This is the eulogy Pastor Bob Thompson gave at Scott's Memorial Service. 

"I won’t pretend that preparing to preach Scott Horowitz’ service was an easy task.  Not only did I not know him (we only met briefly when his brother died in 2009), his closest family members had had little contact with him for many years.

Neither Ann nor Tracey lack memories of Scott, however.  Many of their memories are painful, but not all.  If Scott could speak he would probably say many of his family memories were also pain-filled, especially his relationship with his father.  Ann and Tracey agree that Bob Horowitz had his own baggage to deal with, and that Scott took the brunt of it.  Maybe it was that he was the oldest son.  Maybe it was because Bob saw too much of himself in Scott, and wanted to push him in different directions.

But not all Scott’s memories were painful either, and he loved his Mom as well as Tracey and David and their children.  He would always end phone calls with “I love you.”

Permit me to simply name what we’re here for, and what we’re not here for.  We’re here to find comfort in one another and especially in God.  We’re here to search together for meaning in a life that, if we didn’t take the time to pray and reflect, might seem to many people completely futile and meaningless.  We’re here to see if we can hear God speaking to us in our grief for how Scott died and even how he lived.

We’re not here to try to get inside his head or his soul.  I can’t speak for him, and honestly, we don’t know what lives inside the hearts of others.  I do know a little about the heart of God as revealed to us in the Bible, and that’s where I’d like to focus our attention.

Two themes came to me as I thought through what I might say today.  The first is compassion.

The older I get, the more compassion I have for the addictions and struggles of others.  I suppose my compassion comes from many sources.  One source is inside me, because the older I get the more I’m able to be honest about my own addictions and struggles.

Another source for my compassion is pastoral ministry.  Three and a half decades of church work has taught me that most people really do want to live life as God intended it, and when they sound like a victim they really do feel like a victim. In many ways they are victims – we are all victims of a sin-drenched world and a modern culture that tells us we have a right to “be who we are.”  We follow that evil path to the point that it carves such deep grooves inside our brains that we really believe our sins are our right, and if they’re wrong it’s somebody else’s fault.  I have compassion for the worst sins of others because it’s true what Jesus said about the men who nailed him to the cross, “they know not what they do.”

The primary source for my compassion is the knowledge of God which grows over the span of a lifetime.  The psalmist wrote, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him, for he remembers that we are dust.”

I have compassion on Scott when I hear his story.  To be sure there were elements of Scott’s childhood and adolescence that we can celebrate.  Almost everyone I heard from this week remembered Scott as a terrific soccer player – agile, intuitive, fearless, and fast.

Tracey said Scott was her best friend growing up.  He was mischievous and forward-thinking.  He saved his own money one year to buy the family the first generation of Atari.  Even though nobody else played Pong with him very much, he felt he was giving his family a gift.  Generosity would describe Scott the rest of his life.  He didn’t have much, but would give you the shirt off his back and be there for you if you needed him.  In high school he would buy all his female friends a flower at Homecoming.  He was sometimes even generous with money and things that weren’t his to give.

One of my favorite stories about Scott from Tracey happened the day of her senior prom when a stylist completely ruined her hair at the salon.  She hated it, and cried for hours.  When she came home from the prom she had a note from her younger brother Scott, which said, “You always look beautiful.  Hope you had a wonderful night.”  It seems he knew about compassion too.

Ann says Scott was “by far my smartest child.”  (Sorry, Tracey!)  Then why did he struggle so in school and hate it?  Scott also dealt with what we now know as learning disabilities – dyslexia and ADHD.  It’s not that no one knew about learning disabilities in the 1960s and 1970s, but we certainly have more compassion for them today than we did then.  I know this from my own experience as a child and as a father.  It’s a cultural myth that anyone can grow up to be President of the United States, for example.  Or do anything they want to do.  Biology isn’t fair, and we’re prewired with certain limitations to how well we learn and how much we can accomplish.

We all have choices in how we deal with the limitations we’re given.  Rather early in life, Scott began turning to mind-altering substances.  He never overcame his worst addictions which ultimately led to his premature death.  Today my compassion overflows for his mother, his sister, the rest of the family, and many of his friends because they wanted so much more from Scott’s life and knew he wasted much of his potential.

But I still have compassion for Scott, precisely because of those addictions.  We now know much more than anyone knew thirty years ago about how addictions rewire the brain, especially when they start in the teen years.  For most of us, saying no to illegal drugs or excessive alcohol is not that difficult.  We “just say no,” and that’s the end of it.  For someone with the genetic and environmental factors Scott dealt with, coupled with a lifetime of reinforcement through bad choices, the brain is literally hardwired otherwise.  It’s as if you’re handcuffed in stocks in a prison cell deep inside a dungeon and the key has been lost.  And someone says, “Why don’t you just get up and walk out?”  Even if a person walked into that imprisonment under his own free will, the fact that he’s in what feels like an impossible bondage gives me compassion.

