eddie was honest. She was straightforward. She told you the truth. And that is not always an easy gift to receive.
As Sierra put it, “She wouldn’t take any mess.” Then Sierra added reflectively, “Often times as women leaders, we think we have to smile and just be pleasant. But she was good in her role, she knew what a deacon was and should do. She didn’t take no mess off nobody.”
So we gather this day not to mourn, at least not that alone. We gather to give thanks, to sing, and to laugh. The Apostle Paul writes in our reading from Romans, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
The last time I saw Eddie was a day or so after a scare when it seemed she might slip away at any moment and some days before she died. I went into the bedroom where she would spend her last days and noted the Book of Common Prayer alongside her. I said who I was so she could hear me and she looked with recognition and she just beamed and told me she was so glad to see me. I knew that look of love because I had seen it so many times before. You know it too. We have all experienced Eddie’s smile that came from her very soul. That same look of recognition. That same joy. I felt seen and loved. And in her hand, I could see she was clutching a wooden cross. She sometimes slipped away where she didn’t see me, but she never let go of the cross.
Paul goes on to write, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nothing could and did separate Eddie Adkins from the love of God she experienced in Jesus. Not years of being an Air Force family, not the death of two infant children, not the usual stresses and strains of families and jobs and life. Not even the death of her beloved, Bob. In all these things she was more than a conqueror through Jesus who loves her and loves you and me. Bob and Eddie are at peace.
And so we give thanks for her life and the witness of her hugs, her smile, her heart, her love. But I want to end with a challenge, because in the end this is a sermon. Eddie Adkins did not witness to herself, she witnessed to Jesus. She loved because she was loved as her grandmother taught her to be a precious child of God. The challenge is the one Eddie said changed her life. When she joined the Daughters of the King, she took their motto to heart and living into it and the spiritual disciplines that go with it transformed Eddie and living into it could transform you and me. The motto is this:
For His Sake…
I am but one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
What I can do, I ought to do.
What I ought to do, by the grace of God I will do.
Lord, what will you have me do?
As we give thanks for Bob and Eddie Adkins, two lives well lived, know that you don’t have to earn or deserve God’s love, you have that fully. Everything that needs to be done, God has done. In thanksgiving for that love, you too are but one, but you are one. You can’t do everything, but you can do something. With the example of a true servant of Jesus before you, what might God be asking you to do to share that love with others?
Amen.
