‘A remarkable life’ recalled at Bush’s church
Sermon reminds St. Martin’s faithful ex-president lived life of ‘time well spent’
People peppered the pews at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston shortly before 8 a.m. Sunday for the first service of the day — often a little sparser, by parishioners with hair a little grayer than some of the later services throughout the day.
This is the old guard. A group of Houstonians who, upon the passing of President George H.W. Bush on Friday, have lost a prominent member.
“I’m going to pause before I begin,” the Rev. Russell J. Levenson Jr. said at the top of the hour. “Some folks would think — knowing who we are, and where we are — this Sunday, on the death of our 41st president, there would be some attention for him in our worship. But those of us who know and love the Bush family also know and love that it is not something he would want us to do. He would want us to worship on the Sunday that is given to the first Sunday of Advent.”
With that, Levenson led his congregation through a moment of silence, for “a remarkable life.”
The congregation knows as well as the country and the world, that when Bush died on Friday, at age 94, he left a legacy of public service that spanned more than a half-century. That will, of course, all be noted when St. Martin’s Episcopal Church hosts the late president’s funeral on Thursday.
But the members at St. Martin’s, which has grown to be the largest Episcopalian church in the nation during the decades in which Bush and his late wife Barbara, who died this April, have faithfully attended, know