Homily for Bob Stegman

Sail Away

Charlie Barton • December 9, 2011 • Saint James, Monkton

If we could rise into the air and see all things, we could trace how raw materials are mined and gathered in remote places and then transported by baskets, horse carts and trucks. If we could see through walls, we could peer down into factories and foundries, mills and processing plants and watch thousands of people busily transforming ore, grain, resins and fibers into finished goods.

If we could speed up time, we would see trains and trucks carrying goods from where they are made to a thousand distant ports, flying like bees to and from a thousand busy hives.

From all people and all nations, vessels come in and go out carrying the raw materials and the finished goods that become the wealth of nations. The lines on a map that portray sea lanes traverse the globe and connect the cities, and people, of the world- Shanghai and Seattle, Baltimore and the 200 ports in the Baltic Sea.

The clothes we wear, the food we eat and the machinery that drives the modern world moves over the face of the water... and someone has to guide it from point A to point B.

Any Bay Pilot will remind you that it takes more than one someone to get a vessel safely home. Getting out of port and into port is a very different exercise than crossing the open ocean. Any of us that have been on a long sea voyage know that one not only loses sight of the land on such a passage but that one can get lulled into thinking that one day is the same as the next.

But there are times when minutes matter and seconds count. In the shallows one needs knowledge, wisdom and experience to avoid running aground. In narrow channels all vessels may rise when the tide comes in but any number of them can still collide if their pilots aren't watching many things at once.

We are sailing through our lives, and much of the time we can look to the distant horizon and imagine that we are not only the captain of our ship, but also the master of our fate. The long passages over deep water lull us. But there's a pilot who comes to guide all vessels in the shallows, the narrows and on that last part of the way to the final port. This pilot loses nothing that has been entrusted to him. No vessel whose captain is willing to relinquish control to this pilot will ever go aground.

Surely you know where I am going with this. Bob certainly would. Virtually every Sunday Bob was in church. When he wasn't, I knew he was on the water and that he'd be back as soon as he reentered the port. He knew the stories and the rites.

Now we use symbol and metaphor in the language of the church and the stories from Scripture were first told to an agrarian people. Look at that stained glass window. It depicts Jesus as the Good Shepherd but the sense of the words would be just as true if we call Jesus the Good Pilot. He knows his own and His own know Him. They know the sound of His voice and they follow Him.

It takes a pilot to truly know what a pilot does and to understand the value of that guidance. While a logbook can sketch out the bare outlines of the journey, a long conversation over time makes much more clear. Scripture is a logbook and God is the ultimate pilot. Talk to Him and you will learn much.

There will be storms and waves in this life - larger than we ever expected. There will be shallows and narrow places. But there is One who comes to us in love, who guides us and brings us safely to that distant shore, that greater light.

For those who know that Pilot, gratitude and grace are linked. Bob knew this. This is why the last words I heard from this gentle, lovely, faithful man were, "thank you." A journey that ends in gratitude is safely home in port, indeed. AMEN

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