Burying our Priest

Burying our Priest

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I dreaded today for several days. It has been a difficult Christmas season. We are Anglicans, so our priests are usually married. Father Jack was married, and had a large family. His oldest son David had died only a few weeks ago. Our priest, rector, a father both to family and to parish had fallen ill around thanksgiving but seemed to be gradually recovering. He had come home and was recuperating, weak but hopefully improving. The parish had rejoiced to see him, although in weakened condition. On Christmas Day, the news that caught our attention was that daughter Heather had suffered a dog bite, while walking her dogs. Then on December 26, Father Bradberry had to be taken once more into the hospital. He was put on medication and his heart gave out.

            I have been a member of four churches in my life. Each church and ministry had different strengths. Father Bradberry’s strength was his love and compassion for the people he served in the ministry. He was quick to sacrifice his own well-being for the people to whom he ministered. He kept his theology simple. Regarding the big questions he once told a Bishop, “I am a parish priest and if I am going to err, I want it to be on the side of the Scriptures.” His Sunday morning focus was to point his flock to the centrality of the Eucharist. He believed that God especially met with his people in giving them the body and blood of Christ in the bread and the cup. As an Anglican he understood the communion to involve a real partaking of Christ’s body and blood “in a heavenly and spiritual manner”, but he wouldn’t be pinned down on exactly what that meant except that God truly gave His Son to us when in the midst of worship, we partook of the bread and the cup. I believe that one thing that members of our church felt was that we had a minister who loved and cared for the people of his church.

There are times when I talk too much and other times when I don’t know what to say. In seeing the Bradberry family members grieving today, I felt my inability to be able to say anything. I did a lousy job of sharing grief, but perhaps part of this was because I was grieving. His family is a living testimony of both the grace of God and the blessing of godly parents. A grandson, I think perhaps twelve or thirteen, moved us as he spoke briefly of his love for his grandfather and how he learned so much from him of God’s love, of loving God’s creation, and loving God’s church, because these were the loves he learned from his “papa”.

            Over the years, my understanding of Christianity has become focused in the incarnation; of God entering into humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, so that we could be united to Christ’s humanity and be given access to God through the Deity of Christ. In my thoughts this morning, I thought of how even in baptism we die and are buried in Christ that we might be raised with him in the final day.

            As I thought more about this, I realized how part of the meaning of the communion our Father Jack so loved, was to realize that what happens to one person in Christ happens to all of us. We are of one body and one blood. I had felt like in burying Father Jack I was burying a part of myself. The Eucharist tells us there is truth in this. As we age we realize more and more that another’s death cuts at us, as if we die from the many deaths we experience. We are as Christians a people baptized into Christ’s life, death, burial, and resurrection. We are not alone, but are one in the body and blood of Jesus Christ. So as we committed our priest’s remains to the ground we being with him in Christ buried a part of ourselves. In the morning we shall worship, according to Hebrews 12 in communion with the city above, where the spirits of just men made perfect praise God. We will sing the doxology asking that heavenly host to sing above even as we invite all creatures here below to sing praises to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are a broken people who have buried parts of ourselves with every burial of every human being we ever loved. But we are also a people who are one in Christ, both in burying and in being resurrected. One friend passing on condolences to me wished for me healing and hope. We are as Christians a people who are dying, being broken, buried, and yet in hope being brought towards healing for we have been baptized into Christ’s death that we might be raised in his resurrection.

            I believe in Christ a part of me was buried in Father Jack’s burial. We are dying, experiencing death, one death at a time for we are one body in Christ Jesus. We are dying, we are broken, we are being buried, but we are one people in Christ moving towards healing, hope, and resurrection in the life, death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.