Monday, March 22^nd, 2021
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
 
To Members and Friends of 
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
 
Friends,
 
This past Saturday at Mark Warren’s memorial, we sat masked in the South Carolina funeral home chapel. We were socially distanced, gargoyles in the pews, our thoughts spinning and bodies aching with the low-grade fever of grief. I didn’t know Mark well. His brother, though, is my oldest friend in this world. Besides my boys, John is part of the shrinking circle that is my next of kin. 
 
The gospel choir took off their masks to sing their anthems. Here, in the capitol city, they treat Covid like alligators. They know the beasts exist in the Congaree River that skirts Columbia, but the odds are in human favor so long as you keep your distance from that muddy shore. The choir sang and clapped. It’s hard not to get lost in the music. When I hummed along, my breath from behind my mask steamed my glasses.
 
I cry at funerals. There’s so much I’m glad about and sad about. All the losses I’ve experienced have a way of crowding onto me at once. I’m sitting with my mom and dad, and they’ve both been gone long enough that it shouldn’t feel like yesterday, but it does. My grandmother is squeezing my hand like a stress ball while wind batters the funeral tent. Staked canvas holds the gusts only slightly at bay. Nothing but our bones hold the winter cold. The tent does all the heaving. My Baba doesn’t shed a tear for her only son as he is lowered down into that Tidewater ground. But I did then, and I sure enough do now. I let the tears come. John Mark puts his arm around his old man and gives me a squeeze. Never mind that I also cry at Disney movies and diaper commercials on TV.
 
Pictures of Mark flash across the screen behind the choir. In his younger days he could have been a model for the jet set—handsome, thin, and strong with a mustache that made him look like a Hollywood natural. There’s a picture of his mother holding him as a baby. I remember Mrs. Warren. She was a hoot. I preached her funeral service years ago and remember glancing down from the pulpit to the front row to her two sons sitting there so young and alive. We were going to live forever.
 
At Mark’s service, I appreciated the preacher’s words and those of the fifteen other speakers, mostly family, who gave heartfelt tribute and meaningful condolence. But one can take only so many words at once, no matter how healing they are. Silence and reflection is what gives words meaning for me. I needed some of both to let the many graces of the service to sink in. When the preacher finally dismissed us after his “few words” that took the better part of the hour, we walked out gingerly, mindful of alligators. 
 
Ushers dismissed us row by row, and we caught the end of the line that yanked us swiftly down the center of the wide aisle to the side doors out into momentary sunshine with the choir clapping us home and singing I’ll Fly Away as if actual flight were imminent. Gospel choirs don’t sing like wishful thinkers. 
 
We spilled out at the front bumpers of a fleet of polished white limos idling to take the family home. A few of the men who spoke at the service stood together in a huddle. I walked up to these tall, large men who looked like rocks in charcoal suits and asked them what elementary school they went to. When they spoke during the service, they identified themselves as old friends of Mark’s from Hampton, our mutual home town. They had graduated with Mark from Hampton High the year before me and John. 
 
They were taken aback by my question.
 
“You graduated Hampton High,” I said, “so where did you go to elementary school? I’m from Hampton, also.”
 
That broke the ice. We commenced having old home week on the spot. Some went to Wythe Elementary, where John and I went, where above the high arching doors these words were carved into stone, Enter to learn; leave to serve. Yep, they remembered those words from those long-ago years. One fella went to Robert E. Lee, and if we weren’t in a pandemic, and if a pig pickin’ followed that service, which it did not, I would have asked him, What was it like for a little black boy to attend a school named after a confederate general? I’m guessing it didn’t bother him then. We were just children, and a lot of things scared you then besides the name of the school. But it probably bothered him now. A lot. I might have asked him that had time and circumstance allowed. I would have entered that conversation thoughtfully, respectfully. It might have gone down like a prayer.
 
I could tell by the laugh lines around their eyes these big men were smiling. If they didn’t play football then, they could have. They could have turned over some of the cars in that parking lot with their bare hands had somebody forty-years-ago double-dared them to try. It was good to be standing in their huddle now, to introduce them to my youngest son, John Mark, my wingman in a blue Jos A Banks suit. 
 
It was good to be standing out of doors in the fresh air with people who shared some of the same, wrought story. Because of Mark Warren, we had landed on the asphalt shores of a Soda City funeral home, sharing the sun, translating life’s deep mystery by way of small talk. God’s grace is sometime a falling star that flares quickly like a blink, like a tear. It’s just enough to make your heart jump. My heart was pounding.
 
I’ll never see those fellas again.
 
* * *
 
When one is in a funeral state of mind, one thinks of who you’re going to see again, and when. 
 
The preacher said we’ll see Mark again on the other side of Jordan. Dry bones and singed ashes will have come together for a resurrection dance, and a glad reunion awaits us, where we won’t stand emaciated and barely alive, but hale and hearty and looking redeemed and glorified, which, I presume, means happy and satisfied and, at least, relieved.
 
But when would I see John again? We’re planning to meet in NYC like we’ve done before as soon as pandemic will allow. We’re eating Chilean sea bass at that place in Hell’s Kitchen around the corner from Birdland. We’ll catch a set of jazz, which John doesn’t like but I do, and, maybe, we’ll buy Arturo O’Farrell a drink. We’ll catch a play. We’ll walk across the Brooklyn Bridge even though John’s knees are getting bad and we might have to catch an Uber halfway. Two years ago, we met in Chicago. We met another friend and sailed out of the Chicago harbor into Lake Michigan. That friend died unexpectedly three months later. The memory of that day, though, still shines, so much so, I’m not sure if anybody died, after all. 
 
I saw John, his wife, and son walking away at the far end of the parking lot. My son and I jogged over to say goodbye. We hugged. They were flying out on Sunday. It was a quick trip. Celeste travels a lot for her job. This was like a business trip, family business, the business of burying John’s brother. When you’re at a funeral, are you closing an old chapter or opening a new chapter? What were we doing, exactly? What was happening? This was a business trip for all of us—a numbing, surreal trip to mark a milestone, to thank God for a life we’ll miss. The gospel choir had called out our destination. The preacher even offered to punch our ticket. 
 
Hugging a friend is a funeral home parking lot puts everything on shaky ground. Through the soles of your shoes, you feel the tectonic plates grind and time dimensions blur back and forth. You’re not only blinking back tears. The now and then come in and out of rapid focus. John and I both presume there will be other times of gathering, other times to make memories and to remember and make sense of this one. We’re counting on it. 
 
When we hugged this time, it took us both a little longer to let go.
 
* * *
 
PEACE,
 
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church

* * *
Lenten Daily Devotion
Monday, MARCH 22, 2021
LUKE 9:12-17
The story of Jesus’ feeding of 5,000 people is the only miracle story found in all four Gospels, which highlights its importance in the memories and imaginations of early Christians. The story prompts our reflection on how we perceive ourselves and the world around us: do we perceive and act out of a sense of scarcity or a sense of abundance? Scarcity is the world’s logic, but abundance is the gospel’s logic.
Practice: Prayerfully read this story several times and imaginatively
enter into the scene. How does it challenge your perception of scarcity or
of God’s abundance?
Journal: Note in your journal any movements of your spirit that you
discern – toward God or away from God – as you prayed with this
Scripture.