We Still Have Promises to Keep

 

A Tribute to My Uncle, Dave Lagore

I am currently in a season of grief and loss, taking the needed time to mourn the loss of my uncle Dave, who passed away June 24, 2024. It is hard for me to fathom that he is gone. Every moment, I expect another text or encouraging phone call from him, because he continued to do so up until he was incapacitated by a series of strokes over the past few months of his life. Yet, he still managed to call me one more time on the eve of his birthday, March 5, telling me how much he loved me and appreciated me.  I could tell that he was close to the end. It strikes me that when Jacob died, the Egyptians mourned for him for seventy days (Genesis 50:4), which is so contrary to our current culture - we don’t know how to stop for grief so we medicate it.

Grieving Through Gratitude

One healthy way to grieve the loss of someone is to offer a tribute to their life and to practice gratitude. Healthy grieving includes gratitude for the gifts our departed loved one has given us. On July 11, I was given one of the greatest honors of my life. I was asked by Dave’s immediate family and church to officiate his celebration of life service in Anaheim, California, and to offer a tribute.  In his Examen Practice, Ignatius of Loyola, (d. 1556) encourages us to look back over our days, weeks, months, years, even our whole life at times, and gratefully see the way God has loved us. For me, the life of Uncle Dave loomed large for me as a significant way that God has loved me. Dave was that adult for me, that significant adult in my life other than my parents who saw me and influenced me towards good. Dave was hands down my favourite adult growing up, and for good reason. He was funny, energetic, and generous to a fault. I always looked forward to our visits, along with Auntie Eileen, and my cousins Rob, Debbie and Kenny (Joshua would join the family later). He always seemed to have a treat for me in his pocket, like Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum. He had a great knack for relating to children and youth. He had an energy and charisma about him that always made me feel like the world was a lot better than it was before he arrived.  He was the life of the party at our epic Lagore family reunions at 11610-84^th Street in Edmonton, the home of my paternal grandparents where sometimes 4 or even 5 large families would cram into that little house at one time. My cousins and I all look at that little house today and wonder how in the world we all fit! Dave would tell stories and jokes – multigenerational jokes like “the preacher’s horse,” and all of us kids would laugh as hard as the adults, and he would laugh along with the rest us!  

That Unforgettable Laugh... and Grief

I still remember his laugh, oh, he would laugh! Decades later, when I suffered a total psychotic breakdown at the age of 30, convinced I was falling into hell, he called me from his vacation in Hawaii and asked what was happening. I told him that I believed I had committed the unpardonable sin, and he burst out laughing. Now, laughing when someone is in pain may seem insensitive, and usually it is, but in this case, his laughter was exactly what I needed. He wasn’t laughing at me, nor with me (for I was not laughing!). No, he was laughing for me. Even though I was still to have a long period of recovery ahead of me, that laugh felt like an anchor for my soul that exposed the absurdity of the lie, and gave me the assurance I needed that my story was not yet finished. Indeed, laughter characterized much of the 10 wonderful years of pastoral ministry that I enjoyed together as a Youth and Associate Pastor alongside Dave at Calgary Christian Centre.

Dave also knew how to grieve. I remember when his father, my grandpa, died of heart failure in 1978, and I accompanied him on the plane to Edmonton from Calgary. Of course I was grieving too, but he wept all the way there. He modelled a faith for me that made room for suffering and even doubt. One time he confided to me in exasperation, “Gordie, I just don’t understand God!” Of course, none of us do, but this was frustration that he was expressing at the deepest level over continual ministry reversals, doors that had been shut, people who had moved away, and the constant ailments that he had suffered, even though God had used him powerfully to heal the sick. He had great faith, but he was always so real.  

