Mama Didn't Teach You Right

I recently read a eulogy for a good friend and former pastor. This man gave me one of my first Bibles, one with a red cover that has been highlighted, searched, and nearly come unglued. The article was a fairly basic overview of his life of 82 years and the contributions he made as a human. You can find it here:

http://www.abpnews.com/content/view/5084/53/

At the bottom of the associated Baptist Press article was an additional comment made by someone who had also read the article. I don’t usually read comments to articles online, because most are made by people who either have nothing to add to the article content or by accident have typed a misspelled word or letter in the comment box and accidentally hit the return key. This one was different. This one was thought out and perhaps five times longer than the original author’s. In the first few paragraphs, it seemed as though this person was also acknowledging the commitments and contributions of my good friend regardless of some of their very own private disagreements. This would have been a great response, had it focused on the loss of this person. Instead, the response turned to an egotistical crusade against this man’s life work. The author penned his words almost carefully to insinuate that his entire life had been waste of time, yet important for his own theological understanding of right and wrong – a viewpoint that was antithetical to the man who just recently passed away. I write ‘almost’ carefully penned his words, since someone who can read will realize that they were written as an insult.

I investigated this response a little further and found it to be linked to his blog page that was connected to his Twitter account. On the day that he wrote this scathing response he had written on this account that he felt it necessary to respond to this passing of a ‘moderate’ leader. This struck me....there are only two reasons that someone would write something discourteous like this on the occasion of another’s death:

1) Your seminary training did not adequately teach you appropriate pastoral ministry skills at a funeral.
2) Your mama didn’t raise you right.

As this man is currently the president of a Baptist seminary, I must assume that it has to be the second. Who responds to a eulogy about how they hated someone’s ideals. Even criminals have family that attend and search out the good times in a person’s life. If this is the correct response for a Baptist and seminary president to give as example on funeral rites, then I would sure hate to see how Baptists are now teaching their seminary students on performing weddings, conducting Baptisms, or raising children. What happened to the ‘conservative’ values of sending food or flowers to a funeral in support of a family, or lending kind words to a staunch adversary that gave your life purpose. Growing up in Texas, you learn very early that you don’t kick someone when they are down, you pick them up first before you hit them again. If your mama had taught you about that you wouldn’t have written it.