Dead and Gone

Recently, I accompanied my parents to the funeral of a man whom I believe was my second cousin once removed. I did not know him, and felt largely out of place there. The service consisted mainly of people recounting how wonderful he was and the memories they had of him. I felt like an intruder sitting so high up in the pews meant for family, while close friends sat in the back or in overflow seating. Afterwords, my dad took me home a little early to work on a research paper, and we spent most of the time talking about funerals. Some of it got pretty interesting, and I thought I would share the highlights with you.

Funerals are not meant for the dead, they are meant for the living. Most people take this as a way to say goodbye to the person, to remember them or talk about their life. But this is actually not the purpose of a funeral. The purpose of a funeral is to confront our own mortality, and what happens to us after we die. This is especially important today, when modern medicine pushes death farther and farther away to the edges of our lives. In the past, people died young. They lost children and parents and siblings. Death was a reality, it was there, it was a close and deeply personal thing. It was not such an alien experience as it is today. Funerals were a way of confronting the reality of death and sin, and the reality of the cross. The service did not focus on the greatness of the life of the individual, it focused on the finality of the death and on the importance of the gospel and the afterlife. Today however, that focus has drastically changed. The hard painful subjects are avoided and pushed neatly aside in favor of the person themselves. So often the message of the funeral can be boiled down to, “Be like John Smith, and you will be ok.” Spiritual connections tend to be tacked on or superficial. And as much as we want it to be this way, it is simply ignoring reality. Sin is real, death is real, and we are no more untouched by them than that man is in his grave. We can not run away from this forever. Funerals should make us stop and contemplate that reality. They are meant to make us look upward to God, not backward to the past. By making it solely about the memories of the person, it can make the funeral empty and without spiritual substance. It becomes a bunch of meaningless stories that hold no real content, especially for those who can not share them. It also tends to separate anyone under 60 from this future. Death becomes something that happens when you are old and have lived your life. But the honest truth is, it is not just something that you face when your hair begins to gray. It is something that waits beside you and can strike at any moment. This relative of mine that passed away was forty six. He had just gotten through a serious bought of illness, and had believe he was recovering when an infection took his life away. He left behind a daughter who was only three years younger than me. The image of that young girl standing in front of her fathers casket is very, very impacting, and a funeral is there to make you look at it. It there to say, “You are mortal. You are going to die. This could just as easily be you. This is reality. This is why you need God.” It is not there to give an empty speech, it is there to remind you of what is to come, and what will be.

-BlackFox

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