- (0:00)
- Prayer from John Witvliet
- (3:30)
- "…the Christian church has lost its way about funerals…"
Thomas G. Long: "Thank you for coming out this morning to engage in some conversation, I hope, on what is a very interesting and important topic, at least to me. I have been working on a book on the Christian funeral for ten years now. My wife says that my tombstone is going to read, "Still doing research." One of the reasons that it has taken so long is that I have been converted by my own research and have changed my mind about this. I started out to write a kind of bland book on how to be sensitive to grief and how to be sensitive to the liturgical claims of a funeral. I think that's important. But I have found in my research that the Christian church has lost its way about funerals. I want to try to make that claim today and make that case today. I'm aware of the fact by the way that whenever we talk about funerals and memorial services that this is not neutral ground, this is sacred and tender ground. I want to say that even though I'm going to be bold and say what I think today, in my own family we have had funerals and memorial services of all kinds, some of them according to what I would like to see and some of them not. I think it is important for us to strive toward excellence in worship but I think it is a sign of the grace of God that all of our worship is received by God and all of it shapes us in the Christian life. I'm going to tread on some sacred ground, but I'll try to be tender while at the same time being clear about what I think is important.
- (5:30)
- Elizabeth Jansen's Story
When Elizabeth Jansen died last October in a nursing home in Minneapolis the staff immediately, of course, called her nearest of kin, her daughter, Sarah, in St. Louis. Sarah was both surprised and not surprised. Her mother had had a long illness. And so she arranged for her mother to be cremated and for the cremated remains to be shipped to her in St. Louis. The first weekend in November Sarah and her husband took the cremated remains to a beautiful lake in Minnesota where the family had had many summer vacations. And after a moment of silence on the edge of the lake, they scattered the ashes on the surface of the water. The next week in the small chapel of the Minneapolis church, where Elizabeth had been a member although she had not been able to worship there for many years because of her age and her illness, there was a memorial service. There were about 25 people, friends and family who came. When you came into the chapel right at the entrance, arranged by the funeral home, was a table with pictures of Elizabeth at various stages in her life and other objects associated with her: a Bible, a piece of ceramic pottery that she had done in the arts and crafts class at the nursing home and other objects. The service was quite informal and involved a lot of speakers. The first speaker was Sarah, who got up and spoke a little about her mother and then read one of her favorite poems. And then Elizabeth's younger sister got up and told an amusing incident about something that had happened to them in their childhood. And then the chaplain at the nursing home got up and read Psalm 23 and John 14 and had a prayer of thanksgiving for Elizabeth's life. Then two of her former students (she had taught high school for 30 years) got up and read reminisinces of her as a teacher. Then Sarah got back up and invited everybody to engage in a moment of silence and at the end of that a recording of Julie Collins singing, "Amazing Grace", one of Elizabeth's favorite songs, was played and then everyone left that chapel.
- (8:00)
- Departure from Classic Christian Funeral Practices
Now, Elizabeth is fictitious, but the details of what happened at her memorial service are not. They are a representative of what is happening in funeral practices in America. And in many cases some of us who are pastors would say this is routine. But as a matter of fact, when you put the microscope on this, this represents a dramatic and fairly sudden (it's happened within the last 50 years) departure from classic Christian funeral practices.
- (8:30)
- Common Elements of a Memorial Service
Now, these funeral-memorial service rituals vary widely and in fact, improvisation is one of the characteristics of these. There is no standard form to them. But they do have some common elements. They often are memorial services instead of funerals. That is to say, they are services in which the body of the deceased is not present. They are also brief, simple, highly personalized, and improvised and they involve several speakers. Often with the usual clergy person taking a somewhat minor role in favor of neighbors, family members, coaches and friends. There is a focus in all of these on the life and lifestyle of the deceased. Often it is conveyed by photos, memorabilia, favorite music, favorite poems and so on. There is an important emphasis on joy rather than solemnity. There is an emphasis on celebration of life and the goodness that we can remember in the person rather than on the somberness of death. They are quiet services. By the way, worldwide, funeral rituals are noisy. It is one of the noisiest of human rituals. People make a lot of noise at death. But American funerals and memorial services have become quiet times of reflection and contemplation and remembrance. There is a private disposition of the body, a private disposition of the body, usually done before the service with an increasing preference for cremation. As recently as two generations ago cremation was three percent in America, it is now over thirty percent, over fifty percent out west and moving rapidly east.
