Funeral Homily for Leon Barfield-Rev Melanie Lemburg

Funeral Homily_Leon Barfield

February 18, 2023

 

        Leon Barfield was a man of honor and faithfulness.  I knew him as a quiet man, with a sweet smile and a gently-wry sense of humor.  So, I was a bit surprised when he caught me after church one day this past November, and he wanted to talk.  He told me about how when he was a teenager, he had a motorbike that he used to ride the country roads in Moultrie.  And one day his bike broke, and he took it to a man he knew as “the welder.”  The welder fixed his bike for him, and Leon promised to pay him back over time.  Leon told me how, so many years later, he was haunted by that unpaid debt.  So, his longest friends went on an odyssey for him, back home to Moultrie.  They searched high and low for “the welder” or a member of his family.  They found the welder’s shop, but it was long closed, and eventually, they had to admit that they were unable to locate the man or a member of his family to pay Leon’s debt.  As Leon was telling me this, he was visibly moved—by the generosity of his friends, by his grief at being unable to make this right.  He told me that he was going to make a donation to the church—in honor of his friends and in memory of the welder for his generosity in fixing a young man’s bike. 

        That was Leon.  Quietly faithful.  Trying to see that the right thing was done and an old debt was honored.  While many of you knew him professionally, I knew Leon in the context of his family—deeply devoted to Lennie and she to him, joining with Claud and Ginger as the four of them brought Lennie’s mother Betty to church and they all sat together and then would go out to eat after. 

        His last couple of months were hard, in and out of the hospital, and while his warrior-spirit wouldn’t give up, his body eventually did.  And while we mourn the loss of this good man among us, we gather today to give thanks for him and to remember.

        We remember the promise of our faith, the hope of our calling, the truth of the resurrection.  We remember that through Jesus’s death and resurrection, God has proven once and for all that God’s love is stronger than absolutely anything, even death.  We hold fast to the hope, even in the midst of our grief, that we will all feast again together at God’s heavenly banquet, and we trust that Leon, this honorable and quietly faithful man, has been welcomed by our Lord Jesus Christ, who was his friend and not a stranger, saying “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”