The Bible consistently speaks of God’s compassion.  Compassion means “to suffer with,” and the Scriptures tell us God’s compassions never fail.  This side of the cross, we’re aware that Jesus’ life on earth and death on the cross is God suffering with us and for us.  He hurts when we hurt, even when we are responsible for our own pain.

What I like about Psalm 103 is, well, two phrases.  First, “he remembers that we are dust.”  He knows all about our being a collection of molecules.  He knows our frailty, our mortality, our limitations.  Second, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”  If God held our sins against us, who could stand?

One of the ways you can honor Scott’s memory is by choosing compassion for those who suffer from various forms of addiction.   Compassion doesn’t mean enabling or excusing or participating.  That only reinforces the addiction.

Compassion does mean trying to understand addiction better.  Toward that end, this week I ordered ten copies of a great book called Addiction and Grace, by Gerald May.  You may take one at no cost to you if you promise to read it.  That’s all I ask.  It’s not light reading, and honestly it’s probably not a book that someone with Scott’s learning disabilities would ever have read all the way through.  But one of its goals is to increase compassion for those who are addicted.

One of the ways Gerald May helps me with compassion is with a two-page listing of addictions (38-39).  One list names “attractions” – this includes drinking and drugs.  But some of my addictions are on the list – calendars, chocolate, ice cream, nail biting, neatness, soft drinks, weight, work.  I could name some of my other addictions he doesn’t list. Some of yours are on there as well.  And then there’s a separate list of aversions to certain animals or situations or people.  So if you have an irrational aversion to tunnels or germs or spiders or public speaking, or even an aversion to addicts – if there’s something you wish you could talk yourself out of but it feels hard-wired in your brain – just apply that ownership of addiction to someone whose addictions are different than yours, and even much more destructive than yours.

Gerald May says, “To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace” (11).  So there’s a second theme I want to lift up today, and that’s freedom.  Just to focus on addiction – even compassion for addiction – would not be the right way to remember Scott.

The opposite of addiction is freedom.  Gerald May says, “Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire.”  But what Jesus said is, “If I set you free, you will be free indeed.”  Jesus came to set us free from the sins that imprison us.  My role as a Christian and as a minister of the Gospel is to point people to that freedom through the grace of Jesus.

Gerald May’s book is not necessarily a Christian theology of addiction, but he draws on religion and especially the Christian faith as he speaks of the way out of addiction.  He insists the most powerful force in setting us free is grace, or unconditional love.  The demons inside us that scream messages of worthlessness drive us to our addictions to compensate, whether those addictions are alcohol or shopping or eating.  When we’re more known and more loved, we’re more capable of freedom.

There were hints of that freedom in Scott Horowitz’ life.  Maybe Hickory was too associated for him with failure and inadequacy, so he didn’t come back here much.  But he longed to be free from his own addictions, and tried many times through the years.  Ann said he had an entire collection of 30-day coins from AA.

There were also seasons of his life and people in his life who filled that need for unconditional love.  His aunts took him in their home when his father exercised tough love. Don and Sally Murphy took him under their wing in Charlotte in the 1990s, often having him over to grill out or watch World Cup soccer.

Andy Hart gave him that kind of unconditional love in the last five years.  Andy has a 6-year-old daughter named Kinston, but said on Facebook that he’s really been caring for two kids – the one named Scott was just 40 years older.  Andy said Scott loved movies and sitcoms and Notre Dame football.  Scott was also a good friend to Andy and helped him get his business, Green Grubbin’, up and running.  He had a good influence on Kinston as well.

I wish I knew more about Scott’s awareness of and embrace of God’s unconditional love through Jesus.  All I have are little hints.  He was baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  He only listed one book on his Facebook page as his favorite – the Bible.  He certainly had friends who know Jesus.  Jamie Fox wrote this on his Facebook page last Monday:  “Rest in peace brother, awesome guy, thoughts & prayers to the family, will be missed but not forgotten, you are holding hands with the King of all Kings, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Bless you my friend, ‘Live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you” -2 Corinthians 13:11.”  My prayer and my hope is that somewhere along the way he found, even in the midst of his addictions and in spite of the way he died, the freedom of knowing he was loved unconditionally by Jesus.  It’s the reason Jesus came, the reason he suffered, the craving of his heart – to set us free.

So this is what I want to remember as I remember Scott Horowitz.  It’s not really about him – not about his addictions or failures, and not about his accomplishments or good times.  No life is ultimately about that person.  Mine isn’t and yours isn’t either.

I hope at the end of my life people are not so much focused on what I did well or where I failed – on my addictions or my accomplishments.  I hope at the end of my life those who talk about me give thanks to the God of compassion who remembers that we are dust.  And I hope whatever I’ve done for good or bad, they take the time to talk about the freedom that Jesus Christ came to give us.  Whatever happens with my life, if it points others to seek him, that’s all I want.  Amen."

Link to Scott's obituary from the Hickory Daily Record:

http://www.hickoryrecord.com/obituaries/horowitz-scott/article_3af074aa-a16e-53f5-b035-b8e50f1635c0.html