Not Alone
Funeral Service: Calvin Bennett - December 28, 2007
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Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him. |
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Calvin never did anything, it seemed, without thinking about it for a good while, worrying the subject around and around from every possible angle.
So it would be appropriate for us to wrestle the scriptures around this morning and hear what they have to say to us as we remember Calvin.
Our first reading was from Proverbs, a list of wise sayings... things worth pondering as one goes about daily life. Many say they are loyal, but few are, the wise person realizes. Until his infirmities made it impossible, I could always count on seeing Calvin in his regular place each Sunday at 8:00. His hearing wasn't so great and his eyesight tenuous, but nevertheless, he was there to soak in as much of the Gospel as he could, and enjoy being with the folks some of whom he had known his whole life.
“The righteous walk in integrity – happy are the children who follow them,” says Proverbs. Calvin talked often of formative influences in his life, such as Sister Mildred Winter, who serves the parish in the 1930s. She lived uprightly, she taught forthrightly, she became the model for what one should say and do. Blessed be God for sending Sister Mildred to shape the life of faith in so many people, including Calvin. Blessed be God for persons such as Calvin who have responded.
The Gospel reading this morning was from the passage we often call the Beatitudes or the blessings. We may want to surround them with a general rosy haze. But these are not nice sentiments, spoken in a vacuum; these are the forceful and direct words of the Lord who lived in the swirl of controversy wherever he went. “Blessed are those who do not boast about their connections with God, the poor in spirit, because they already understand something about the kingdom of heaven.” That seems to fit Calvin. Despite his worries about many things, Calvin neither fretted nor boasted about his connections with God; he simply lived in it. That's a great place to be.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” That one fits those who gather here this morning. It is right and proper to grieve that Calvin is separated from us, but that isn't the end of the story. We shall be comforted; we shall know that the whole of creation will be remade, restored, put together on a new basis, where every right relationship we have enjoyed will be known and lived in its fullest, through our connection with the Lord Jesus Christ.
We also heard from Paul writing to the Philippians. Paul has faced every kind of problem over the years, and knows that death could come most any time. Yet he begins this passage: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, rejoice.” No matter if all sorts of things are going wrong, all manner of disaster befall us, we can copy Paul and sing to God anyway. “The Lord is near”, says Paul. He might be talking about the final coming, and he also might be talking about the Holy Communion, where the Lord comes close to us week after week. “Do not worry about anything”, Paul says. Here he is, imprisoned again, not knowing what his fate might be, saying that we should not fret. Worry; what a hard thing for us to give up! Oh, if we would just give them up to the Lord in prayer, search out the best judgments and get on with things. Why do we hang onto things and fret so much? It doesn't accomplish much, and gets in the way of the joy that Paul knows is God's good gift to us.
Then, Paul urges us to hold onto and copy those things that we have heard and seen in our mentors to be the right things, for as we do this, the God of peace will be with us.
And that brings us to a final point. We can be lonely, but not alone; the Lord Jesus has promised to be with us always, in word and sacrament, in prayer and contemplation, in the mutual conversation fo the saints. I suspect that Calvin may have been lonely sometimes; his circle of activities was rather small. But he was never alone. The Lord's promise in Holy Baptism is good, forever.
So there we have done it. We have wrestled around with the scriptures for the day. We have found connections with Calvin in these scriptures, and maybe for ourselves. But most of all we have encountered a loving Lord Jesus who reassures Calvin and us, “You will never be alone, forever.”
Amen.
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