Note: Holy's Father, known as the TV Star in this blog, died on Friday afternoon May 1st, 2009. He had planned his funeral service and asked that Holy deliver the eulogy. The subject made the content easy, but the circumstances were personal and emotional. Here is the text that was delivered at the First Baptist Church of Longview, Texas on May 5, 2009.
Thank you for joining us to celebrate a life really well lived, the life of Lester Lee Morriss.
Let's start with his name. Was it given to him by parents who wanted to honor a city in England and a Civil War general? I don't know. The real distinctive was something for which even they had no responsibility, those two "SS's at the end. Those two letters meant that people could not find our family in the phone book or anywhere else where alphabetical order is demanded. Members of the family who continue with the name bear the same burden that he carried for over 89 years of having it misspelled almost universally.
But Lester Lee Morriss was his formal name. Those are given to us long before it is known who we will be or will become. It is in nicknames that we begin to really know a person. If Simon Peter lived today we would call him "Rocky". We wouldn't even recognize the real name of that New Testament figure who's nickname was Barnabas, translated "son of consolation". Everywhere he appears he is consoling someone or a group whom everyone else had given up as lost causes.
Dad's first nickname was "Lec", a kind of shortening of Lester. But it was my mother who gave him the nickname that she used and diffused to friends and church members. She called him, "The Preacher". That certainly did not exhaust his reality, but it was a title that he not only wore proudly, but filled its description with excellence for 73 years.
He had already been "the preacher" for eight years before I met him in a hospital room in Athens, Texas. In one of my last conversations with him, he said that he could still smell the roses that he gave my mother that day. He was 25 and about to go off to war.
This son of the south volunteered to be a chaplain to black troops in segregated Mississippi. Years later on a Father's Day, I would stand with him under a spreading oak tree in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. We were surrounded by diversity. Down the street to our left fire hoses and police dogs had left their indelible mark. To the right was the location where Martin Luther King, Jr. had written the indomitable "Letter From a Birmingham Jail". Perhaps remembering with fondness his experiences with black troops, he said to me, "We have come a long way from M. L. King to B. B. King, haven't we?"
He arrived in Germany just in time for Hitler to commit suicide. He kidded that like the rooster who with his crowing thought he brought the sunrise, his arrival brought the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. When his tour of duty was complete, he returned to his family, stepping off a train in Sommerville, Texas. My mother had taught me the greeting I gave, "Where have you been all my life?"
For the next fifteen years, my relationship with him was Parent/Child. There is an obscure little verse from Numbers 32:23,that describes much of my memory: "...be sure your sin will find you out." Some examples:
At five yrs of age, in the middle of the outdoor pastor/led revival service held in the space between the parsonage and the First Baptist Church of Cameron,Texas; I tumbled out from behind the piano with my new toy terrier puppy, he barking and I giggling with delight. My hunch is that "the preacher" had a new understanding of how to "quench the spirit"
It was at the First Baptist Church of Mt. Pleasant that I learned that architect Louis Gomert couldn't design a balcony that was far enough away from my dad's gaze if I happened to be acting up. The balcony later in Midland was even farther away, but I can still hear, "Son! Settle down" reverberating back to where I was sitting. Even those vast distances did not keep "my sin from finding me out."
The Midland FBC sanctuary slanted downward toward the pulpit in almost the perfect angle for an 11 yr old on a Wednesday night when "the preacher" was in the middle of an in depth study of the book of Revelation, to start a golf ball rolling from the back to the front and watch startled people as it picked up momentum and struck heel after heel on its gravitational downward path to come zooming out near dad's speaker's stand on the floor in front of the raised pulpit. He knew who did it. His look let me know that he knew, and that once again, "my sin had found me out."
When I was 14, he was walking to his home study that was in a separate building from the living quarters. It was a night I had chosen to "camp" outside in the backyard and explore my budding freedom by experimenting with the joys of smoking an Old Gold cigarette. "How are you doing?" he asked, as he was walking about thirty yards from my position. In my guilt, I thought he said, "WHAT are you doing?" I discovered that there is an infinite qualitative difference between those two questions. "Be sure your sin will find you out."
For a little more than a decade of my own life, I followed in his ministerial footsteps and began to understand through more mature eyes the life that this man lived. At his age 34 he moved from his native east Texas to the oil filled sand dunes of West Texas where he pastored a church that upon his arrival was smaller in attendance than the one in Mt. Pleasant from which he moved. I have my own nickname for him for this period of his life, "The TV Star."
There may be many in attendance today who do not remember a time when there were not hundreds of TV channels from which to choose your viewing. In 1954, there were two station channels whose signals reached for hundreds of miles into almost all of west Texas. At 11 am on Sunday morning if you wanted to watch television, you watched the morning worship service of the First Baptist Church of Midland with Dr. L. L. Morriss or the other guy from FBC Odessa. Well, in my somewhat biased opinion, the other guy wasn't very good. Most chose to watch Dad's telecast and as a consequence he was known everywhere he went. Because of his celebrity, little things like eating out as a family became a constant parade of people to our table who wanted to say, "Hello." He was in their home every week and they thought they knew him. The church exploded with growth. Dad and the church became "mega" before "mega" was cool.
He set before himself a daunting creative grind in wanting to fulfill his high calling. Are there still folk who think that "the preacher" works an hour a week on Sunday and the rest is easy sailing? Let me give you an idea of his weekly speaking schedule.
On Saturday night at 6:30 he had a live TV show. I used to go with him to the TV station to watch the lead in show. It featured a band called "The Wink Westeners" with a budding young regional star by the name of Roy Orbison.
Sunday morning was a live radio show produced and broadcast first at the downtown Midland radio station and later on location from the church.
At 11 AM was the live TV broadcast of the services of FBC.
Sunday night was a new member orientation class followed by another preaching service with hundreds in attendance.
Wednesday night was a service of prayer and bible study. Again, hundreds were involved.
In between all of these formal and VERY demanding presentations there had to be time for prospect visitation, hospital visitation, family, marital, spiritual counseling sessions, deacon's meetings, funerals, marriage rehearsals and ceremonies, civic club presentations, denominational meetings, and staff meetings.
The preparation time for all of these events did exact a toll. It was exacted on the rooms where he studied. He could trash an office. Books, papers, and periodicals were scattered everywhere. One could scarcely navigate the space. My mother, who thought a trash can was a decorative item, kept the door closed to the home office. It was off limits.
The church maintained two offices. A formal one for his appointments and the "lived in" one for his creative pursuits. Once after a burglary at the church, my dad reported that nothing was missing from his work area. A deacon friend replied that the robbers thought that someone had beaten them to the punch.
It all was just what he wanted. No complaints. He loved it and filled the time with energy, enthusiasm, and laughter. And the treasures of excellent preaching were mined from those rooms filled with what we all thought was trash.
His moves from the pastorate to denomination employment to retirement were an extension of his former labors because of revivals, interim pastorates, and other opportunities to exercise his gifts of preaching. His last message was before the residents of the Buckner facility where he lived. It was the conclusion of seventy three years of pouring content and character into his nickname, "the preacher".
As he came to his last days, he always asked the many nurses attending him two questions: Are you a Christian and where do you go to church?
Just before he became unresponsive, he found out that one of the grandchildren was about to become engaged to be married. He called everyone over to his bed and proposed a Dr. Pepper toast in honor of the event. Then he led us in singing the Doxology. He was still celebrating life and the gifts given by God.
Thanks, Dad, thanks.
