Stan Grenz passed away Saturday morning. It was sudden, a brain aneurysm of sorts. He went to bed Thursday night and never woke up

Dwight called me Friday afternoon with that ominous lead-in phrase: “I have some bad news.” Even when it was just the ICU, it felt like a goodbye. There was definitely an air of inevitability about things. Still, Saturday morning’s definitive news struck and stunned me, as things like this always do.

I saw Stan a few weeks ago at a conference in San Diego. I stuck my head into the meeting room where he was preparing for a workshop. The wall behind him was a screen bearing the images of Neo and Morpheus. It was obvious that Stan, in a black t-shirt and jeans, was updating his Star Trek act which had served him so admirably when I was his student almost a decade ago.

Stan was known for this little quirk – a love of Star Trek and The Matrix and most other things sci-fi. He enjoyed a good metaphor and was fond a bringing show-n-tell to class, be it a video clip, a movie poster, or an acoustic guitar. In San Diego, at a session on “Truth,” Stan sang a six-stanza parody of “Jesus Love Me This I Know.” He was fond of puns and jokes, the cornier the better. Sometimes when I was talking to him he’d say something, then pause, and a heartbeat later I would realize by the gleam in his eye that he had just mad a funny. Then we would both laugh and sputter at his own cleverness, like children hiding under a bed quilt with a flashlight, waiting to leap out when an unsuspecting parent walked by.

Stan was an amazing crusader – standing up for women leaders in the church, even at the detriment of his own career; writing about postmodern theology when the rest of the Evangelical world cringed; being the “young one” amidst senior fellows like Drs. J I Packer and James Houston. I’ve always admired the way he could slide in under the radar and do really radical things without getting too bloodied. He had a way about him, that Stan.

Stan was my professor at Regent College. When he had to travel, he was so determined to give the students their money’s worth that he was known to film himself with a camera on a tripod. It was odd to take notes from a talking head whose voice emanated from a television on an AV cart, but you got the message: “Stan Grenz is looking out for you.” Paul was Stan’s research assistant, marking papers and finding footnote sources for Stan’s many excellent books. One whole summer was dedicated to prooftexting and indexing – a long job that caused Stan to sheepishly approach his boss for additional funds in his student employment account. Stan insisted to his publisher that his book Women in the Church had a female co-author. Stan gave up a prominent job that would double his salary so that his wife’s career wouldn’t be damaged. Stan gave my husband the Ethics Award. But the thing I remember most about Stan has to do with my son.

You didn’t know I had a son, did you? Well I do, or I did, but only briefly. Simeon was our first child, found to be fatally flawed five months into our pregnancy. We were faced with difficult choices and we needed wise council. We had just completed an ethics course with Stan, so Paul phoned him for advice. He talked us through our options and then told us he would support whatever decision we made. This was incredibly helpful when “friends” from our home church questions our decision to induce labor early. We were able to counter their critique by saying, “Our friend, the ethicist, approves of this plan.” Stan’s support helped us through the most difficult period of our life, and I will never forget him for it.

I have never met Edna, or the Grenz children, now grown with children of their own. But I know of suffering, of the loss that comes when a loved one disappears without warning. So I in my own small way I reside with them for awhile, sitting Shiva, waiting for the services and mourners. Knowing the end is already here, yet it’s still to come with the shoveling of earth and the praying of psalm. Knowing too that something new has already begun, and hoping that soon that knowledge will bring comfort.

Thank you Stan. May your hale and hearty humor, your legacy of ground breaking thought, and your very human kindness prepare a way for many who follow your guidance.

Amen.