The Funeral Eucharist for LaRoy Baird

 

St. George’s Episcopal Church, Bismarck, ND

Saturday  Aug 17, 2024

 + It is a true honor for me to officiate at this service today.

 I am very grateful that John asked me to come to Bismarck to lead this service in which the life of LaRoy is celebrated .

 And I have to say this was a life that needs to be celebrated.  

 As I read that incredible obituary, I was impressed.

 LaRoy led an amazing life!

 He seemed like some kind of renaissance man!

 Studying zoologoy.

 Becoming a forensic chemist

 Then law school.

 A distinguished legal career

 Helping those who truly needed help.

 A devoted Democrat!

 How many people would have dreamed to have lived a life like his!

 It was truly a blessed life!

 There is no doubt that he was someone who made a major impact in so many people’s lives.

 To hear all these stories and to hear the wonderful things people have to say is a big sign that a person made an major impact in people’s lives.

 And LaRoy did that.

 This was a man who made a difference in this world and in the lives of his family, whom he loved deeply, and for all the people who knew him.

 And in countless people’s lives that we will never know about.

 And it is this that we celebrate and remember today.

 It is important to remember that success is not just something that just happens.

 One works hard to succeed.

 One sacrifices and struggles.

 Few people know how much sleep a truly successful person loses in their lifetime.

 It is important to remember that, to hold that close and to celebrate those sacrifices LaRoy made in his life.

 And the fact that he did so not only for himself, but for his family, for those whom he loved the most.

  And because he did, this world is a bit more empty today without LaRoy in it.

 The lives of everyone who knew him and experienced that love and generosity and caring is emptier because LaRoy is not there to share that.

 But, it is vital to remember that all this reminds us that our goodbye today is only a temporary goodbye.

 All that you knew and loved about LaRoy is not gone for good.

 It is not ashes.

 Is not grief.

 It is not loss.

 Everything that LaRoy was to those who knew him and loved him and now miss him is not lost forever.

 All you loved, all that was good and gracious and amazing in LaRoy—all that was fierce and strong and amazing in him—all of that lives on.

 It lives on with all of you who experienced the kindness and generosity and love of LaRoy in this life.

 And for those of us who have faith, faith in more than this world, we know that it goes on too.

 I don’t claim to know how.

 I don’t claim to know for certain what exactly awaits us in the next world.

 I do believe that all that is good and gracious and loving in LaRoy now dwells in a place of light and beauty and life unending.

 I believe it will be very much like the vision we see shown to us in our reading today from the prophet Isaiah.

And I do believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will see him again.

 A place of rich food and well-aged wines.

 A place in which every tear will truly be wiped away for good.

 A place in which there will be no more tears.

 And it will be beautiful.

 Of course that doesn’t make any of this any easier for those who knew him and cared for him.

 Whenever anyone we love dies, we are going to feel pain.

 That’s just a part of life.

 That is the price we pay for love.

 We all know that love is not free.

 It comes at a very costly price.

 We all run the run the risk when we love that one day that those we love may not be with us for all of our lives.

 And the more pain we feel, we know the greater the love we had.

 And that’s all right.

 There is nothing wrong to know that accept that.

 Because the really important thing to realize, in the end, is that it was worth it.

 Every single bit of it was worth the price.

 So, yes, there are tears today.

 Yes, there is a feeling of separation and loss.

 But like the hardship in this life, our feelings of loss are only temporary as well.

 They too will pass away.

 Realizing that and remembering that fact is what gets us through some of the hard moments of this life.

 This is where we find our strength—in our faith that promises us an end to our sorrows, to our loss.

It is a faith that can tell us with a startling reality that every tear we shed—and we all shed our share of tears in this life—every tear will one day be dried and every heartache will ultimately disappear.

And I can also tell you that he will not be quickly forgotten.

LaRoy Baird is not someone who will be easily forgotten.

He is not someone who passes quietly into the mists

His fierce determination lives on in us.

His strength, his dignity, his love lives on in his family and his friends and in all those who knew him.

His strength and his compassion, his sense of justice and dignity lives in those he helped and encouraged and led and was an example to. 

So this morning and in the days to come, let us remember LaRoy with joy in our hearts.

Let us hold him close in our memories and celebrate his life with a sense of gratitude for all he was.

Let us truly be thankful for LaRoy.

And let us be glad that one day we too will be sharing with him in that joy he now lives in, and joining him in that place of  light and beauty and unending happiness, where there are no more tears and no sadness, but life unending.    

Into paradise may the angels lead you, LaRoy.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

12 Pentecost

 August 11, 2024

I Kings 19.4-8; Ephesians 4.25-5.2; John 6.35,41-51

 + We’re going to do it again.

 We’re going to go back in time, for a moment.

 Well, not all that far back, anyway.

