Accompany Them with Singing--The Christian Funeral

by Thomas G. Long

I must die with simplicity but with majesty. You must help me. Go get the people together. These words flowed from a deep faith, and they emerge from a profoundly Christian understanding of dying. But they point not only to a way of dying but also to a way of commemorating death, to the actions and convictions of the church at the time of death, and indeed to some of the key marks of a Christian funeral: simplicity, majesty, and the gathering of the people.

In a Christian funeral, there is simplicity because there is no need for ornament or ostentation among the saints, no need for lavish expense to trumpet importance. Christians are “lambs of God’s own flock, sinners of God’s own redeeming,”2 and they move in simple peace and confidence toward their Good Shepherd. This character of simplicity is in tension, of course, with the costly events that many funerals in North America have become.

For Christians, Jesus is not the founder of some new religion or separate sect, but rather a revelation of what it means to live a fully human life, a life that truly embodies the image of God. To follow Jesus, then, is to walk the royal road intended for all humanity, “a way in the wilderness” (Isa. 43:19) toward God marked out for all people.

Every Christian funeral, in its grand and sweeping representation of the journey of a saint toward God, tells a story of majesty. Every Christian funeral is, in fact, a royal funeral.

Performing these rituals well is not merely an issue of propriety, sensitive pastoral care, or liturgical taste and tradition, but is rather a matter of telling the gospel truth, of giving testimony to the faith, of acting out in the face of grief and loss our deepest convictions about the promises of God in the risen Christ, and enabling us and our children to discover meaning and hope amid the ravages of death.

Yes, funerals provide consolation to those who mourn, but they do so as a part of a much broader work involving the retelling of the gospel story, the restoration of meaning, the reaffirmation of the baptismal identity of the one who has died, and the worship of God. “Every

The purpose of a Christian funeral is to enact the human obligation to care for the dead in such a way that we retell the story of baptism, and if we look hard, we can still see the contours of this understanding of the funeral shining out beneath the confusion of what funerals have become.

In the 1960s, an anthropologist exploring a cave in northern Iraq came across the graves of several Neanderthal men, tombs believed to be nearly 50,000 years old and among the oldest human burial sites ever found. Near the remains were discovered pollen grains from grape hyacinth, hollyhocks, and thistles, silent testimony that flowers had once been placed next to the bodies.1 Thousands of miles away, at Sungir near Moscow, was found a cluster of Cro-Magnon graves, thirty millennia old, in which lie the remains of what appears to be a family. Draped around the bones of the man are necklaces strung with hundreds of painstakingly crafted ivory beads, and nearby are tools carved from mammoth bones. The woman’s skull is placed on top of the man’s grave, and next to the man and the woman are the remains of two children. They are buried head to head, and around them are scattered more than ten thousand beads of ivory, several rings and bracelets, a collection of spears and daggers, and the teeth of a fox.2 Who knows what happened to cause these deaths so many centuries ago, or what ceremonies accompanied these ancient burials? What we do know is that the flowers, the beads, the rings, and the other artifacts bear witness that from the earliest times human beings have cared tenderly for their dead and approached death with awe. Human death has never been simply a fact; it has always been a mysterious ocean summoning those left standing on the shore to stammer out convictions abou...

Some sociologists and anthropologists venture that the origins of religion can be found in these ancient death rituals. The ceremonies our early ancestors enacted reflexively in the face of death, they speculate, were the soil in which a sense of the holy grew. Others suggest that it was actually the other way around. An awareness of transcendence lies, they wager, hardwired in human consciousness, and the sense that there is something beyond the limits of life and the abyss of death compelled these earliest humans to adorn the graves of the dead with flowers and beads. Intimations of an unseen world were enacted in the rituals of burial. Who can say? Which came first, the ritual rhythms of death or religious awe? Perhaps the knowledge that we cannot finally untangle the knot points to the fact that death and the sacred are inextricably entwined. In both, human beings stand on the edge of mystery and peer into depths beyond our knowing. What we do when the shadow of death falls across our life—the acts we perform and the ritual patterns we follow—etches in the dust of material life a portrait of our sense of the sacred. And, in like manner, what we finally believe and trust about the mystery at the heart of things shapes how our bodies move, what our hands do, where our feet take us, and what our mouths speak in the days of grief and loss. The dance of death moves to the music of the holy.

The stakes are high here. I am persuaded that in this, our moment in history, we are going through one of those periodic upheavals in the ways we care (or don’t) for the dead that are inevitable signs of an upheaval in the ways we care (or don’t) for the living. To put it bluntly, a society that has forgotten how to honor the bodies of those who have departed is more inclined to neglect, even torture, the bodies of those still living. A society that has no firm hope for where the dead are going is also unsure how to take the hands of its children and lead them toward a hopeful future.

Christian funeral practices emerge at the intersection of necessity, custom, and conviction.

Necessity refers to the fact that a death creates certain social needs and obligations that cannot be avoided. Scholars argue about the existence of human universals, but the debate mostly grows silent when death knocks at the door. It is a universal truth that every human being eventually dies, and all societies have recognized that the physical fact of death cannot be ignored. When someone who was alive a moment ago stops breathing forever, we don’t need a law or a creed to tell us that something must be done. It is coded deep in our DNA that a dead body in the presence of the living both poses some kind of threat—of contamination? of impurity? of the loss of human dignity?—and constitutes a summons to dispose of the body with care and reverence.

In this regard, death is like birth. As funeral director Thomas Lynch has noted, “At one end of life the community declares It’s alive, it stinks, we’d better do something. At the other end we echo, It’s dead, it stinks, we’d better do something!”9

So how does this apply to Christian funerals? The Christian faith is firmly, sometimes maddeningly, both countercultural and proindigenization at the same time. That is to say, the Christian faith transcends every tribe, clan, and local custom, while at the same time it seeks to express itself in every local dialect. Funerals should be “recognizably incarnate” in that the funeral combines that which transcends this place with that which embodies this place.

Here’s a test case: In some areas of the United States, it is a custom to drape the coffin of a military veteran with a U.S. flag. People who follow this custom could probably advance many reasons why—it shows “respect,” it’s a symbol of sacrifice, it’s a matter of honor, and so on—but mainly it is one of those local customs that for many folk simply seems fitting. The action is deeper than thought or strategy. This doesn’t mean it is right or wrong. “It’s just the way things are done around here.” Most composers of sound Christian funeral liturgies, however, from their vantage point necessarily at some remove, are not impressed. They cannot imagine that a coffin bearing a national flag would be a proper symbol in a Christian funeral. It would be like carrying a banner in front of the coffin with a picture of a Republican elephant or a Democratic donkey. A funeral should be an occasion to announce that the deceased is a citizen of heaven, a child of the God of all nations and peoples, not a partisan. So, as the authors of one wise and prominent guide for Christian pastors say: “Regardless of whether a pall is used, other decorations, including floral arrangements, flags, and other insignia that distinguish the deceased and suggest that salvation depends on something other than Christ, are removed from the coffin prior to the service.”20

But is this good advice? I would say it depends. As H. Richard Niebuhr reminded us, for a Christian the ethical question, What should I do? is always preceded by another question: What is going on?21 If what is going on, in fact, is that the American flag is draped over, let us say, Fred’s coffin as a sign that “salvation depends on something else than Christ,” then stars and bars be gone. Interpreted this way, prominently parading a national symbol down the aisle should in no way be permitted in a Christian funeral. As the early church did when facing such practices, we should either omit the custom (which is what the liturgists suggest) or denounce it (preferably not at the funeral!). Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre would probably urge the latter, since he finds the blending of symbols of the sacred, the nation, and death to be a particularly noxious combination. He writes: The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred va...

Annie Dillard once compared worship to a play we “have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years,” she says, “we have not worked out the kinks.”26 True, but we don’t rehearse this play hoping to work out the kinks—that will never happen, not in this life anyway. We rehearse this play called Christian worship in order to participate once more in the story and to refresh our memory about our part in it. This is what a Christian funeral is all about. Someone we love has died, and so once again we get out our old scripts, assemble on stage, and act out one more time the great and hopeful drama of how the Christian life moves from death to life. None of us is an expert at this. Some of us limp, all of us have trouble remembering our lines, and many are weeping even as they move across the stage. We are who we are, flawed to a person, and we will never work out the kinks. But that’s not the goal; the goal is to know this story in this play so well that we know it by heart.

That is what we want in a Christian funeral. We do this again and again, every time someone dies, because it is important for our bodies to know the way home.

Death in our culture is a mixture of taboo and terror, always fertile ground for whistling-in-the-dark humor, and while some have claimed that North America is a death-denying culture, this is not exactly on target. For Americans, death is more like pornography,1 endlessly fascinating while at the same time forbidden. No wonder there are nervous giggles over caskets in the housewares department; finding a casket at Costco was like discovering an issue of Hustler in the choir loft.

Christians do, from time to time, use the language of “soul,” as in, “When the ship went down, many souls were lost at sea,” or “Bless your soul!” or the famous statement of Sister Pollard from the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, “My feets are tired, but my soul is rested.” “Soul” in these cases does not mean some immortal spark within, but refers to those times when we become especially aware that we are standing in the presence of God. On those rare occasions when the New Testament uses the Greek word for “soul,” it refers, N. T. Wright has said, “not to a disembodied entity hidden within the outer shell of the disposable body but rather to what we would call the whole person or personality, as being confronted by God.”5 Or as Barth said of human beings, “[T]hey themselves are their souls, for their souls are the souls of their bodies.”

Christians do not romanticize death, and while they join with others in working for human dignity in death and hope for their own deaths to be marked by dignity, they are not banking on it. Death often steals dignity, and Christians don’t stop loving and caring for people when there is little dignity left. Death is a liar, trying to conceal the sanctity of humanity under the disguise of devastation. While death may approach us holding out as a lure the crown of dignity, it always pulls it back in favor of the sword of destruction. Any idea that death—cold and unmitigated death—can be “spiritual” is Platonic wishful thinking. Yes, some deaths are more peaceful than others, some are less painful than others, some can even be taken to be blessings; but death itself is not holy. God is holy, and human holiness comes because God’s breath formed us in the very image and likeness of God. Christians understand, then, that human beings are like icons of God, sacred even when the disfigurements of sin, the ravages of disease, and the final despoilments of death have stripped away the last shred of dignity like the robes of deposed emperors.

Christians, however, are not the least interested in “closure.” Yes, death marks a dramatic transition, and it is important to recognize the change that has taken place in our relation to the dead. But in Christ the dead have an open future, and in the communion of the saints there is no “closure,” but unending praise and participation in the ceaseless creativity of God.

The funeral process begins, of course, with a person’s death, so we begin this theological exploration by noting that, when it comes to human death, the Christian faith identifies two essential forms of death, or two ways of construing death, to which it then adds a third. The two essential forms of death are natural death (which we might call “small-d death”) and Death as mythic force, as the enemy of all that God wills for life (which we might call capital-D Death). The third form of death, added by the gospel, is death in Christ.

It is important to maintain, at funerals and otherwise, the distinction between these two categories: death and Death. If we thunder out only denunciations of Death, the final enemy, we may obscure the fact that death, biological death, can sometimes come as a friend, ending pain and halting the merciless fall of sufferers into despair. On the other hand, if we forget about Death’s bloody saber and focus only on death as a part of the natural flow of life, we can be seduced into bland and finally unchristian bromides about death. We can overlook the poisonous fangs of the old serpent and blather about the naturalness of death, of death as “the final stage of growth” or an experience to greet with open arms and “acceptance,”3 as in the sentiment of the Nancy Byrd Turner poem that makes an appearance in many funeral sermons: “Death is only an old door set in a garden wall. On quiet hinges it gives at dusk, when the thrushes call…. There is nothing to trouble any heart, nothing to hurt at all. Death is only a quiet door in a garden wall.”4 Jesus, however, did not complacently face the prospect of his own death as “a quiet door,” but instead was “deeply grieved, even to death” (Matt. 26:38) and died “with loud cries and tears” (Heb. 5:7).

The bodily resurrection of Jesus—so troubling to philosophers, so perplexing to scientists, so repulsive to gnostics—is a crucial claim, but not a crudely literalistic one. It is not as if God gathered together all of the cells and molecules of Jesus’ body, including the DNA he left on the chalice at the Last Supper and on the cross beam, reassembled them, and set Jesus back walking the streets of Jerusalem. The claim is that God raised the fullness of Jesus, the person of Jesus, from the dead. God raised Jesus, the Jesus who was known and experienced in the things he said and did with his body—not the idea of Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but Jesus; and that is an embodied reality. Reinhold Niebuhr, while rejecting a literalistic interpretation of the bodily resurrection, reported in the middle of his theological career that what he had once doubted—the bodily resurrection of Jesus—had become central to his theology. In his own theological development he had gradually come to understand that the words of the ancient creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” name an indispensable aspect of the Christian faith: These closing words of the Apostolic Creed in which the Christian hope of the fulfillment of life is expressed, were, as I remember it, an offense and a stumbling block to young theologians at the time my generation graduated from theological seminaries…. We were not certain we could honestly express our faith in such a formula…. The twenty years that div...

God exposed his own divinity to the power of negation. And God did this precisely in order to be God for all [people].”13 The motivation for this action on the part of God was love, pure and simple—or love, pure and not so simple. “God, through love, shares the pain of death,”14 and in the resurrection, God gives humanity victory over Death. Humanity, as Niebuhr said, has always yearned to gather the bits and fragments of its historically bounded life together and make of it something eternal, but the gate was always blocked by the poisonous scorpion of Death. But in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, God has opened the gate by taking into the very life of God the scorpion’s sting and exhausting it. “Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). Death’s sting is in the very life of God, overcome in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. God swallowed up death in victory. In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, “Death will die, not-being will be no longer, hell will go to hell.”15

The closing words of the stirring ancient Easter sermon, often attributed to John Chrysostom, picture Death and hell thrown into a frenzied uproar because of Easter: Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it. He destroyed Hades when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, “You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.” Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see. O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and you, O death, are annihilated! Christ is risen, and the evil ones are cast down! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life is liberated! Christ is risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen!16

As for the question of when a person is raised to new life, the New Testament provides evidence for two quite different answers. On the one hand, Paul told the Thessalonians that the dead would lie in state, as it were, until the last day, when all of the dead in Christ will be raised together to the sound of a trumpet: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive … will be caught up in the clouds” (1 Thess. 4:16–17). On the other hand, Paul told the Philippians that he could not make up his mind which was better, to “depart and be with Christ,” which Paul preferred, or to stick around and do more ministry with them (Phil. 1:23), which sounds as if he thinks that death means going right away to be with Christ. Jesus told a story about a poor man named Lazarus who died and was immediately “carried away by the angels to be with Abraham” (Luke 16:22), and he said to the thief on the cross, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). So, which is it? Do the saints go immediately to God at death, or do they go into some kind of holding pattern, waiting for the general resurrection of the dead? There is trouble, it seems, whichever way we answer that. If we say, as most funeral liturgies seem to imply, that the person is raised immediately to be with God, then we have the problem of facing up to our ex...

The answer that the dead wait for a general resurrection seems, at first glance, to solve the problem of individualism, since the dead are raised en masse, and it has the added virtue of making it clear that the ultimate victory of God over death is not just about human life but about the whole of creation. Ultimately God is going to make “a new heaven and a new earth,” to use the traditional language, and the human dead are but a part of this vast act of new creation. But soon problems about this answer stir our minds; particularly, if the dead are raised together at the end of time, we have the dilemma of where to park the dead in our theological imaginations in the meantime.

The church has managed to come up with three broad answers to the question of the when of the resurrection and the whereabouts of the dead, none of them very satisfactory. The first answer is that when someone dies, the soul and body immediately separ...

The virtue of this statement is that it at least recognizes that neither being “asleep in Jesus” (that is, being somehow in Jesus’ presence but unconscious of that fact) nor being temporarily dead (that is, completely dead but “in storage” until the last day) is a theological live option for the fate of the Christian saints. Beyond that, though, this notion of souls and bodies being apart from each other until judgment day does not have much to commend it. To begin with, it is fully Platonic in origin and carries with it the unbiblical idea that it somehow makes sense to speak of human beings as “souls” apart from bodies.

A second view of just where the dead may be and when they are to rise is one that has recently gained an advocate in the fine New Testament scholar N. T. Wright. In two books, For All the Saints?21 and Surprised by Hope, 22 Wright is eager to squash the notion, so dear to romantic piety, that Christianity is all about individuals “going to heaven.” The idea that individuals, one by one, make their personal pilgrimages to an ethereal oasis in the afterlife is not, Wright argues, what the New Testament has in mind. He makes a vigorous case instead that the Scripture describes one and only one resurrection of human beings, namely, the general resurrection of the dead as a part of God’s new creation of the earth at some specific time in the future. Salvation is not about individuals escaping earth and going to heaven, Wright insists; it is about God’s intention to renew the earth and to involve us in this act of re-creation. According to Wright, then, there is one general resurrection, and that happens in the future when God in Christ re-creates all things. But in the meantime, where are the dead until that day when God renovates the earth? “I arrive at this view,” says Wright, “that all the Christian departed are in substantially the same state, that of restful happiness.”23 When Jesus said to the thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” Wright argues, “paradise” did not mean “heaven,” but what paradise means in some other Jewish contexts, namely, “the blissful garden,...

The third possibility for where the dead may be at the moment, a modified version of the first view, is indeed the classical doctrine of purgatory. As it was in the first view, dead bodies go to the earth until the general resurrection. Souls fly away, but not to God—not yet anyway. They are not ready yet to be fully in the presence of God, but must be cleansed of the sin that still clings to them. They go then to purgatory to have their souls rid of impurity. By the eve of the Reformation, the idea of purgatory had become fixed in Western church doctrine. For the most part, even very faithful Christians were thought to have died with enough corruption in their souls to render them not yet fit to join the communion of the saints. These not-quite-saints were no longer on earth, but they weren’t in paradise or heaven either. They were instead in a middle place or a state of in-betweenness (purgatory was described both ways), and they would remain there until they had been, as the name purgatory implies, purged of their sins.

Today, the medieval doctrine of purgatory, with its full array of gears and pulleys, has few friends, and good riddance. Many contemporary Catholic theologians, while in some ways obligated to keep the idea of purgatory going, are nevertheless drastically redefining purgatory along more biblical and christological lines. For example, in his book Eschatology, Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), reframes purgatory not as some “supra-worldly concentration camp” but as a description of a process of transformation, namely, the one that happens in the twinkling of an eye to the dead who ultimately encounter the refining fire of Christ’s mercy. Purgatory becomes that flashing instant between who we are at death and who we will be in the full presence of God, an instant in which all that is stubble and straw is burned away by grace.27 This turns purgatory from a place to a moment, from a region to an experience of transforming mercy, and makes purgatory close, if not identical, to Paul’s statement that “this perishable body must put on imperishability” (1 Cor. 15:53).

Most of this mischief and confusion about the place of the dead was stirred up not only by Platonic dualism but by biblical literalism and, perhaps most of all, by the perfectly understandable attempt to work all of this out using only the metrics of linear, historical clock time, with its fixed notions of before and after, now and then. But when we speak in a Christian sense about death and resurrection, we are working not in clock time alone, but in at least two time frames: ordinary historical time and eschatological time (or perhaps more accurately, the eternal that transcends time). Moltmann points in a better direction when he argues that the raising of individuals at the hour of their deaths, which we in our world of clocks and calendars experience one by one in linear chronological fashion, and the general raising of all the dead in Christ on the Day of the Lord should be thought of not as events that happen one before the other in temporal sequence but as simultaneous events: But how ought we to imagine a “resurrection at death”? The starting point must again be eschatology: the “Last Day” is not just the chronologically final day in the calendar. It is eschatologically the Day of the Lord, and therefore the Day of Days. If this is the day when the dead are raised, then it appears to all the dead simultaneously, “in a moment”—that is diachronically—irrespective of when in time they died. If this is correct, then we must be able to say the converse, too: that the h...

Scripture gives us the image of the great Shalom of God, the vision of God reconciled to and at peace with all (Col. 1:20), of a new heaven and a new earth and God in union with all humanity (Rev. 21:3), of a reality devoid of suffering and death (Rev. 21:4), of God being “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). How shall we picture this reality, this reign of God, in relationship to ourselves? Is this great Shalom a reality that stands in our future, in the sense that as we turn the pages of the calendar we are getting closer and closer to this day, like the arrival of Christmas? Or does God’s Shalom transcend all historical time? Imagine one of those line drawings used to show something about how perception works. If one looks at the line drawing this way, it is clearly a picture of a candlestick, but if one adjusts one’s perception and looks at the drawing that way, it suddenly appears to be the profile of two faces looking toward each other. Same drawing, two perceptions. So look at the reign of God from two perspectives. First, from our vantage point in the middle of history, defined as we are by the march of time, the reign of God lies in the future. It presses in on the present, even...

But eternity speaks not of “the last day” but of Today. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus tells her. Returning to our question of the where and when of the dead, we experience human deaths one after the other in time. Augustine dies, then Catherine of Siena, then Luther, then Wesley, then Mother Teresa, and on goes the line. When does God raise them from the dead and give to them glorified bodies? Immediately. Death does not have one second’s worth of victory over them. But it is also true that they rise, along with all the other saints, together at the same time. If this seems like theological sleight of hand, having our cake and eating it too, I would simply point out that, since Einstein, even in the natural and physical world we have been able to grasp the fluid character of time. In an Einsteinian universe, time can move forward and time can reverse; events in time can happen both in sequence and simultaneously. I am not suggesting that contemporary physics’s view of time and a theological understanding of time are to be equated. I am simply saying that one helps us imagine the plausibility of the other.

One last question remains: Who are the dead who are raised imperishable? Who participates in Christ’s victory over death? Christians only? All of “the righteous,” whoever that might be? Every human being, good or bad? How broad is the way of Christ, how expansive the sheep who belong to Jesus but who are “not of this fold” (John 10:26), how wide the mercy of God? The question is an important and vexing one, and it tends to divide the house. While the biblical evidence is mixed, the overall thrust of the biblical witness seems to encourage a hope for the redemption of all humanity. We are promised that God will be all in all, and we are told of a God who takes “no pleasure in the death of anyone” (Ezek. 18:32), a God who is patient, “not wanting any to perish” (2 Pet. 3:9) and who “was pleased to reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:20). The notion that the eternal fate of people swings on whether they decide to allow Jesus Christ into their hearts is ruthlessly individualistic and runs counter to the biblical hope of a new creation.

Putting the weight of God’s intent to redeem creation on a series of personal choices is something like a man in a cottage on the coast of Normandy in June of 1944, as the Allied forces swept across the beaches, thinking that he had to choose whether to be liberated or not. Moreover, such a view of salvation puts God’s will at the mercy of human decision making. As Moltmann observes: Can some people damn themselves, and others redeem themselves by accepting Christ? If this were so, God’s decisions would be dependent upon the will of human beings. God would become the auxiliary who executes the ...

On the other hand, a sweet and easy universalism itself infringes on the freedom of God (God must redeem every human being, because, after all, that’s what I would do) and runs into problems with ethics. Theologian Miroslav Volf makes the case that when Christians call people in the midst of a bloody and unjust world to turn the other cheek and to respond to violence with nonviolence, this ethical call rests logically on the promise that God will judge the wicked and violent. “[i]f God were not angry at injustice and deception,” writes Volf, “and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship.”31 Volf recognizes that the notion of God as judge of the wicked “will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West,” but he invites his skeptical readers to engage in a thought experiment where ideas about the nonjudging God are tried out in the middle of a bloody war zone: To the person who is inclined to dismiss [the idea that God will judge the violent], I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone…. Among your listeners are people whose villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect, noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a su...

As Niebuhr put it: It is therefore important to maintain a decent measure of restraint in expressing the Christian hope. Faith must admit “that it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” But it is equally important not to confuse such restraint with uncertainty about the validity of the hope that “when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Christians, therefore, gradually formed over the earliest centuries of the movement a set of distinct funeral practices that, while woven from local customs, still reflected Christian theology. At the beginning of the third century, Tertullian could already speak of an “appointed office” for Christian burial in North Africa, and certainly by the late fourth century, we can begin to see the contours of a basic and distinct Christian funeral rite. Simply put, this rite was composed of three movements: preparation, processional, and burial. In the preparation movement, the body was washed, anointed, and clothed in garments representing baptism. In the processional phase, the body was carried to the grave, and sometimes the procession entered the church on the way for prayer and the reading of Scripture. The burial phase took place at graveside and included the commendation of the deceased to God and the actual burial of the body. During each movement, the church prayed, chanted psalms, and sang hymns of joy. Often a Eucharist was held, either in the church or at the grave. The theme of the service was the completion of baptism, and the church accompanied a brother or sister to the place of union with God through the resurrection of Christ. Taken as a whole, the early Christian funeral was based on the conviction that the deceased was a saint, a child of God and a sister or brother of Christ, worthy to be honored and embraced with tender affection. The funeral itself was deeme...

Most of us do not think of ourselves as people who are dying. We tend to make a sharp distinction between “being alive” and the experience of dying; as a consequence, very little about our lives prepares us for death. When people sense, or are told, that they are dying, that they have crossed the invisible boundary that separates those who are “terminal” from those who are not, often frightening and sometimes very new feelings and questions arise: “I’m frightened.” “What will happen to my family?” “I don’t want to not be.” “I don’t know what lies ahead for me. I haven’t been a good enough person. I haven’t lived as I should.”2

The church, paradoxically, imagines death occurring not only at the end of life, but also at the beginning. In baptism, new Christians die with Christ, which is a sign of hope. We have already died, we have already experienced the worst that can happen to a human being, and by dying with Christ, we also participate in the promise that we will rise with Christ. But to place a symbol of death at the very beginning of the Christian journey is also a sign of realism. It reminds us that we are not permanent and immortal, that we are made of dust and to dust shall we return. We walk in faith in a world where sin and death still exert their powers, indeed, in a world where the more faithfully we live for Christ, the more aggressive become the forces of death. “For while we live,” said Paul, “we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:11).

