The American Quaker, John Whittier, wrote a poem which some of you may have sung as a hymn.

Reading it again the other day, I was struck by how appropriate a commentary this poem is on the life and death of somebody like Lambert Brown.

So let me read the poem to you, verse by verse, with a few words of comment on each one.

It goes as follows:

All as God wills, who wisely heeds
To give or to withhold;
And knoweth more of all my needs
Than all my prayers have told.

These words remind one immediately remind us of two phrases from the prayer which Jesus himself taught us, the Lord's Prayer: Give us this day our daily bread and thy will be done.

Lambert was someone who had suffered from a long and often painful illness. In this sense God had, it seems, seen fit to "withhold" from Lambert in his last years something which most of us take for granted: the gift of good health.

Yet good health was not something which Lambert ever took for granted. He never at any time appeared to doubt the wisdom or providence of God, becoming, as he did, a regular practising communicant member of St Stephen's. How many people, by contrast, use their apparent misfortunes as an excuse for ignoring their Creator.

Lambert was never like that. In the words of the poet it might be said of him:

Enough that blessings undeserved
Have marked my erring track
That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved
His chastening turned me back.

The picture suggested by the poem here is that of the lost sheep, who is found by the Good Shepherd and brought back safely to the fold. From being he knows-not-where, he comes home to God where things begin at last to make sense.

Like many other people, Lambert was brought to St Stephen's and found his faith through the ministry of Mrs Lawrence. It was she who first introduced him to the bible-study class which we held for a number of months in Mrs Sloely's house in Algernon Road. During those meetings Lambert's earlier experience of the Baptist Church in Jamaica began to come back and make sense to him again, and as a result he decided that he would be prepared for Confirmation.

As the third verse says:

That more and more a providence
Of love is understood
Making the springs of time and sense
Sweet with eternal good.

Many people find that the well-springs of time and sense, their feelings in other words, become less and less congenial to them, especially as they get older. Many people seem to be disappointed with the way that they see life as having treated them. Not so Lambert. Discovering, or rediscovering, his faith in and love for Jesus Christ in all its richness was for him to come to understand more and more a providence of love. Lambert became a server at St Stephen's and every Sunday found him offering to God something which he learnt to do really well, setting an example to others of how they should behave in the House of God which is the Church of the living God. He took his serving with most commendable seriousness.

Then Lambert's health began to fail. Whilst he was still able to get to Mass his family used to bring him with them, but eventually it became clear that he would need to be ministered to in his own home. It was my good fortune and privilege to take him the Blessed Sacrament week by week. Even as he lost his faculties one by one there was no doubt that he looked forward eagerly to those visits in which the Divine Guest came to him on his sick-bed, at home and in hospital, in the form of Bread and Wine.

Of men like Lambert, John Whittier wrote:

That death seems but a covered way
That leadeth into light
Wherein no blinded child can stray
Beyond the Father's sight.

Lambert looked upon death as he had come to look upon life: as a Way, albeit a covered, often stony and painful way, but one which in God's providence surely led him straight into the Presence of him whom he had come to know on earth in the Sacrament, but now enjoys in company with saints and angels.

Lambert has passed from the covered way, a world of shadows into the world of light; a world of which he had understandably grown tired into one where all things are made new. What you and I can often only see in the darkness of this world as light at the end of the tunnel has suddenly opened out for him at the gate of death into eternal daylight.

And so the shadows fall apart
And so the west winds play
And all the windows of my heart
I open to the day.

Lambert was a man who opened the windows of his heart to God. There could be no better description of him than those words of John Whittier. As we meet together today to thank God for his goodness in bringing yet another blinded child safely into the the light of eternal day, so let each of us make a resolution, like John Whittier and Lambert Brown, to open the windows of my heart to the dazzling brightness and overwhelming freshness of the providence of God which he has revealed to us in his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

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