For Wilshire Baptist Church
Looking out the window on a February morning, daffodils are raising their yellow heads, purple irises are blooming at the corners of the porch, and dianthus decorate the flower beds with red and white polka dots. Even the dead brown lawn is decorated with tufts of green weeds. It’s beginning to look like spring, but this is a “false spring.” February is our coldest month in North Texas, and most likely we’ll see another freeze or two. Still, this preview of spring provides a promise of what is to come and what can be. So it is too with some people we meet.
This week I’ve been to two funerals in three days with Sunday church in between, and in all three places I was told again that the “kingdom of God” we talk about and sing about is not just a place waiting for us “in the sweet bye and bye”; we are living in it right now.
That sounds nice, but this notion of “heaven on earth” seems as phony as a plastic flower when you think about the turmoil and violence, heartache and sorrow, poverty and injustice, pettiness and cruelty we witness and sometimes experience. It’s hard not to ask: Are we really living in the kingdom of God right now, or is this a false kingdom with the real one yet to come? Or, is it all just pretty words and there is no kingdom after all?
The men we memorialized on Saturday and Monday were insistent that there is indeed a kingdom of God and we already are there. What’s more, they ordered their lives around that truth, and that meant sharing their vision of the kingdom with everyone they met.
David Wakefield devoted much of his adult life to mentoring and encouraging adolescent boys to become great men through his leadership in Scouting. Prior to his memorial service, we saw photo after photo of him teaching and guiding young men and training adults to be teachers themselves. He was a preacher of sorts with God’s great creation as his church.
Bill O’Brien was a musician, missionary and prophet who invited everyone he met to join him as an equal in a life of love, kindness and respect. Before his service, we heard recordings from years ago of him singing hymns in his beautiful tenor voice. He was a preacher too with a voice that transcended language and a message for everybody everywhere.
David was big and burly; Bill was thin and refined. Both men in their own way modeled grace and gentleness in a world that often feels cold and hard. They were like irises swaying against the backdrop of the dead, brown grass; they were living reminders that spring is coming and heaven is now.