We laid to rest another brother in Christ this past weekend, the Reverend Don Williams, and in this case I was thankfully able to attend the funeral, which I am regrettably not always able to do. I had the privilege of getting to know Don fairly well over the past decade, especially during his time as a Circuit Visitor, and I appreciated his positive and encouraging outlook on life; so I was particularly grateful for the opportunity to pay my respects and join his family and friends in mourning his death, not without hope, but in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.
Pr. Peter Speckhard preached a beautiful homily for the funeral, focusing on the Holy Scripture that Don himself had chosen and requested in anticipation of the occasion: 2 Corinthians 4:5-18, especially the reference to the “jars of clay,” or earthen vessels, through whom the Lord bestows His good gifts and heavenly treasures upon the Church. That verse has been important to me, in any event, but it is all the more poignant and profound in the face of a pastor’s death and burial.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” we confess in the committal rites, and it was sobering to witness Don’s ashes being poured out into the ground in the Memorial Garden Cemetery at Immanuel, Valpo. It was a stark reminder that we pastors are not simply finite creatures of human flesh and blood, but sinful mortals, subject to death and decay, no different than the people we are called and sent to serve with the Word and works of Christ Jesus.
It is a tremendous privilege that we poor sinners are enlisted by the Lord to convey His divine, eternal treasures – indeed, His Life and Immortality – to His people through the ways and means of His Holy Gospel. That striking contrast between our frail mortality and the Life-giving Word we are given to preach should also serve as a reminder that we ourselves must rely on that same Word of the Lord, which alone endures forever. Everything else is perishing, we along with it, and it is clear that the Word does not depend upon the preachers, but we depend upon the Word: not only for the content of our sermons, but for repentance and faith, forgiveness and salvation!
The day following Don’s funeral was the First Sunday in Advent, on which we hear the account of our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, riding not a mighty warhorse but a humble donkey. That, too, demonstrates the Lord’s modus operandi, coming to us and saving us by way of earthen vessels. We called and ordained servants of Christ are the donkeys who bear Him in our bodies into the Holy City of His Church on earth, our “beautiful feet” carrying His good gifts to His dear people, with His Word upon our lips, His Baptism, Body, and Blood administered by our human hands.
It is all the more staggering to consider that the same Lord Jesus Christ, the almighty and eternal Son of the Living God, became an Earthen Vessel and a Beast of Burden, Himself. Not only did He become flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood by His conception and birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but He then also took upon Himself and bore within His Body to the Cross all our sin and death. He poured Himself out for our salvation, and He was laid to rest in the dust of the earth, buried in the ground whence we were taken and to which we are returning sooner or later.
Not for nothing did He become such an Earthen Vessel! By His atoning sacrificial death, and in His bodily Resurrection from the dead, He has redeemed and rescued us from sin, death, and the grave, and reconciled us to His God and Father in heaven; and so shall we be raised, along with Don and all the saints who have gone before us in the faith and confession of Christ Jesus, to the Life everlasting of body and soul. Then even these poor earthen vessels and “Advent donkeys,” such as we preachers are privileged to be, shall be glorious like unto His own glorious Body!