Not Albert! Not my Albert.
but, sadly; yes.

Sometimes the best go first, we suspect.
And, saying good-by is not easy.
it is a fearful time - a lonely time,
a time of regret, emptiness, and pain.

Yet, we do this not alone.
We do it as a gathering of friends.
We do it as the Church;
and we do it with God.

That is why we are here today.
We are here to call God to be present
in Albert's death
and in our pain,

But, in so calling
we find that God was present all along.

Today's first reading (by Amy)
is from the Revelation of John.

It was written in a time of great pain and uncertainty
to give comfort to the persecuted Christians
in Asia Minor,
the area we now call western Turkey.

They were being treated harshly by the Romans,
tortured and killed in great numbers.

And in that book
we are assured, along with those early Christians,
that, "The Home of God is among us."

God will dwell with us.
We will be his people,
and he will be with us in our pain,
and will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

We are not alone,
unless we choose to be so.

That is good news.
But that is not all the good news!

God promises that
death and mourning, and crying, and pain
will be no more.

I am not there yet,
None of us is,
but even Jesus wasn't without tears
at the time of the story from John's Gospel.

In that story, you heard Jesus weeping.

His good friend, Lazarus, had died.
and Jesus journeyed on foot for days
to Bethany, near Jerusalem,

where Lazarus, and his sisters,
Martha and Mary, lived.

Martha sees Jesus coming
and rushes to meet him,
to hold onto him in her grief.

(Such hasn't changed, has it?
We need to hold onto one another
in our shock and grief.)

Then, still holding on,
she calls her sister, Mary,
and they take Jesus to the grave
where Lazarus lies in death.

A big, heavy, stone blocks and seals
the grave;
and Jesus begins to weep,
for, he loved him so;
he loved him so.

It happened, family and friends,
even to Jesus.

I am certain
that tears are frequently viewed by God
as prayers of Thanksgiving
for the great gifts God has given us
for so many years.

I think, perhaps,
if we didn't weep at the loss
of someone we love,
God might look at us in quiet wonder,
and ask, "What! Didn't you like my gift?"

So, Jesus weeps.
He had loved the gift of Lazarus so,

But, in the end, In Christ,
nothing can separate us for Love;
nothing can separate us from God.

Jesus asks them to roll away the stone,
which they do, very reluctantly,
for they do not have any trust at all
that they will find anything good.

and Jesus cries out with a great voice,
"Lazarus, come forth."
and, out he comes.

Nothing, but nothing,
can stand between us and our Lord,
even in our times and places of death
of whatever kind.

and Jesus said, unbind him.
set him free from his bonds
and let him go.

So, I began thinking
of your experience and mine
in our loss of our friend, Albert.

We loose friends, parents, husbands, fathers…
They were gifts of God to us and to the world
and we weep.

There is that empty, aching, hole
in the center of our chest -
You know where it is.
it is there right now;
and, it hurts.

But, it is not all bad.
It can help make us better human beings.

For, God attends our journeying
through the valley of the shadow.

God attends our journeying,
and, after awhile,
we notice that we have been freed,
unbound slowly
from some of our separation and pain;

Our loved ones creep back into
that empty place in our chest,
often purified, made perfect.

And, we begin to adopt the best
of what they are,
and to engage others whom we love
and the world
with the love we there learn.

Longfellow wrote that there is no death
but there most certainly is change.

We are in the midst of change, of transition,
to a world in which those who have died
have the ministry
of making us more fully human,
more like Christ
in our living, in our loving,
in our doing
and in our dying.

For, we are assured,
and know in our hearts,
that Albert is
and we are
a part of God's Saints of every generation
and every place
who move in God's time
toward perfection.

They, and we,
are with God,
and we sense
and know
that it is OK
Everything is all right;
everything will be made perfect.

For, Jesus has called us out
of our places of death
into new possibilities
new relationships
with him
and all his saints
of this world, and the next.

Unbind him, said Jesus
of his friend.

Unbind him from all that limits his humanity.

Unbind us!

Bring us out of the places of death,
of loneliness, and fear,
and pain, and uncertainty.

Unbind us,
make us perfect,
and set us free.