Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 21, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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As a child, I remember finding this among the strangest, enigmatic, even frightening of verses spoken by Jesus. “Let the dead bury their own dead” just didn’t make any sense to me way back then. Later, of course, I learned that this is but a metaphorical expression in which Jesus advises his followers about the urgency of discipleship, so urgent that time should not even be taken to pause and bury a dead father. It is one of the sayings of Jesus that demands a choice between living in the past or embracing the new eschatological future breaking into human time and space. But really, “let the dead bury their dead?” Sounds almost like a line from a Stephen King novel or maybe a scene from another new film that I have no desire to see, Dawn of the Dead.

Probably much more congenial to us when it comes to scriptural guidance on what we should do with our dead is the reading from Genesis, about the tender care of the body of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and its reverent placement in the cave at Machpelah. Even though Abraham has found himself in a foreign land when his wife dies, he purchases a field with a cave as a burial place from the Hittites for the princely sum of 400 pieces of silver. It is a touching gesture of final reverence and respect that has become a justification for Christian burial practices.

Every culture, every religious tradition, has a solution to the social problem of what to do the body of someone who has died. Some of you might consider earth burial more humane and civilized than other practices such as the open funeral pyre in India or the African tribal custom of placing the body inside the hut, pulling down the hut on top of the dead person, and then moving on to a new village site. I don’t know if it is some collective unconsciousness in our DNA that compels us to care for the dead, or simply legitimate concerns about pubic sanitation and hygiene, or whether an intuitive universal religious obligation that kicks in at the time of death – but we all would surely agree that something has to be done with the bodies of those who have died.

The recent distress experienced by the next-of-kin of those who had entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the crematory officials in north Georgia illustrates the point. Great anger, jail time, and lawsuits have ensued after this story broke when surviving relatives discovered that loved ones, thought cremated, had actually been left to rot in the open air. There is a real problem for us when bodies are left “in limbo,” as it were, the deceased’s journey towards an eternal destination and final rest diverted by the malfeasance and neglect of a crematory operator. People who thought they had achieved some form of closure on loss and death found, much to their dismay, the old wounds of grief opened up again as they struggled to cope with the aftermath of this crematory scandal.

Simply put, funeral rites represent the process by which we enact the social and religious obligation to dispose reverently of the body. The funeral performs the final journey of the deceased into the eternal destiny prepared by God. The funeral also signals that life does go on even after family and friends have passed through the awful despair and anguish brought about by facing hard fact of human mortality. The funeral recognizes that relationships have been altered; the bereaved now has a changed status; the deceased lives now only in memory. As hard as it can be, the funeral is what makes this necessary transition possible and bearable.

I know that the phrase “good funeral,” like the phrase “good death” that I used last week, is an oxymoron, a cruel pairing of two words that are antithetical. But I believe that if we don’t consciously try to see the faith value of the funeral, then other cultural forces will determine for us what value the funeral will have.

There is no other moment during the life cycle fraught with the same level of ambivalence, stressful decision-making, and emotional heartache that death and the funeral bring. Yet, there is also no moment in the life cycle that more clearly defines who we are under the canopy of God’s love and God’s redemptive purposes for the whole creation.

Which is all the more reason, I believe, to take the funeral out of the closet, to speak about the funeral and death more openly, and to question some of those cultural values we attach to death. I think it is accurate to say, as Tom Long puts it in the article I made available for you to read “The Christian Funeral in American Context,” he argues that the funeral “is but one element in a complex constellation of ritual activity set into motion by death, all of it embedded in a matrix of cultural attitudes, traditions, fashions, and conventions” (p.87).

While, on the one hand, it is true that the funeral home, the florist, the cemetery superintendent, and other cultural forces have influenced our view of death, on the other hand, it is also true that Christianity has always had some very distinctive things to say about death and the funeral quite different than what our culture might say.

