Sermon for Rob Sanders – 1/21/2017
Mona Sanders died 14 years ago, and the night before her funeral, I told Rob how I’d been praying for grace to preach a truthful sermon at her funeral, really for Mona’s sake, and to do justice to her life but I wasn’t real sure how it was going to turn out. He said, “Oh well, B.E. that’s okay. It’ll be alright, just say whatever you want to. And don’t worry about it, and preach as long as you want to.” I am assuming those instructions are still in effect. Today I am trying to get this said right, because I am very aware that I am talking about something wonderful that is not easily said. We are gathered here because of an earthly life that touched ours. And now will touch us no longer.
Rob Sanders is my first cousin, my oldest and best friend. We were born a month apart. When we were 27 years old, he led me to Jesus.
This sermon is about a Christian life.
Here is how Rob Sanders understood life:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. In him was Life and that Life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
That’s how he understood it.
Early on Rob seemed to have a burning desire to understand. All of us have this desire to a degree. This appears to be a human necessity. But few of us have a burning desire. Rob did.
From what Jack has related, you can see that Rob had doubts about his competence, despite his being obviously gifted in some really powerful ways.
For example, he was able to pretty easily figure out complicated rational things like mathematical formulas... and could read literature with exceptional understanding. Life in all its complexity was also something it seemed to Rob that he could figure out, or would have to figure out. We talked and talked and talked about this. His parents’ approach to life was not one he could accept. The Western cultural understanding of life seemed to Rob flawed and morally bankrupt.. and He was right. In high school he read Freud, and began to analyze himself and others. His conclusion (and Freud’s) was that he was doomed. Here he was wrong. In college Rob read other philosophers but they brou
ght little solace. The intelligentsia, the scientific community, and most writers of literature all seemed to agree. Life is short, harsh, and often miserable, and that it even exists makes no sense at all. This conclusion was a constant torment to Rob for years.
Now here is a question. How is it that this brilliant miserable, tormented, and deeply depressed young man could 50 years later have such beautiful and impressive things thought and said about him?
Everyone here knows the answer to this question...
You know, Rob was such an unlikely person to become a Christian, let alone a priest. Sara and Jack both have mentioned that he was unconventional. This was not a decision on his part. Rob was not wired to get convention. Conventional behavior was not his default setting... After a few years in the parish ministry, however, he began to get a little better at it. But I remember seeing a birthday card that he had given Mona (they had been married maybe 20 years)... he signed it “Your Husband, Rob Sanders.” I thought , “He’s still got a ways to go.”
But in ministry, Rob was in many ways light years ahead of conventional Christianity. He had thought things through... and his mind was trustworthy and discerning. I remember Rob telling how he wrote his Master’s thesis in theoretical mathematics. He would go out at night on the university golf course and walk for hours and think. He would figure it out in his head, and when he had got it straight, he would go inside and write it out... pages of mathematical formulae that he carried in his head. And this is how he did theology... he thought it through, got it right and clear in his head, and then he wrote it down and then he acted on it.
Theology acted upon is what we call the Christian life.
Theology, of course, is thinking about God. Once Rob started doing this he never stopped. He thought about God all the time. The year Rob became a Christian, I was in Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts working on a degree in Psychology. I had a phone conversation with Rob about his conversion, and was very troubled by it. I was not a Christian myself, and I thought he had gone off the deep end. I made an appointment with the Head of my Department, recounted the conversation and his sense was that probably Rob was incurably paranoid schizophrenic. As it turned out he was only right about the incurable part. Rob was incurably Christian.
The thing was: in that conversation, I could tell a real difference over the phone in Rob’s misery level. It was way down. I had known him all my life. He sounded a little crazy but a good bit healthier. I wondered...What was going on? Now he had me thinking about God.
I want to emphasize that Rob’s life was an unusual but typical Christian life.
It was like the the life of Jesus was in that regard.
Rob was...unique (would you agree) but very like all the rest of us....
and what we understand about Jesus is that
HE was like us in all ways, except that He did not get lost from God... he did not go off on His own... He did not lose his connection... we say He was without Sin... which is the same as saying, he lived life the way God wished it to be lived
So when I say Rob’s life was like the life of Jesus, I don’t mean to say that Rob was without sin...
as far as sin goes, Rob’s sins were ever before him, he was very bright, so he could see most of his failings, and when he saw them he repented and confessed his sins and started over afresh...(Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you)...
the sins that he couldn’t see, we just forgave them...
after all, his life was like Jesus’s, but he was not Jesus...Rob’s goodness and mercy were considerable, but he knew that that came from God... and his friends knew that too... so God gave us grace to cut him some slack
Rob’s understanding was that if God did not help him, there were a lot of things in this life that he would not get right...
So he was constantly seeking the input of God... expecting it... and as many of us know, from time to time receiving it... and it was input that changed things and changed them for the better...
this is what I mean about Rob’s being a typical Christian life... this is how he did it... he recognized 50 years ago that there is a design for life that makes sense... we heard about that design in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians... life is designed for love, not just loving family and friends, but loving everyone, even enemies, even Bishops... and, of course, loving God who is the source of love in the first place,
that One Who makes love possible, even when we are not aware of it...
