Speaking about death and dying is a problem for Christians these days. "What a way to go" is a phrase I heard several times yesterday. And it seems odd to me.
Death is all around us. Not that we don't try to beat it -- by ignoring it. We do. We belittle it. We joke about death. Like WC Fields, we'd love to find "a loophole" to the Great Judgment and Equalizer that is death. But there isn't.
I know why we Christians do it. Because we're what I call "practical atheists". We joke about death. Some of the funniest stories I've ever heard are funeral anecdotes recounted by the drivers of hearses on the way to and from the funeral home. People have always joked about death, because people have always feared death, and jokes and laughter are a way of whistling in the dark on the way to Hamlet's "undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns". But things have changed. When people believed in God, they had a godly fear of "meeting their Maker", even if the Church sometimes exploited that fear in unconscionable ways. But now that most people don't believe in God, but rather, with John Lennon, "Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky" -- now the common fear is not godly, it's atheistic. You might say that whereas once people were afraid of meeting their Maker, now they're afraid of there being no meeting at all; not afraid of going to hell, but of going nowhere at all.
And that shift comes, in part, from a seismic shift in the way we die. For Christians, especially.
Yesterday, there was a tragic death of my neighbor. When I arrived home yesterday afternoon, I swooped into pastor-mode. I offered comfort to those suffering. And most of that care came in the form of listening. Part of what I heard, shocked my spiritual sensitivities. "What a way to go", "I'd rather die suddenly, than to know", "At least it was an accident and not a tragic choice".
Let's admit it: In our culture, we'd rather die quickly -- in our sleep would be great (it seems to be the preferred ideal), next best a stroke that kills you before you hit the floor.
But that's not the way we Christians have traditionally seen in. And after having faced life with the reality of my death, it's most certainly not how I think about dying.
We've traditionally prayed to be delivered (in the words of the Great Litany) "from dying suddenly and unprepared". "Unprepared"? Unprepared for what? Again, for "meeting our Maker". But, again, no Maker, no meeting -- and so no need for preparation: No need for repenting and amending, for cleaning up the clutter in our souls, for repairing broken relationships, for letting go. But how can it be that Christians themselves have slipped into this cultural attitude of indifference?
See why I think we Christians are practically atheists? God just don't enter into our dying.
Nowadays people don't talk about preparations before they die, but they might talk about arrangements after they die. Simon Cowell, one of the richest man on television, said in an interview that "Medical science is bound to work out a way of bringing us back to life in the next century or so, so I want to be available when they do". Thus has "eternal life" has morphed into "unending life", the resurrection of the body into the resuscitation of a corpse. Thus have the heights of the Christian hope been reduced to an abyss of morbid designer banality.
That's the irony of our "culture of death" (John Paul II). War, capital punishment, euthanasia, suicide.
And now, add to that mix the fear of death. I can't recall the last time I heard a sermon on the spiritual "art of dying well" (think Jeremy Taylor's Rules for Holy Dying or William Law's Serious & Devout Call for a Holy Life).
Youth. Beauty. Those are our values. Hence we run from the grim realities of suffering, death and trauma.
We have all the chemicals and science for keeping our bodies fresh and young. Cosmetic surgery for keeping us (grotesquely) young and beautiful.
And, of course when you're young, you think you're immortal. (We have a word for that -- immaturity! -- but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, apparently.)
Now, our adults are so young that they don't even try to hide it.
We're Peter Pan. "Living the dream" right into a manufactured old age.
And when reality finally, inexorable strikes, well, freeze-dry me today and thaw me out tomorrow.
And, what else has changed? How about the culture of death-denying that is the funeral? Some years ago, Michael Budde wrote Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business is Buying the Church. In it, Budde highlighted how our ways of dying have laid-bare how our faith has been transformed by the ways we approach death.
Because it's all about me and mine, funerals are now becoming customised "celebrations", upbeat, nothing sad, no grief, no frank recognition of the grim reality of death -- this is what ministers are hearing more and more when we meet the families of the "deceased". Coffins are as likely to be draped with photos, flags, or sports memorabilia as with Christian symbols. One minute you're singing "Amazing Grace", and the next (never mind the inconsistency!) you're hearing a CD of Frank Sinatra belting out "I Did It My Way". And poems are read that are not only -- let's admit it -- mawkish and banal, but also completely untruthful: "Do not stand at my grave and cry: / I am not there, / I did not die" -- but you did, you know. There is mounting pressure on ministers to collude in this make-believe Peter Pan production, even to direct and choreograph it.
I've seen it. I saw and heard it yesterday.
My vocation is to care and comfort as Jesus would care and comfort. Not just to be a bumbling mass of "availability".
