We buried Rick Kersey on Low Sunday, which, this year, fell just three weeks ago on March 30^th. As a term or phrase in the Church’s calendar of times, Low Sunday is always the Sunday after Easter and gets its name, so far as I can tell, from the fact that Easter has been so “high” that anything subsequent to it is bound to be “low” by comparison, at lest for a few days. But not this year.

This Low Sunday at Holy Trinity in Memphis, Tennessee, we began our Sabbath together by singing—quite lustily, in fact—one of those spirituals that are springtime favorites in my part of the world: “I Went Down To the River To Pray, Studyin’About that Good Ole Way, and Who Shall Wear A Golden Crown. O Good Lord, Show Me the Way. After that, we did what Christian churches often do. We baptized new Christians, we confirmed some of those who wished to renew their vows, we accepted two confirmands into full membership within the Church, and we received into congregational membership those baptized Christians who had come to us from other places and now wished to join as co-congregants in that part of God’s church which we call Holy Trinity.  It was a glorious morning, despite it moniker as “low.”

One of the baptized had no family living nearby and so had asked if I would stand with him for the sacrament. I don’t think that has happened to me more than twice or three times in my whole life; and it would have been memorable in and of itself. As things stood, however, it was more than memorable this time. Standing at the font, watching Tim, our priest, consecrate the water in the font and then holding the service book as he read the eternal words of baptism, I felt the emotion not only of the moment, but also of what was ahead of us before the day was done We were receiving one new fellow-Christian into the body of Christ on earth; but in less than two hours, we would be releasing a brother whom we had loved—releasing him from this part of space/time and into life at a remove from space/time.

Tim had spoken to us earlier about baptism itself, and our visiting clergy had spoken of the waters of baptism, of how we are conceived in water and kept safe in water and then born in a mighty rush of water…of how we solemnize those truths by using water once again to mark the re-birth of the Christian into the kingdom of God. Now, even as he was pouring the holy waters, I saw Tim’s face gather itself against grief. We, and half  of those watching, knew that there was another form or act of baptism still to come and that we would shortly be participating in it.

On Low Sunday, the mighty Mississippi was at flood tide and near its cresting in this spring of floods and cresting.  He was a good man, was Rick Kersey, in every part of his life; and he had desired cremation and to be returned to the flow of water. So we took him, or that part of him which had survived the crematorium, and we gathered at the river, at the swollen rush of muddy water that had jumped its banks at least two weeks before Easter. And standing on what was left of a verge between the road and the swirling waters, Tim read the words of dispersal. “We return to you, O Father, one of Your own whom we have loved and who, with us, has loved you.”

We were probably a motley looking crew, standing there. Some of us had changed into jeans after church, because of the mud of the cresting river and the continuing rains that had fallen for five days unremittingly. Some of us were wrapped in slickers and all of us had umbrellas under which we hid from the rain and also from the nakedness of our grief. And so, the words over, Tim and Ann, the love of Rick’s life and his wife, stepped cautiously down to the very last foothold on the bank, and there they released his ashes down into the flow of the river. Rick Kersey had returned to that from which he came by the same means as his original coming.  He had flowed through water into life and then into redeemed life and now, at last, into life fulfilled.

When we had first begun to gather at the river’s edge, there had been no one else out in the weather except for us and one stranger who, given the look of his equipment and the positions he was taking on the slippery bank, had to be a professional photographer recording the river’s cresting. In the course of his watching the river, though, he had begun to watch us, as if he were being drawn into our circle by some familiarity more powerful than acquaintance. I had even realized a time or two that he was very unobtrusively taking pictures of us, of Ann, of Tim, or the dispersal itself.

Then the whole thing was over. Some of us left, but most of us went back to Ann’s house for drinks and rememberings before facing the somber drive home.  But two days later Ann received a packet from the unknown photographer. He had made contact with a woman in our group whom he did know and had gotten Ann’s name and address; and in the packet was a disk of the pictures he had taken as we released Rick to the river on Low Sunday.

“I did not know who he was,” the photographer wrote in his accompanying note, “but he must have been a good man to be so obviously loved and revered by everyone in attendance, as it was very evident.”

“….as it was very evident.”

 I shall not hear those words ever again in quite the same way. Instead, always hereafter they will remind me of the ineluctable truth that even in death, we testify. I know that, of course, we all do. It is, none the less, a good and worthy thing to make mention of from time to time here in this place where the Words of Jesus are the reason for our coming