The first thing to say is that the dead body needs to be reclaimed as a theological symbol of death. Currently, however, it is a symbol of the embalmer’s art and ability to create a cosmetic veneer of life, to make the person appear to be asleep when in truth they are dead. Thus, since the care and constructed meaning of the body reside largely in the hands of the funeral director, the church has great difficulty inserting alternate interpretations of what the body should mean into funeral rites. For the funeral industry, the body is a marketable commodity; in order to sell its value to a family who is going to pay for their services, it is best for the mortician to try and hide the harshness of death and to encourage talk of how good and natural the person looks.

I know that, at one level, we need funeral home personnel to help us manage the perplexing and difficult details around this transition. But, we also need to be brave enough to question the high cost of taking care of the dearly departed, at a time when the cost for a traditional earth burial can easily exceed $10,000. There are stewardship matters, theological matters, fellowship matters that need to take precedence over a variety of other matters that are typically at the tope of the funeral director’s list of priorities.

This might be a sensitive matter with some of you, but I don’t think it is a good decision to have “The Service of Witness to the Resurrection,” which is the proper name of the funeral as a worship service for Presbyterians, not a good decision to have it at the funeral home, although that is by far the popular option everywhere I have ever lived, including here. There are a variety of reasons why people choose the funeral home, with convenience and ease of greeting visitors usually topping the list.

My argument is that anyone who is a person of faith, who has been baptized, fed at the table and pulpit, been a part of the gathered mystical body of faith, sung the hymns, recited the creeds, etc. should be here in the sanctuary at the end, as well. There is no funeral home that I have ever been in that can recreate the kind of sacred space that we have as Christians in our households of faith. And if any of you have advanced directives to have your service at a funeral home, I hope that you will revisit that decision. There are times when a funeral home service meets a legitimate need, but in general, that is not the most appropriate place for a Christian worship service.

The funeral creates a whirlwind of emotions that are complicated and painful. There is much emotional ambivalence about the body and what we should do with it – should we have the casket open, should we have a private viewing, should there be earth burial, cremation or donation for medical purposes – all of which are legitimate otions in our tradition? These are all matters that can weigh heavy during the hour of death. But, I think, because the body is such an important theological symbol, we need to be careful about any practice that excludes the body from our services, even though the celebration of a memorial service that comes after burial, cremation or donation is a choice that is gaining increasing popularity in our time.

In our particular tradition of the Church, Reformed Christianity, the body of the deceased is considered to be the body of a saint; therefore, any suggestion of the immortal spirit somehow hovering triumphantly over the irrelevant or expendable body is just plain wrong.

In 1963 a British transplant to America, a woman named Jessica Mitford wrote a scathing, best-selling indictment of the funeral industry, a book entitled The American Way of Death. In her desire to discredit the funeral industry’s greedy habit of taking advantage of a gullible public, she is generally credited with the popularization of the “just a shell” view of the body, that is, that the body is meaningless – its just a shell – and should not be viewed or made a fuss over, just quietly removed out of sight and disposed of without the kind of sentimental attention promoted by the funeral home. While we in the Church don’t agree with the funeral industry’s view of the body as a marketable commodity, neither do we want to say the body has no purpose or value during the funeral rites.

Which leads me to the second thing I’d like to say about the good funeral, namely, that since the Christian tradition neither ignores nor despises the body, we need to give the doctrine of the resurrection of the body more careful attention. A literal belief in the idea of bodily resurrection has caused mainline Christianity not a little bit of embarrassment. And I am not proposing a return to this doctrine’s literal interpretation. But why, then, every time we repeat the Apostles’ Creed, do we declare our belief in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting?

If you are a student of the history of art, you know that Christian art throughout much of western history has been preoccupied with trying to imagine what the end of time will look like and what, exactly, does happen to those going to heaven and to those going to hell. In the days of the early church and into the middle ages, it was quite common, to depict bodies emerging out of the ground and body parts that had been scattered or the bodies of martyrs that had been eaten by wild beasts being miraculously reassembled on the last day.

But the Apostle Paul’s idea of the “spiritual body,” one that he discusses in his well-known chapter on the resurrection in I Corinthians 15, gradually took precedence over the idea of a literal bodily resurrection and replaced it with the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul. In our day, it has become easy to reject the materialism of the body and to ridicule the mortuary industry’s obsession with making the body appear life-like.