“You Can’t Walk”

Dave embodied a blend of the “already, but not yet,” now a familiar term and framework for the reign of God in this messy world. In a previous post, I wrote how that Dave was born with club feet and could not walk as a child without severe pain.  The prognosis was that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair by the time he was 20. However, his dad, my grandpa, took him to every healing meeting imaginable on the Canadian prairies including an Oral Roberts tent revival. When Oral Roberts laid his hands on Dave, Dave felt the power of God course through his whole being. Dave testified that it changed his life forever, but he still wasn’t healed. Then one day, Dave’s older brother, George, (my father), took Dave to a healing meeting led by a healing evangelist, Fern Olson, a guest at Central Pentecostal Church in Edmonton. She laid hands on Dave and told him to run. Dave ran around the very large auditorium repeatedly. After that, Dave continued to run, walk, ski, skate… you name it for the rest of his life without pain. He became an elite and very competitive athlete. He was a star quarterback for an Edmonton high school football team.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Just over a decade ago, Dave had to get an X-ray for calcium deposits on his feet. The doctor took a look at the X-rays and immediately asked for another X-ray. He looked again, and called Dave into his office. He said to him, “You have no tendons attached to your toes, and with the bone structure of your feet, it is physically impossible for you to walk.” From then on, the doctor and Dave shared this ongoing joke every time Dave visited him, saying, “Oh, you’re the guy who can’t walk!” For all those years, Dave had been walking, running, working, playing, even dancing (ok, the “Pentecostal hop!”), with no tendons to his toes. He was literally a “walking miracle.” The compassion and healing he had received gave him faith to pass that same compassion and healing on to so many others. Yet, throughout his life, he continued to suffer chronic ailments, but he did not let that stop him. He was a wounded healer.

The Gift of Generosity

Dave embodied the goodness and generosity of God for me. One time, I was in my office on the phone having an argument with my wife, Kathleen, about some very “expensive” new sheer drapes she wanted to buy for our new home. Dave was eavesdropping and bellowed out, “Oh Gordie, just get her the drapes!” So, we bought the drapes, but I never remember paying for them, and I think I know who did! Dave wasn’t just generous with money. I remember him confiding in me that one of the stalwart members of our church was also a staunch supporter of the Federal Liberal Party.  Now, you have to know that back in the 1980’s in Alberta, during the National Energy Program of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, many of us believed you couldn’t be a Christian and vote liberal! Yet, Dave included him in our church without question, and even put his wife in charge of prayer ministry, and I wondered how he could do that. What if she prayed for the wrong party to win?

Err to the side of Mercy

Probably what stood out to me most was Dave’s generosity of compassion. In this regard, he was way ahead of his time. One time, we had a transgendered woman come into our congregation at Calgary Christian Centre. Now, remember this was the 1980’s, forty years ago, in a conservative church in a conservative province. I will be forever grateful for the way Dave engaged me in navigating the pastoral nuances and dilemmas in such a context and time.  I saw him wrestle with the tensions of needing boundaries and definitions, yet finding accommodation and compromises for the sake of love, and he invited me into that journey to love this person.  What washrooms should she use? If she uses the women’s washroom, how will this make the other women in our church feel?  How will she feel if she can’t? We found workable solutions, but it wasn’t easy. He simply taught me to love people in the messiness of life with many questions left unanswered. Through that season, Dave would often repeat a phrase that has been deeply etched in my heart, “Gordie, always err to the side of mercy.” That statement has shaped my pastoral ministry. Yes, mercy will be shown to those who show mercy, and mercy triumphs over judgment. I saw Dave practice this over and over again. He loved crowds, and we sometimes had some big ones, but his greatest impact on me was how he was with “the ones and the twos”; for example, this transgendered woman, plus countless others including a man dying of AIDS, rejected ones, abandoned ones, and broken-hearted ones. He saw people, and like the One he and I endeavored to follow, he was moved with compassion.  He was a wounded healer.

The Greatest Gift

As mentioned in my previous blog, Dave gave me the gift of faith and was so generous in giving me lots of freedom to spread my wings and grow, but never to the place where I felt alone. He could offer a well-timed rebuke, but it was always from a place of believing in me with eyes that saw who God could be in and through me. Perhaps the greatest generosity he showed me was when, after a decade of ministry together in Calgary, I felt God calling me and my family to leave Calgary and move to Vancouver and literally start all over again. I felt this was a calling from God, but it was still hard. Dave represented God so much to me that I felt I was a disappointment to him in leaving him in Calgary, and therefore letting God down! Yet, Dave let me go with such generosity, even though I knew it was hard for him to do so. In the years following, he never stopped believing in me and encouraging me, even though we joined a very different style and culture of churches than the ones he was familiar with. He invited me several times to preach at his church in southern California. People would tell me ahead of time how much he had been bragging about me. He never stopped pastoring me all through the thirty plus years after Calgary, and I’ll never forget his last phone call, the day before his birthday of this year just before he passed. It is a memory I will always cherish.  

