In his old creation body, mind and spirit Gene Owens caught sight of that New Creation, and it pulled and pushed, astonished and gladdened him -- then he pulled, pushed, astonished and gladdened us.
He loved you. And you loved him. He argued with you and you argued back. And in all things he was your friend, a real friend.
This New Creation he glimpsed sent him down the aisle in worship with a petition against the death penalty asking you to sign it with him. It sent him to the streets to work for racial justice in this city.
He was a man of peace. "Peace is loud, noisy, hard work," he once preached, "like the pounding of steel, like the beating of swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks!" When he tried to ring the church bells in protest to the Vietnam War and that failed, he took his own bell up into the pulpit and rang it.
James McClendon, the brilliant and irascible Baptist theologian, called himself a "catfish in a barrel." He explained. Many years ago New England fisherman on their long trips out to sea would put a catfish in the barrel with all the other fish they caught because the prickly catfish would keep the other fish so uncomfortable that they stayed alive until they got back to shore. Gene Owens was a catfish in our barrel. He kept us uncomfortable -- and alive!
For twenty-three years and more he married you and buried your loved ones, wept with you and danced with you -- and graced this pulpit with his soaring baritone voice, his ringing speech, his searching mind and his passionate heart.
In 1979 he and you sustained his invitation for Carter Heyward to preach. She was a daughter of this city, a budding theologian, an ordained Episcopal priest who had just uncloseted herself as a lesbian woman, child of God. As Gene Owens welcomed her to the pulpit, he said these words:
Whatever freedom of the pulpit I enjoy in this place -- and I have more than I enjoy -- whatever openness I treasure in this place with its welcome to all people and to all questions, I owe to Gene Owens’ twenty-three years of passionate insistence and to your brave support of him. I don’t know whom to thank more.
I’ve spent the last three days diving back into his books, and down in the Archives room, into mounds of sermons and papers. I’ve felt like a kid in a candy store. I’ve brought back up some of his words for you today.
A "found poem" is a poetic device by which a poet takes another’s words and phrases and fashions them into a poem.
It I were to create a "found poem" of Gene’s words, it would start with some of these lines:
Faith is a trusting willingness to allow the active purposes of God to be fulfilled
. . . .
In every human God is a "sigh" in the soul, a call to fulfillment, a yearning to
transcend. . . .
All genuine meeting is "holy ground." The divine in us recognizes the divine in
some other. . . .
God is active in history, suffers in history, overcomes history. . . .
Religion is a crutch . . . . It’s time to grow up . . . .
He quoted these words from the great James Baldwin:
When the real Word is heard we might at last "see ourselves as we are." I’m not talking about the correct, proper, right word. I’m talking about the real Word . . . . It will not be controlled. The real Word comes to us -- unbidden, from somewhere outside the self. The real Word comes from God knows where -- and causes poets to speak of a muse and causes preachers to suspect the Spirit. . . .
For twenty-three years my prayer from this pulpit has been:
Say who you are, dear God,
and in that saying
may we come to know ourselves in relationship . . . .
For years we have said, "The doors of Myers Park Baptist Church are open to all and closed to none." By this affirmation we have been tested -- and will be tested again and again. In the light of this affirmation, you need to ask yourself, Whom don’t I want here? Whose presence will truly test my welcome? . . . . Someone waits for you to be the church. See to it that you are!
The last words of his I quote are a prayer he offered one Memorial Sunday as we celebrated and remembered the lives of people of our congregation who had died the previous year:
Eternal God,
Blessed are our dead who have entered into the joys of their Lord.
Now, they are away from us -- and yet they shall be close to us as long as we live.
Now, they are dead -- and yet they shall live as a part of us as long as we live.
Here, we strive; there, they are at rest.
We wonder, they know; we yearn, they possess.
O Great God, on the passage between no longer and not yet;
between who we are and who we are becoming;
between the bondage of slavery and the freedom of the Promised Land;
between the kingdom of this world and your coming kingdom;
between life and death and life forevermore --
in this passage be our helper, our guide, our God.
Enable us, O God, to be good managers of the legacy our dead left behind them.
They were our teachers, our pastors and priests, our loves;
they were our friends, our dear confidants and our counselors, our guides.
In them we knew ourselves, in them our love found a reason for being,
in them we transcended ourselves.
Now, without them, help us stand on our own feet, growing toward maturity --
a living memorial to their relationship with us.
This past Sunday, Gene’s last Sunday, he was here teaching a Sunday School class of young adults on Baptist principles. Then he came with some reluctance to worship because he also wanted to be home watching The Ryder Cup. On the visitor pad in worship he scrawled out his name "Gene Owens" and then wrote, "I am pledging $50,000 over the next 50 years!" Ray, I don’t know the legal force of this document, but I’m handing it over to you!
Gail Godwin, the novelist, wrote out this question:
"In my Father’s house are many rooms," Jesus said to his bewildered and grieving disciples. One of these rooms is the heart.
So I say aloud to God in this place: We thank you, O God, for Gene Owens’ life. As you receive him into your eternal love, create a room in our hearts where the meaning of his life can continue to grow.
Amen.
BENEDICTION
In Gene’s last benediction to you as senior minister ten years ago he spoke these words. They are yours again:
We worship and serve the only God there is
in the only life we have,
and the Spirit of that God binds us
to one another and to all others.
Amen.