- (10:25)
- Resistance from Ethnic and Geographic Groups
These are the characteristics of memorial services, especially for white, suburban Protestants. The whiter you are, the more suburban you are and the more protestant you are the more likely you are to engage in these kind of practices. And by the way, they happen differently in different geographical areas and certainly different in different ethnic groups, but even local customs differ. There can be one set of practices on this side of the river and another set of practices on that side of the river, so these are fairly broad trends. African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans to some extent have resisted these changes. Catholics have attempted to resist these changes. The official requiem mass for Roman Catholics is a different kind of service altogether, but there are not enough priests to do them, so if a deacon is doing the service then it is going to be more protestant generally than it will be Roman Catholic. If you are in a landed area, agricultural area, there is sometimes a lag time there as well. But even among non-whites, non-suburban and non-Protestants, we are beginning to see, already, some of the signs that these shifts will take place among those groups as well, but they are more rapid among white, suburban Protestants.
- (11:50)
- Clergy Support for these Changes
For the most part, educated, progressive clergy have supported these changes. They look like good changes from the point of view of the Christian faith. Who wouldn't want to have a more joyful service than a somber one? Who wouldn't want to deemphasize the body, which since Jessica Mitford's work in 1963 in the American Way of Death, we have been taught to think that the fascination or focus on the body is an act of morbidity and is something that we should avoid. If you can get the body absent from the service, you can focus more on the joy of the resurrection. And it also, for clergy, provides some protection for their parishioners from the highly cosmotological, expensive limo and hearse-style weddings that had prevailed all through the 50's that became a matter of consumer concern. I would like, while respecting these changes, to suggest that as a matter of fact they reflect a major departure from the theological claims and themes of the classic Christian funeral ritual and, in ways that are not entirely clear at the surface, they represent a departure from our customs and an incapacity, generally, to tell the gospel story at the time of death.
- (13:24)
- Early Formation of Christian Funeral Rituals and Practices
And in order to see what this departure might be like, I want to go all the way back to the early formation of Christian funeral rituals and practices, and to see how these represent departures from those. Now as you know, Christianity developed in the Greco-Roman world. We are the children of Jewish parents set down in Roman society, and our funeral customs are drawn from both of our influences, from Judaism and from Roman practices. What were the Jewish funeral practices that we inherited, that the Christian church inherited, at the very beginning?
- (14:06)
- Jewish Funeral practices
When a Jew died in the first five Centuries of the Christian experience, the Jew was always buried before sundown, still done in most Jewish settings, buried before sundown, and what happened was, as the person was dying the family would be gathered around the person who was dying, and when the person died, generally the person who was closest to the deceased would reach out an close the mouth and the eyes of the deceased. Now, this seems like a universal gesture, but for Jews this was an important gesture because suddenly the person who had done this had become ritually unclean. You had touched a corpse, and that theme is going to play out in Jewish funeral practices. The body was washed, anointed with aromatic oils and spices, and dressed in a linen wrapping, and then carried immediately to the place of burial. Now here, an important distinction occurs are you well [skip in the recording to discussion] a shallow grave dug in the earth. But if you have any means at all, the place of burial is going to be like Jesus' tomb; it is going to be a cave or grotto, something carved into the side of a face and it will have niches where the body can be laid. As you go to the tomb, there is lamenting; if you've got some money you are going to have flute players go along with you, but you are going to have lamenting as you travel. Not everyone who laments at a Jewish funeral has a kind of, what we would call, psychologically sincere grief. People who were simply a part of the party would find their obligation to lament loudly even if they didn't have a psychological connection with the deceased because, and this is important, what's happening here is we are acting out a ritual story and the snatching of this person from the human community has created a gash which must be lamented. It is our cultural and human responsibility to lament. There was loud lamenting.
- (16:30)
- The Sepulcher Process
Now I'm going to follow the Sepulcher process from here on out because it is much more interesting. When you get to the Sepulcher you place the body on the niche, and after some prayers and Psalms are said a rock is rolled over to close up the tomb. We're familiar, of course, about this from the burial of Jesus. But, the family members now go into mourning, and there are three phases of mourning.
