St Neots Parish Church

We’ve described this Eucharist as a service of celebration and a thanksgiving for Tim’s life – and what a colossal amount there is to celebrate and to thank God for. In her tribute to Tim, Catherina acknowledges that she’s had to leave out a great deal, and also that there’s a great deal more that all of you here could contribute to Tim’s story – all the many and various ways in which the path of Tim’s life criss-crossed with your paths as you shared his zest for one or more of his many areas of activity. We’re thankful for his friendship, his love of family, his generosity, his sense of fun, his seriousness of purpose, his passion for justice and his compassion for the world’s poor and marginalized, his willingness to help with anything practical, his concern and care for this church, perhaps especially for what goes on many feet above us – the bells, the clock, the flags. Reading what Catherina wrote, it seems incredible; it seems positively indecent that all of this could be accomplished by one man in one lifetime. Was there nothing that Tim couldn’t do? Tim’s capacity for learning new skills, and not just learning them, but mastering them seems almost downright greedy. Greedy that is, until we remember that having mastered them, Tim was just as eager to make those skills, those many gifts available to anyone who needed them. And alongside all those practical gifts, the greatest gift that Tim shared with so many, was the gift of himself, the gift of friendship, the gift of love. That there are so many here this afternoon is an eloquent testimony to the quality of Tim’s friendship, and to his special integrity as a person.

The gift of love that Tim shared so freely with all of us was of a very high order indeed. He was profligate in his self-giving – in fact I’m tempted to say that he positively squandered his gifts, lavishing them with relish. Except that I’m sure that Tim realised that the best gifts, in fact the only ones worth having, are the gifts that we share with others. When we share what we have, when we use our talents and abilities to bring delight and joy into the lives of other people, when we are able to help those in need, perhaps especially when we are able help them to help themselves, to stand on their own feet, when we can restore humanity and dignity to the marginalized and abandoned, then perhaps we come close, or as close as we can, to sharing in the self-emptying, self-abandoning love of God in Jesus Christ.

Of course, those who are in the best position to pay tribute to the gift of love that Tim possessed in such abundance, are those whom Tim loved most, and who shared in that mutual love and returned it. Catherina, Liz, David, Tom and Stanley, John and Mary and all the family, in these past days we have all shared something of the shock and loss and grief that you are feeling, but we recognise that great as that sense of loss is for us, it is as nothing compared to what that you must be feeling. Today we join together to assure you that you are held in our love and in our prayers, and will continue to be held there for as far as we can see ahead. There has been an extraordinary outpouring of love and compassion in this parish since we first heard the news of Tim’s death, and today that is renewed in the wider circle of friendship that this congregation represents. It is hard for us to comprehend the magnitude of your loss, but we offer you all our love as we all struggle to come to terms with what has happened.

The sudden, tragic death of someone so full of life and vitality, someone with seemingly so much more to give to his family, his friends, his church, his community comes as more than just a shock. We are reminded just how fragile human life is and it brings us face to face with our own mortality. It also leaves us asking questions, not least questions of God himself. Tim was a man of deep and secure faith; a faith that inspired him to live life generously, to make the fullest use of the gifts and talents that God has given him. We can I think, be forgiven for asking the question why – why did this happen? How could God allow it to happen? The classic attempt to answer that question goes something like this: It is all part of God’s loving providence – we’re not able to understand it now, but one day, perhaps not in this life, we will see it as part of God’s great plan. It’s an understandable way of trying to explain the seemingly inexplicable, it trips off the tongue and maybe it brings some comfort, but I’m afraid that for me, it won’t do. It won’t do because it presents me with the image of a God that I find very hard to believe in, and completely impossible to love. It presents the image of a God who is capricious and uncaring – the image of a God who arbitrarily gives life and even more arbitrarily takes it away, an image that for me is utterly incompatible with the reality of God that I see manifested, incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the person of Jesus, God voluntarily and freely laid aside his divinity, in order to enter fully into our humanity so that we could know the full extent of God’s love revealed in a human being. We all know from our own experience that love can result in both triumph and tragedy. Love’s triumph is effected when our love is reciprocated and returned by the one we love – the tragedy comes when our love is not returned or when a loving relationship is marred by self-absorption, or broken by the pain and separation of death. In his life and ministry, and most of all in his death on the cross, Jesus showed us the extent to which love could be poured out, the extent to which love makes itself vulnerable to rejection – vulnerable even to the point of being willing to die, willing to risk extinction for the sake of the beloved. It may seem strange to talk about God making himself vulnerable, even to talk about God suffering, but that is precisely what the passion and death of Christ shows us. In our gospel reading this past Sunday we heard the words of Jesus - well-known words: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’. Jesus’s death seemed like a tragedy, indeed it was a tragedy, but the tragedy of love on the cross became the triumph of love in the resurrection, because it is through Jesus’s resurrection, and then through his ascension in which his humanity and his divinity are taken up into the very being of God himself, that our own eventual triumph is assured. In today’s gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that he goes to prepare a place for them in the Father’s kingdom – that is the ultimate triumph of love through which we are all assured of our own place, but at the time the disciples had no idea, no comprehension of what it would cost, or how much God himself would have to suffer.

Today, we do have an idea of the cost of loving, as we feel keenly the pain of Tim’s absence. But because of the triumph of love in the resurrection, for Tim, the tragedy of death has simply opened the gateway to the triumph of eternal life. But as God shares in that triumph, so I believe God also shares in our tragedy, in the pain and grief of bereavement. I can’t believe, and I don’t believe that Tim’s death was pre-ordained by God as part of some mysterious unknowable plan. God’s plan is perfectly knowable, and it is quite simple – it is nothing less than the renewal of creation and that, through Jesus, has been achieved for all time and eternity. But the terrifying truth is that in order for us to live as people capable of loving and being loved in return, we have been given complete freedom and we live in a world that is full of chance and accident, because that is the only kind of world in which our freedom, integrity, responsibility and love can exist. God does not prevent accidents because nothing is predetermined – every moment is a newly created moment - at every moment there is the possibility of triumph or tragedy. But God is not an absentee landlord – or a blind watchmaker waiting for the inevitable to unfold. The Anglican theologian W H Vanstone found words to express something of the continuous creative love of God when he wrote: ‘that upon which all being depends is love – love expended in self-giving, wholly expended without residue or reserve, drained, exhausted, spent…ever poised upon the brink of failure, ever questing, ever venturing, ever at the end of its strength, but ever finding in the challenge of tragedy, yet new strength to redeem that tragedy and restore again the possibility of triumph.’ St Teresa of Avila once wrote ‘Christ has no hands but ours.’ If we want to know where God is in all of this, then I believe we should look for him not in what happened to Tim, but in where He is at work, now in all of us, suffering with us, but endlessly renewing his creative love within us to bind us together in love for one another.

Tim now knows fully the triumph of God’s love – and for that, praise the Lord. But God is still utterly committed to this world, to everyone in it, and to us. Because he shared in the suffering of Jesus, God suffers with us; is at this moment closer to us than we are to ourselves, and his love is still totally outpoured, totally spent, yet ever renewed, shining forth gloriously in our love for one another.

Tim was indispensable in so many ways to so many people, but his earthly life is now complete and we must go on into the rest of our lives without him. In his integrity, in his generosity, in his love, Tim showed us something of the self-emptying love of God in Jesus Christ. The best tribute we can pay to him, because it is in precisely this way that God works, is to do what Tim did and manifest that love to one another – to be Christ for one another – and so begin to turn the tragedy of death into the triumph of the resurrection. I pray that it may be so.