I haven't been posting much. I went to Ethiopia and then my father got sick. I was traveling to and from Texas far more frequently than usual (even pre-pandemic) and the amount of preaching I was up for got smaller and smaller and eventually withered away.
Then, on November 22, 2021 my father died. I was in Dallas and had had lunch with Daddy and David. Daddy had declared that he was "so dang ready to go." It was the 68 years to the day since he had married my mother, although I don't know if he consciously knew that.
I would have been on a plane flying back to North Carolina but the flight was delayed so I was still there when my brother David called and said "don't get on the plane." It was three days before Thanksgiving, two weeks before the big Parktown Food Hub Christmas giveaway was to start, and just over a month before Christmas. So we made the arrangements, wrote this obituary and waited until the funeral on December 18.
It wasn't quite that clean and clear and as we waited for the funeral I saw some of the ugly side of this thing some call Christianity as not one but two pastors declined to respect my ordination in what felt wrenchingly unkind. I ended up planning and leading the funeral myself. Seldon played piano (magnificently), Jackson read scripture in the Quaker style he is learning in seminary, and Jennifer held my grief. Lisa and David sat on the front row but I couldn't look at them but Jennifer was there for me even if she did not know it.
This sermon is the message I preached that day. I didn't go off script very much - that would have been way too dangerous. Rev. Dr. Robert Preece sat at the back of the church, watching just in case I (or anyone else) fell apart and needed pastoral care. It ended up being beautiful. I now know I am a person who can lead her own father's funeral even as I feel that my heart has had a huge hole torn in it and everything was and continues to be weird.
There is no moment when the Resurrection is more important and more real than when preaching at your father's funeral, so here is what I said on that day. Someday I will preach again and share those words here... but for now... this is what there is.
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What do you remember about my Daddy?
<long pause>
Do you know him as a brother? As a father? As an uncle? As an almost-grandfather? As a friend? As a woodworker?
He was all of those things and so much more. And among all those roles, the most important one for us to remember today is that he was a beloved child of God.
Faith was a work of art for Daddy. The pain of his childhood led him to pay close attention, to study and think and pray and ultimately, to believe. To believe that
· The God who would create a world that was good and let it devolve into sin rather than force anyone to behave a certain way…
· The God who would let his own Son die the most undeserved of deaths out of love for creatures who had gone far astray…
· The God who is *defined* as love and yet spent his earthly, embodied time with the most impure of sinners…
· That God would be there for him through thick and thin.
· That God could handle it all.
· That God meant that, ultimately, everything would be alright.
When I was little, still living at home, we would be sitting in the living room after supper, or on a weekend, or for whatever reason and Daddy would stand up and say… “Well, I gotta go!”
He said it so much that we had a shirt embroidered that said “Gotta go!” It was his watchword. He would usually go to his workshop to build something but it could also mean it was time to go home, time to turn off the tv… time to go do something else.
Fast forward a few decades. The pandemic was hard on all of us and during the long stretch of time when I could not visit Daddy I would call – sometimes 3 or more times per week – and every time he would say “things are going good here.”
No matter what was going on.
In an ice storm so the power would be off and on and he had to put on all his warmest clothing? “Things are going good here.”
When he had been hospitalized after a fall? “Things are going good here.”
Every. Single. Time.
So one day I said “well, Daddy, how would you know if things were not going good?” And his answer was “because then I would be grouchy.”
For this man – my Daddy, your brother or uncle, cousin or friend - how things were going depended on his attitude, not on the circumstances.
And on the very last day I saw him, the very last day he was alive, he said to me “Go on to the airport, it will be ok. Things are going good here.”
And here is what I think happened on that day:
I think maybe, perhaps at some unconscious level, he decided that things were just not going so good anymore and he decided he had to go. So he went to sleep, and then went to Jesus. It was one last Gotta Go.
This is hard for me y’all. I loved my Daddy as much as any Daddy’s girl has ever loved their Daddy. He was not “Dad” or “Father” to me – he was and always will be Daddy. Because I loved him and still love him and will always love him in a very special way.
But I know something even more special than that enduring love for the man who once said “I will love you as much as you need me to.” I know that when he went to sleep on November 22 and then went to be with Jesus, he finally found the place where he will never be grouchy. Where things will always be going good. By every standard, and not just the standard of making the best of whatever bad circumstances he might have been in.
And so I offer this comfort:
· because in his life Jesus showed us how we can care for each other and live with one another, valuing mercy and grace and comfort for those in our lives over any kind of perfection or purity
· because Jesus came and experienced death when he did not have to
· because Jesus could not be held by death and therefore broke those bonds
· because Jesus died and it did not stick…
· because there was and is RESURRECTION
We no longer have to fear anything. We are forgiven and have eternal grace and mercy.
Because of that Jesus who literally embodied love, Daddy has arisen. He is shining. His light has come. His son has come from afar and his daughter has been carried into this place by grace. We are here today, the people we are, because of a faith that Daddy embodied every day of his life.
My Daddy is now and forever in a place where things are and always will be going good here. Now and forever.
So when you are sad because you won’t be able to call him up and seek his advice…
Or when there are no more carved Santas or custom cabinets
Or because you will just plain miss your father, brother, uncle, almost-grandfather, friend…
Go with that feeling.
Feel it all the way.
Appreciate the great love that is necessary for such great sorrow to exist.
But also know this:
Jesus has my Daddy and Jesus has you, too.
And because of that, things are going really good, now and forever.
Amen.