Just Show Up

In a previous blog, We Have Promises to Keep, I wrote how that Dave taught me to show up, even if it’s for the ones and the twos. Dave modelled this for me over and over again. He just showed up. Reinhold Niebuhr, author of the Serenity Prayer wrote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love…” Out of the burning bush, God is revealed to Moses as multi-generational – the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Thomas Cahill wrote in his classic, “The Gifts of the Jews,” that this multi-generational dimension of our faith is one of the greatest insights gleaned from the Jewish story. For my family, this began in the form of a mysterious vow made to God by my grandfather, Peter Lagore, who, still scarred from the ravages of World War One, was sensing the call to ministry but circumstances in his life prevented him from doing so. But he made a vow to God that instead, he would dedicate all five of his sons to Christian ministry.  Dave was the fourth of five sons, (my dad was the second). There was also Arthur (oldest son and missionary to South Africa), William, third son, an evangelist and pastor (retired), and the youngest son, Stan, pastor in Edmonton (retired). Arthur, George and Dave are gone now. As I stood together last week with many of my cousins including Dave’s children at Dave’s celebration of life service, I felt a sobering mandate on all of us to, in our own unique callings and vocations, just continue to “show up” for those who are following behind. We are “dwarves on the shoulders of giants,” continuing to live the story so faithfully entered by our grandparents and parents.  

Thank you, Uncle Dave. You have been such a gift to me. I will miss you, but I know God better because of your life and legacy. You loved well. You finished well. You ran your race. Rest well in the arms of Jesus. Amen.

Gordie Lagore

July 18, 2024

Advent - "Dressing for Hope" in the Darkness

Happy New Year! Of course, what I mean by that is that we are in the Season of Advent, the beginning of a new church calendar year, the means by which we tell the story of Jesus with the calendar. “Advent,” is the Latin word for “coming,” and the Season begins four Sundays before Christmas, and on the first Sunday, we light the “candle of hope on the Advent wreath.

Have you ever had to get dressed in the dark before the sun had risen, perhaps because you didn’t want to wake someone up, only to find out later that your shirt was inside out or backwards, or, you had put the wrong clothes on?  In today’s Advent Reading from Romans 13:11-14, this is exactly what Paul is describing, getting dressed for hope in darkness that he describes this way...

¹²The night is nearly over; the day is almost here…

It’s almost day, but it looks like it’s still night. He does not say, “the day is nearly over; the night is almost here…” No, the night is nearly over…  This distinction changes everything, including what kind of clothes you put on!   

What do we call the time of day, when night is almost over and the day is almost here? We call it, twilight. It is an in-between time, or, a “liminal” time. We could say, it is “already but not yet.”  

Does twilight occur in the morning or in the evening? That is a trick question, because the answer is “both.” As you see in this image, it happens both when the sun is going down at night and when the sun is coming up in the morning. The approach of morning looks the same as the approach of night. We often call the morning twilight, “dawn,” and the evening twilight, “dusk.”  

So, how do you know whether it is dawn or dusk?  This may seem quite simple, but if you are disoriented as to what time it is, it can be hard to tell! For example, I remember being very sick and sleeping for three straight days in the middle of winter and when I got up to go the bathroom, I could not tell whether it was morning or night. This can also happen with jet lag. In those times, we must discern: do we put on our pajamas for bed, or do we put on clothes for school or work? (That said, I observe nowadays that students sometimes wear their pajamas to school! 😊)

How do we know what time it is? Clock? Watch? Hourglass? Angle of the sun, or stars?  Advent reminds us what time it is. Advent reminds us that the twilight we are in, this darkness, is not dusk, but dawn, and this changes everything.

