Funeral for Billy Judkins St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
June 30th, 2023, 2 pm
As Billy is dying, his son, Hunter, comforts his dad by saying to him, “Did you ever think you would live to be 93 years old?”
In fact, in just three months, on September 13th, Billy Judkins would be 94 years old. I invite you to go back to 1929, the year of Billy’s birth. The influenza epidemic kills 200,000 people. Herbert Hoover is inaugurated as our president. The stock market crashes on October 29th and heralds in the Great Depression. Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy, Anne Frank, and Martin Luther King Jr. are also born that same year. Billy is 12 when World War II starts on December 7th, 1941. He is 23 when this church, St. Mark’s, is founded on January 6th, 1952.
In the 1950s, Billy serves in the Air Force in Korea and afterward completes his college degree at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he meets Dana. Billy had been a member of the Church of Christ until he marries Dana, an Episcopalian from New York. They come to St. Mark’s from Christ Church in the late ’70s. This is about the same time my husband and I and our family also come to St. Mark’s. I would sing in the alto section beside Dana.
Billy was very active at St. Mark’s on the vestry, junior warden, greeter, and usher. Billy and Dana were married for over 62 years. Together in 1990, they started Judkins Insurance and Financial Services Inc. Agency.
Dana died five years ago, in 2018, after cardiac surgery at the age of 85.
One of Billy’s best friends is our emeritus deacon, Len Griffin. They would take amazing road trips together. When Billy moves to northwest Arkansas less than a year ago, Hunter reminds us that his father immediately makes another connection to a man in the nursing home named Harley. By then, Billy can barely hear, and Harley is almost blind. They pool their resources and spend much time together. Hunter practiced medicine in Alaska, but moved back to Arkansas to help his mom and dad about ten years ago. When Billy moved closer to Hunter,/ Carol, Hunter’s wife, and Hunter sneak beer and barbecue to Billy at the veterans nursing home on Saturday. This was his favorite meal. I hear that there will soon be a barbecue and beer wake at Hunter and Carol’s home in Northwest Arkansas to honor Billy when they return home.
I often visited Billy and most enjoyed his stories. His favorite story was about a near-death experience. He had gone to the hospital to have surgery on his carotid. That night, bleeding developed in his neck, which started blocking his airway. By chance, an ENT physician is in the hospital late that night making rounds and saves Billy’s life with an emergency tracheostomy. For Billy, this was a near-death experience where he describes floods of light around Jesus, who is there reassuring him that all will be well, all will be well. After that encounter with dying, Billy said he did not fear death.
The Presbyterian minister, Frederick Buechner, has written often about the death of his own father and brother. Buechner would say to Billy’s family that you can say goodbye as each of you do at the veterans nursing home, but at the same time, you carry Dana and now Billy with you in your heart, your mind, and your stomach./ You do not just live in a world, but there is a world that lives in you./
Buechner’s experience is that these larger than life figures of our childhood,/ live on./ They take death in stride, for the most part,/ because although death ends their earthly life as we know it, it can never end our relationship with them. They are alive in the resurrection,/ but without a doubt, they are also still alive in us through memories of good and bad times.
Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer;/ it is a looking out into an altogether different kind of time where there is no time./ It is a new heaven and a new earth./Led by the good shepherd, those in the resurrection are changed and become more Christ-like. Those who have died live in another kind of time where everything that ever was/ continues not just to be the same, but to grow/and change./ They, in some mysterious way, are alive in the resurrection and also still alive in us. In their new resurrected life, we will slowly begin to understand in new ways the people we loved, the people who loved us, the people who, for good or ill, taught us things./ In some mysterious way/ they come to understand us—and through them, we come to understand ourselves and them — in new ways. / As we begin to remember them, they will be changed, and we, in turn, are changed. This has been Buechner’s experience, and also has been my experience.
Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just we are haunted by ghosts,/ because they are not ghosts, but a cloud of witnesses./ Those in the resurrection we once knew/ are not just echoes of voices that have now ceased to speak. They are saints in the sense that through them, something of the positive power and richness of their life in the past/ now continues to touch us, but in new and different ways.
They have their own business to get on with now, I assume — “increasing in knowledge and love of You,” says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in your kingdom,” which all sounds like business enough for anybody.
We can imagine all of us on this shore fading from them/ as they journey ahead toward the new shore that awaits them, but it is as if they carry something of us on their way/ as we assuredly carry something of them on our journey. Perhaps this is why we are gradually called not only to remember them as they used to be/ but to see and hear them in some new sense. Remember how even Jesus’ closest friends such as Mary Magdalene and those on the road to Emmaus did not immediately recognize the risen Lord. If those in the resurrection had things to say to us in the past, they also have things to say to us now, and what they say may not always be what we will expect/ or the same things we have heard from them before. Be open to this experience.
Buechner writes this is some of what he thinks those in the resurrection are saying to us.///“When you remember us, it means you are carrying something of us with you. We have left some marks, our fingerprints on you, just as we, Dana and Billy, have left our fingerprints on our family and friends,/ and on St. Mark’s,/ fingerprints of who you are/ and who we are. You will summon us back to your mind countless times. This means that even after we die, you can still see our faces and hear our voices and speak to us in your mind and in your heart… and someday/as in the resurrection of our Lord/you will see us again/ face to face…” in the new and overpowering light of Jesus, the risen Christ.
Today we celebrate Billy Judkins’s life in the house where he came to experience Jesus/ and the Good Shepherd’s promise of this new life in the resurrection.
Frederick Buechner in The Sacred Journey A Memoir of Early Days, Harper One reprint edition (October 1991)
Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark, HarperOne; Reprint edition (May 21st, 1993)
Joanna Seibert