People wonder whether the body should be in the sanctuary or not:  one is a reminder of our death, our offering up of the body to God in hope of resurrection; the other reminds us that "He is not here; he is risen."  Is embalming or cremation better?  Generally in Bible times, neither was practiced; bodies simply were allowed to return to what they had been in the beginning - some stuff.  We trust God to do with us as God wills in eternity, no matter what has happened to us in this place.

   The funeral may be uplifting, but its measure is not whether it makes us feel better.  Bonhoeffer, reflecting on family he had loved and lost, wrote, "Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love... That sounds very hard at first, but it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us.  God doesn't fill the gap; God keeps it empty and so helps us keep alive our deeper and richer memories...  Gratitude changes the pangs into tranquil joy.  The beauties of the past are borne as a precious gift."

   The early Christians worshipped in catacombs, subterranean burial vaults where the faithful believed they enjoyed a proximity to heaven; the grave was the portal through which one traveled to the direct presence of God.  We pay meticulous, reverent attention to the dying and their survivors; our best dress, flowers, and music and dress express love.  The funeral declares we never stop being loved, by our fellow worshippers, and by God.  "If the Lord had not been on our side, we would have been swept away" (Psalm 124).  We may eulogize the deceased, but the focus isn't the grandeur of a life lived but the amazing grace of God.  We are saved not by a high mountain of accomplishments, but by the power and mercy of God.

   And yet the goodness of a life well-lived is honored in the funeral.  Moments of wisdom and charity are recalled - not merely to extol the deceased, but to remind us of what life with God looks like.  The service's prayers, hymns, and words give our amorphous, overwhelming ache some shape, a frame to make intelligible our loss - and to take solace in the hope that the last word pronounced is not the death certificate, but the resurrection of our Lord.

   So the funeral is for the deceased, but also for the survivors, and so it is for God.  We bow our heads in sorrow and commend the one we have loved - and ourselves! - to God.  Faith "is not a matter of getting a bulldog grip and not letting the devil pry us loose.  No, faith is letting go rather than keeping hold.  I am coming to think God loves and helps best those who are so beat and have so much nothing when they come to die that it is almost as if they had persevered in nothing but had gradually lost everything, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but God...  It is a question of his hanging on to us, by the hair of the head, where we cannot see or reach.  Who can see the top of his own head?" (Thomas Merton)

James

james@mpumc.org

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