But I think we have to be careful about privileging the immortality of the soul at the expense of the material body. God created us as a psychosomatic unity, and our corporeal identity, body and soul, is crucial to who we are as persons. The survival and continuity of the self beyond the boundary experience of death is central to the idea of the resurrection, and if we surrender that belief, then it may no longer be appropriate to call our funerals A Service of Witness to the Resurrection. For if resurrection doesn’t have something to do with the body being raised, can it really be considered resurrection?

We might prefer the language of the purifed, freed soul alive eternally with God. Or even the Easter image of the butterfly shedding its cocoon, that is its disposable body, so that the really colorful self can emerge into the new life of heaven. But I am not sure that is the model for the resurrection that we have in Jesus, whose post Easter body was changed, yes, but who was neither just a spirit nor an immaterial self.

There is great cultural anxiety today over issues of self and survival. There are intense debates about artificial intelligence, organ transplants, the proper treatment of cadavers, stem cell research, and even over our very definition of death itself.

You may remember the controversy several years ago over what to do with the body of baseball hall of famer Ted Williams. There was a tug-of-war in the family. I believe his will directed that he be cremated and the remains scattered at sea, while someone in the family contested this, wanting to preserve his body through a freezing process called cryogenics so that his body parts or DNA might be harvested at some future time.

These are a host of scientific and medical issues that focus in new ways old debates about the body and its potential for continuity and survival, even resurrection.

The church no longer produces artists who paint body parts emerging out of the ground on Judgment Day, but if you watch TV or go to the movies, you know there is plenty of cultural anxiety over what happens to the body at death.

I believe there is a deep yearning for a body beyond death, the belief that something of the embodied, personal self does survive so that who we are will be recognizable even beyond the limits of time and space.

And so, a good funeral recognizes that, yes, we do inhabit a redeemable body. But the good funeral also realizes that the body or the person who has inhabited the body is not our object of worship. We always have to be careful that eulogy doesn’t take precedence over proclamation, the telling of the gospel story a backseat to the telling of the deceased’s life story.

It used to be that routinely the funeral dramatized and acted out the journey of the deceased out of this world into the next, a performance of the spiritual passage from baptism to resurrection as the community literally carried the deceased to the church and then to the grave for burial.

But now, instead of the focus being on the journey into the afterlife, funerals often focus on the “transformation of the mourners.” The overarching desire is to heal the damaged emotions of survivors and help them adjust to their loss. Instead of the journey to the burial grounds, the journey is more one of the intra-psychic journey of memory and celebration of the deceased’s family and accomplishments. The ritual energy of the service shifts from the worshiping community to the commemoration of relationships which different friends and family members enjoyed with the departed. (Long, 101)

Now, certainly, the power and importance of personal memory at the funeral should not be underestimated or ignored. But that kind of memory should not take precedence over the corporate memory of the Church. As our Presbyterian Directory for Worship puts it, “in the face of death Christians affirm with tears and joy the hope of the gospel. Christians do not bear bereavement in isolation but are sustained by the power of the Spirit and the community of faith. The church offers a ministry of love and hope to all who grieve.” (W-4.10001)

In closing, I would say to you that a funeral is a necessary interruption in our busy lives that forces us to face the truth of our mortal natures, but also a time to remember that fundamentally, we are a people who face the future with confidence in the redemption and mercy of God. To the extent that we can discuss with others and plan wisely the advance arrangements which will be necessary at the time of death, then it will be all the more likely that we can not only have a good death, that is a non-anxious dying, but we can have a good funeral as well. And that should be good news for us and good news to those who must continue to live after we are gone.

Let us bow as we hear prayed one of the great funeral prayers of the church. Let us pray.

O Lord, support us all the day long
Until the shadows lengthen
And the evening comes
And the busy world is hushed,
And the fever of life is over,
And our work is done.
Then, in your mercy,
Grant us a safe lodging,
And a holy rest,
And peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.