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So this book is an appeal for reform, but certainly not for repristination. There never was a “golden age” to be nostalgic about, a time when Christians somehow got everything right about funerals. Christian funeral practices have from the beginning been tightly woven into their social contexts, and they necessarily adapt and respond to shifts in the culture. We should learn from our history, but whatever shape Christian funerals will take in the twenty-first century, they must not be attempts to re-create practices of the fifth or sixteenth or nineteenth century. Instead they must be doable,
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when Christian funerals are faithful to those shapes, themes, and trajectories, the human spirit is nourished, the community of Christ is strengthened, the gospel is proclaimed, the dead in Christ are honored and remembered, and the light of resurrection hope shines for all to see.
Deciding wisely will require a pastor’s eye and a pastor’s good judgment, which has always been the case in Christian worship.
The variety of Christian funeral practices stems partly from historical, ethnic, cultural, and denominational differences, but there is also no one pure form of Christian funeral because there is no one pure form of Christian. Christians do not live or die in the abstract. They are real people who live real lives, and they die real and very different deaths.
the very nature of the Trinity: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and so on. “Our window’s geometric design,” observes Lischer, “seemed to say, ‘Any questions?’”
(Jessica Mitford’s scathing attack on the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, taught us that); the tittering over the notion of
For Americans, death is more like pornography,1 endlessly fascinating while at the same time forbidden.
The funeral liturgy remembers the gospel in its most basic form and holds it in trust for us, knowing that we will urgently need it when death throws us into confusion and tries to make a mockery of faith.
Even if the deceased is a ninety-five-year-old Sunday school teacher who died peacefully in her sleep, this death is not altogether sweet and beautiful. Death has once again severed the cords of love, shattered community, and destroyed a life. Someone is dead. Something must be done with the dead body, and we do it with care and love.
in funerals, these same Christians, having traveled the pilgrim way, are once again buried with Christ in death in the sure confidence that they will be raised to new life. In baptism, the faithful sang them into this new
The mourners need to be assured, the church needs to remember, the world needs to be told, that death does not in truth speak the final word.
A funeral governed by the gospel is built upon the eschatological hope that the deceased is not a static corpse or a gaseous and disembodied spirit, but an embodied child of God moving toward the communion of the saints.
Take weddings, for example. Although we often think of weddings as joyful occasions, they actually mask social circumstances fraught with uncertainty and even danger. Two people are in a sense wrenching themselves free from their families of origin in order to form a new family. Everyone involved—parents, siblings, bride, groom—is being asked to do the hard work of changing social roles and relationships, and the question of the day is, How can we possibly get from here to there?
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.
Ars Moriendi
The doctor’s oldest skill in trade was to place his hands on the patient.
Anointing with oil is associated, perhaps, with particular Christian traditions, but the willingness to touch the dying tenderly and to pray for them is shared by all Christians. A friend of mine had, by his own account, a terrible relationship with his father, who was cold and emotionally remote.
Almighty God, look on this your servant, lying in great weakness, and comfort him with the promise of life everlasting, given in the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.18
Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.
May his soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Lord our God, the death of our brother/sister N. recalls our human condition and the brevity of our lives on earth. But for those who believe in your love death is not the end, nor does it destroy the bonds that you forge in our lives. We share the faith of your Son’s disciples and the hope of the children of God. Bring the light of Christ’s resurrection to this time of testing and pain as we pray for N. and for those who love him/her, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
‘Take your Bible and hymnal with you … and turn off the television.’”
Death obviously brings silence to those who die, but it also stills the voices of those around the dead, and the pastor is there with needed wisdom, ancient words of comfort and hope, personal words of remembrance and love. Even people who are normally cold toward the church and indifferent to its worship can be so hungry for a steady hand and a good word in the face of loss that they become uncommonly grateful for what pastors say and do at funerals.
Everybody present at the funeral has a role to play, and the purpose of a funeral is not to uplift the audience but to transform the cast.
