Funeral Service for Gus Andrian
Posted on
February 9, 2018
Funeral Service for Gus Andrian
Trinity Church, Hartford
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 91
Revelation 21:2-7
John 14:1-6
Preacher: The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
In the book of Genesis, God comes to Abraham, who was already 99 years old, and says to him that he and his wife Sarah, herself well-past child bearing age, will have a child. When Sarah hears this she can’t do anything other than laugh. I’m reminded of this story when I marvel at the advanced old age to which our friend Gus Andrian lived. He lived to the same age of Abraham when God spoke to him, an age that can truly be considered a blessing despite the afflictions that also accompany growing older. But in the Bible old age is honored and those who have attained it are worthy of praise. As God says to Abraham, "As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age.” Gus is certainly being buried at a good old age. Generally the Bible thought of old age as anything over 70. The psalmist says The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength [perhaps] eighty, but Gus defied these biblical assumptions about old age and made it well into his late 90’s. And so we have come here today not so much to mourn or grieve an untimely death (though those emotions are certainly appropriate), as we are to celebrate a long life well-lived from which Gus passed peacefully.
Gus Andrian led a life of accomplishment and fulfillment, as a scholar, as a teacher, a writer, a mentor to students, as a member of the faculty at Trinity College (where I was honored to serve with him for a number of years before his retirement), as someone who cared about everyone from janitor to president at the college, as a friend and colleague, as a neighbor, as a fellow-parishioner here at Trinity, but above all as a husband for 66 years to his dear wife Peggy, and as a father to his children Barrie, Bill, and Bob, and as a loving grandfather. If anyone has done so, Gus truly embodied what it means to live a long, full life, astounding many of his neighbors in Wethersfield before he and Peggy moved to Glastonbury with his energetic walking jaunts around the town well into his old age. And as his son Bob put it in some notes he sent me, “Up to the end of his life, Gus was conscientiously managing family affairs, checking his social calendar, spending quality time with Peggy like going to "happy hour" with their new found friends at their assisted living facility, welcoming his kids and grandkids, and trying to adjust his hearing aids.”
He led a full and remarkable life.
But I’d like to add another note to our memory of that life. Gus and Peggy were members of this religious community for sixty years. This is part of his remarkable life. We live in a time in which affiliation with a religious community is on the wane, as established religious institutions have ceased to be relevant for many people. But Gus and Peggy, even when their health was such as to make physical attendance at services difficult, looked forward to having communion brought to their home by members of this parish. As a scholar and academic Gus might have been expected to join in the anti-religious sentiments so many in the academic world seem to share. But I’m convinced that over the course of his very long life he acquired a certain kind of higher wisdom, not found in the often shallow understanding of the secular world, a wisdom that allowed him to see beyond the biases that so often afflict the worldly wise. As Paul says in the book of Titus: Older men are to be temperate, dignified, sensible, sound in faith, in love, in perseverance. And Gus embodied these characteristics. The wisdom he acquired through his long and fruitful life was evidence of a deep and abiding faith in the reality of God and his presence in Gus’s life. His faith was deeply grounded in his conviction that life is essentially meaningless if it is lived only for oneself. How exactly Gus defined the meaning of his life in relation to God I don’t know. There are, as the gospel we read this morning reminds us, many dwelling places in our Father’s house. Which exact one Gus was most comfortable in I don’t pretend to know. The precise concepts and words that encapsulated Gus’s faith are known to him and God alone. I’m convinced, however, that as the psalm we just heard says, Gus knew that God, in whatever form, was his refuge and stronghold, in whom he put his trust. At the heart of that trust, that fundamental religious conviction, is the belief that ultimately death has no final dominion over us. Death will eventually bring this present life to an end but God promises us as the prophet Isaiah says: Even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you! I have done it, and I will carry you; And I will bear you and I will deliver you. But to what will we be delivered? The Christian faith looks forward to a new world, a world beyond this one, full of all those things that will enrich, fulfill, and complete us. It will be a world in which we will flourish fully and without restriction. We may get hints of such a world beyond our biological death while we live out our lives here and now and Gus’s life is a living example of such a hint. But the religious seer, John of Patmos, in the book of Revelation, affirms that after death we will live in a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem. It will be a place where “God himself will be with his peoples, and he will wipe every tear from their eyes. And death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” because God is making all things new.
And so on this occasion of remembering our friend’s long and fulfilling earthly life we can rejoice in the newness of life beyond death which God promises us. It is a life which, I am convinced, Gus is already enjoying while he is walking again with full vigor and enthusiasm down all the corridors of the mansion God has prepared for him. It is a life in which we, too, will share someday, when the time comes, as we rejoin Gus and all those who have gone before us. And so the final word is not our celebration of Gus’s life and journey into death as important as that celebration is. The final word is that of hope and promise that nothing essential to the meaning of Gus’s life has been lost. It is preserved forever in the love of God and the new world beyond death into which we will all eventually be welcomed and embraced.