- (16:55)
- Shiva – the First Phase of Mourning
The first is called Shiva. They would sit Shiva for seven days. Now what this would mean is that they were isolated from the community, and the reason they were isolated from the community is that, not only were they mourning, but also because they were impure. They had touched the dead body, they had prepared the body for burial. The first three days of Shiva they go to the tomb, and the men will roll the stone away. Remember the women in the Easter story, "Who's going to roll away the stone for us?" And they would go into the tomb and they would anoint the body with spices, aromatic spices. This is what the women were trying to do on Easter morning. And this serves an important practical function because they are looking at the body and premature burial was not unheard of in antiquity and three days need to go by before you are absolutely certain that the person is dead. It was not a frequent thing, but not unheard of for people to get up, out of their own tombs and to be waiting on you came in. But after three days in the heat of Palestine it is clear that the person is dead. By the way this gives us insight into the Lazarus story in the eleventh chapter of John. You remember Jesus is late to the funeral, and when he finally gets there he is told, "He has been dead four days," which is John's way of saying, "He's really dead." This is not simply a resuscitation, this is a raising from the dead; Lazarus is really dead.
- (18:42)
- The Second Phase of Mourning
After Shiva there is the second phase of grief, which is mourning, which is one month of home rituals. There is no sexual intercourse, no looking in mirrors; all of this has to do with dealing not only with grief, but also with ritual impurity.
- (19:00)
- The Third Phase of Mourning
And then the third phase, somebody in the family, usually the oldest son, for one year, has to say Kaddish. This is a custom still carried out in conservative and orthodox Judaism and to some extent in reformed Judaism. Saying Kaddish is this: you go to the synagogue every day for a year, every day, and the Kaddish is a prayer that is a Psalm-like prayer of praise. It doesn't have any kind of pandering sentiment or grief, it is simply external praise of God. And the idea is that if you go everyday and externally praise the creator of the universe, that as a matter of fact this self-absorption that can be there when grief is transcended by focusing on that which is outside of you. And one member of the family does this ritually.
- (19:55)
- Secondary Burial
Now a year has passed and Jews engage in something what is known as secondary burial. After one year you go back to the tomb, roll away the stone, and what is left, of course, on the ledge is simply a skeleton, which is now ritually pure. All the corruption of flesh has been taken away by the process of decomposition and all there is left there are the bones. The bones are gathered, placed into an ossuary, a bone box, and set over to the side, generally, thereby freeing up the niche in the tomb for the next person who has died. By the way this is what is causing the stir on the discovery channel. A group of archeologists have claimed that they have now found the bone box of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the son of Joseph. I don't want to spend too much time on that, but let me say that's very dubious. What it involves is this story: Jesus died just before the Sabbath, and therefore he had to be buried in a hurry. And so Joseph of Arimathea said, "You haven't got time to burry him, take my tomb." So, before the sun goes down he is buried in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, and then, the disciples after the Sabbath spirit the body away and take it to a secret location, and after a year they then gather Jesus' bones and put them into a bone box. By this time they have invented the resurrection and need to maintain this story and therefore keep the tomb of Jesus secret. One of the problems with that theory, by the way, is if that were true, why would you write, "Jesus the son of Joseph" on the bone box as if to say, "If you ever find this, I hope you don't, but if you ever find it there is Jesus, the son of Joseph."
- (21:52)
- Christians Modify the Jewish Stream in Two Important Ways
That is the Jewish stream. Now Christians modify the Jewish stream in two important ways. The first way they modified it was in terms of the purity rituals. They believed that Jesus had overturned the purity laws of Judaism, that he had declared all things clean. By the way, we see the purity customs at work in the statement of Jesus to the Pharisees, "You are like white-washed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but on the inside full of all manners of uncleanliness." This does not mean that the tombs in Palestine were decorated and were beautiful. What it was, was, before the festivals in Jerusalem you white-washed a tomb, because you did not want a pilgrim to Jerusalem accidentally walking over a tomb. If they walked over a tomb, they would be ritually unclean and unable to participate in the Passover or whatever it was, so they were marked. But the Christians believed that Jesus had overcome these purity laws, and therefore, instead of the deceased being a contaminant, the earliest Christians declared the deceased to be a saint. And they embraced and kissed the deceased. They would even go to the grave side and have Eucharist and give the holy kiss to the one who was deceased. Dionysius of Alexandria in the mid third century wrote this about Christian practices:
With willing hands they raise the body of their saints to their bosom. They close their eyes and mouth and carry them on their shoulders and laid them out. They clung to them, embraced them, and wrapped them in grave clothes.
