I’m
Gary Hall, a priest in the church, and I’m here because I’m married to Kathy,
who is Betty Kirk’s sister. It has been my peculiar destiny to marry into a
family where the men are all expected to be super-nice. I’m not sure I
inherited the same “niceness” gene shared by Norman Matheson, Roger Kirk, and
Harry Zymaris, but I count it both a great sadness and a great privilege to be
presiding at this memorial service for a wonderful and in his own way extraordinary
man.
I met Roger Kirk
for the first time on the day after Christmas in 1975. I remember this so
clearly because I had just driven straight from Boston to Toledo to stay for a
few days with Kathy and her family. I had met Betty and the Mathesons in
Cambridge a year before, but this trip was my first meeting with Roger. I
remember coming into the house on Luverne and seeing Roger, Manhattan in hand,
standing by the fireplace in his Harvard sweatshirt. I was ragged and tired
from the drive, and Roger offered me a Manhattan. It was the first of many acts
of kindness I received at his hands.
Tim,
Joe, and Andy have spoken beautifully about their grandfather and his presence
in their lives. I don’t have many stories to add about Roger, but I do have
some images: Roger with a Manhattan in
hand by the fire, Roger looking out at the lake, Roger at a baseball game,
Roger singing his heart out in church, Roger sitting in the Adirondack chair he
helped me assemble in our back yard and reading a book about birds in
California, walking with Roger on the beach in Carmel looking at the Hale-Bopp
comet in the night sky after Easter in 1997. I know that Roger worked
incredibly hard most of his life, but I got to see and know him principally in
his rare moments of relaxation. Although we belonged to different political
parties, the only serious argument he and I ever had concerned the designated
hitter rule. But Roger’s values were solid and pure. He loved his family. He
loved nature. He loved baseball. If that version of the Trinity was good enough
for Roger, it’s good enough for me.
We’re
gathered this afternoon both to remember Roger Kirk and to give thanks for his
life. We have three scripture readings to help us do that.
Our
first reading was from the Wisdom of Solomon. [Wisdom 3: 1-5, 9] “The souls of
the righteous are in the hand of God,” it goes. “Those who trust in God will
understand truth, and the faithful will abide with God in love.” The first
thing we should acknowledge about Roger was that he was faithful. Speaking as a
priest, I might be misunderstood to be talking about Roger’s religious ideas.
But in calling him “faithful” I am thinking more of his behavior than his
beliefs. Roger was faithful to all of his commitments. He was faithful in his
family relationships, in his business practices, in his civic commitments. He
gave himself over to the people and the things that he treasured. This kind of
faithfulness—personal, relational, practical—is on the decline these days in
our culture. Our loyalties today seem to shift with the winds. But Roger was
perhaps one of the last of a generation who committed themselves early in life
and then stayed with the people and the causes they had given themselves to. I
have been working in the church for almost as long as I knew Roger, and it’s
hard for me to express how precious a faithful man like Roger is in the work I
do. He is there when you need him and even when you don’t. He keeps his
promises. He takes on important yet unrewarding work for the sake of the cause.
The
Wisdom of Solomon tells us, “the faithful will abide with God in love.” Faithfulness is one of the attributes we
prize so highly in God, and it is one of the attributes God prizes so highly in
us. Whatever else we might have to say about Roger Kirk, the first thing we
need to acknowledge is this: the steady, committed, generous faithfulness that
Roger exemplified cannot be overvalued. His life of service to the people and
the causes he loved shows us the very definition of what the Bible would call a
“good life”: family, nature, baseball; and, of course, friends, community, and
church, and work. This is not a glamorous list of commitments, but they’re at
the center of the Bible’s description of what it means to be a faithful and
righteous human being.
But
it is one of the mysteries of existence that righteous, faithful lives do not
always run smoothly. Roger celebrated the joys of family, nature, and community
even in the midst of business difficulties and personal suffering. The last
decade of his life was overshadowed by his experience of Parkinson’s disease,
and those of us who knew and loved Roger felt the cruelty of an affliction that
took away some of the basic joys that meant so much to him. In our second scripture reading from Romans,
[Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39], Paul speaks to an early generation of
Christians who also experienced suffering, and while Paul does not attempt to
answer the question we all pose (Why?) he does get at what suffering reveals to
us about ourselves and God. At the end of our passage, he asks:
Who
will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
No,
in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I
am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.
Nothing can “separate us from
the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”. Not even illness. Not even death.
One of the things a long, faithful life reveals to us is the way God’s universe
actually works. Over the course of his life, Roger’s faithfulness was not paid
back in good luck or “earthly rewards”. But over the course of his life Roger’s
steadfast commitments revealed the depth and extent to which his love of God
had patterned his life. Roger’s love and faithfulness revealed both to him and
us something about how things finally are.
We spend our lives in the
psalm’s words living “in the valley of the shadow of death”. We fear death as
the worst thing that can happen to us. But as the 23rd psalm and
Paul’s letter remind us, there is always someone alongside of us as we traverse
that valley. That one is committed to us. That one is faithful. Roger’s
lifelong faithfulness is for each and all of us a sign of God’s unbreakable
commitment to us. We are precious to that one, and not even the thing we fear
most can alter or cancel that commitment. From our vantage, death looks like a
defeat. From God’s vantage, death is just one point on a journey in faith and
love and hope.
And that, finally, is where
the third reading, our gospel [John 11:21-27], comes in. Jesus tells Martha as she mourns the death of
her brother, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even
though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will
never die.” Martha has complained to Jesus that if he had only been there,
Lazarus would not have died. Jesus responds that even those who die are part of
the resurrection now.
Those of us who follow Jesus
have so gotten used to talking about resurrection in the future tense that we
have forgotten to look for signs of it in the here and now. I have no doubt
that Jesus’s promise is real, that in and through him and the one he calls his
Father you and I and all creation will participate in God’s future. And if read
the scriptures aright, I also know that nothing—not even his death and separation
from us and not even the pain of his final days—can separate Roger Kirk from
the love of the God that he knew and served all his life.
But here is something else I
know, and it is something we often miss at occasions like this. I know that
every once in a while someone like Roger comes along who shows you what
resurrection actually means. When we’re lucky enough to know someone who lives
as Roger lived, we get a sense of resurrection not only as a future promise but
also as a lived reality now. In all this I am not trying to make Roger holier
or nicer or better than he was. I am not saying that Roger was perfect or
anything like that. But I am saying that his steadfast, faithful, righteous
qualities add up to something like an image of life as it can be lived on God’s
terms in the here and now. Jesus’s
resurrection means not only liberation from the fear of death. Jesus’s
resurrection means freedom to live as risen people in the midst of life now.
Roger Kirk showed at least me what a life lived on God’s terms might look like.
And I’ll bet he showed you that, too. For this gift, we will always be
grateful.
We
come now to the Eucharist, the meal of bread and wine which Jesus gave us as a
way to remember both himself and the kind of living he calls us into. As we
gather around God’s table with each other, with Jesus and with Roger (and with
Harry Zymaris who was a blood brother with Roger in faithfulness and
generosity) let us remember and recommit ourselves to the things in life that
really matter. Family. Nature. Community. And, yes, even baseball. If the rules
of the church would let me, instead of the wine I would fill the chalice with
Manhattans. But you get the idea.
Roger,
we love you. We miss you. We have learned so much from you. And we commit ourselves,
each in our own way, to living the faithful, steadfast, generous life that you
and your son-in-law Harry have shown us.
Amen.
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