Sermon at the Funeral of David Evans

Here's the address I gave at David's funeral, yesterday.

David Evans (1937–2010) 

David’s interest, care and enthusiasm for other people is quite amazing. His unexpected illness and death are all the more shocking and painful, because when a great tree of a person, like David—not a weed—but a great tree falls, the reverberation is large too. Because it’s like David had fitted a thousand lives into one lifetime he could give off the scent of eternity.

There’s a poem by Maya Angelou that explains this kind of falling of a tree better than I can:

Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens and Mayfield

When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,

lions hunker down

in tall grasses,

and even elephants

Lumber after safety.

When great trees fall

in forests,

small things recoil into silence,

their senses

eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.

Great souls die and

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls,

dependent upon their

nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed

and informed by their

radiance

fall away.

We are not much maddened

As reduced to the unutterable ignorance

of dark, cold

caves.

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed.

[Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems, Virago Press, London (1995: 266-67).]

We have heard in the reading from John’s gospel [19.38-42] about the shocking and untimely death of Jesus of Nazareth, and the beginnings of the funeral arrangements. At a time of death there’s much to organize but after today the agony and pain can find us, to quote the poem in ‘dark cold caves’.

Some of us will be angry: angry with God; with the cancer; with human frailty. For some of us: numbness; or action and reaction; for some silent emptiness; for some tears and pining.

With a great tree, such as David, who we have been privileged to know there’s a comfort that ‘they existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.’

David’s care, interest and enthusiasm has touched thousands upon thousands of people. For each of us, our relationship with David doesn’t cease with his death, rather he will continue to shape and fashion the course of our lives for having known him. There is comfort in this.

As a Christian I find comfort in the fact that God grieves with us too, and that God—in Jesus—has experienced, intimately, the agony of death. We are not alone. I believe too there is comfort in the way a person’s life can become magnified after their their death; that their being can come alive so powerfully for us, as will be the case with David for many of us.

I find comfort too, at the end of David’s life—a working life given to the care, enthusiasm and interest of house and home, and the people and animals that lived in them—I find comfort in the Christian hope of a perfect heavenly home, a dwelling where:

there shall be no darkness or dazzling

     but one equal light;

no noise or silence

     but one equal music;

no fears or hopes

     but one equal possession;

no ends or beginnings

     but one equal eternity.

               [John Donne 1573–1631]

Amen.