What is a Funeral For?

What happens at a funeral? What are we doing when we gather around a person who has died?

There's a long-simmering, kinda fierce, largely unarticulated debate within the church about what a funeral is for. The traditional answer is that the funeral service is a "witness to the resurrection." The focus, according to tradition, is the proclamation of God's resurrecting power.

I won't argue with that. But I will take issue with how that goal is traditionally--and best--done.

Funerals are where some of the most egregious instances of ministerial malpractice in Christendom take place. Clergy screw up funerals all the time. Funerals wound families and they turn people away from the church. The cliched example is the Baptist funeral where the preacher questions if the deceased had sufficient evidence of being "saved." Or perhaps the preacher uses the occasion of the death of a beloved to harangue the congregation, by fear or threat or shame, to "give their lives to Christ" so they don't end up in hell. Nothing communicates "Good News" like shame and guilt. Now, I get that some of my Christian siblings truly feel that the "right" words at a funeral can move people toward their literal eternal salvation, so, if that's you, go for it. Good luck.

The other example of profound ministerial malpractice is the highly liturgical service in which the deceased in hardly mentioned. The liturgy marches through, sometimes beautifully, triumphantly proclaiming wonderful things about God and resurrection, but hardly mentioning the particular person around whose death (and life) we have gathered. It's as though the individual person who died is insignificant--what matters is the church and its "proclamation."

The presenting issue at the funeral, in my own experience, isn't eternal salvation. People don't really care about heaven or hell. What they care about is that someone they know, and maybe love, is dead. And their death--and the chasm of that person's absence--and the memories, good, bad, and otherwise, that they leave us.... that is the presenting issue. What do I do with this death? What does it mean? That is what the ritual must tend to.

My conviction--and I could be on this limb alone--is that the funeral (I use this interchangeably with "memorial service"--the difference is the presence, in the former, of a corpse) is an occasion in which the task of the clergy and the church is to witness to the love of God and God's resurrecting power in the particular life of the deceased. Did God's love "save" this person? 

Another way of getting at this is to say that we don’t know God apart from our relationships with each other. There can no "relationship" with God that does not draw us into complex loving relationships with others. In effect, we know God--who God is, how God "works," what faith in God looks and feels like--in and through our life together. We know God in our life with and love for the deceased. What happens to that love when it feels like it’s gone away?

When someone dies, it's a profound opportunity to see God’s love at work. In a funeral, we must talk about the deceased--about the particular contours of their life: the joys, the heartbreaks, the weakness, the struggle, the suffering, the overcoming, the desire, the giftedness. I want to know who they loved and how they loved. I've heard grumpy Christians say, "I don't come to a funeral to hear someone's obituary read." But I believe that unless we hold up the banal details of that person's life and examine them to see the way God might have been moving in that person's life--a love that urged them to lose themselves in something bigger than themselves, a love that healed them, forgave them, gave them grace and courage to seek the common good--if we can't pull those pieces of the deceased's life out and share them, we've done nothing worthwhile. 

If we are resurrected (and I think we are), we are not resurrected in spite of our particularities, but with and in and through them.

When a funeral "works," you should hear that person's voice, you should see their face in your mind's eye, and you should marvel at the way God's love moved in that person's life. We're not worshiping the person. We're declaring that this was one of God's unique creations--a "sheep of God's own fold, a lamb of God's own flock, a sinner of God's own redeeming." We know the Creator through the creation, the Redeemer through the redeemed, the Sustainer through the one sustained.

Our culture is bereft of death rituals. If we all had Irish wakes--if we took time to sit with our deceased in our homes, and told stories, poured drinks, shared food, danced, sung, laughed, and grieved at home--there would be no need to do name particularities in church—we’d just focus on God. But we don't have these rituals. People die in sterile hospital rooms, where there is no laughter or singing or drinking allowed. We need a space to make theological sense of every person's existence on this earth, especially when we shared a significant part of our life with that person and they are now physically gone from our presence.

The funeral is a celebration of God's life in the life of the deceased. Anything else is ministerial malpractice.