 We’re going to back to 1994.

 Sunday, August 14, 1994, to be exact.

 It was on that Sunday, 30 years ago this coming Wednesday, that I preached my very first sermon at Maple Sheyenne Lutheran Church.

 And here I am, 30 years later, preaching still. And on the same scripture I preached 30 years ago.

 Now, I will say this about my 30 years as a preacher.

 As most of you know, I am fairly confident in my vocation as a priest.

 I love being a priest.

 I have wanted to be a priest since I was 13 years old.

 I knew this was what I wanted to do.

 And I have loved it.

 I am pretty confident in who I am a priest.

 However, I have never—not once—been confident in my vocation as a preacher.

 I have never felt like I was a very good preacher.

 And, to be brutally honest, I still don’t.

 There are days I get up here in this pulpit and think to myself or to God, “What am I doing?”

 Now over the years, I have worked hard to gain some confidence in my preaching skills.

 I have taken classes.

 I have read countless books of homiletics.

 But it has always felt like a burden I have to bear and a cross I have to carry.

 Donna Clark often shares the story about how on her first Sunday visiting St. Stephen’s, she went downstairs at coffee hour and was shocked to hear one of our parishioners exclaim at the table, “That was one of the worst sermons I’ve ever heard!”

 Yes, that would’ve been one of MY sermons.

 And of course this was a running gag from this particular parishioner (who has since moved away to another state). I am still actually fairly close to this parishioner and their family.

 It was a joke.

 Kinda.

 *Ha.* *Ha.*

 But, for me, sometimes, as much as I smiled and chuckled, I will admit: it wasn’t always a joke.

 It was sometimes very painful to hear that.

 Again and again.

 Which is just the way it is sometimes.

 There are certain burdens we just simply must bear in our lives of following Jesus.

 And God never, ever expects any of us to be perfect.

 I have known good preachers who have been not such good people.

 I would rather be a good priest and not-such-good preacher.

 Any day.

 And if, at my funeral, someone says, “Now that was a good priest!” it would mean more to me in whatever celestial afterlife I may at that time being living within.

 More so than being a good preacher.

 And I am sure someone at that funeral will say, “He wasn’t that great of a preacher.”

 God, as I said, doesn’t call perfect people.

 God calls fractured human beings, with various and very limited talents, to do what they can with that they’ve been given.

 And to do the best they can within those limitations.

 Now, our response to that can either be despair or acceptance.

In our reading from 1 Kings, we find the prophet Elijah in the wilderness.

And his response to hardship is. . . despair.

In that wilderness, after traveling a day’s journey, he asks God to let him die.

In fact, we find him praying a very beautifully profound prayer, despite its dark tone.

Elijah prays, “It is enough: now, O Lord, take away my life…”

And you think I’m dramatic!

But, if we’re listening closely, that prayer should actually cause us to pause uncomfortably for a moment.

It’s actually quite a shocking prayer.

But it is brutally honest too.

Anyone who has been in the depths of depression or anxiety or despair knows this prayer.

Anyone who has been touched with the deep, ugly darkness of depression has probably prayed this prayer.

“It is enough. Now, O Lord, take away my life.”

Now, some people would be afraid to pray this prayer.

Why?

Because they’re afraid God might actually answer their prayer.

Well, in the case of Elijah, God actually does.

Wait, you’re probably saying.

No. God didn’t answer Elijah’s prayer.

Elijah lived.

Ah, yes, but actually, God did answer the prayer.

In the midst of his depression, in the midst of his anguish, in the midst of the wilderness of not only his surroundings, but his own spirit, God really does answer the prayer of Elijah.

But…it is not answered in the way Elijah wants.

The prayer is answered with a beautiful “no.”

And we all have to understand and accept that sometimes “no” is the answer to whatever we might be praying for.

But before you think this is cruel—before you start saying that God’s “no” is a cruel no, follow this short, short story of Elijah all the way through.

Yes, God answers Elijah with a non-verbal no.

But God still provides even after the no.

For Elijah, an angel appears and feeds him in his anguish and in that wilderness.

Elijah is not allowed to die.

But he is sustained.

He is refreshed so that he can continue this journey.

This is a beautiful analogy for us, who are also wandering about in the wilderness.

I think many of us have probably come to that time in our lives when we have curled up and prayed for God to take our lives from us, because living sometimes just hurts too much.

We too, more often than not, in our despair and pain, cry out to God.

 We ask God to relieve us of this anguish.

 “Take this away from me, God,” we pray.

 Or, on really bad days, we pray, “Take me away from this pain, God.”

 “Let me die.”

 When that happens, God’s no is not the final word.

 The final word is God’s sustenance.

 The final word is that fact that, even in our anguish, even in our wilderness, even when we are exhausted and worn out and so depressed we can’t even function, God still provides us with Bread.

