Fr Robert Hendrickson
Dear Friends in Christ,
I was honored to preach at Dick Cockrell’s Requiem yesterday with Fr Matthew celebrating. It was a wonderful opportunity to think about life, loss, and the Christian life we share together—and I offer it to you this morning.
So when I arrived here, at Saint Philip’s, Fr Cockrell was eager to tell me about some intersections in our ministry and faith life.
He had been a parishioner at Christ Church New Haven when he was a student at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. In that time he lived right across the street from the church. He had found himself welcomed into ministry there just as I had and spent many a quiet hour there. Before I considered ministry, I used to just enjoy a few quiet moments there as the Holy Spirit did its work.
Dick had the same experience there, welcomed into a life of prayer by a church that seems soaked in it.
He was welcomed at Christ Church by Fr Wade Eaton. Fr Eaton was the father of Peter Eaton, the Dean of the Cathedral in Denver, for whom I worked before coming here to Saint Philip’s. Dick was on staff, five years before I was born, at Trinity on the Green in New Haven, which was the church that sponsored me for ordination.
Dick’s life and mine had intersected at Christ Church and Trinity on the Green, and through Fr Eaton and his son, and now here at Saint Philip’s.
Of course, it’s true that the Episcopal Church is small and we all seem to know each other.
It is also true though that the love of God is immense and he calls us together for love’s sake.
The love of God brought Dick into that church in New Haven. The love of God drew him into conversation with a priest he came to know well. The love of God brought him into ordained ministry to share that love in Bread and Wine. The love of God inspired him to activism in the Civil Rights movement.
The love of God brings us together here, too. We gather at this Altar not as strangers but as friends who share in one Bread because we are one Body. We are drawn together because we have come to see God’s love made real and present and alive in the life of Dick Cockrell.
The many intersections of our lives are the webbing, the cross-cutting strands of chance, that make up who we are and who we will become. Those threads are the many, many strands of a tapestry that forms the image of Christ for the world.
Each of us brings here some story that intersects with another’s. Each of us brings some place we loved, some people we know, some meal we shared, some chance encounter that defied mere chance.
We share these intersections where a small knot is tied that binds us more firmly together.
Ultimately this intersection of relationship and connection, past and future, who we were and who we will yet be are the incarnation story.
God in Christ finds a place, a moment, and a people where he decisively chooses to knot our story and our destiny together with his.
The tapestry is woven that is the knitting of heaven and earth together in the person and promise of Christ.
Salvation history is woven one small thread at a time as we find our story crossing with Christ’s and we are made one people.
The whole life of the church is the sum of the countless patterns of connection that are local parishes, national churches, dioceses, and so much more.
Even more than that though, the whole life of the Church is one person asking another, do you know Christ? There, in Christ, the binding together begins.
Though this one Church, the Episcopal Church, may be small and we all seem to know one another, it is because we know Christ together that we come to know ourselves not as strangers but as neighbors, not just as neighbors but as brothers and sisters, not just as brothers and sisters, but as heirs of an eternal promise that is the story of the world’s redemption.
So many stories and small intersections have woven the path here today. In one man’s life come together so many stories of love and loss and triumph and more.
In one man’s hand was also held, for us all, the Bread of life and the Cup of Salvation.
The priest’s charge is to share that source and summit of our life together—the story of thanksgiving for bread made body, wine made blood, as small sips draw deep from the well of eternity.
These intersections, in a crib in Bethlehem, on a cross in Jerusalem, in a cup here in Tucson, and in the well-lived, well-loved life of Dick Cockrell—all of those intersections are a place where we meet again and again the presence and promise of a God who chooses and uses the messiness of this human world to make himself known.
Dick saved a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins in his many notes. The poem begins with the famous line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
God does not content himself with incorporeal myth but let’s us find and be found by him in the real, holy, untidy, and flawed stuff of life.
He makes of our lives an intersection where we might yet be knotted more closely with him one cup, one prayer, one act of love at a time.
He charges our lives with his grandeur—a grandeur revealed is so many small ways that become the tapestry that is the Church.
That’s what all those stories we share are. Acts of love that are the essence of the church.
Those little chance encounters are the essential matter of the world’s conversion because they are where we remember that we are one with one another and one with the source of light and life.
It’s in lives like Dick’s—and yours and mine, too—where the intersections become ever more cross-shaped for those who look with the eyes of faith.
Those moments become small sparks of the grandeur of God.
I’m so grateful to have known Dick Cockrell. I’m so grateful for those little threads we shared that knit us together.
And I’m so grateful that we gather together at this Altar praying for him, asking for his prayers for us, as yet another thread is woven binding heaven to earth today in the life of Fr Cockrell here and beyond.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert
