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What really comforts at funerals

All Sould : 11 November 2012

It is hard to believe now but at the turn of the 19th/20th century the burial office was usually read out over the coffin without even mentioning the deceased’s name. In our time the pendulum has swung completely the other way with funerals being judged by how personalised they can be. Coffins hand painted by the grand children, slide shows of a life in review screened on the wall of the church, often with a sound track, and long, long eulogies with lots of personal information. At a memorial Service my father attended several years ago the eulogist spoke for over an hour, dividing his account of the departed person’s life up into chapters. On that hot nor’ wester afternoon as the attendees turned to lumps of glue in Knox church, Christchurch they were drowned in a flood of information that obscured rather than revealed the person whose memory they had come to honour.

What we are seeing is an insidious process in which funerals are being turned into a consumer experience, rather than a facing up to the fact of death, in which the dear departed are commended into the presence of God. Which raises the question of exactly what it is that a funeral Service is supposed to do, and what it is that really brings comfort at a funeral Service?

If you analyse a funeral Service from an objective point of view what it does is to set up someone’s death as a dramatic event, a public occasion in which ritual action, solemn words, and inspiring song helps us to come to terms with the loss experienced, and to make some sense out of what has happened. Grief and sadness are openly acknowledged as a legitimate season of the human heart.

That is not a popular point of view now. Have you noticed how often funerals are described as the celebration of a life. What makes me uncomfortable about this, is that while sometimes someone has died full of years with a sense of natural completion, often and usually, death is a tragedy, not what people wanted to happen, an event that leaves an aching sense of loss. When all the emphasis is on accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative; the essential element of a grief acknowledged gets left out with unhelpful downwind consequences. For the truth is that death is the last enemy, as the Bible puts it - it is the most concentrated form of evil in the world, the surest evidence of a creation gone wrong, and in rebellion against God’s life giving intentions for us. When we come to a funeral Service having lost someone we love we are helped when we face our tragic loss head on.

The most important part of a funeral Service is the prayers of commendation and committal. Those are the prayers that begin, "Go forth from this world O Christian soul," and, "Now, therefore, we commit your body to be cremated, earth to earth, ashes to ashes." What this climax of the Service helps us to do is to let go of the person who has died, to accept that things are different now, that life will have to be lived in a different way now without them. This dramatic ritual of letting go and of sending forth helps to produce the catharsis that assists our acceptance of what has happened. Yet oddly enough this part of the Service is often down played now. At my God mother’s funeral four years ago it was left out entirely.

What has emerged centre stage in its place is the remembering bit, the long and many eulogies, as though the only enduring legacy of the person who has died is their place in the memory banks of the living. How I wish eulogists would come to understand that less is always more - that the challenge before them is to select a few facts, just one narrative strand, and to create out of that a pattern that interprets this particular life. The trick is to select one or two shrewdly chosen vignettes that illustrate a host of typical behaviours, to avoid repetition at all costs, to be as honest as possible, to keep it short, and to stick to that key thing you want to say about this person in a clear thinking, concise way. Above all one should avoid the trite, the banal, the cliched, and the embarrassing. My father was helpful to me in this way. As a country lawyer he would often attend the funerals of his clients, and would gleefully report back to us some of the more fatuous things the local clergy had said. Perhaps the most classic utterance was the local Pentecostal Pastor who said, "As we all know, Derek had booked his tickets on Jesus Christ airlines some years ago."

Still, at least the Pentecostal Pastor mentioned Jesus Christ, and that is the most important thing I have got to say to you this morning. What really comforts us at a funeral is the knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who now lives with the Father in a transformed, glorified existence, and who invites us to share that heavenly destiny in the life that really is life. This is what needs to be talked about at funerals, because it answers the fundamental questions of the grieving - where has my beloved gone, what has happened to them, what is next for them?

What I understand we are in the business of at a funeral Service is that we take the life and death of the person who has died and insert them like a picture into the frame of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Within the frame we can see the pattern of that life, we begin to make sense of it, we can interpret where that life was heading, we begin to see the shape and the direction of that life narrative. And when the focus moves to the wonder, and the mystery, and the glory of God’s being then we begin to understand that this life was just the beginning, a short time of preparation, that the best is yet to be, that here we are like a chrysalis about to be transformed into a beautiful butterfly.

The early Christians thought it was rather bad form to grieve too much at a funeral, because joy was their dominant motif when they thought about what was in store for their dear dead. After a brief sleep, God would raise them from the dead into the glory of the company of heaven, the community of the faithful now living with God in the life of the world to come. Their dead now knew what happiness really was. A funeral was a celebration of the personal reality of the resurrection of the dead. It was a matter of applying the unsearchable benefits and unspeakable joys of what Christ had achieved for us to the life of the person who was being farewelled from this rather unsatisfactory life. These joyful Christian funerals stood out in abrupt contrast to the many pagan funerals, at which people by and large believed that the dead had had their chips. These glum occasions could only draw comfort from the dead living on briefly in the memories of the living.

Once we regain this perspective we begin to see that our business on this All Souls day is to pray for our dear dead. Since, as we were reminded in last Sunday’s celebration of All Saints, we are bound together in a great heavenly company that unites the living and the dead, since we are not alone in our pilgrimage on earth with just the believers who are presently alive, and since we are praying for each other across these dimensions of space and time, God is of course listening to our prayers for one another, keenly interested in what we have to say, and likely as he always is to give us a favourable hearing. And since as a matter of theological necessity it seems highly likely that further opportunities for spiritual growth will be accorded to many of the departed before they will feel at home in God’s company, then of course they need our prayers and our encouragement to assist them on this journey of growth, and of purification, and of discovery into God. Many people leave this life as a work in progress as it were; with many unresolved issues that God is longing to sort out for them.

This continuing process of healing, and of maturation, and of a deepening holiness is what we can assist with our prayers. Life with God in the life of the world to come involves transformation - eternal life cannot be just more of the same in a continuation of what we have known here. Exciting changes are afoot for those we love who are now with the Lord, and we have come here this morning to help them proceed with these transformations into eternal life agendas.