Indeed, theologically, all of the Christian life can be seen as the in-between time, the time of dying.

When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote her famous book On Death and Dying,3 she outlined a five-stage emotional process through which the dying characteristically move. The five stages—denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—have entered the vocabulary of popular knowledge, and many people can recite them from memory. Despite the fact that Kübler-Ross tried later to insist that these stages were not fixed and sequential categories, On Death and Dying does little to dispel the impression that “normal” people, when they know they are dying, move step by step from denial of death to its “acceptance with peace and dignity.”4

Second, and more to the point here, the implication in Kübler-Ross’s work that knowledge of impending death somehow drives people rapidly up the stairway of emotional and ethical development is a fiction of the therapeutic culture. The fact is that people die pretty much as they have lived.6 If someone has been enraged throughout life, we can expect rage at the end. A person who tries to bargain with life, family, physicians, and God on death’s door has probably tried to cut a few deals before. A person who blesses the world at death has not learned this in the last few hours of life but has been shaped to live a life of blessing. As one rabbi said, “A Jew is expected to die, as he has lived, with the name of God on his lips.”7 The best preparation for dying a Christian death, then, is living a Christian life. There have been times in our history when Christians have made this truth explicit by helping each other, in the middle of life, to marshal the resources of the faith that will be needed at the end of life. In particular, I am thinking of the Ars Moriendi (the art of dying well) tradition, which consisted of very practical devotional resources, dating from the fifteenth century, that enabled Christians to “dress rehearse” the experience of dying.8

When theologian Douglas John Hall entered his seventies and faced his mortality every day, he wrote some wisdom for dying well: I entered my seventieth year not long ago—the biblical age, as they say…. I am in a position now that I did not occupy at age twenty-one: that is, I can say with a certain real confidence I have seen the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living—and quite specifically in my own life…. Even this wonderful (if rather small and problematic!) body I live in and am, even these (now somewhat arthritic) hands that love to play the piano and write little yellow words on a computer screen; even this mind full of its own unique memories … all of this that is me … must come to an end, and sooner rather than later, now…. Resurrection is the ultimate declaration of God’s grace. It is not … natural. It is not … automatic. It is wholly dependent upon the faithfulness, forbearance, and love of God. And just for that reason—only that!—I am able, usually, to sleep at night…. Because the only thing of which I can be at all confident when I think of my own “not being” is that God will be.13

To begin with, James thinks that Christians ought to go and be with other Christians who are sick and dying; but today, when the word goes out that someone is dying, this is often the signal for the rest of the community to stay away, to cordon off the dying person from the rest of life. Why? Ethicist William F. May is convinced that one factor that makes Christians reluctant to be with the dying is the fear that dying people need something that we don’t have to give. Because they are facing death, being in their presence somehow compels one to “be a God-producer, a Christ-dispenser, or a religious magician in the sickroom.” Since we are none of these things, of course, we are strongly inclined “to shy away from the dying to avoid [our] own poverty.”14 According to May, such feelings of inadequacy, which keep us away from the dying, are the product of a faulty theology. We think the room where a dying person lies is a temple of death, devoid of God’s presence. But the resurrection means that Christ has invaded the regions of death and reclaimed the territory. “There is no need to produce Christ in the sickroom,” May says, “when he is already there.”

What do the dying need? As James says, they need the community to gather around to pray with them. They need people to read Scripture and to sing with and for them. In the congregation where I worship, the whole choir has, on occasion, traveled to a hospital room to sing in the presence of the dying. Invariably the choir members report their own faith strengthened by the experience. When they sing with the sick, they do ministry, ministry is done to them, and both choir and dying person discover anew the presence of Christ. James also calls on the church to anoint the sick with oil. This was not an extraordinary act for James’s congregation. Oil is a symbol for the Holy Spirit, and every member of James’s church would have been anointed at the time of baptism. To be anointed with oil at the time of sickness is to remember one’s baptism and to remember that one ultimately belongs to God.