Adventure

A Funeral Homily

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christ’s commands to “Go!” and to “Love!” are anything but sentiment. Rather, they are calls to a life of high adventure! They are God’s own exhortation for us to explore, to risk, to dare, to strive, to fall and to rise again, living without limit, living without fear.

For love, in the Christian tradition, is not merely emotion. It is the willing choice to put the good of another before our own, to pour out ourselves for our beloved. And that is sacrifice. It hurts, giving of ourselves. But therein lies all true joy. This is how God loves us. He lays down His life for His friends, for His beloved children. He pours out His own life from the Cross, pouring out the very life and breath and love of God into us, into our wounds, so that we may at last be made whole.

And because He does this for us, we are freed—freed from fear or despair or timidity, freed from our age-old slavery to sin and death and hell. And we are not simply freed from, but freed for. Freed now to lay down our lives for our friends. Freed to dare and to risk, to explore and to love, freed to pour out ourselves for others as Christ pours out Himself into us.

David got that. What’s more, he lived that. His life was that of high adventure! He learned and he fought and he built. He traveled the world as both soldier and civilian, and he reached back through history in his love of ancestral roots. He found his place in the great story of his family, the chain of loves that led to us, and he passed on that gratitude, that passion, to the next two and soon three generations.

David was good and he was kind. He loved his neighbors, loved his family, and adored his wife. He was humble and he was successful by any mortal measure. And he lived long enough and well enough that today’s services, while solemn, are anything but tragic. He has returned, now, to the wife who loved him, and to the Lord who surely welcomes him with that greatest of accolades: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master.”

For you see, brothers and sisters, we are Christians here. And as such, we believe strange things, scandalous things. First and foremost, we don’t believe for a moment that David’s story has ended. Yes, he has died. Obviously that’s why we’ve gathered this morning. But as a Christian, David knew that his real death happened decades ago, when he was drowned and resurrected in his baptismal Font.

In Baptism, David was joined to Christ’s own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to Christ’s own eternal life, already begun. As the monks of Mt Athos like to say, “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.”

David was not afraid to live—indeed, he lived his life to the fullest—and that can only really happen when we’re not afraid to die. For the Master we serve, the one who has claimed us in our Baptism, has already gone before us into the grave, into the abyss. And He has conquered!

Thus we need never fear, and may tread boldly in His footsteps, living without temerity, loving without fret for the cost, boldly going to the ends of the earth and the farthest reaches of history in order to reflect the Light and Love of the Risen Christ out into a needy world.

Thanks be to Christ for the witness and life of Michael David Krey. May we do honor to his legacy in our own lives, until we are at last reunited, in our own good time, at the great feast of life that swallows up all death.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.

Let perpetual light shine upon him.

May he rest in peace.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.