Advent means “coming,” specifically, that God is coming. We look at God’s coming in three ways: First, we look back to God coming to us in Jesus and reflect on that; secondly, we look ahead to Christ’s future return and the hope that our “swords will be turned to ploughshares,” as our Old Testament reading from Isaiah tells us.[1] Imagine! All the resources, money, and energy that we currently invest in military spending, will be invested into farming so that there is food for all the people of the world!  The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank estimates that just 10 percent of the annual military budget of the world’s superpowers such as the US, China, Russia, would be enough to end global poverty and hunger within 15 years… it would be enough to house, feed, clothe, and educate every person on earth. [2] Does that fill you with longing?  Finally, in light of these first two “comings,” we watch for how Christ is coming to us now, continually, today, everyday, right here.

Advent is a season of waiting and of hope. Advent is counterintuitive.
In a culture that does not know how to wait, Advent teaches us to resist hurry. The modern Advent wreath as we know it was invented by a German Protestant pastor, Johann Wichern who was a pioneer in urban mission work among the poor during the 19th century. He had founded a school in Hamburg, and during Advent, the children would ask daily with regards to Christmas, “Are we there yet?”

So, he built this large wooden ring, made from an old cartwheel with 20 small red and 4 large white candles. A small candle was lit successively every weekday and Saturday during Advent. On Sundays, a large white candle was lit. The custom gained ground among Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany and evolved into this smaller wreath with four or five candles as we have today.

So how does this all relate to the darkness? Well, let me be frank with you. We are all going to die, (with the exception of the generation that is alive at Christ’s return).[3] I was reminded of this on a morning walk this week after a big storm “blow-down.” The sidewalks were caked with leaves and the sweet smell of death was everywhere, and it reminded me of this eventuality of death for us. And, if you do not die first, you will experience many “mini-deaths” beforehand. A pet will die. A loved one will die, a parent, a brother or sister, or spouse. Even children die. Other kinds of death occur. A season will end. Someone will leave the church. A friend will move away. A child will move out from home. A sickness. Dementia. You name it. My mom, who will be soon 90, has lost so many friends and colleagues, and only three years ago, she lost her best friend and life partner, my father. Yes, you will eventually lose everything, including your own health, your breath, your heartbeat. The Bible calls this, “the reign of death,” “darkness,” or “night time.”  

But, in the middle of this night when it seemed like it could get no darker, there was a gleam of light. Twilight. A teenage girl received an announcement that she would conceive and bear a child, and his name would be called, “Immanuel, God with us.” And like us, he was born of a woman and grew up in a world of darkness and death. Like us, he suffered, and like us, he died, but unlike us, he rose from the dead, not metaphorically or spiritually, but literally and physically. Love conquered hate. Mercy conquered judgment. Forgiveness conquered revenge.  Twilight came to the human race, a gleam of light. This is the message of Advent. It is not dusk, it is dawn. Like him, we will also rise, and death will die.

The long night of death is nearly over… the new day of resurrection is almost here and that changes everything. And, when you believe that, it changes everything for you. It changes what kind of “clothes” you will put on every day, and how you will “dress.” You will dress for hope, not for despair. Paul wrote:

¹¹ And do this, understanding the present time: the hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. ¹² The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light. ¹³ Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. ¹⁴ Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh[4]

Paul exhorts us to take off the “clothing meant for night time,” that is, “clothing” for death that numbs and medicates our despair, boredom, and emptiness. This includes behaviours such as sexual and chemical addictions, living in a virtual world of fantasy, living in continual dissension as we see in our current culture wars, silos, and echo chambers. Rather, he exhorts us to put on clothes born out of the hope that morning is almost here. We clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus, immersing ourselves in him and his unfailing love, dressing for hope in the darkness of twilight. We put on gratitude, patience, compassion, gentleness, and kindness, making it our life-long quest to love well, to love better, and to finish well. Wake up, wake up, wake up! It is not dusk, it is dawn. The day is almost here! “May the God of hope fill you with hope… so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”[5]

Acknowledgements: I found the twilight graphic while browsing but now can't find the source. If you know this, please let me know and I will give credit. Wickern image was found on Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hinrich_Wichern.

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[1] Isaiah 2:4

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-military-goals-idUSKCN0X12EQ

[3] 1 Corinthians 15

[4] Romans 13:11-14

[5] Romans 15:13