Warren Saunders Funeral - April 27, 2023
We have gathered to remember Warren Saunders. We have gathered to mourn his loss and also to celebrate his life.
And as we considered what might be a meaningful passage from Scripture to reflect upon, this passage was suggested, and it resonated with Ann Marie and Peter.
The passage might be familiar to you. It was written by Solomon, the son of King David. Solomon was considered the wisest person of all time in his day, and for many, since his day.
The passage is from Ecclesiastes, a book in which Solomon expresses a great deal of existential angst. At the very least he seems to be struggling openly with the meaning of life.
But here’s what he writes in chapter 3:
A Time for Everything
1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
While he's still sorting through questions about the hardship of life and the meaning of life, he does establish that Seasons exist, and the seasons exist for a reason.
Time exists, and Time exists for a reason. Time brackets everything, gives a framework for everything.
Time helps us to make sense of many things, whether or not it is much of a consolation is perhaps still an open question for Solomon.
Someone said: “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.”
Someone else said: “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.”
And using the framework of time, Solomon says some things that are both very obvious at one level, and individually and collectively can be seen as quite meaningful at another.
He also speaks of universal realities and common human experience.
Everything that occurs has its place, even though some things can very much feel like an unwelcome intrusion.
So as part of his quest in this book of Ecclesiastes to make sense of the challenge or the drama of existence, Solomon makes these observations.
He does so in the form of couplets which create a helpful contrast between the things that he was pondering.
There is a time to be born. Typically this is anticipated and experienced with a sense of hope and joy. Barbara and I are about to become grandparents for a second time to our second grandson.
Our experience with our first grandson, Stevie, has been nothing but joyful and life-affirming and life-giving. That is the nature of birth and life.
And then by contrast, there is a time to die. This is what we are a part of today, a part of recognizing that a beloved friend or family member, Warren Saunders, has died.
It's very important to recognize, acknowledge and celebrate a birth. It is equally critical to recognize, acknowledge and find our way to be able to celebrate the life of the person who has now passed.
Just as life itself is a journey, the acceptance of the reality of death is also a journey, experienced incrementally, often painfully, but of course very necessarily.
And yet, as Helen Keller said: “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose; all that we deeply love becomes a part of us.”
Solomon speaks to many other such couplets or contrasting ideas.
There is a time to plant and a time to uproot. So much of Warren Saunder’s life was spent planting in Spring and harvesting.
Those like Ann-Marie and Leslie and others who have worked for so long alongside Warren know that there is a seeming endless list of strategies and actions and adaptations and weather-minding and informed prognostication involved in planting and harvesting.
It’s a full life investment, especially to do it as superbly as Warren Saunders did, and then pass it to his family to do.
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. In a sense these are worlds unto themselves. Weeping and mourning involve deep travail and anguish.
They involve wrestling with reality - trying to turn back time, trying to bend back the fabric of reality in one’s soul so that we shouldn’t suffer so greatly in our grief.
And laughter and dance, while not prevalent on a day like today when we are trying to wrap our minds around this loss, they too are the fruit of human endeavour and other emotions perhaps on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Victor Borge said that “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables said that “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
At the end of this book of Ecclesiastes, in chapter 12, Solomon begins to land his thoughts.
He says: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come...Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, 7 and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Solomon’s encouragement to us over the millennia since he penned this book, is to remember our Creator. Solomon’s refrain through much of this book is “Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless”. But he says that not of human beings.
We are not that, we are not meaningless...not in any way shape or form. His encouragement is to remember that we were created in love, with intent and purpose and meaning, by a loving Creator who gives us liberty to ignore Him should we choose to; or to love Him should we aspire to. To give no mind, or to embrace His love fully.
And as Solomon says, the spirit returns to God who gave it in the first place. And so we acknowledge, with gratitude and sorrow, with appreciation and a certain disorientation at how life will now be different.
Different in a world that on the one hand is minus the humble yet great Warren Saunders who dwelled here for over 102 years.
But on the other hand his life and legacy lives on in Ann-Marie, in Leslie, and in the very soil itself that Warren toiled in and for,
in the endless pursuit of great wine, which, by the way, Solomon celebrated when he also said: “there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad”.
Thank you, Warren, for the life you led, for the friends you supported, for the family you and Ivy created and loved with your whole hearts.
Let us pray.