 Maybe not actual bread.

 But with the Bread of Life.

 The same bread we heard Jesus tell us he in our Gospel reading for today.

 A Bread that truly sustains, that truly refreshes.

 A Bread that give sus life!

 God provides us with what we need.

 As much as we may relate to this story of Elijah in the wilderness, we also have this reading from Ephesians this morning

 Now, I will say this about our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: it is one of the most difficult scriptures I have ever had to deal with in my life as a Christian.

 Every time I have heard it or read it, I feel myself sort of (and this is a very evangelical term)…convicted.

 In the mirror of this scripture, I feel inadequate.

 I see my own guilt staring back at me.

 St. Paul lays it on the line.

 “Be angry,” he says. “But do not sin.”

 Trust me, I’ve been angry plenty.

 But be angry, without acting maliciously in your anger.

 “Let no evil talk come out of your mouth...”

 “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit…”

 We grieve the Holy Spirit when we let those negative, angry words out of our mouths.

 When we backbite and complain.

 When we bash others when others aren’t there.

 What harm can it do? we wonder.

 They can’t hear it.

 But the Holy Spirit hears it.

 And those negative words do make a difference.

 They make a difference with God. 

  “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

 But, then, as though to drive home his point, he puts before us a challenge like few other challenges.

 “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

 “Be imitators of God,” Paul says to us.

 Be imitators of the God of love we worship.

 Be imitators of the God of love who loves each of us fully and completely.

 Be imitators of the God of love who loves us for who we are, just as we are, even when we lash out with our angry words at others.

 Be imitators of the God who hears our prayers and answers us by feeding us with a life-giving bread in the wilderness of our lives.

 For me, this has to be the most difficult thing about being a follower of Jesus.

 There are days when I want to be angry at those people who have wronged me and hurt me.

 There are days when I want to get revenge on them and “show them.”

 There are days when it feels almost pleasurable to think about “getting even” with those people and “putting them in their place.”

 It’s so easy and it feels so good.

 And it makes the pain of betrayal less.

 That is certainly the easier thing to do—at least for me.

 But driving that anger and hatred and frustration from me is so much harder.

 Being an imitator of God—a God of radical acceptance—is much harder, much more difficult.

 To be an imitator of the God of love takes work. Hard, concentrated work. 

 But, in the end, it’s better.

 Life is just so much better when the darkness of anger is gone from it.

 Life seems so much less dangerous when we realize everyone is not our enemy.

 Life is so much sweeter when we refuse to see a person as an enemy who sees us as their enemy.

 Life is just always so much better when peace and love reign.

 Yes, I know. It seems so Pollyannaish.

 It seems so naïve.

 It seems as though we are deceiving ourselves.

 But, the fact is, it takes a much stronger person to love.

 It takes a very strong person to act in peace and love and not in anger and fear.

 It takes a person of radical strength to be an imitator of a God of radical love.

 We, as followers of Jesus, as imitators of God, need to rid ourselves of the thorns and brambles of hatred and anger so we can let the flowers of peace blossom in our lives.

 But it begins with us.

 It begins with us seeing ourselves for who are—loved children of God attempting to imitate that God of love.

 So, let us be true followers of Jesus in all aspects of our lives.

 Let us strive to imitate our God of peace and love in everything we do.

 Let us, in imitating our God, also reach out and feed those who are in their own wilderness.

 Let us let peace and love reign in our hearts and in our lives.

 And when we let peace and love reign, we will find that it permeates through us.

 Everything we do is an act of peace, is an act of love to others.

 And that is what being a follower of Jesus in this world is.

 That is the sermon we preach to others, even if we’re not that great of a preacher.

 That is the message of God’s love that we proclaim in our very lives, even when we’re depressed and anxious.  

 That is true evangelism.

 And that is what each of us is not only called to do by Jesus, but commanded to do by him.

 When we do, that love will change the world.

 

 

11 Pentecost

 

August 4, 2024

 

Exodus 16.2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78.23-29; John 6.24-35

 

+ Last Monday, we celebrated the 50^th Anniversary of the first women ordained to the Priesthood in the Episcopal Church by watching an amazing documentary about the trials and struggles of those first eleven women, the so-called Philadelphia 11.

 

The documentary was, at turns, shocking, sobering and frightening, but also inspiring and affirming.

 

As I said on Monday evening, I can’t even imagine where we as a Church would be without our women clergy.

 

But what really inspired me about the whole documentary was how these women, despite being blamed and ostracized and made fun of and snubbed, were somehow sustained in their calling by their faith in God and their commitment to their calling.

 

God provided for them, even against the odds.

 

And they were able to persevere.

 

It reminded me in many ways of our scripture readings for today.

 

In our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, we find the Israelites, in their hunger, complaining and grumbling.

