Eulogy for Gerry Dunlap

June 12, 2024

The Apostle Paul says in Philippians:

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”

Many years ago I taught junior high school. One day a student asked me, “Mr. Smith, what is a eulogy?” I told him it was a time when we say good words about someone – most often at a funeral. After thinking about it I asked the class to pair off and think of a one word eulogy for each other. It could not be about their physical appearance but about something that was unique to them. After a few minutes, a student raised her hand and said, “This is hard! All we can come up with is the word nice.” She was right. It is hard to do a eulogy when all you come up with is one word. It’s harder still when you have too many words for someone who was so much more than nice.

In his book titled “Character” David Brooks wrote:

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

For Christians we might call the eulogy virtues the fruits of the spirit and ask ourselves how our lives will have been illustrations for others of those virtues. Will there be good words about the fruit of our lives or will people be stumped after saying ‘Nice”?

I heard Gerry before I actually met him. Even though we were at Baylor, lived in the same dorm and were in the same Spanish class together we never connected. You know the poem about two roads meeting in the wood by Robert Frost. I was the one who chose the path less travelled – the path from the dorm to classes. I would have met him then had I gone to classes. But decades later, he was in a small cluster of men in the back of the Sunday School room and it was his laugh that made me first notice him. Everyone was laughing and it was clearly about something he had said. This was normal. Gerry made everyone laugh and feel comfortable in doing it. There was nothing cutting about his humor. He made people glad they were around him because his humor enriched people. Jonathan Swift said, “Good manners is the art of making people comfortable. Whoever makes the fewest people uncomfortable has the best manners.” Gerry had good manners because he was comfortable in his own skin and that put everyone around him at ease. He was not trying to impress anyone because he was confident in who he was. Remember Popeye’s great line? “I yam what I yam” Gerry knew who he was and was never trying to be someone else.

But he was not just funny. His life was not painless. It was not without tragedy and heartache but someone said he was like one of the patriarchs. As Paul said of Abraham, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed..being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised.” He never asked, “Why me?” He never played the victim. He dealt with hardship and disappointment. He persevered. Perseverance is the virtue that will outlast all opposition. Scripture says it is the virtue that persists or literally “that which remains” when everything else has been eroded away. That is what a batholith is, isn’t it? It is an igneous rock that remains when everything around it has eroded away. These are the often unnoticed, covered up, hidden, and still remaining virtues that are only revealed when everything else has fallen away. These are the virtues that no society can do without over time because they form the very structure that holds up everything else.

Gerry had all the emotions – fear, anger, grief, disappointment – but he governed them. He had somehow mastered himself without making a show of it. From an early age he had displayed the fruit of self-control. That’s exactly the image Jesus uses for the word meekness. It does not mean passive. It means great strength under control. You could misuse that strength but you choose to be self-governed. Gerry always knew more than he let on but never used that to stir up or embarrass anyone.

So many people have talked about his patience and kindness. Patience is not simply waiting while doing nothing. It is not being passive. It is practicing hope daily while knowing people and circumstances have a timing we don’t always understand. It is giving people room to grow without forcing them.

The Apostle Peter writes about kindness

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”

It is not a prescription of duties and chores, but a description of a life that grows. There is a beginning – faith – and an end – love. But after faith what is the first step toward love? The word used here is often translated as kindness or goodness. Kindness is where we begin. Kindness is one of the traits hardest to define but precisely the virtue which has the greatest influence in the world. Kind to my wife or husband. Kind at work. Kind with my friends. Kind with my family. Kindness that points people to God. Paul even goes so far as to say it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance.

Gerry was kind to friends and strangers. He was kind to his family and those with whom he worked. His life was marked by goodness.

When salt dissolves it is absorbed and assimilated into the body. It becomes a part of the blood and the bones – and the effects remain long after. That is how I see Gerry’s life. His goodness and genuine integrity have become a part of this body we represent this morning. Not just his laugh, his wit and his care for people he loved but the good memories of his life will play over and over in our lives for as long as we live. The best parts of Gerry’s life have been absorbed into ours and will last for years to come.

Some people say a piece of us dies when a friend passes. Not so for Gerry. There is a little piece of each of us – the Gerry piece – that lives on and may even grow. Sometimes we let go and yet the people we held so dear and who loved us come back to us. It’s not hearing their voices in the night or seeing ghosts in the house. Rather, there is something of their lives left unfinished and in us they are still working to complete it. It is the sense that the best of who they were (and often the part we knew the least) is being lived out for them in us.

I tell men and women who have lost a father that they will be sitting alone three or four years from now and realize traits of their fathers that they thought were his alone have been coming to life in them. It’s more than recollections. It is a kind of waking up to something long dormant. Sometimes the very traits and mannerisms we understood the least and resisted the most are the very things we begin to recognize in our own lives.

Gerry had character that assured and encouraged those around him. Someone once described him as a great wingman. You could count on him. Every letter Stonewall Jackson sent to General Robert E. Lee ended with these words: “Yours to count on.”

The pastor, Gordon MacDonald writes in his book, “The Life God Blesses” about Michael Plant who set off on a solo crossing of the Atlantic in his custom sailboat. The keel of his boat had an extra 8,000 pounds of weight bolted to it to ensure enough stability below the waterline. Eleven days into the voyage his friends lost contact with him but they waited a few days to issue an alert because they were so certain he was in control. He wasn’t. When they examined the empty boat the weight was missing. Unlike Michael Plant, Gary had enough weight below the waterline to weather the storms and rogue winds that come in any life. Like so many of the World War II veterans he interviewed and admired, Gerry was a man of honor and his character kept him afloat.

Gerry had his own phrase that Jude will recognize. “I love you man,” and while that was special between the two of them, everyone knew the same about their standing with Gerry. People counted on Gerry and he carried burdens and lifted loads. He was like a deep keel in rough seas for so many. Paul said, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business and work with your hands..so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

John Gardner wrote, “There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are –and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.”

That was Gerry, wasn’t it?

But we are here this morning for a larger purpose. It is more than honoring and recognizing the effect of Gerry’s life for all of us. Gerry was not just a good man and he did not merely make things better for everyone around him. Gerry believed and was a witness to the resurrection life to come and that is what we are here to share today.

There are times when all of us wonder, “Is this all there is?” Is faith only for making us better people or giving us a better life? No, for we can say with Paul

If there’s no resurrection, there’s no living Christ. And face it – if there’s no resurrection for Christ, everything we’ve told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you’ve staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ – sheer fabrications, if there’s no resurrection. If corpses can’t be raised, then Christ wasn’t, because he was indeed dead. And if Christ wasn’t raised, then all you’re doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. It’s even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they’re already in their graves. If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot.

No, we were not made just for this world. C.S. Lewis says it this way:

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise […] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

In another place he says that this life is not the real story but only the beginning of the real story. All of our lives and adventures have been only the cover and title page but Gerry is now at last beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

So, as we close I want each of us to know that we are here to be witnesses not only to the good life of Gerry Dunlap but we are gathered as the church to be witnesses to the resurrection of Christ. Just as Paul said, if all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot. There is an answer to the question, “Is this all there is?” The answer is there is so much more that we cannot even imagine for those who believe and accept the gift of Christ to us – the kindness that leads to repentance and because he lives we will as well.

It would be missing the point to leave here today talking about what a remarkable gift Gerry was to us and to overlook the real message of his life.

Christ will take hold of you as well and underneath are the everlasting arms.