Accompany Them with Singing--The Christian Funeral

Thomas G. Long

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781611641318
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Thomas Long begins this fascinating volume by describing how the Christian funeral developed historically, theologically, and liturgically, and then discusses recent cultural trends in funeral practices, including the rise in both cremations and memorial services. He describes the basic pattern for a funeral service, details options in funeral planning, identifies characteristics of a "good funeral, " and provides thoughtful guidance for preaching at a funeral.

Long also notes a disturbing trend toward funeral services that seem theologically right and pastorally caring, but actually depart from the primary aims of the Christian funeral. He argues that a new, less-theological and less-satisfying service that focuses on the mourner has begun to erode the Christian view. He contrasts the ancient grand community drama with today's trend toward body-less memorial services that focus primarily on the living and grief management. This is a loss for the church, he argues, and he calls for the church to reclaim the classic metaphor.

PART ONE

Background

1

Marking Death: Human Rituals, Christian Practices

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 about life and to wonder what lies over the horizon. From the beginning, humans have adorned burial places and the bodies of the dead with tokens of beauty and love, symbols that push back the brute facts and display the hunger for meaning in the shadow of death.

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 CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF FUNERALS

This book is about how one religious tradition, Christianity, with its own sense of the sacred, expresses itself in seasons of death. I want to explore how Christianity’s particular understanding of life’s holy mystery takes on shape and movement in the customs, practices, and rituals around death. My main interest here is not anthropological, however, but theological and pastoral. I want to explore Christian funerals— what they do, what they mean, how they work. The overarching goal of this book is quite practical. Specifically, it is to help priests and ministers who guide parishioners and congregations at the time of death to preside over funerals that genuinely embody the hope of the gospel. More broadly, this book is aimed at the larger church with the goal that all Christians will move toward ever more faithful practices in the hour of death.

Doing so, however, will involve some hard work. We will need to be more than liturgical interior decorators, trying to figure out how to create tasteful funerals. We will need to step behind the curtain of our current customs to examine what lies hidden in the shadows and to explore the history of how we came to this place in our funeral practices. We will need to rethink basic assumptions about what makes for a “good funeral.”

The moment is ripe to explore the Christian funeral. Over the last half century, a number of exemplary funeral liturgies have been developed by the various Christian communions. Many of these have been stimulated by the breathtaking renewal of worship that has occurred among Roman Catholics as a part of the outpouring of reforms from the Second Vatican Council and, in particular, the appearance in 1969 of a new set of funeral rites for the Catholic world: Ordo Exsequarium, the Rite of Funerals. These new rites reflected an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to clear away centuries of clutter that had cropped up around funeral practices and to allow the strong bond between the death of a baptized Christian and the hope given in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to shine through more brightly.

Protestants have been prompted by this to do their own rethinking of the funeral, and in North America alone, revised funeral liturgies have been developed by Presbyterians, United Methodists, the United Church of Canada, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the United Church of Christ, Lutherans (twice), and several other denominations, all seeking to join Catholics in creating what Richard Rutherford has described as “truly a human and Christian symbolic language that allows death and the grief of loss their rightful articulation in a living faith community.”³

As compelling as these new funeral rites are, what is most impressive is how little impact they have had on actual practice. Ironically, right at the cultural moment that these rich resources for funerals have appeared, American Christians, along with the rest of American culture, have become increasingly confused and conflicted about healthy ways to commemorate death. Funeral practices are in a windstorm of change, and old customs are being abandoned right and left, but the new Christian funeral liturgies don’t seem to factor much into the equation. What one scholar said about Catholics a decade after the new rite appeared could well apply to Protestants also:

After ten years of official use of the new Rite of Funerals …, American Catholics do not seem to be handling death any better than they did before. In fact, since much of the piety and devotion connected with prayer for the dead has fallen into disuse in that same period, there might be a tendency, at least in some parts of the country, to cope with death more poorly than before the reform.⁴

If we ever needed evidence that writing good liturgy does not automatically generate good worship, the current state of the Christian funeral would be a prime case. While liturgical specialists quietly toiled away, crafting funeral services of great beauty and depth, actual Christian funerals were often migrating toward vague “celebrations of life,” sometimes with such features as open-mike speeches by friends and relatives, multimedia presentations of the life of the deceased, NASCAR logos on caskets, the deceased’s favorite pop music played from CDs, the release of butterflies, cremated remains swirled into plastic sculpture, and cyber-cemeteries.

Even when the changes are less dramatic, it is still true that a general cultural and generational shift toward experimentation, customization, and personalization has impacted the social network of death customs and the Christian funeral along with it. “Leave it to my generation, the baby boomers, to take control,” writes Michelle Cromer. She continues:

We’re not only organizing our parents’ funerals, but even planning our own in advance, putting our requests in writing and letting everyone know exactly what we want. We’re a demographic so totally accustomed to center stage that we will never give it up without some fanfare. I first noticed this in [the movie] homage to my generation, The Big Chill. After the priest announces that a college friend will play one of the deceased’s favorite songs, Karen [one of the characters] solemnly sits down at the church organ and hits the classic opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” As that sixties anthem accompanied the funeral procession, I wasn’t the only boomer in the audience who thought, Now that’s the way to go out.⁵

Responding to the demand for funerals with fanfare, one funeral home in Florida has taken to designing elaborate stage sets for theme-based funerals, and a New Jersey funeral director proclaimed that the old-fashioned funeral business is itself on life support. “We can no longer deliver funerals out of a cookie cutter,” he said, speaking of funeral professionals. “We must become event planners.”⁶

Funeral changes are not just cultural trends and fashion statements. If our theology shapes our funeral practices, and vice versa, then a change in our practice signals a commensurate shift in our theology. Our funerals are indeed changing, and that means something about how we view death theologically is changing as well. At first glance, though, it is hard to assess what is happening. Are we renewing our faith in a different day, or losing our grip? Many funerals today are more upbeat, more filled with laughter, more festive. Is this good or not? Funerals tend to be less formal, less governed by ritual, more relaxed and personal. A gain or a loss? There seems to be less emphasis on the presence of the dead body in funerals, an increase in “memorial services,” a measurable rise in the number of people choosing cremation. Worthy, or a cause for concern?

