Funeral Homily for Jack Kinzie

 Funeral Homily_Jack Kinzie

September 9, 2022

 

        “What do a tick and the Eiffel Tower have in common?  They are both Paris sites.”  It was not uncommon for Jack Kinzie to show up at church on a given Sunday with a new joke he’d share with his clergy.  (That was one of his more recent ones…)

        His family shared that his favorite response to the question “how long have you been married?”  was “We’ve been happily married for 60 years, and 60 out of 67 isn’t bad!”

        This week, the stories of his jokes (and pranks) have been swirling through this place and through his family.  We’ve been talking about the time that he tried to convince Beth Wall that Mount Rushmore was a naturally occurring phenomenon and when she didn’t believe him, he told people that’s what she thought.  We’ve talked about how he bought a picture of Savannah from the thrift store when it first opened.  The picture was marked as being $100, but he talked Carol Giles into selling it to him for $75.  When he came back to pay for it, he had a check already written that didn’t account for sales tax, and Carol insisted he would need to bring another check to pay for the sales tax.  When he came back the third time with the check for the sales tax, he proudly showed Carol a letter he had gotten from the Selig auction house of New York that had valued his new picture of Savannah at so much more than he had paid for it.  Carol later realized that the Selig of Selig auction house was Giles, her last name, spelled backwards, and Jack had written the letter himself in an elaborate joke. 

        We’ve talked about the times he dressed up in ladies’ clothing for the Thrift Store fashion show, and how one year, he and Jim Jeffers danced.  (Beth Wall has happily provided photographic evidence of this.  It’s on the picture table in the parish hall.) 

        There have been so many stories about his other gifts, besides his humor:  stories about the kindness that was always behind his impish playfulness, about how he cared for people, and he took the time to act on it, to show it.  There have been so many stories about how he encouraged people, how he influenced people by believing in them, and he was always so proud when those he encouraged lived into their potential.  So many stories about how this good faithful man devoted himself to his family to his friends and to this church. 

        He was always so happy to do things for those he cared about.  Whenever I called and asked him to do something for the church, he would always say yes.  There was one time that he told me no.  (I think it was playing the part of Ezekiel in a skit for our Easter Vigil service.)  But then he called me back the next day and said he’d rethought it and would do it. 

        Underneath his playful exterior, Jack Kinzie was a man of deep faith, and what a gift he has been in our lives!  His sudden and unexpected death may not be what we would have wanted for him, but there is some comfort in that he died doing something he loved—outside mowing his grass and working in his yard.  And there is comfort in knowing this faithful man, this oak of righteousness, was welcomed into his eternal life by our Lord Jesus, who is his friend and not a stranger. 

        So today, even as we gather to mourn the loss of this sweet, faithful man in our lives, we gather to remember and to give thanks.  We give thanks for Jack—for all the ways that he brought us joy; for all the ways he loved and cherished and encouraged us.  We give thanks for the way that he lived his faith, how even though he had known great loss and sadness, he lived his life, always, with faith in God and in the hope of the resurrection.  We gather today to remember that this is our hope as well—the hope of Easter—how Jesus suffered and died, how God proved through his resurrection that God’s love is stronger than absolutely anything—even death.  We remember that death is not the end but a change, that Jesus has invited us into his resurrection and given us the gift of eternal life at his side.  We remember that nothing and no one we have loved is ever lost from the Kingdom of God.  And we remember that one day we will all feast together again at God’s heavenly banquet.

        Just think of all the new jokes Jack will have waiting for us!