The deceased is now a saint, not a contaminant.
- (21:52)
- Purity Rituals
That is the Jewish stream. Now Christians modify the Jewish stream in two important ways. The first way they modified it was in terms of the purity rituals. They believed that Jesus had overturned the purity laws of Judaism, that he had declared all things clean. By the way, we see the purity customs at work in the statement of Jesus to the Pharisees, "You are like white-washed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but on the inside full of all manners of uncleanliness." This does not mean that the tombs in Palestine were decorated and were beautiful. What it was, was, before the festivals in Jerusalem you white-washed a tomb, because you did not want a pilgrim to Jerusalem accidentally walking over a tomb. If they walked over a tomb, they would be ritually unclean and unable to participate in the Passover or whatever it was, so they were marked. But the Christians believed that Jesus had overcome these purity laws, and therefore, instead of the deceased being a contaminant, the earliest Christians declared the deceased to be a saint. And they embraced and kissed the deceased. They would even go to the grave side and have Eucharist and give the holy kiss to the one who was deceased. Dionysius of Alexandria in the mid third century wrote this about Christian practices:
With willing hands they raise the body of their saints to their bosom. They close their eyes and mouth and carry them on their shoulders and laid them out. They clung to them, embraced them, and wrapped them in grave clothes.
The deceased is now a saint, not a contaminant.
- (23:53)
- The Place of Burial
The second change they made was a change in concern about the place of burial. Jews buried in family tombs. Being buried with your fathers, and your mothers was an important thing to do. Christians became less concerned about being buried with their natural families and more concerned about being buried with their eschatological family. Augustine one time said to his mother, Monica, if you should die in this place, we are so far from where your husband is laid, and I am worried that you will not be buried with him." And she said, "I care not where I am buried, for we will all gather at the great banquet table of our Lord." Gradually Christians wanted to be buried literally near the banquet table and that's why we get church cemeteries and graves piled up against the edges of churches and graves inside churches as close to the altar as you can get.
- (24:50)
- Roman Funeral Practices
That is the Jewish stream. What about the Roman stream? For Romans, whenever somebody was dying, the family and friends would gather around, and the person who was closest to the deceased would stand next to the dying person and the goal was this: when they breathed their last breath, when they went into the death rattle, and were breathing their last, the person who was closest would lean over and kiss the deceased and suck the breath into himself. The Romans were Neo-Platonist at this point, and the body was a kind of prison house for the spirit, and so they idea was to catch the spirit. The next thing that they did was, when the person dies, they close the eyes and then start shouting their name, "Ruphenus, Ruphenus, Ruphenus" trying to make sure that they were dead, it would wake them up if they were not dead. Then they were washed, anointed and wrapped, and a coin was placed in the mouth. This coin was called the viadicum. And this was the fare to get you across the river sticks, into the other world. They were placed on a bed for seven days and during those seven days (now notice in Judaism you have seven days of sitting Shiva) in the Roman custom it is seven days of gathering around the body and shouting the name all the time, "Ruphenus, Ruphenus," to make sure that they are dead. When you were sure that they were dead, there was a burial procession at night with torches, black clothes were worn, and when you got to the place of burial (Romans were shifting from cremation to burial at this point) you had what can only be called a barbeque. They would roast a pig, and when the person was placed in the ground, some of the barbeque was placed in the ground with them, and in fact, some Roman graves we have found have pipes, lead pipes that go from the tomb up to the surface so that food and drink can be dropped down the tube. After nine days of mourning you return to the grave and you have another meal, dropping, if you have a pipe, some of the food down into the place of the deceased.
- (27:07)
- Influence on Christian Practice
Now, what did Christians do with that? No last kiss to catch the soul. For Christians, body and soul are in unity. You aren't pulling the soul up out of a body. There was a kiss, but it was at the grave and it was about the Eucharist, the holy kiss. There was no coin placed in the mouth of the deceased, although it did develop as a Christian custom that the person who was dying should have a last Lord's Supper, a last Eucharist, and that last Eucharist, right before they died, took on the Roman name, Viadicum, the same as the coin. There were no loud laments trying to wake the person, in fact the rubric in some of the earliest Christian services say, "Accompany them to the place of burial with singing." Accompany them with singing. And so, as they marched along they sang psalms and would not wear black garments, but would wear white baptismal garments as they walked, because the ritual in itself was a reenacting of the baptismal journey.
