After more requests than I can count, I have done my best to reproduce this sermon.  Brady Mayo was a dear friend and a member of our church.  He also happened to be homosexual.  He died a couple of weeks ago.  This is the sermon I preached at his funeral.  I don’t use a manuscript when I preach and so I have had to use my notes from that day to reproduce it as best I could.  Those who are are grammatical experts will notice that many of these sentences are not complete.  I have tried to write it as I preached it.  It was not intended to be a written document.  Please forgive my lack of attention there.  It is intentional.

Week after week on Tuesdays at 10:00 Brady came into my office, usually with Tamara (his niece) in tow.  We spent time together... talking.  At first we dealt with his wounds.  Sadly most of them were caused by the church of Jesus Christ.  They were caused by those would claim to be better Christians than he.  They were caused by those who were unable to admit that it is possible for a guy like Brady to believe that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior.  

Brady, in every way, was dedicated to Christ... to God... to his church.  Wherever he was, he sought to fit in and to do the right thing.  To give generously of his time and energy.  To give generously of his money.  Time and time again, he was hurt.  He was damaged by leaders in the church, by people who found one rule in a few spots in the Bible.  Most of which were taken out of context.  All to tell him he was a sinner.  Mostly by people with half the dedication to life in community as Brady himself.

The trouble is that he began to believe them.  There were people who literally nearly killed Brady as a young man.  He was given insulin shock and electroshock therapies that brought him very close to death in order to change him. To fix him.   All because he began to believe what society was telling him at the time.  He could not be Christian.  He could not be a good human being and be gay. Trust me.  If ever there was evidence that same gender attraction is not changeable, Brady is proof.  As a young man he would have done anything and he did do everything to change.  And so he became convinced over time that he was the person who God created him to be.  He sought to surround himself with people who treated him as such.  Sadly, that for many years was not the church.

He was in a committed relationship for nearly 30 years.  That relationship was not without its problems but he was faithful in it.  Right up until the death of Zim in 1994, he was faithful.  And then he was celibate for 17 years after Zim’s death.  Yes... Brady and I had these conversations.  Do you know what we call a faithful relationship that ends in the death of one of the people involved in it?  For most people we call that a marriage.

I never met a man who was more kind and gentle and loving.  Tamara, He loved you with all his heart.  Leslie (niece), you too. We talked about you.  James (brother) and Stephana (sister in-law), he had the deepest respect and love for you even though he disagreed with you on every political point possible.  He recognized that you had the perfect right to be wrong as often as you wanted!

I first knew Brady as a medic.  He would first respond early on in my time with this department.  Anything that happened in the DMR, we knew Brady was out there.  Even when he was growing more feeble, he responded.  He gave us assessments.  We knew he was taking care of our patients long before we could get there.  Since Brady quit serving as a medic, I think we all have a little more anxiety about calls out in the DMR because we know he is not there.

He had also been a water tender for the DMR Fire Department.  It was a role he downplayed.  It was a thing he had enjoyed doing but didn’t consider it to be an important job.  I tried to convince him that being a water tender was one of the most important jobs on any department.  It’s not glorious. It’s kind of boring.  But a water tender sees that there is water for the fire trucks.  A fire truck without water is a pretty useless piece of equipment.  In fact, a fire truck without water is pretty much... well... a truck!

Brady loved people and he wanted to help in anyway he could.  He stood up for the poor.   Most of Brady’s neighbors know he hired quite a few people to help around his place.  What most probably didn’t know is that he didn’t really need the help.  They did.  He hired people who needed money because he saw a way to protect their dignity and to help them out.

He tithed.   To whatever church he belonged, he didn’t just give generously.  He tithed.  He did the math and gave 10% of his income.  Then he gave beyond that to other programs.   He loved to give to organizations that serve children.  Smile Train was one of his favorites.  Either he supported my daughter’s Girl Scout  troop or he had the darndest addiction to Girl Scout Cookies I have ever seen.  He’d buy boxes of Peanut Butter Patties from her on Sunday after worship and call me with another order to have ready on Tuesday morning.  How in the world he didn’t weigh 400 pounds when Charis was selling cookies, I will never know.