Think I'm blowing this out of proportion?
What about the committal? Once the committal was the public climax of the service, now it is fast becoming a private affair, a family-only ceremony, in the US even an undertaker-and-minister-only ceremony. Sometimes the committal is no longer even a committal, rather the coffin is left on the catafol for discreet disposal after the people depart. Thus too "services of thanksgiving" are as likely as not to take place after the committal and so without the presence of the body at all. Reasons of convenience are usually given -- so we don't have to watch the clock, so we can take our time with the tributes -- but I do wonder that there's a subtext here and it's got to do, again, with the sub-Christian change of focus in the contemporary funeral. Ministers of course -- me too -- collude in this cover-up.
See, we think death & dying these days have more to do with psychology than theology. It's not so much the grand drama of the Gospel of Life, so much as the (small) story of grief. Not a story about Resurrection in and with Jesus. But a story about us.
The goal of the committal is "closure", and that is best done as a more private matter. It frees up the public memorial service to be about the business of enhancing grieving without the clutter of the body.
These are unprecedented developments in the history of Christian funerals. Imagine, if you will, a baptism without the baby, a confirmation without a new member, an ordination without a new minister, a wedding without the couple. I am concerned that these are not healthy developments at all. They are signs that not only is society becoming post-Christian, which we know, but also that even the church itself is becoming post-Christian -- and we aren't even aware of it!
Folks balk at this. I say the Church is becoming practically atheist. And what's so insidious is that we don't even realize it. They'll say I'm reactionary. But I think it's largely a matter of our cluelessness.
This is why I insist funerals aren't funerals. They're Services of Death & Resurrection. The death and resurrection of Christ is the basis of all we say and pray and sing, about the death and resurrection of believers for sure, and the death and resurrection of non-believers in the trust that there are no limits to the grace and mercy of God. We do not deny death. We recognize that everyone is mortal, that death is natural, and we pray, with the Psalmist, that the good Lord will "teach us to count our days / that we may become wise" (Psalm 90.12). On the other hand, the New Testament is quite clear that death is, finally, an alien and brutal force, not a friend but an enemy, indeed the "last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15.26), who steals our loved ones, breaks our hearts, and shatters our families and communities. "Death is nothing at all"? No one really believes that -- and Christians least of all.
So this denial stuff? Not for me.
No. Instead, there's comfort and consolation, but of a particular kind. Of what kind? Well, that turns on the recognition that our services of death and resurrection are not first -- and most emphatically not finally -- about us. It's about Jesus. And only in that way, is it about a particular, single, individual person.
It's about this particular person who has been a part of our lives and, if a fellow Christian, a part of the life of the church. Which is why of course the service of Christians should take place in the church, and why of course the body should be there. Christians do not believe that the body it is just a "shell". That's quite a pagan idea -- great Plato but lousy Paul -- which is why Christians have always treated the dead not only with respect but with tenderness. Have you ever loved a "soul"? Of course not! You have loved this embodied, this whole person. In heaven, when we meet again, will it be as ectoplasm? Of course not! It will be as what St Paul calls a "spiritual body", which means that, while unimaginably transformed, we will still recognizably be the people we were. Here in church the dead was baptized, indeed baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ (Romans 6). Here in church the dead was made a member, and perhaps married. Here to church the dead came to worship week by week, to celebrate Communion month by month, to hear the Easter message.
And here, I conclude, in church the dead should be brought on the last stage of his or her earthly journey, that the church family may mourn, yes, but more, that our mourning may be transformed, not just by memory but by hope, as in worship we accompany the dead as God draws them through the thin space between time and eternity. Funerals may be for the living, but they are about the dead, and they are in and through the dead yet living Jesus Christ. If we ever forget that Christian services of death and resurrection are about the management of our mourning only insofar as they are about the meaning of the message, then we of all people, in self-pity, are most to be pitied.
I know why our culture is so mixed up about death and dying. We worship at the altars of so many gods -- not least the image we see reflected in the mirror -- that the "culture of death" really just has to pervade.
But Christians?!? We shouldn't be! Our teaching is clear: In the words of the Nicene Creed -- "We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come". The church is not a public service industry. We are not here to meet people's "felt needs", to give their Jack or Jill a "good send-off". We are here to proclaim the gospel that "Christ has died! Christ is risen! In Christ shall all be made alive!" -- to show the world the way out of its fear and muddle and into the truth. The truth is often hard and always odd, but only the truth will set people free.
And, as I discovered yesterday, no truth seems more important for Christians to proclaim than the sure and certain hope of death and resurrection. It's the Easter message, because we're an "Easter people" (St Augustine). We all die. What matters is how we die, and the kind of hope we have in Jesus.