A Funeral Sermon for the Living

A sermon on Romans 8.26-39

Trinity Lutheran Church was founded by German settlers in the 1840’s. The imposing church structure, one red clay brick stacked upon another, sits resolutely atop a hill in the western Carolina countryside. Walking up the meandering road that leads to the church, its imposing and steely gray steeple juts into the sky, demanding your attention like a glass lightning rod on a tin roof. The ancient stained glass windows, spread along the sanctuary’s length, were long ago covered by a protective layer of glass. Since then decades of condensation have built up in the space between, leaving windows that can only be enjoyed from the inside and the impression that the church like her windows are well defended. It is bordered on one side by the cool, crayfish-filled waters of a meandering brook, on another by a few strands of limp barbed wire clinging to a litany of wayward fence posts, and on another it is bordered by a small patch of cleared hillside in which my ancestors lie.

The Big Red Dirt & the Big Green Vine

A sermon fragment on Isaiah 55.10-13

My brother and I, as children, were failed entrepreneurs with perpetual hope. One summer, on the tails of the roaring success of our roadside squash stand [2 happy customers served], we launched a new endeavor the following week.

Back in a hidden corner of our family’s pastures in North Carolina was a hole, carved eight feet deep into the red clay. It was while playing in the loose, crimson, granulated soil at the bottom of the hole that a light bulb illuminated over each of our heads. Squash did not sell, but perhaps, just maybe, red dirt would. And so, we hauled five gallon bucket after five gallon bucket of red dirt out of the hole to our roadside stand where it sold for five dollars a bucket. Sadly, this time, not even our grandmother was so kind as to buy our wares.

This hole and its red dirt spilled out on one end, into a bare spot in the middle of the pasture. It sat away from any trees or shadows and was baked each year by the summer sun. The sanguine  patch was the cause of much consternation for my father. Each year bag after bag of grass seed and fertilizer was spilled on this spot. Yet the grass never grew, and the rain continued to wash this free dirt away in an ever widening gully.

There was one option, a nuclear option of sorts, one seed which could be spilled and no doubt would cover the spot and halt the rapid withering of the soil. It is the one seed that will grow regardless of rocks, thorns, or scorched earth. Some call it mile-a-minute vine and others foot-a-nite vine. Kudzu, as it is most commonly referred to, was introduced in the south from Japan in the early 1900’s to halt erosion. And that it did, it holds the soil firmly in place, but then it keeps growing and it does not stop for anything or anyone. There seems to be no dirt, no soil, no object which the Kudzu does not find habitable. And so, it grows unchecked, reaching out and grasping the landscape, seemingly holding the whole world in the arms of its embrace. Driving through the countryside one is expected to find this vivid vine draped over telephone poles and power lines, old barns and abandoned homes. The legend goes that you have to keep your windows closed at night to keep it out, and even then there’s a reason the windows are tinted green.

Like the kudzu, the promise proclaimed this morning is the promise of the God who is beginning a new creation one small seed. One seed this creation is growing and will grow until all things, all people, the rocks, the thorns, and even the good soil will be held together in its ever widening embrace. And with that seed already been planted in the Christ, and God, bringing bread to the eater and water to the parched, is like the kudzu vine on the run. AMEN.





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