St Bob of Abilene (by Jonathan Storment)

St. Bob of Abilene

Doing a funeral is one of the hardest and most enjoyable parts of my job.  It is hard because it is emotionally exhausting, and death is never conveniently worked into a calendar.  But I love doing funerals because they are the moments when everyone has ears to hear.

We spend much of our lives trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we won’t one day die.  And at a funeral all that pretense is stripped away.  Dallas Willard has pointed out that there are two kinds of ways we talk about what a good life looks like.  One is from Madison Avenue; the other is in a eulogy.

I think that is right.  I have never had someone ask me to preach a funeral about how nice her hair was, or what a great car they drove, or how big their house was.  Two week’s ago, the NY Times columnist David Brooks talked about this in a similar vein by pointing out that there are two kinds of virtues that people chase after.  We either pursue the resume virtues or the eulogy virtues.  Here is Brooks:

The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace.  The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful.  Were you capable of deep love?

When I first read this op-ed piece I loved it.  I think Brooks has his finger on the pulse of one of the greater problems in Western secular society.  We are fascinated with the superficial and spend an inordinate amount of our lives on things that really don’t matter.  But a week after reading that article, I did a funeral that seemed to disagree with Brooks’ point.

Bob Allen has been a Shepherd of the Highland Church (where I serve) for years.  He has spent his life working at an accounting firm where he served as both manager and president, and everyone who worked for him said he was the best boss they had ever had. He was kind and compassionate and forgiving.

He served on a dozen or so non-profit boards in Abilene.  FaithWorks is a ministry that serves unemployed and underemployed people of Abilene and he has been on that for years.  Christian Homes is a ministry for pregnant women who are considering giving their child up for adoption to a Christian family.  While he was serving on that board they served around 1000 women and placed somewhere around 600 babies in new homes.  He served on the Abilene literacy non-profit, trying to inspire kids to find joy in reading, and civic organizations, including the Boy Scouts, the Abilene Chamber of Commerce, and the Council of Governments.

When I was writing Brother Bob’s funeral, it occurred to me that David Brooks’ formula didn’t work for everyone, because Brother Bob’s obituary was going to mention a lot of stuff that would have fit neatly on a resume.  He was a civic leader, president of a business, and his employees loved working for him, mainly because he loved them.

St. Augustine says that the greatest problem for humans is that we have disordered love.  It sounds cliché, but I think he is right.  Our biggest problem is that our loves are out of order.  We put too much weight on our jobs, or our spouses, or children because we are trying to get something from them that only God can give.

The problem isn’t that we love our jobs, it is that we love them too much.  We love our kids or our family or our reputation or our city too much, and when they can’t deliver what we need (and they never will be able to) we implode.

And that is when it dawned on me the secret to Brother Bob’s life.  He honestly did love the right things in the right order.

I preach in the Bible Belt, and every funeral I preach people tell me that the deceased’s first love was Jesus.  That is what they are supposed to say.  But Brother Bob’s secret was that it was true.

Brother Bob had money, but money never had him.  He was incredibly generous with his finances and his life, because Jesus was his first love.

Brother Bob loved his wife (he sent her flowers so much that when he died the florist sent her flowers because he knew that is what Bob would have done).  He was honestly one of the most loving husbands I have ever known, but his wife never doubted who his first love was.

Brother Bob loved his kids, but he made clear that he loved his wife more than them.  He actually told them that repeatedly, as in “I love you, but not as much as the woman who I made you with.”  That sounds counter-intuitive, but at his death bed they prayed, thanking God for the gift of him showing them how to love their spouse.

Brother Bob loved his job.  He loved to create opportunities for human flourishing, but he never missed a t-ball game or dinner with his kids for what he did vocationally.

At church Brother Bob always had an eye out for the widows and orphans.  At his funeral countless stories came out about how he and his wife would secretly sneak over to widows’ houses to mow and weed-eat.  This is the president of a successful accounting firm, who was firmly convinced that wasn’t primarily who he was.

I think David Brooks is generally right, that what we want said at our funeral isn’t what we are tempted to put on our resume.  But sometimes that’s not true.  Brother Bob’s obituary was filled with the ways he served God, his church, his family, and his city.
In that order, because he had ordered his loves correctly, he loved each of them well.

Have you ever noticed that most of the people we call saints don’t really have last names? We know them by their location:  St. Francis of Assissi, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Jullian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Avila

I think that is fascinating.  One of the markers of a saint is that they loved God and were known for loving their city.  In the evangelical world we don’t have a process for sainthood, but I would like to make a modest proposal that this is one of the ways we can have eyes to see what a good and holy life looks like:  A life of ordered loves that starts with God and spills over into their city.

And if that idea resonates with you, then I would like to introduce you to St. Bob of Abilene.

May He rest in peace.