Good afternoon. I’m Gary Hall, a retired priest. I first met Jim when I joined the clergy staff of All Saints, Pasadena in 1990. My wife Kathy and I moved around the country a lot since then, but Jim and I stayed in touch over the years, and I’m grateful to George for asking me to preach and officiate today.
How can one possibly do justice to Jim Watterson in any speech, let alone a funeral sermon? In all my years of life inside (and outside) the church, I have never known anyone like him. He was the sweetest, most generous man on the planet. He also did not suffer fools gladly. It was something about that combination—the way his fundamental goodness combined with his fierce critical intelligence—that made me love and respect him from the day I first met him at All Saints, Pasadena over 30 years ago.
Chris and Milinda have already paid tribute to Jim’s many lovable and admirable qualities, and I am sure many more stories will be shared over the course of the day. Jim Watterson was, in many ways, larger than life. He produced lavish events, especially for the myriad charities and causes he believed in. He and George acquired and revived beautiful properties both here and in Mexico. And he had a kind of old world charm which it is impossible to fake. He was successful because he was smart, compassionate, and empathetic. You always felt better about yourself after spending time with Jim Watterson.
Although I knew Jim for several decades, our friendship revolved more around the church than his other philanthropic and cultural interests. So I don’t have any stories to tell that might rival the anecdotes we’ll hear from others today. But what I do have is a deep gratitude for his friendship and for the way he lived the life of faith—a life of worship and belief, yes, but also a life of generous and compassionate action.
Whenever I would preach at All Saints, Pasadena, (which, under George Regas and Ed Bacon, was not often) Jim would linger and grab me at the door late and give me a digest of what he had taken away from what I had just said. He loved the life of the church, and he would have been a fabulous preacher himself. (And just imagine the spectacular liturgies he could have produced!) If Jim were here right now, he would want me to get on with it, to give not an after-dinner speech about him but a sermon, to suggest one, two, or three things that God might be up to as we gather to remember and give thanks for Jim’s life. We are all caught somewhere on the emotional spectrum between profound grief at his passing and deep gratitude for his life. Let’s explore for a bit what our scriptures might have to say to this creative tension in which all we find ourselves.
Our first reading [Isaiah 25:6-9] gives us an image of our shared hope for the life beyond this one. For some reason, our culture persists in imagining heaven as a misty place above the clouds where everyone seems to fly around playing the harp. That Hollywood image of heaven is at odds with the biblical picture. The prophet Isaiah describes heaven not as a gaseous cloudfest, but as a meal, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines”. He does that because in the Jewish and later the Christian scriptures, the meal symbolizes the well-lived and abundant life. Whether it’s the Jewish Passover seder or the Christian Eucharist, people of faith in the Western world have always seen eating, talking, celebrating together as the ultimate image of what it means to be truly and deeply alive.
The connection between Isaiah’s image of the life after life and the example of Jim Watterson is almost too obvious to say out loud, but being a shameless expert in stating the obvious I’ll go ahead and make it. Jim’s life exemplified the values of conviviality and abundance. He shared both his life and his substance generously with others. Being around Jim in his festive mode was very much like sitting at God’s table as portrayed by Isaiah. If I had to describe it, I might just dare to say that my best hope for heaven is that it might be an event produced and presided over by Jim Watterson.
Isaiah goes on to tell us that on this mountain God will “swallow up death forever” and “wipe away the tears from all faces”. The Christian hope that animated Jim’s life was a hope grounded in the celebration of the joy and abundance of life. And when you have lived as joyously and generously as Jim has, what becomes most true and enduring about your life is the spirit and the grace with which you lived it. Yes, as Psalm 23 says, we all walk through “the valley of the shadow of death”. And yes, we all shed tears and suffer as we walk through this valley, but what finally matters is that in the midst of it we were able to embrace, celebrate, and love life and each other. It’s not that Jim didn’t have sorrow, pain, and struggles in his life. He did. But he made his way through them by embracing George, his friends, and the world.
