He was a living, breathing stereotype of the blunt "New Yawker."  Art Buchwald never knew Helen, his mother; they put her in an asylum for the insane shortly after he was born.  She spent thirty-five years there and rarely saw her son.  His father, a curtain manufacturer whose business failed during the Great Depression, put Art in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York.  The Depression was too much; his father could no longer cope.

As is the case with many a humorist/comedian, Buchwald was the class clown.  His one goal in life was, as he wrote, "to make people laugh."  After school, and only sixteen, he joined the United States Marines in World War II.  He later said that the military was the only family he ever had.

After the Marines, he found his niche as a writer and began a career as a columnist, most notably for the "Washington Post."  It was a "forever" job for the workaholic.  He wrote a regularly appearing column for over sixty years.  He won two Pulitzer Prizes in the 1980's and thirty books sprang from his typewriter.  At the height of his career, 550 newspapers carried Buchwald's column.

His humor came barbed and many a politician found themselves on the sharp end of his rapier wit.  His was not a gentle sarcasm.  Buchwald found a person's weak spot, then used his humor to insult.  They said President Nixon loathed him.

They paid him highly to speak at dinners and if you ever heard him speak, you couldn't forget that New Yawk accent and the rounded face and body on the attack.  People loved it and him too.  He counted as his friends the French Ambassador, politicians, and Hollywood types.

They say he introduced Marilyn Monroe to Judaism.  She converted.  While living in Europe, he came to know Elvis Presley as no other newspaperman.

He smoked eight cigars a day until he turned sixty.  But life had its price. Buchwald suffered two "depressive breakdowns," one in 1963, another in 1987.  It's odd how funnymen are those who often suffer the horrors of depression.

The funnyman died today.  He knew it was coming, as did others. In February of last year, at age 80, doctors cut off his leg, just below the knee and he was bitter.  But reports say that, tired of dialysis, Buchwald "cheerfully waited for death."  While he did, he philosophized.

"People ask me if there's an afterlife.  If I knew, I'd tell them," he wrote.

"I have no idea where I'm going, but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?" he said.

"Life is no more than an intermission between two ends of a mystery that can never be solved," he opined.

When people learned that Buchwald was under hospice care, they wrote over 2,000 letters.  Many wrote concerned for his soul.  His reaction?  "I don't believe in any of the gods they are shoving down my throat.  I hate organized religions that are telling me what God wants."

Art Buchwald is a microcosm of the human dilemma.  He's finite and limited.  In that condition, life is an intermission between two ends of a mystery that will never be solved. But the interesting thing is that even the tough New Yawker couldn't let himself die that way, just staring into an unknowable mystery.  He had to find something, somewhere, somehow, some meaning.  What he found was this: "It's what you do here on earth and the good deeds you do that are important," he said.

Important?  But how?  To whom?  If there's nobody out there, then there's no ultimate way they can be important.  If the whole is a meaningless mystery, then the parts (the good deeds, what you do on earth) have no meaning.  A part cannot be greater than the whole.  Such was Buchwald's leap of faith in the dark, a leap that said, "Somehow what I've done has got to be important."

Listen to what a friend wrote of Buchwald:  "His words aren't likely to survive, living only as a half-remembered chuckle."  And that from a friend.

How different is Buchwald's depressing philosophizing than these last words: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race.  I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge will award to me on that day - and not to me only, but to all those who have longed for His appearing."  Funnyman Buchwald depresses; the Apostle Paul uplifts. And there's this last description of the Apostle Paul: " . . . [he] stayed in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him.  Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ."  Purpose and meaning.  What a way to finish!

I'd like to think that somewhere in those 2,000 letters of concern Buchwald received in his final months, there were presentations of faith alone in Christ alone, that there were those who wrote with compassionate pen to simply say, "Believe Jesus for everlasting life."

I would like to think that the writers included John 3:16 and John 11:25-27, as well as John 6:40.  If they did, Buchwald included them with those who were "shoving gods down my throat."  I would like to think that, in spite of all the bravado a finite man can muster, Buchwald, perhaps at the end, came to faith alone in Christ alone.

But if not, another visual, the one Christ paints, emerges.  A man has died, and like Buchwald, he knew the amenities the world has to offer.  But in the visual, the past amenities mean nothing.  He's separated from God and he's begging. He pleads that someone, someone from the dead, be sent back home to warn his brothers (who, like he, think good deeds are important).

The answer (paraphrased) strikes with impact: "Your brothers have a Bible; they can read John 3:16.  A person sent from the dead could say no more than, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (Lk. 16)

A funny man died today.  He didn't leave us laughing.   

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

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