Praise the Lord

It's been a while.  Usually guilt finds a clawhold on me, somewhere underneath my ego and above my ability to find time to do all the things on earth that I am meant to do.  It's all about time, isn't it?  Even if there were twenty-eight hours in a day, even if there were thirteen months in a year, even if I could live to one hundred and fifty years of age I would still find a way to stress out about all the things that I am supposed to do in the next week.  So, on a Sunday night in mid-November I sit in front of the digital eye tapping frantically away at words that will somehow be cathartic for me.  This tip/tapping on my computer keyboard brings some kind of release.

Or, it could be just a gracious opportunity to procrastinate. 

I'll choose the former.  Catharsis always sounds better.  In fact, the word catharsis is a fun word to say as if by saying it enough times you already feel less stressed.  Try it.  Catharsis.  Dictionary dot com defines catharsis as the purging of emotions or the easing of emotional stress.  Am I stressed?  Do I know what that means?  Does it simply mean that can I feel the blood pressure in my throat at certain times of the day?  Perhaps, but cathartically I can purge my emotional duress by laying out there some of the events that have occurred in the life of this small town pastor.

I've never not prepared for a funeral sermon before.  After spending time with a grieving family, usually I will find a way to connect the life story of the deceased with the living word of the Bible and viola, a sermon leaps from my head like the kangaroo that jumped out of the bush at my car this morning on the way to Mt. Sylvia, a fly speck of a church in the hills of the Lockyer Valley.  Fly speck sounds derogatory; don't ge me wrong - it was an adjective indicative of size rather than composition.  The church building  would comfortably hold forty on a Christmas Eve service.  I'm not sure that Cross Lutheran Church has seen that many since Martin Luther was alive, though.  Perhaps we can invite the local kangaroo population to attend.  Anyway, this kangaroo comes flying out of the bush to leap across the road inches in front of my Toyota Altise, as if a crocodile were hungry for some kangachips.  I beeped my horn as I swerved on the one lane road.  I didn't hit the marsupial but I'm pretty sure her pouch was not full of joeys when I barely missed her.

So the funeral sermon, right?  Eddie was an incredible man.  After the funeral service, one of the attendees caught up with me and explained Eddie in the best way possible.  The man who described him was one of the local farmers.  To the funeral he did not wear a suit and tie, but stained blue jeans and a wide brimmed hat.  His hands, large and stained with dirt, encircled my own as he stopped to talk about Eddie.

"There was nothing spectacular about Eddie.  He didn't really own anything.  He wasn't rich.  He wasn't powerful.  He wasn't even particularly successful at farming.  But look around you.  At this little church, there are almost three hundred people who have come to say farewell to an almost ninety year old man.  When is the last time you saw a truly elderly man whose funeral was attended by so many?"

I had to agree with him.  Usually, when someone in their late eighties passes away, it is a small funeral attended by the family and a few friends.  Most of the deceased's friends had died before.

"And yet here we are, farewelling (it's a verb here) a man who, by most standards, was not materially successful.  But he must have done something right."  With that, the farmer pushed his hat back a little farther on his head, placed his hands on his hips and smiled a slight smirk of contentment.  It was obvious his own memory of Eddie was impinging on the moment.

It was the same memory that all of us had (and I had only known Eddie for a eighteen months.)  Eddie smiled a lot.  And I mean, a lot.  Not just when things were going really well, when he was thinking about his kids or grandkids, but all the time.  One time, during a church service, Eddie banged his leg and it started to bleed.  Because he was on blood thinners, the bleeding didn't stop very easily, but no one in the congregation knew that Eddie was exsanguinating all over his Sunday best socks.  He just sat at the front, content to be part of the community, caring not whether he had to buy a new pair of argyles.  Nobody knew because Eddie was smiling.

His smile carried him through life.  It wasn't that he was happy all the time; the last few months he was not particularly pleased about his lack of ambulation, the falling, the bleeding, the cancer, the age; but he was joyful.  Content with whatever life brought because it meant that he was, as we spoke on that last day, "Almost home."  He said that a few times as he laid in the bed.  "Pastor Reid, I'm almost home."

People knew about Eddie's faith; it was evident in the way that he carried himself and the way he related to his church and his children.  But I'm not sure anyone really knew the extent of his faith.  When Jesus said have the 'faith of a mustard seed,' Eddie's faith was more like a coconut.  Which is why, when it came to preparing a sermon for Eddie's funeral, he had already done it for me.  The four texts that he picked out, all of them about praising God, entering his courts with gladness, rejoicing in the Lord always - the all fit together perfectly, so that when it came to speak about Eddie's journey home, I simply read the word of God. 

I should do that more often.

On the front page of the funeral bulletin was a picture of Eddie (smiling, of course), but the picture is only two dimensional; we don't hear Eddie's voice or see his depth of character and certainly, we don't catch a glimpse of his fourth dimension-ness, his spirituality.  "Come into his presence with gladness.  Praise the Lord.  Rejoice in the Lord always."  Shake and repeat.

I wish there were a lot more people like Eddie in the world. 

Praise God, he's home, though.