- (28:30)
- The New Metaphor: The Deceased Saint Traveling to Be with God.
Now, what do we pull out of this? Here is what I would like to say: What is for us an afterthought, that is to say, going to the cemetery, or going to the crematorium, was the funeral in early Christian practice. The journey with the deceased to the place of departure was itself the funeral. And it was a piece of theater, it was a piece of community theater in which the community acted out its understanding of the gospel and it was built on this master metaphor: The deceased is a saint, traveling to be with God, a journey that began with baptism, and the funeral ritual is a community of saints traveling the last mile of the way to the place of farewell, and they ritually reenacted this in funeral practices. We can see this persisting...I don't know if any of you have ever been in towns where the funeral director is asked, "Would you please drive the hearse to the cemetery past the place where so and so was born, past the place where she taught school, past the place where she lived when she was twelve, kind of making a ritual journey of ones life on the way to the cemetery. That's a memory in our mind of this reenacting of this baptismal journey. Now that metaphor no longer grips the imagination of white, suburban Protestants: The deceased as a Saint traveling to be with God. That no longer grips the imagination, because everything necessary to maintain that metaphor is now under attack or doubt.
- (30:29)
- Four Factors to Maintain this Metaphor:
- Sacred narrative
- Sacred space
- Sacred community
- Deceased as holy unto God.
What do you need to maintain that metaphor? First of all you need a sacred narrative. The deceased as a saint traveling baptismally to be with God--that's a sacred story, a gospel story, you need a sacred narrative. You need a sacred space. That is to say, at least eschatologically. These funeral rituals move; they aren't static ceremonies, they actually involve movement from one place to another, sacred space. You need a sacred community. You can't do this just by yourself, or your nuclear family. This has to be done by the community of saints. And you need an understanding of the deceased person as one who is holy unto God. You need those four factors. All four are under attack, for reasons that I will say.
- (31:25)
- The New Metaphor "The Deceased is Dead and Going Nowhere."
Because they are under attack, we now have a new metaphor, and all of the rituals of death are reorganizing themselves around the new metaphor. Instead of the deceased saint traveling baptismally to be with God; the new metaphor is, the deceased is dead and going nowhere, or at best, going into the spiritual ether of the eternal present, a kind of Gnostic, pseudo-Gnostic understanding of death. You can hear this in funerals. "Little Missie is gone from our hearts, but right now she is looking down on us, and we will never forget her." Well, we will as a matter of fact. In terms of human memory, there are millions of dead who are forgotten. The Christian church does not claim that our dead are sucked into our Gnostic present memory. The Christian metaphor says, "We're traveling on." There is a forward, temporal, and eschatological movement, and we hand the dead over and they are remembered in the memory of God eternally, even when we forget them. But the current ritual is the deceased is dead, and at best, pulled into a kind of eternal present. They're not moving anywhere, I'm moving. The mourner is moving, and we are not moving spatially, we are moving intrapsychically from sorrow to stability. Therefore the rituals of death have now shifted. Instead of the big public act of walking with the deceased to be with God, they are now grief management. They are small, internal, and psychological.
- (33:25)
- Consequences
Now what has that meant in terms of consequences? Attendance at funerals is down. Attendance at funerals is down. Attendance at visitation, if there is one, is up. National funeral directors association has measured this. Now why would that be? If the important movement is the intrapsychic movement of the mourner, I can't figure out what I'm doing going to somebody's funeral, because if it's the druggist, and I didn't really know him as a close friend, why would I sit in a pew and participate in what is basically an inward experience of grief management on behalf of the druggist whom I barely knew? Now in the old paradigm, I go because you need the full cast to act out the theater of the Christian gospel in a public space. But when you don't need the full cast, then I can't figure out why I'm there. But, I will go to the visitation because I can speak to the widow, and when I speak to the widow I can participate in the psychological process of grief management.
