When Rick Erickson started piano lessons at age 10 he told his teacher that he wanted to learn to play the organ, and he wanted her to prepare him. Apparently, she did—and very well at that. His mother and paternal grandmother were church organists, and his
family included many other musicians as well as pastors. He knew early on that he wanted to follow their paths.
And, in fact, Rick’s whole career has been spent as a church organist. While teaching at Eastman School of Music, he was organist at Lutheran Church of Incarnate Word in Rochester, New York, for 14 years; then he spent 20 years at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan; and for the last eight and a half years he’s been at Christ the King Church.
In the Book of Genesis we are told that “there were giants on the earth in those days;” who were “the mighty men of old, men of renown.” We don’t really know who they were then; nor what made them “men of renown.” But we do know – all of us know, even a late-comer like me knows — that we can apply that description to Paul Edgar Schenck now. By any measure, Paul was a giant of a man – a strong man, a family man, a faithful man, a patriotic man, a renaissance man, a churchman, Christ’s man, a renowned man. And Paul would tell us exactly what, or rather who made him that way. The Lord Jesus Christ, Paul would say. In fact, that is exactly what Paul is saying to all of us today with his choice of another Paul’s words to the Romans: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.” Paul lived his life, served his country, loved his wife, raised his family, conducted his career, followed his passions, served this church, and met his death confidently trusting that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” He chose for us to hear those words today because it was by those very words that he lived his life and met his death.