 

In some translations, we find the word “murmuring.”

 

Over and over again in the Exodus story they seem to complain and grumble and murmur.

 

To be fair, complaining and grumbling would be expected from people who are hungry, who are feeling abandoned and left to their own devices in the wilderness.  

 

But in their hunger, even after they have complained and murmured, God does something for them:

 

God provides for them.

 

God provides them this mysterious manna—this strange bread from heaven.

 

It’s the manna itself that has always confused me.

 

In my mind, I still don’t have a very clear image of what it could possible have been.

 

In fact, nobody’s real clear what this mysterious manna actually was.

 

It’s often described as flakes, or a dew-like substance.

 

(It does not sound very appetizing)

 

I wonder if it was vegan?

 

But one thing we do know: it was miraculous.

 

Now, in our Gospel, we find the same story of the Israelites and their hunger, but it has been turned around entirely.

 

As our Liturgy of the Word for today begins with hunger and all the complaining and murmuring and grumbling and craving that goes along with it, it ends with fulfillment.

 

We find that the hungers now are the hungers and the cravings of our souls, of our hearts.

 

Now, this kind of spiritual hunger is just as real and just as all-encompassing as physical hunger.

 

It, like physical hunger, can gnaw at us.

 

We too crave after spiritual fulfillment.

 

We mumble and complain and murmur when we are spiritually unfulfilled.

 

We too feel that gaping emptiness within us when we hunger from a place that no physical food or drink can quench.

 

In a sense, we too are like the Israelites, wandering about in our own wilderness—our own spiritual wilderness.

 

Most of us know what is like to be out there—in that spiritual wasteland—grumbling and complaining, hungry, shaking our fists at the skies and at God.

 

We, like them, cry and complain and lament.

 

We feel sorry for ourselves and for the predicaments we’re in. 

 

And we, like them, say to ourselves and to God, “If only I hadn’t followed God out here—if only I had stayed put or followed the easier route, I wouldn’t be here.”

 

We’ve all been in that place.

 

We’ve all been in that desert, to that place we thought God had led us.

 

Last Lent, Dan Rice led a class on the Lamenting psalms in scripture.

 

 

Lamenting is a word that seems kind of outdated for most of us.

 

We think of lamenting being some overly dramatic complaining.

 

Which is exactly what it is.

 

It was what we do when we feel things like desolation.

 

Like hunger, few of us, again I hope, have felt utter desolation.

 

But when we do, we know, there is no real reason to despair.

 

As followers of Jesus, we will find our strength and consolation in the midst of that spiritual wilderness.

 

We know that manna will come to us in that spiritual desert.

 

God always provides.

 

We must always remind ourselves of that simple fact.

 

No matter how terrible the desert experience may be, God will provide.

 

In whatever terrible situation we may find ourselves in—even ones we have brought upon ourselves, God will rain manna down upon us.

 

God will shower us with grace and goodness.

 

For us, manna has come many times in our lives.

 

And I am not talking about flaky bread falling from the sky.

 

I am talking about sustenance.

 

Real sustenance.

 

This is how God works in our lives.

 

Yes, we might complain.

 

Yes, we might shake our fists at God, and say, “this is unfair!”

 

We might lament and complain about being hungry in the wilderness of our lives.

 

But God, we find, is not distant.

 

God is right here. In the wilderness.

 

Right here, with us.

 

After eating our fill of manna in our lives, we no longer can accuse God of being distant.

 

Because, God has come to us.

 

And the sign that God is with us?

 

God has fed us.

 

Look at all the ways in our lives in which God has truly fed us!

 

Again and again.

 

In those moments when God has provided for us, when God has drawn close and given us all we needed (and didn’t even know we even needed in in the first place) that is when we know we have truly eaten the Bread of angels.

 

It is then that we have had the grain of heaven.

 

In our hunger, God always feeds us.

 

In our grumbling and complaining, God quiets us.

 

After all, when we are eating and drinking, we can’t complain and grumble.

 

And unlike the food we eat day by day, the food God provides us with will not perish.

 

God sends us the bread of life.

 

“I am the bread of life,” we heard Jesus say in our Gospel reading. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

 

In the echo of that statement, we are silenced.

 

Our grumbling spiritual stomachs are silenced.

 

Our spiritual loneliness is vanquished.

 

Our cravings are fulfilled.

 

In the wake of those powerful words, we find our emptiness fulfilled.

 

We find the strength to make our way out of the wilderness to the promised land.

 

And, we who eat of this bread, of this manna from heaven, we in turn become the bread of life to others. 

 

“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

 

So, let us be thankful for the manna we have received—in whatever form that manna has come to us in our lives.

 

Let the One who feeds us take from us our gnawing hunger and our craving thirst, once and for all.

 

And when God does, it is then that we will be given what we have been truly craving all along.