- (33:25)
- Attendance at funerals is down
Now what has that meant in terms of consequences? Attendance at funerals is down. Attendance at funerals is down. Attendance at visitation, if there is one, is up. National funeral directors association has measured this. Now why would that be? If the important movement is the intrapsychic movement of the mourner, I can't figure out what I'm doing going to somebody's funeral, because if it's the druggist, and I didn't really know him as a close friend, why would I sit in a pew and participate in what is basically an inward experience of grief management on behalf of the druggist whom I barely knew? Now in the old paradigm, I go because you need the full cast to act out the theater of the Christian gospel in a public space. But when you don't need the full cast, then I can't figure out why I'm there. But, I will go to the visitation because I can speak to the widow, and when I speak to the widow I can participate in the psychological process of grief management.
- (34:35)
- Downsizing of ritual
The second implication is we've had what might be called a downsizing of ritual, a downsizing of ritual. They are smaller, briefer, more spontaneous. I know in my research I ran into a minister who is doing one minute funerals. He is in Sun City, California, and here is what typically happens. He's got an elderly congregation, and people disappear. They died over at the nursing home or the retirement center, and its just like the case we had at the beginning, the person is cremated, generally, and the ashes are sent elsewhere and the person never shows up at church anymore there. Vaporized from the community. So instead of saying, "I regret to inform you that last Thursday at Siani Hospital so-and-so died," he takes that announcement period and has a one minute funeral ritual so that there will be at least some kind of memorialization of the dead.
- (35:40)
- Improvisation ritual
What we have seen in weddings we are now seeing at funerals. The improvisation ritual. Since the sacred story is under attack or doubt, we have to make this up now. We create a kind of story that wasn't there before, and improvise our rituals. The dead have stopped coming to their own funerals. We wouldn't do a baptism without the baby, we wouldn't do a wedding without the bride, but we now do funerals without the deceased. It is not simply an attempt to honor the resurrection, or that funerals are for the living, it is a matter of embarrassment about bodies. It is the inability to see the Christian faith in an embodied sense. By the way, historically, whenever we have incomplete funeral rituals like this, what happens culturally is that we are haunted by the dead. Right before the Reformation, when the doctrine of purgatory was in full glory, and the plagues had spread through Europe, you had literally, millions of dead people who were thought of in purgatory, which meant they weren't quite dead. They weren't quite transitioned. They were the moral and financial responsibility of the younger generations. Purgatory was the nursing home of the pre-reformation period, and never was Europe more haunted then at the eve of the Reformation. The cultural experience of the dead who are not quite gone coming back. In our own culture, my colleague at Emory, Gary Laderman says, if you want to see haunting taking place in our culture, look at horror movies, and you will see the kind of psychic nightmare that a cultural has when it has no way to tell the story of where the dead go, of their moving on to be with God.
- (37:56)
- What should we do about it?
What should we do about it? I'm going to end with this, and then I'm going to see what you think. What should we do about it? When Pope John the 23rd was on his death bed, his young physician came to him one day and said, "Holy Father you have always made me promise that when your time had come I would tell you, and with great sadness I must tell you that your time has come." And then the young physician fell down on his knees weeping. And Pope John the 23rd reached out and touched him in blessing on the head and said, "Son I am a bishop, and I must do this with simplicity and majesty and you must help me." I think that is a profoundly Christian understanding of what we should do built into that, not just for bishops, but for all of us who are baptized. I must do this with simplicity. Christians do not need ornamentation in our funeral rituals. We don't need expensive limos and hearses and cosmetics and all the trappings that try to make something out of death that it is not. This could be done with simplicity. But Christians are royal people and every Christian deserves a royal funeral, that is to say, we are burying a saint. We are sending a precious child of God to be with God, and the ritual of death needs to reflect that stature of all Christians, doesn't have to be expensive, and it should surely be simple. But we must do this with simplicity and majesty. We saw in the most recent pope's death and example of what can happen when Christians understand their own death rituals. First of all, he was brave enough to die in front of our eyes, and not to hide his illness behind some kind of screen of secrecy. And, when he died, his body was visible for all to see and was carried in a journey motif to the place of departure. He reenacted his baptismal identity. At Turner's funeral home in Atlanta, the one where most of the people I know are buried out of, here is what happens. The congregation is seated as you are, and when the time has come, two of the Turner