Homily by Reverend Boggs at Ken Brill's funeral
Homily in Celebration and Thanksgiving for the life of Ken Brill
St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine
August 17, 2013
Please pray with me for a moment.
Gracious God, please listen this hour to our words of joyful thanks and our sighs of grief. And in these contrasts, in the midst of our laughter and our loss, speak your clear words of life. Amen.
Good morning and thank you for being here. This is a rich day that we share, a rare time, full of so many precious and complex memories and emotions. You will each have your own personal understandings of this, your personal truths about rich times like these, but I hope you will agree that this is right where we should be today, together in this welcoming place, in this company, giving our time and our attention to this turning point, this intersection we all find ourselves in.
I honor all your understandings of this time, yet I want to suggest that from where I stand, there are three distinct things that we are doing together in this place at this hour.
We are here first of all to simply and fully offer our gratitude for the life and love of this generous man. To celebrate a life of such consequence, and to give thanks to God for Ken.
We have just heard this morning such wonderful witness of his gifts and his sharing of them. I only knew Ken through our occasional and too brief visits over these past months. I was smitten by him, his intelligence and curiosity and sparkle. And I’ll confess that I selfishly regret that I did not get to know him and love him as you did. So, I won’t presume to speak of that which you know so much better.
I am struck by the joy in Ken’s words and their echo in the family’s voices. Joy is different than mere happiness or satisfaction. Joy is a sense of the rightness of life. We do not make joy. We do not even discover it. It discovers us. It discovers us when we are open to the wonder and possibilities in all the gifts of God we have been given. I think Joy discovered Ken.
And then, in his own way, he shared it. He knew the truth that in giving we receive and each of you have been graciously gifted by him. We remain empowered by that love.
Of the many things we cannot avoid in life, one is that of becoming a teacher. For better or for worse, we are all teachers of those with whom we live and love and work and play. Ken was obviously such a fine teacher, a natural teacher, a teacher who opened doors for students, doors into. And I know that however you knew him, you have each learned much from him, including a central lesson of his: that living life in a posture of gratitude.
So, we are here first to give thanks to God for the wonder and constancy of Ken’s generously-shared life, a life of such consequence and to shout right out loud our abidingly grateful love of him.
And we are also here to acknowledge our sufferings at this great loss, a loss which comes too soon. One of the reasons we are truly human is that we affirm that life is so very precious, and that death, expected though it is, confronts us with painful mysteries we cannot fully grasp.
We acknowledge the significance of this here in the midst of the traditions of our faith. The symbols, music, words of this service and the images, and light around us, the vaulting above us; these are all not so much meant to convey wisdom as wonder. Part of the reason we are here, in this place, embracing these traditions, is to acknowledge that life and love and death are part of a mystery we can know only in part.
We are seldom closer to the core of what makes us human than in moments like this, moments of great and acknowledged loss. So don’t be embarrassed by your tears or shy away from your sadness, they reflect your humanity…and Ken’s.
We are reminded this morning that it hurts to be in the valley of the shadow of death. The loss of people intertwined in our lives hurts us terribly when they are taken away. It leaves a hole, and holes in us hurt. That hurting reminds us that we are real, that we are human.
As Ken knew and taught so very well, there is only one antidote to loss and that is life. Grief is part of the story, but it’s not the end of the story. He knew that the holes of our lives, small and large, must be filled with something that is alive and life-giving, something like love.
So, we are here to give thanks, and we are here to mourn and we are also here in the crazy, radical hope of our faith that God will be in our lives and be with Ken still, that he may be ever closer to him. This hope at death is such a mystery to us. It is tied deeply into the entire gift and story of resurrection, that possibility of enduring, continuing relationship with God. Ken is not alone in finding this claim deeply mysterious and this is not the place for a discourse on the resurrection, except to say sitting with the uncertainty, as Ken and I were privileged to do, embracing the question is as any good engineer would know the first essential step.
What follows in our service are our songs and prayers and hymns and fellowship. They give us a chance to step back and experience the wholeness of all that we are doing today: our thanksgiving, our grief and our hope in enduring relationship.
And in that they allow us to hold up this dear man to the healing and illuminating light of God. I suspect God is not through with him just yet.
A priest friend recently wrote: “I’ve come think that if there is one single virtue: it’s integrity. By integrity, I don’t mean simply mean honest, I mean the word literally. It’s the quality of being an integer, an entity. He said, integrity is what happens when at your funeral your spouse talks to your pastor, who talks with your daughter, who talks with your neighbor, who talks with your colleague, who talks with your best friend, and they all discover that they knew the same person. You weren’t a series of masks worn for different relationships. You were complete.”
Ken was indeed that. An integer. An entity. Complete. No matter how much or little you knew of Ken or about Ken, what you always got was Ken.
May Ken now know the full reward of his life, may his relationships continue in your hearts and in his, may he somehow take joy still in God’s great creation.
And as a priest who came to him late in his life, may I say:
May he rest in peace. May he rise in glory. Amen
Copyright 2013 by the Rev. Timothy A. Boggs. Reproduced here with permission.
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