lifeasmission

Church as Revealer

September 28, 2009

A week ago today I learned that my Uncle Dick Hammond had passed away.  He was 70 and had been fighting cancer for the last 5 years.  Since well before I was born, the Rozko’s have been good friends with the Hammonds.  Uncle Dick and Aunt Judy invited my family into their lives at both Longboat Key, FL a frequent vacation spot of my adolescence and Pelee Island, Ontario, which became more permanently ingrained into our family when my grandparents bought a cottage there several years ago.

I was honored when the Hammond family asked me to conduct Uncle Dick’s funeral.  Amy and I traveled to Cleveland last Thursday, met with the family that night and gathered the next day with more than a hundred people to both morn our loss and celebrate Uncle Dick’s life.

When it was my turn to speak and offer words of pastoral comfort, I talked about the illusion of death’s finality.  Like a good magic trick, death makes us think and feel something based on our immediate experience, but when we pause, step back, and really evaluate things, we just know that there’s something we are missing, something is hidden and we ache to know it.

It was a good reminder to me that it is the unique calling of the Church to pull back the curtain, to reveal that which is hidden, to spoil the illusions of this world with the reality of God’s Kingdom in all its forms.  This is a high and lofty calling, but man, what a joy to say to those wracked by the pain of the illusions the finality of death (in all its forms) of this world, “I’ve got good news!”

Posted in: church, gospel