Rob realized 50 years ago that he did not love people, that he did not love God, and that he did not love life... and so he cried out for help
I remember the first time he told me about this realization. He said in 1969, he saw a vision while someone was laying hands on him and praying for him...and in this vision he saw God... in his great and beautiful goodness, and then he saw the world from a distance (perhaps from the perspective of God) and it seemed almost unbearably beautiful and lovely, but in this vision as he drew nearer and looked more closely he saw that the world was deeply infected with evil, that it was as if there were dangerous, despicable,ugly, sickening creatures crawling all over the face of the earth, a huge contrast from the light of God...and Rob, in his justice mode, cried out to God to destroy it.... to destroy that evil world...at which point, he said, he suddenly realized that he was on the earth himself, and then he cried out for God to have mercy and to save the world and to save him.. this was quick thinking on his part
over time, and it took time, Rob became a exceptionally loving person... able to love despite his own and the world’s imperfections.
He made the transition from being an extremely self-concerned person to an unpretentious self-giving person... he still had occasional lapses with regard to loving his enemies... but he would repent of these little flare-ups and go on... he was radically committed to loving people even when they did evil... and in this way, he was following Jesus, and Jesus helped him along this way, changing him in the process...
In the gospel that Bo read, Jesus says, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” What Jesus is talking about here are the things that have been revealed about life through his Jesus’s life: his preaching, teaching, and healing. His great capacity for forgiveness. And what Jesus says is: if you follow along with me in these ways, the Father and I will make our home with you. We will come to you. We will not leave you desolate. In the hardest and the worst of life we will come to you, and be with you.
I well know how unwaveringly Rob Sanders kept this word. Remember we are not talking about reading the Bible, though this can be a great help. And we are not talking about religious piety, or moral purity, or human perfection. We are talking about love. Love which, thank goodness, covers a multitude of sins.
After Rob died, and we had wept and had prayed. Jerree was spending time beside him, loving him to the end, and she called me in and said as she stroked his head, “Where is he?” She was troubled and said “I can’t bear to think of him being off alone somewhere.” And I said “ I don’t know where he is, but he’s on some great adventure and I’m pretty sure he’s not alone.” I said,”He’s not been alone for the last 50 years. so I can’t imagine he’s alone now.”
The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit had made their home with him, and they were ever available to him. He was ever calling on them, and they on him. He needed their help, and they had things for him to do; people for him to love. This is the Christian life, and is another way in which Rob’s life was very typically Christian.
On the other hand, not many of us see a vision of God, and then of the world with creepy evil uglies crawling over it. But Rob did. He saw things like this. This is unique, but not completely unusual. He was a seer, and its not a stretch to say that he was like one the prophets of old, who also at times had dreams and visions in which God revealed himself in visual hyperbole. This is rare, but not without precedent.
In prayer Rob, at times, heard (perceived) what he understood to be words from God to him. He experienced this God who had made his home with him as a God who spoke life-giving words to human beings and who acted in their lives. But Rob did not just blindly believe anything that came into his awareness. Not long after that first vision of God, Rob writes (and I’m quoting)
A couple of weeks after the vision I suspected it may not have been God, but rather, an inner explosion of the image of God received in my childhood, pent up due to my sinful life. Even so, I decided to see the matter through. I was in hell for about a year and a half, the Holy Spirit revealing successive dimensions of evil and sin in me. I would repent, surrender this sin to God, receive the laying on of hands for prayer, and go on.
One evening in terrible torment, I suddenly cried out.
”Put it on Jesus.” I was instantly healed.
The hell that had tormented me since childhood was gone. It has never come back although I have had some tough times.
“Put it on Jesus.” We learned this back in 1971. To put our hell on Jesus, and trust Him to handle it. This is what worked in tough times. Rob would commend this to us.
We might have thought that the last year was pure hell for Rob. The pain from the cancer, the debilitating chemotherapy, the continuing lack of well-being. But there was much that was heavenly. Awarenesses of God in the midst of his suffering. The care and love of Jerree and Lilly and Sara...of Bo and Matt and Susan and John. The love and prayers of Ron and the St. Andrews church family. The constant support of his brothers and their families. It was very good of God to surround Rob with all this love.
It is very powerfully here today.
We are truly thankful for Rob’s life, but even more truthfully, we are bereft. We all wanted more of him. But to be completely truthful he gave us all he had.
The night before Mona died Rob and I were in the hospital room and Rob said to me “I probably didn’t love her the best that I could, but I did love her as hard as I could.”
That was exactly true. Its really a description of all of Rob’s life: ...he loved the goodness of God... He loved the radical life of Jesus of Nazareth... and with Their help he loved us as hard as he could
Please understand how this love happened.
Rob would want us to get this...
For being loved by Rob was actually also being loved by God... God loved us through Rob... and whether we knew it or not, I can assure you that Rob did.
This is the Christian life at its best.
Thank you Jesus, for taking all that Rob put on you, it was a load, way more than he could bear.
Thank you Lord God for the gift of his life among us typical in many ways, but radically unique in others...for which we gathered here are unutterably thankful.
Thank you that Rob dwells now upon another shore and in a greater light, with that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.
May the Almighty God bless us with his grace; Christ give us the joys of everlasting life; and unto the fellowship of the citizens above may the King of Angels bring us all. Amen.