employees come and stand like Mr. Clean sort of in front of the congregation. The side door is open, the family comes in, and takes a separate place. If there is a casket, and their often is not, if there is a casket, it is rolled in from the side, it is placed in the center for that part of the service, and when that part of the service is done the Mr. Clean folks will take the casket out the side door to a waiting hearse, and you go to the cemetery. Notice the difference between a ritual in which the casket enters in the front door of the church, comes down the center isle, and then is followed by those who are in attendance to the place of burial as opposed to this sort of side action. It is a small thing, but in one case you've got a recapitulation of the journey of the saint, in another you simply have an appearance, a cameo appearance and out it goes. I think, rethinking the journey motif, Ronald Regeans funeral, he was met at the door of National Cathedral by the clergy who said, "Our brother, Ronald, a lamb of Gods own flock, a sinner of God's own redeeming," and then walked with him down the center isle. Notice what they are doing, we're acting out a different image here. And I think as much as we can we ought to reclaim that sense of the sacred baptismal narrative, not only in what we say, but in the actions that we do. By the way, I think it is a rule of liturgy (this is not a very elegant way to say it) but I think it is a rule of liturgy that if you do the basic framework right, they are good waste management systems. That is to say, a lot of things that are not very good can't happen in the context of a funeral if the basic structure is there, because the basic structure speaks more loudly than the occasional uncle who'll cut the fool at a funeral.
- (37:56)
- Rethink the journey motif
What should we do about it? I'm going to end with this, and then I'm going to see what you think. What should we do about it? When Pope John the 23rd was on his death bed, his young physician came to him one day and said, "Holy Father you have always made me promise that when your time had come I would tell you, and with great sadness I must tell you that your time has come." And then the young physician fell down on his knees weeping. And Pope John the 23rd reached out and touched him in blessing on the head and said, "Son I am a bishop, and I must do this with simplicity and majesty and you must help me." I think that is a profoundly Christian understanding of what we should do built into that, not just for bishops, but for all of us who are baptized. I must do this with simplicity. Christians do not need ornamentation in our funeral rituals. We don't need expensive limos and hearses and cosmetics and all the trappings that try to make something out of death that it is not. This could be done with simplicity. But Christians are royal people and every Christian deserves a royal funeral, that is to say, we are burying a saint. We are sending a precious child of God to be with God, and the ritual of death needs to reflect that stature of all Christians, doesn't have to be expensive, and it should surely be simple. But we must do this with simplicity and majesty. We saw in the most recent pope's death and example of what can happen when Christians understand their own death rituals. First of all, he was brave enough to die in front of our eyes, and not to hide his illness behind some kind of screen of secrecy. And, when he died, his body was visible for all to see and was carried in a journey motif to the place of departure. He reenacted his baptismal identity. At Turner's funeral home in Atlanta, the one where most of the people I know are buried out of, here is what happens. The congregation is seated as you are, and when the time has come, two of the Turner employees come and stand like Mr. Clean sort of in front of the congregation. The side door is open, the family comes in, and takes a separate place. If there is a casket, and their often is not, if there is a casket, it is rolled in from the side, it is placed in the center for that part of the service, and when that part of the service is done the Mr. Clean folks will take the casket out the side door to a waiting hearse, and you go to the cemetery. Notice the difference between a ritual in which the casket enters in the front door of the church, comes down the center isle, and then is followed by those who are in attendance to the place of burial as opposed to this sort of side action. It is a small thing, but in one case you've got a recapitulation of the journey of the saint, in another you simply have an appearance, a cameo appearance and out it goes. I think, rethinking the journey motif, Ronald Regeans funeral, he was met at the door of National Cathedral by the clergy who said, "Our brother, Ronald, a lamb of Gods own flock, a sinner of God's own redeeming," and then walked with him down the center isle. Notice what they are doing, we're acting out a different image here. And I think as much as we can we ought to reclaim that sense of the sacred baptismal narrative, not only in what we say, but in the actions that we do. By the way, I think it is a rule of liturgy (this is not a very elegant way to say it) but I think it is a rule of liturgy that if you do the basic framework right, they are good waste management systems. That is to say, a lot of things that are not very good can't happen in the context of a funeral if the basic structure is there, because the basic structure speaks more loudly than the occasional uncle who'll cut the fool at a funeral.
