Lennart Fransson

A Sabbath Eulogy

This morning, at 6:15 in his Texas home, my father finished his work.

Just shy of ninety‑four, he had lived what we too casually call “a full life.” As I recount in The People of the Sign, he left Sweden for “Stora Landet i västen”—the great land in the West—drawn by the same magnetic pole Bahá’u’lláh names “the great republic of the West.” He began in Canada, but he did not rest until he crossed that last border and, in 1975, became what he had longed to be: an American citizen.

He did not come for ease. He came for freedom and opportunity, and he paid for both in work. His workaholism was not a flight from life; it was his way of honoring it. He believed that a man is given tasks and is meant, simply, to do them. He risked everything familiar so that his children could stand where he never had the chance to stand.

The Gospel gives us an image for this. In John 5, Jesus comes to the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath and heals a man who has been lame for thirty‑eight years. The religious guardians are scandalized that He has “worked” on the day of rest. His answer is simple and seismic:

“My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”
— John 5:17, KJV

And in the Sermon on the Mount, He makes clear that His mission is not to abolish the Law that commanded rest, but to fulfill it:

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
— Matthew 5:17, KJV

My father’s life was, in its own limited way, an echo of that pattern. He worked as if the Father were still at work in the world: creating, sustaining, mending. He did not treat the Sabbath as a loophole from responsibility, but as a promise that, one day, the work would be finished and rest would be real.

It moves me more than I can say that he died on the Day of the Ascension of Bahá’u’lláh—the anniversary of the passing of One I have come to recognize as a Messenger of God for this age. On that day, Bahá’ís suspend their ordinary work to remember the completion of His earthly mission. And yet today, Friday, is the day of preparation for the Sabbath. I find myself, in that spirit, working to mark my father’s first Sabbath in the hereafter: tomorrow, the day when he no longer needs to “work” in any sense, because his own lameness has been healed, his own labor is complete, and he can finally rest in the care of the Father who, in Jesus’ words, “worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Those who have read The People of the Sign know that our life together was anything but simple. We had long seasons together and apart, shared joys and deep fractures. The preceding paragraph is also an illustration of our different beliefs. One of the stories in that book was on how I used an unlikely song—“God Shuffled His Feet”—as a way to bring the generations together in the Church we both, for a time, belonged to. To find a common soundtrack in the midst of dissonance. If you want to understand more of who he was, and who I became through and sometimes against him, that book is my attempt to tell that story honestly, not to market him—or myself—but to let you see our lives “with your own eyes.”

Continuing on the theme of working through dissonance, he came from a country with no history of chattel slavery, to a land that is now endlessly indicted for having had it in its roots. He did so knowing, at some level, that America’s spiritual aim was higher than its history: that it, like he would learn to do, took seriously Jesus’ impossible injunction, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” That relentless drive toward a more perfect union, never yet attained, defined both the nation he embraced and the man he became. In that sense, his story is inseparable from the story of the United States of America, whose Memorial Day we just celebrated. One nation, under God, with liberty and Justice for all.

This eulogy will be published tomorrow, on Saturday—the first Sabbath on which my father will completely and fully keep, having finished his work on this earth. For him, the command to rest has at last been fulfilled, not abolished. For those of us still here, Sunday comes. For Christians, Sunday is not just another day of labor; it is the day of Resurrection, the sign that God’s work of new creation has begun. In that rhythm—rest, then resurrection‑work—I hear my own calling.

On Sunday, the work resumes—not his, but ours. The work of honoring his legacy not by embalming it in sentiment, but by continuing the trajectory he set: working tirelessly to draw people’s attention to the Word of God and what it has to say for our day and time. For me, that now includes saying hard things about race and justice that some will not want to hear, insisting that every soul have “a completely equal voice,” refusing to let any ideological framework pre‑cancel the testimony of a human being before the bar of divine Justice.

My father crossed an ocean and an identity to bind himself to a country that, at its best, insists that every citizen’s voice counts. He gave his life to a land whose stated goal—however often betrayed—was always higher and purer than its execution. I cannot honor him unless I am willing to contend, in this moment, for that deeper promise: that in God’s sight, color is “the least of all distinctions,” that justice means learning to see with our own eyes, and that rest is not the cessation of meaning, but its fulfillment.

He has finished his race. May God forgive his faults, reward his labors, and receive him into that greater Sabbath. And may we who remain find, between Saturday’s rest and Sunday’s resurrection, the courage to take up the work that is now ours.