There is good wisdom for the funeral. First, the funeral is a kind of “seeing place,” and the initial measure of a good funeral is, how well does it enable people to see a truth worth seeing?
But a good funeral works the other way, drawing private grief and personal loss so fully into the gospel that mourning becomes not only consoled but transformed.
these people are first and foremost saints of the living God, made holy by Jesus Christ.
We get a completely new set of people every 100 years, and it will not be too many generations before
As important as consolation is in a time of loss, the role of the Christian community at a funeral is much larger than emotional care. People feel grief, of course, but death is also a crisis of meaning. What is death? What has happened to the one who has died? Why is life so fragile? What is our hope? These questions find their best response not in discussion groups but in worship. At a funeral, the church has come not to provide therapy but to worship, to enact the story of the gospel about life and death, which, of course, provides the deepest comfort of all.
Death is a fearsome reality;
When the four needed elements—a holy person, a holy place, a holy people, and a holy script—are brought together and put into motion in the theater of the funeral, we have the makings of a “good” funeral. These four elements, working together, enable a good funeral to achieve eight key purposes:
Missional.
Many funeral congregations include those who are not Christians, or at least who are not usually a part of the worshiping community, and the funeral can be an occasion for the biblical practice of showing hospitality to the stranger.
Good funerals, as the old wedding saying goes, incorporate “something old and something new,”
To put it another way, whenever we perform a funeral on the occasion of a person’s death, we should be ready to do what we have done a thousand times before, but in a way we have never done it before. It is not easy to walk the balance
A major fault line lies between funerals that are “personal,” which is good, and those that are merely “personalized,”
A pastor needs the strength and love to guide people well.
I stood in the ashes of fury and spoke the sentences of praise. Was that voice my voice? It was no longer the effusion of woe. Magnified, I said. Sanctified, I said. I looked above me, I looked below me, I looked around me, With my own eyes, I saw magnificence.
At a funeral, we do not bury the dead in general; we bury this very particular dead person, who was herself or himself a mixture of the well-being and woe, the commonplaces and eccentricities that make up any human life.
As the joke goes, many people want both “Amazing Grace” and “I Did It My Way” sung at their funeral.
Many congregations have rules and policies about funerals to step around common problems and to help keep funerals liturgically sound and theologically responsible.
Church contexts vary widely, of course, but most pastors find it useful to go to the family immediately upon receiving the news of a death, not to do planning but to establish a pastoral presence. Then there will be another meeting with the family to plan the service. These are often powerful times of pastoral care and fertile moments for the pastor to learn more about the deceased and how the person should be commemorated.
The Order of Christian Funerals (1989; hereafter called OCF),
Protestant rites, the funeral service in Evangelical Lutheran Worship
Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979)10 and the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship (1993),11 and with material from an Eastern Orthodox rite for laypeople (1998), part of a recent translation of The Great Book of Needs.12
In the same sense that an Episcopal priest, in order to conduct a good funeral, will need to develop the gift of ad lib and a dash of skill at improvisation, just so, by doing a little translation, the free-church pastor can gain much from tracing the maps of the prayer-book traditions. What one tradition does with holy water and the rhythmic chanting of psalms another tradition accomplishes through extemporaneous prayer and freewheeling gospel songs. A second
This is not to say there will not be some tough decisions and judgment calls to be made about local and cultural customs.
Also, the focus in this book is on what we have been calling “the Christian funeral,” meaning the death ritual for a baptized Christian. However, many Christian groups make ample and hospitable room in their life for funerals for those who are outside of the faith or alienated from the church. This issue will be discussed in a separate section.
Welcome in the name of Jesus, the Savior of the world. We are gathered to worship, to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, to remember before God our sister/brother______________, to give thanks for her/his life, to commend her/him to our merciful redeemer, and to comfort one another in our grief.
All who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ. In her/his baptism was clothed with Christ. In the day of Christ’s coming, she/he shall be clothed with glory.15 The OCF calls