- (43:00)
- Reclaim a sense of sacred space
The second thing we need to do is to reclaim a sense of sacred space. We live in a society where people aren't from anywhere anymore. There isn't a sense of sacred space, and to reclaim that, now how can we reclaim it? I think we can reclaim it literally. We are probably past the time that we are going to have church cemeteries; they are difficult to maintain and they are expensive, but we are not past the time where churches can have memorial gardens with brass plaques and columbariums, and can have a place where the dead continue to worship with us in the communion of saints. You remember that wonderful scene in Kathleen Norris's, "Cloister Walk," where she has been at Saint John's for awhile, and the head monk comes to her one day and says, "I think it's time you met the rest of the community." The rest of the community? And he took her out to the cemetery and introduced her, one by one to the saints who had gone on to glory. That sense of worship being gathered in the presence of the communion of saints. We can do things with our churches to make that literal sacred space come alive. But we can also do it liturgically. We can have liturgical space. I think those churches who recognize the power of All Saints Day as a time to ring the bell and read the names of the deceased who have died in the past year are creating a liturgical space. My wife was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey and we were having a family night supper one time to celebrate the history of the church and the choir had prepared some Broadway tunes that they were going to sing as the entertainment for the evening. But in addition to the Broadway tunes they had mixed in a few old favorite hymns and so on and at one point, almost as a joke, they started singing, "Give me that old time religion! Give me that old time religion!" We were really into it; we were patting our feet, we were singing that. We were into it so much that they had run out of verses but they still wanted to sing. "It was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for Moses, it was good enough..." They were naming names, but they ran out of names! And they paused for a minute, and then somebody in the choir said, "It was good enough for Dorris Becket, it was good enough..." Well, she was a member of the congregation who had died two months before. And we got quiet. Then they began adding other names. "It was good enough for Steven Smith. It was good enough for Fred Swarps." And they named the roll call of the saints. What a powerful experience. Suddenly in the midst of mirth and frivolity to be gathered into the presence of our own communion of saints.
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- Preach about the Sainthood of all believers
The third thing we need to do is teach and preach about the sainthood of all believers. I preached at Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn one Sunday. It's a large African American Church where the Rev. Gardner Taylor was for many years the pastor. My sermon was a non-event, I can assure you. The real event of that day was that there was a member of the congregation who was a postal clerk, and he had been sick for six weeks and had not been able to come to church, but that Sunday he was well enough to come back. And for forty-five minutes, he stood up and was celebrated as a child of God by that congregation. Welcomed back into the community. At the post office, he is a clerk, but in the house of God, he's a saint. The more we can do this counter-cultural identity to claim that, the more we can celebrate it and walk with the saints at the time of their death.
- (47:15)
- Work on the notion of sacred community
The last thing I think we can do is to work on the notion of sacred community. The best way to do that in terms of funeral practices is to support educationally and homiletically the responsibilities that Christians have to help each other learn how to die. We die alone now, behind medical barriers and nursing homes and hospitals and hospices. Christians for centuries have not died alone, they died with each other and they taught each other how to die. In fact, there was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a powerful Christian literature called the ars moriendi literature, which was a literature designed to teach each other how to die. One particular example of it involves the dying man being visited by Satan, who is a pastoral counselor from Hell. Listen to the conversation. This would have been devotional literature that would have been read by Christians to each other.
Satan: You're frightened, aren't you.
Dying Man: Yes, I am frightened. But I'm trusting my Savior who calms all my fears.
Satan: Oh really, you don't think your going to be rewarded by Jesus do you, you who have no righteousness?
Dying Man: Christ is my righteousness.
Satan: Oh, Christ is your righteousness? You think Christ is going to welcome you into the company of Peter and Paul and the apostles? You who have sinned over and over again?
Dying Man: No, I'm not going into the company of Peter and Paul, I'm going into the company of the thief on the cross who heard the promise, "Today you will be with me in paradise."
Satan: Why are you so confident? You've done nothing good!
Dying Man: I have God's forgiveness and mercy.
Back and forth. You can see what is happening. Every mood and experience of dying is anticipated in the literature and put into the mouth of the tempter. Catechetical answers are given in advance. These were read not by dying people, but by people fully alive in preparation for dying Christianly and dying together.
