Bill

Tomorrow we’ll bury Bill. We’ll set tables, bake brownies, and lay out trays of little roast beef sandwiches, the only sandwich Bill would eat. The choir will sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Bill loved that song. It’s Friday and February and most likely cold as the grave, but someone will make sure the heat is on and the pews tidy. And after all the visits and the prayers, tomorrow, in tears and laughter, we will bury Bill.

Because that’s what we do. Bill told me, back when he joined our little band of Jesus followers, that we had a rep for a turning out a good funeral (his words). He didn’t want much, he said. Just give him one of those good funerals, and we’d be fine.

Friendships have deep roots in our congregation. Some of these folks have known each other for years, lived on the same block, raised their children together. Like many community congregations, family names run through the red books, showing up in generation after generation, populating the Properties Committee, and the choir, and the youth group.

But we recently celebrated our church’s 100^th anniversary and we discovered that what we thought was shared history wasn’t. Close to 50% of our membership had joined in the last fifteen years or so. They were polite about the 100^th anniversary memory book, but….

Back in the day, folks hung around. They grew up in the neighborhood, went to church there, got married, had children, and were buried there, often in the cemetery back out behind the nursery school playground.

Nowadays, not so much. If folks even did grow up in the church, it wasn’t this church.

I think we have to be intentional about growing community. I’m not sure that, in today’s digital, mobile world, community can be considered to be a given wherever two or three are gathered in his name. If we want to be what we say we are, if we want to be a family, sisters and brothers gathered around the Risen Lord, then we who are on the inside of the circle are going to have to work for it, be intentional about getting to know the siblings God has brought our way.

We’re going to miss Bill. It’s a fact that he was one of our newest members, but you never would have guessed that. He walked in the door one morning and joined the choir. As I recall, someone said, Can you sing? He said, yes I can. They gave him a robe and music folder—and Bill was home.

So tomorrow we’ll bury Bill. We’re going to turn out one of those good funerals, like we promised Bill that we would. There will be brownies, and trays of little roast beef sandwiches. I’m guessing there will be some laughs, too, and plenty of tears. After all, if only for a little while, Bill was family. And in our neck of the woods, that’s what families do.