In the summer of my sixteenth year, my parents procured a job for me. I suppose that they were tired of watching me mope around the house without direction and tired of me listening to rock and roll records at top volume. My parents had reached out to a lifetime friend who was employed at the historic Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. The cemetery hired seasonal workers to cut grass on its 360 acres. It was also the final resting place for 87,000 souls. I was to be one of those workers.
To be honest, I wasn’t too thrilled about my parents’ choice for my first job. My first day there was brutal. The temperature hovered near the mid 90’s with humidity that caused sweat to seep through my shirt (before even starting the actual grass cutting). My job consisted of pushing a lawn mower up and down hills for eight hours. I could not believe that my parents had done this to me.
As a cemetery worker, I got to observe at least one funeral every day. At that stage of my life, I had never even been to a funeral home, and I certainly had never observed a graveside service. From my vantage point as a grass-cutter, I began to contemplate how people faced death. It was quite an education. Later in my career, I became the worker who swept out the mausoleums of some of the city’s most famous citizens, like Adolphus Busch. I wondered why anyone would plan and build such an expensive structure in an attempt to secure their own memory.
Needless to say, my parents did me a great favor by finding me this job. Of course, it taught me the usual values of hard work and discipline. But more importantly, watching the operations of the cemetery taught me that life is transitory, and how you lived your life makes a difference. It also caused me to ponder what happened after death. Was the end of it all just a trip to the cemetery, or was there more? The lessons I learned in my first summer job are the basis for the sermon for Easter Sunday. It is titled, “Good News from the Cemetery.” To prepare for worship, read Luke 24:1-12.