Funeral sermon 1 Corinthians 13: 11-13
I'd like to welcome you again
to this service. It has been a real
pleasure for me to spend time with Renie and Linda to prepare for today. This family strikes me as having tremendous courage
and warmth, and I'm sure Ron, who I know was so proud of you all, would be
delighted at the determination with which you have faced his death
together. You yourselves are showing
the love and fighting spirit which characterised the life of the person we are
here to say thank you for and goodbye to.
Ron himself demonstrated these same qualities last Wednesday. He knew he was dying, but spent his last day
chatting with grace and humour, more concerned that Linda should get enough
rest than for his own needs. He passed
away restfully and at peace with his family, and in that we have a lot to be
thankful for.
And it was that fighting
spirit that it seems to me, as I've been talking to Renie and Linda, best
characterises the life of this special person.
He really was someone who put away childish things, and lived like an
adult. He was a fighter who fought for the right things. From day one, there
were so many challenges that faced him, so many things that might have defeated
others, but which he faced with the dogged insistence that life was going to be
full - he wasn't going to stagnate, and that he was going to make life better
for others as well, come what may.
These are the marks of a person of great maturity, someone who has truly
grown up.
He was a fighter from
birth. When he was born in Pembroke in
1920, he weighed three and a half pounds, and was baptised because the doctors
didn't expect him to survive. And as
you all know, ill health was a constant feature of the last thirty years. He suffered from heart attacks, angina, and
all that goes with it. But the staff at
the Princess Margaret Hospital called him the "miracle man" - he kept
on going. Renie has told me that Ron
could be a stubborn fellow at times, and after 49 years of marriage, she is the
most qualified to know. But it is this
kind of stubbornness, coupled with a high sense of moral values, that saw him
through difficult days.
And perhaps, too, it was his
humour and love of life. He threw
himself into things with such enthusiasm and zest that others couldn't help be
affected by it. His wartime career in
the R.A.F., begun at the age of 18, stayed with him throughout his life, and
was inherited by Owen. He loved the
camaraderie in the R.A.F, and I've been told he was the instigator of a good
few practical jokes in that time. One
of these involved putting Golden Syrup into the pyjamas of one of his
colleagues, although I'm not allowed to tell you which part of the pyjamas were
affected! His quiet but sharp sense of
humour served him well for his career in youth work and the probation service -
a challenging role by any standards.
But his compassion and ease of manner, and his ability to empathise with
people, won him the respect and affection of those he worked with. "Your dad put me back on the straight
and narrow," one former client told Linda. And while recuperating from his first heart attack in hospital,
Ron was visited by a group of his probation clients - real testimony to the
effect he had on peoples' lives.
And if you were looking for a
model as to how to approach retirement, look no further. The list is exhausting - an Open University
degree at 68, helper in the Victim Support scheme, PROBUS member, organiser of
two music appreciation groups, a founder member of the Swindon U3A and its
programme co-ordinator, officer in the air cadets, railway enthusiast. Here was a man who enjoyed life to the full,
and wasn't going to let some health complaint defeat him.
And we have to be like Ron
today. We have be fighters. Not to fight back our tears, or our grief -
that is not what he would want, and it is not for our good. But we have to fight to put away childish
things. We have to fight to think and
live like people who, like him, want to be fully grown. This is a time for us to face with courage
the questions of why we are here in the first place. "I know I've got to die," says Woody Allen, "I
just don't want to be there when it happens!" But to not face up to the reality of what death means to us who
are living is to remain stuck in childish ways. Ron knew he was living in bonus time, and thus became determined
to live his life to the full. And we
can honour Ron by considering how we are using our time.
For Ron now, there is no more
fighting, the struggle is over. We only
ever knew Ron in part, you can never know a person completely. But to be finally face to face with God, to
be fully known and understood at last, is to live in a way that is more real
than anything we know now. The things
that remain of us after death, things like faith, hope, and love, are the
things that really matter. And we can
have this hope for Ron, and for ourselves, because he isn't the only fighter to
have walked this earth. Jesus fought
and won the battle over death and suffering, making possible a new world and
existence in our future in which there is no more pain, suffering, or
tears. Let Ron's life give us the
courage to fight and to live in the knowledge that we ourselves are fully known
and loved, and that one day we will see fully, just as Ron sees now.