This episode discusses the latest dispatch from The Embassy - Funerals and Other Expressions of Reality. Here is an excerpt -

I officiated a funeral service for the mother and grandmother of friends of ours recently. I had never met the woman whose life we were remembering and whose absence friends and family were grieving. She was someone who lived within the big gospel story, who had, by all accounts, embodied the reality of this story for those who knew her. I spoke on the passage in John 11 describing the death of Lazarus, the grief of the family, the grief of Jesus as He wept with them - and the promise of the resurrection.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26

We Christians believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and that belief in Him is life, even through death - and that those who live this life will, spiritually, never die - not in the old, final, tragic sense. Even though we grieve those we lose, it is our loss we grieve, not theirs. Theirs is the resurrection and, finally, the life that is life eternal.

It is a familiar passage of scripture for Christians who are familiar with the gospel accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. The events of this account weigh heavier, no matter how familiar, with the casket holding a loved one a few feet away. That is the thing about funerals, or memorial services, if you prefer. They are the realest of ceremonies. The realest of things has happened. A thing that is somehow shocking while being the most ordinary of things, literally and actually awaiting all of us. The intruder we are apt to pretend isn’t visiting us. But it does visit. And so real things must be said, priorities reexamined, commitments renewed.

Real things must be said, but what must be said is not always said and what must be done is not always done. The real things are sometimes not said, and nobody is wiser, or better, or even really comforted in their absence. Some years ago, I attended a funeral for a young man that many people I was close to knew very well. The young man, while remaining a story of redemption and renewal, and while bringing joy into the lives of many, tragically and, for those who knew him well, mysteriously, took his own life. Probably around 500 people attended, and almost all of them, many of them very young, knew that he had taken his own life. But this reality was never mentioned during the service. What hundreds of young people needed was some sort of connection for their young friend who had given into his darkest impulse, to this story of redemption. This was bypassed in favor of a message that, very likely for the sake of some in his immediate family, missed the chance to provide this comfort within the harshest of realities.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.

From ‘At the Burial of the Dead’, Book of Common Prayer ~ 1549

Reality, as the saying goes, bats last - not just in death, but in life. And it is the reality that we live in a story that contains death but does not end in death (“Do you believe this?”). We avoid this reality to our own detriment and diminishing.

Read the whole article here

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