Brady’s generosity astonished me every moment I knew him.  When t became clear to him that he could no longer run with EMS, it tore him apart.  He wanted to be involved.  He wanted to help.  He wanted to be the good neighbor he clearly heard Christ calling him to be.

Brady was among the most inquisitive people I have known.  I never knew any person to take church membership more seriously.  We have a constitution in the Presbyterian Church consisting of two pretty good sized books, The Book of Confessions and the Book of Order.  He read them both before he became a member of the church. Then he came back for more books.  He wanted to read the History of the Church so I loaned him another book and he read that one.  He read book... after book... after book.  Then he came back with questions.  I’d send him home with a book and he would bring it back twice as thick.  There would be Post It notes on every other page with questions.  Questions to which he wanted answers.  He’d show up for the adult Sunday School class and he would ask questions to which he wanted answers.  It took me forever to convince him that there are a certain number of questions about God to which there are no answers.  Most of them are simply questions with which we must live.  They are mystery.  He was getting there!

He was a fun guy to joke around with and humor was a good way to teach him... and to learn with him.  Just days before his death, Brady had made the decision to stop treatment and to move into Christopher House, a marvelous Hospice facility in Austin.  Tamara and I had the conversation.  Was Brady really ready to die (a thing we both knew he was not afraid to do)?  Or was Brady simply being a drama queen... again?  Because he had the ability to do that better than any man I have ever known.  And it was fun to joke around with him about that because he took it so well.  He played along.  He was a funny guy.

I have missed our Tuesday meetings since Brady first went to Midland for heart treatments back in March.  Gosh he regretted not being able to sing here on Easter.  All that treatment in Midland led to a diagnosis with lung cancer.  That led to surgery from which he simply could not recover.  And he died... after bravely facing basic torture for seven months.  

I am amazed at how this man lived his life.  In a world that sought to define him by what many consider sin.  He lived a life full of grace and truth.  He lived a life full of faithfulness and love.  He lived a life full of confidence that he was doing the best he could.  When he was going in for surgery he asked me to pray for him.  Not for healing.  But that he might have the strength to live out God’s will.  WOW!  What a brave guy.  I have been involved in daily ministry for almost 15 years now.  That’s a first for me.

Was Brady a sinner? -- YES! -- Aren’t we all?  How many of us want to be defined by our sin?  For that matter how many of us would want to be defined by our sexual attractions?  All people are more complicated than that.  And the Grace of Christ rains down on all of us.  All of us!  As Paul Says... NOTHING CAN SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE GOD IN CHRIST!

Roy (friend and church member) has said several times that Brady finally got all those questions answered because Brady really did have a lot of questions.  If his questions are not answered, I guarantee you he is reading every book in Jesus’s library.  If all his questions are not answered, I promise you that he is driving Jesus nuts today!  He was one inquisitive dude.

I hope we are learning as a church.  Not just First Presbyterian Church.  I am incredibly proud of this congregation for the way that all of you welcomed him in.  He was proud and found fulfillment in his leadership position with the music.  But I hope the whole church... every denomination... every church... every person who claims to be a Christian... I hope the whole body of Christ is learning.  I hope we are learning to pay attention to grace.  To name the sin without paying attention to grace is to ignore the most significant parts of scripture.   It is to ignore the gospel of Christ.  I hope we are learning to watch folks like Brady Mayo and to pay attention to grace.  To name the sin without talking about grace is no less honest than if we were to ignore those parts of Leviticus and of the Pauline epistles that name sin.  To say that there is no such thing as sin would be dishonest.  But is it our job to name it?  Brady was not defined by his sexuality.  Why would we define him that way?  Would we want to be defined that way?

Friends, it is our job to spread the good news of Christ.  Yes, you may have flaws but Jesus loves you ... as he loved and loves Brady.  Yes.  You may be a sinner but so am I.  Aren’t we all?  Welcome in. Welcome home!  Brady Mayo was one of the most devoted Christian men I have ever known.  I am proud to have known him.  Thank God I got the chance to learn from him.  Thank God I got to love him and to be loved by him.