Time magazine correspondent Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who spent several years studying changing death rituals in America in order to write a book on the topic, concluded that the “new American way of death is personal, spiritual, and emotional. It is altruistic, futuristic, and individualistic.” When she began her exploration, she was, by her own description, “an unabashed advocate of the new American way of death, a way I believed involved celebration in place of mourning.”⁷ But near the end of her research, two beloved members of her family— her grandfather and a cousin—died, and her mother’s cancer, once in remission, returned “with blinding speed and terrible fury.” These sudden and sobering encounters with mortality prompted Cullen to question her “blithe convictions” about mourning being displaced by celebration. “if [my mother] died,” she wrote, “if I lost this woman who raised me, would I have it in me to throw a party?”⁸

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.

I also am convinced that there is a broad but identifiable Christianly way to honor the dead, to walk with them in hope, and to mark well the meaning of death and life. Christianity is not simply a set of ideas and doctrines; it is a way of life, and it finally expresses itself, or denies itself, in the patterns of everyday living, in the ways that Christians do such things as raise children, care for the earth, gather at table, show hospitality to the stranger, manage money, and face death. There are Christianly patterns of living, and there are Christianly patterns of dying and caring for the dead. In sum, I believe, amid the swirling changes and uncertainties of American death patterns, it not only makes sense but is in fact an urgent task to describe, nurture, and practice what can be called “the Christian funeral.”

NECESSITY, CUSTOM, AND CONVICTION

The fabric of the Christian funeral is not woven entirely from threads of pure spiritual silk. The finger of God did not inscribe a divinely mandated funeral service on Moses’ tablets, Jesus gave no teaching about funerals in the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul did not bother the Corinthians with burial instructions. Throughout their history, Christians have always done what every other social group has done: figure things out for themselves and construct death practices out of rock from nearby quarries. When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are summoned to do? In other words, Christian funeral practices emerge at the intersection of necessity, custom, and conviction.

Necessity

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 A generation ago, when a group in the Church of England made a list of the key tasks of a Christian funeral, at the top of the list was: “To secure the reverent disposal of the corpse.”¹⁰ They threw the word “reverent” in to make it sound like theology, but it was mainly just an acknowledgment of human necessity.

So some of what Christians do at the time of death is dictated not by a creed but by the simple truth that a dead body must be moved fairly quickly from “right here” to somewhere “over there.” In this regard, Christians are no different from anyone else. When Christians care for, memorialize, and dispose of our dead, we are not doing something only Christian believers do. We are doing something all human beings do, acting on a very human need, carrying out a basic human responsibility.

And that, interestingly enough, is a matter of theology. The necessity of tending to dead bodies belongs, as theologians would remind us, to the order of creation. And that means that whatever rituals Christians develop around death, they are faithful only to the extent that they do not obscure the essential humanity of the experience. A Christian funeral should not be a precious ceremony aimed at covering up the fact that someone is really dead and that the people who are around the dead person have to take care of the body. That is the honest-to-God truth of what is going on. When we care for the bodies of the dead, we are not trying to hide an embarrassment behind a screen of piety; we are trying to do a human thing humanely. Jesus does not reveal what it means to be “fully Christian,” but rather what it means to be fully human. Part of being human is confessing that we are humus. “I would say,” writes Robert Pogue Harrison, “that humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories…. To be human means above all to bury.”¹¹

Custom

If simple necessity demands that something be done with the bodies of the dead, local customs dictate, to some degree, what is imaginable and proper to do. Our place in the world—geographically, historically, culturally—both sets limits and offers possibilities for what actions are expected, for what seems fitting to do and not to do at the time of death. I am thinking here less about broad multicultural themes and general ethnic and class styles of ritual observance (although these are certainly not irrelevant) and more about the set of very particular and concrete actions that are built into the repertoire of a community’s response to death.

For example, when someone dies in my own family, we call a funeral home to come for the body. We don’t think much about other options; this is just what we do. The body is removed, cared for by the funeral professionals, and we are not likely to encounter the body of our loved one again until the time of the funeral. In other families and social groups, however, such behavior would be astonishing, even offensive, since their impulse is to stay with the dead body at all times and never leave the body alone or in the hands of “strangers.” If someone from one of these groups were to challenge my family on our behavior and demand to know how we could possibly allow the body of a loved one out of our sight, I imagine that most of us would end up looking puzzled and stammering, “I don’t know. That’s just the way it’s done.”

In some Japanese American Christian funerals, there is a ceremony that hearkens back to customs older than Christianity among the Japanese: a floral tribute. Near the end of a funeral service, the congregation processes forward with flowers, which are placed on or in the coffin.¹² As the people pass by, they show respect for the deceased by bowing toward the body, praying while standing next to the body, or by passing by in silence.¹³ Once again, an action that would be puzzling or even suspect to some, bowing toward a dead body, seems to others intuitively the way to show respect. It’s just the way it’s done.

There are many other examples. In many Alabama farm communities, the burial of the dead in the nearby earth within a matter of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Background
• Part Two: The Church’s Ministry in Death
• Appendix: Difficult Funerals
• Notes
• Index