The Community in Times of Death

I have been attending a lot of funerals lately, which I find to be an important part of my own spiritual movement toward Good Friday and Easter.  Our culture works so hard to deny and prolong death, that we often need stark reminders of our own mortality to plunge us into the deepest questions of our existence, who we are and how we want to live in the world.

As I have stood in receiving lines and sat in sanctuaries and chapels these past two weeks, I have seen the mixture of grief and beauty as women and men in a community surround a family with love and support in a time of loss.  I have been particularly touched by the number of members of our congregation that have attended two recent funerals that touched members of our church family.  I believe showing up in times of grief to witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ in worship is one of the most powerful things we can do as a Christian community.

In his book Accompany Them with Singing, professor Tom Long recounts the history of the Christian funeral.  He laments many of the commerical elements that have crept into our funeral practices, as he remembers what he calls the "essential Christian funeral."  He writes,

"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 deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope."

The funerals I have attended most recently, I believe, have upheld these early Christian traditions.  I have heard preachers recount the life of the saints who have died, and they have reminded us of the Good News of the Gospel that in the midst of our grief there is hope.  The body of the one who has died has been present, and worshippers have been able, symbolically, to worship with them one last time and carry them spiritually to the place of farewell.  The lives have been celebrated as a journey toward God that is now complete in death.

Long goes on to describe the Christian funeral as an event of "community theater," wherein we enact the Good News of the Gospel in prayer and singing and proclamation.  We proclaim the Easter Good News, what must appear absoluately insane to those who grieve without any hope of resurrection and life eternal, amidst our tears and our sadness. 

One of the necessary elements for the Christian community, Long writes, is the "holy people," the gathering of the saints in worship.  Long points out how many commentators lament "a general breakdown in the old infrastructure of community support at funerals.  They bemoan that funerals once were about people gathering in strength around their neighbors at the time of death, but now the congregations at funerals are smaller, and mainly just a collection of individual mourners."

I have been impressed by our church in these recent days, however, for you have lived out the calling to community both for a family in grief but also the need of the community to gather in worship at the time of death.  We are more than a system of support in the time of death; we are proclaimers of the Gospel, and your presence in worship to sing and pray has impressed and encouraged me.  You have even done this in cases of saints you have not known personally, but you know that you have a role to play in carrying this person into the arms of God because she was a saint to whom we are bound in our baptism.

In times of death, the community is needed to provide hugs, to bring casseroles, to send cards and flowers.  But the community of faith is also needed to worship, to take part in "community theater," to sing and pray, to cry and laugh, to lament the death of the one we love and to declare to the world that there is Good News of eternal life.  May we continue to be faithful to this charge, to be a church that worships the living God and celebrates the Easter Good News in times of joy and sorrow.