at every funeral: “Jesus Christ, who rose victorious from the dead . . . comforts us with the blessed hope of everlasting life. For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended, and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling-place eternal in the heavens.”1
“Life is changed, not ended.” In other words, eternal life is not something that we look forward to experiencing after we breathe our last. It is not synonymous with “heaven” or “afterlife.” Eternal life is what we experience from the womb to the tomb and beyond. As Christians, we believe that death marks not an end, but a transition from one stage of eternal life to another, from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant. To us, the faithful departed are dead, but they are not dead and gone. In the words of a majestic prayer, they “rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light.”2
Funerals are about hope. First, admittedly, we focus on hope for the deceased. As the body is carried into the church, we proclaim, recalling Jesus’ words to Martha: “I am the Resurrection and the life.” And then, even as the gaze of the mourners is fixed on a casket or an urn containing the earthly remains of their loved one, we continue in the words of Jesus’ own declaration of hope: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25).
Hymnody complements liturgy, as we sing hope-filled verses written throughout two millennia of Christian witness. They describe the hope of eternal bliss of the saints in light (“Oh what their joy and their glory must be/Those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see”). They describe the hope of the heavenly city where the departed have, as it were, taken up residence (“Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest”). They describe the hope of new relationships with each other, (“where knitting severed friendships us and partings are no more”) and the hope of new relationships with God in the joy of the Resurrection through Jesus Christ (“He walks with me and he talks with me along the narrow way”).3
But while music can do much to enhance the beauty of funerals, and the liturgy itself can offer a dignified and Spirit-filled framework befitting so solemn an occasion, most would agree that it is the sermon that is the linchpin of the funeral. Friends seeking a report of a funeral service they missed are unlikely to ask the name of the song rendered by the soloist and are even less likely to ask which rite was used. But almost invariably they will want to know something about what the preacher had to say. What was her message? Did she bring comfort to the family in their hour of need? Did she know Aunt Hattie?—which is not interpreted as “Were they bosom buddies?” but rather, did she understand Aunt Hattie and appreciate her place in the church, the family, and her community? Was there a personal, reassuring word from the pulpit, or was the preacher’s style distant and aloof?
If funerals are about hope, the funeral sermon must not concentrate exclusively on hope for the deceased but must also concern itself—to an even greater extent—with the hope of the mourners. Few worshippers believe that the funeral service actually effects the transition of the dead person from this world to the next; most, indeed, express a belief that Aunt Hattie is already, through the grace of God, “in God’s hands” or “in a better place.” Above all, the sermon is a message of hope for the bereaved. As one writer poignantly observes: “When somebody dies . . . there is only that moment in which to speak the Gospel to the sharp, fresh pain of the survivors. It is necessary to write a word of hope in the concrete of their experience before it hardens.”4 Every person attending a funeral is reminded of his own mortality. The service causes that person to contemplate how the rest of his life should be spent, and the preacher must be able to seize on that kairotic moment when the bereaved might be able to be inspired by the life of the deceased and may even be contemplating amendment of life.
How is this to be accomplished? If the funeral sermon is to offer to the bereaved a glimpse of that “sure and certain hope” in the Resurrection, it can do so by demonstrating how in her life, her earthly pilgrimage, Aunt Hattie strove to live into the joy of the Resurrection; how she, however imperfect, was a vessel of God’s grace. Whether a close family relation or a person who is not a member of any faith community but has come simply to pay respects—for it must be remembered that funeral preaching presents a unique evangelistic opportunity—the person who worships at a funeral service wants to learn from Aunt Hattie’s example and be able to sing with her, “For the saints of God are just folk like me/And I mean to be one too.”5
There is a problem, however, in such an approach to funeral preaching—of which I am acutely aware, having relied on such an approach myself—namely, that in using “material” from the life of the deceased, the homilist runs the risk of delivering a eulogy and not a sermon. Inspired, perhaps, by Marc Antony, who prefaced his funeral sermon for Julius Caesar by stating “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” many preachers have admonished their colleagues to eschew any expression of praise for the deceased, and stick to the Gospel instead!6
But whereas Antony justifies his approach by contending that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” many funeral preachers,when plying their trade, seem pleased to inter, in the same osseous mix, good deeds along with the bad, by delivering generic homilies on the Resurrection, (a practice described by one pastor as “to whom it may concern” sermons) with nary a word about how the deceased shares in that Resurrection.7 Such a practice is especially lamentable, since the preacher should be aware that, unlike a Sunday congregation, the worshippers at a funeral are united in a common purpose, namely, to give thanks for the life of a departed loved one.
Some reasons given for omitting laudatory references to the departed stem from the fear that any attempt to praise the dead might come across as depriving God of God’s due, since all worship, as most theologians understand it, is presumed to exist first and foremost for the praise of the Almighty.8 One pastor asserts that the funeral sermon is “preaching from the Scripture,” and therefore allows personal data about the deceased to be expressed by a family member or friend only after the sermon is delivered or before the service begins.9 There is also what can be described as the “egalitarian approach,” which contends that nothing should be done to make a difference between people at the time of death. Still others have opined that any praise of the deceased runs the risk of being disingenuous. The late dean of the American Cathedral in Paris famously quipped: “Eulogies are difficult. It is wrong to have one person lying in the nave and another lying in the pulpit.”10
Much of the criticism of eulogies is valid. Eulogies do have as their subject matter a life that is past as opposed to a future consummation of that life in the divine presence. They do emphasize human accomplishments as opposed to what God has wrought through the agency of women and men. But I am not suggesting that funeral preachers should mount the pulpit and present a eulogy as if it were a citation for Aunt Hattie’s candidacy for an honorary degree, but instead to present vignettes from an earthly pilgrimage that make her worthy for enrollment in the Book of Life.
The funeral sermon is not a eulogy. It is, rather, a scriptural message illustrated by eulogistic examples. The sermons in this book are replete with such examples. Sue Boulden’s passion for social justice, for instance, is nothing less than her living out the spirit of the Beatitudes. The reference to Attorney Charles Arensberg’s volunteer work in the Mississippi Delta at the height of the Civil Rights Movement is not an item randomly plucked from his resume; it