And that picture from the Hebrew scriptures points us toward our final two readings from the Christian New Testament, both of them attributed to John. First, from John’s letter [1 John 3: 1-2]: John tells us that “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Heaven may be a banquet, but John cannot precisely tell us what’s on the menu. Neither he, nor I, nor any preacher, can describe exactly what happens to us when we die. But John does know and believe one thing. He knows and believes that “when [Jesus] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
The Christian hope goes beyond a simple wish for life after death. The Christian hope has also to do with personal and social transformation now. Over time, living the life of faith, we go to church, we say our prayers, we read the Bible, we engage in works of mercy and justice because we believe that in listening to and watching Jesus over the course of our lives we can indeed become like him. I was once on a panel on spirituality with several speakers, including the writer Diogenes Allen. He summed up his understanding of the life of prayer this way: “We become what we attend to.” What you probably know about Jim Watterson was that he was deeply engaged in his society and the world. What you probably don’t know is that he was even more deeply engaged with Jesus. Over a lifetime of churchgoing, Jim was becoming what he attended to. And the Christian hope in which he lived and died suggests that even now, as he has gone over to the other side, God is showing Jim Jesus as he is so that Jim can finally be who he truly is, too.
And that brings us at last to the gospel [John 6: 37-40]. Yes, we believe that heaven is a banquet and not a harp concert. Yes, we believe that in both life and death Jim was and is on the road to being like Jesus and seeing himself as he is. But there is one more thing to say, and the one who says it is not John, is not Jim, not even me. It is Jesus himself who says it. “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”
In celebrating and grieving for Jim Watterson we are in fact giving thanks for the life of an extraordinarily accomplished and lovable man. But we are doing something more. We are remembering and honoring a man whose life was animated by a hopeful faith in God’s future for the entire human community. Christianity is finally not only about you or me. Christianity is not finally about the church. Christianity is about the world—its people, its creatures, its natural processes. Jesus came not to a select group of insiders but to the entire human and natural world. And he promised to raise us all--every single one of us separately and together--to raise us all up on the last day.
Jim Watterson gave of his time, energy, and resources to serve the causes he supported not because he was a do-gooder philanthropist. He gave himself to all that charitable work because he understood that God was up to something both in him and in the world beyond him. Jim understood that being a person of faith has implications for the way you live your life. Jim understood that you and I will be saved only to the extent that everyone else is, too.
I asked your rector for permission to wear the stole designed by the great liturgical designer and priest Vienna Anderson today. George Regas—Jim’s longtime rector in Pasadena and close friend—died not long before Jim did, and George left me this stole. I’m wearing this stole today as a reminder of the gospel that George preached and that Jim gave so much of his life to believing and following, a gospel that sends us out to be agents of love, justice, and healing in our own lives and in the world around us. Jim Watterson’s life was a banquet. He kept his eyes all through that life on Jesus. And then he lived in a generous and expansive way to open that banquet to everyone—the poor, the sick, the lonely, the suffering, the lost, and even the otherwise happy and well to do. Everyone is welcome at God’s banquet. Everyone was welcome at Jim’s.
Jim Watterson was unique in my experience. I will never have another friend like him. He blessed Kathy and me in so many ways over three decades of friendship. He blessed so many other lives as well. He is gone, and I join you in grieving his loss. But I also join you in giving thanks for this lovely, generous, remarkable, and accomplished man.
So from his life and witness I take away a renewed hope not only in a love that transcends death, but in the possibilities of the way to live and engage life now. As we move to the Eucharistic meal that was itself so central to Jim’s life and faith, let us come together around God’s table in anticipation of that final heavenly banquet where we, together with Jim and Jesus, can celebrate and embrace God’s love for Jim, for you and for me, and for the world that God and all of us, especially Jim Watterson, loved so fiercely. Amen.
