St. Paul’s United Church
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Til Death Do Us Part – Rev. David Mundy
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 John 14: 1-6,18,19, 26
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I spent three years at the University of Toronto training for the
ministry and during that time I received a grand total of an hour and a half of
practical instruction on how to conduct a funeral. It was akin to showing
someone a couple of episodes of ER, then asking them to perform surgery. During
my summer internships I got lots of practice leading Vacation Bible School but
I didn’t conduct a funeral service.
My life experience wasn’t much help either. When I was ordained at the
age of 25, I had attended a grand total of one funeral, that for my aged
grandmother, whom I did not know well. Believe me, attending a funeral as a
teen did not prepare me for a role of leadership.
Of course this meant that in the first couple of weeks on my settlement
charge in outport Newfoundland I had three funerals.
The first death came on the weekend I arrived.
It was an elderly woman whose family was poor by our standards. This
meant that she was buried in the simplest casket and she was dressed in her
best nightgown, as though she had gone to sleep. There was no funeral coach to
go to the cemetery. The casket was hoisted into a pick-up truck and the
pallbearers hopped in on the sides for the brief trip.
The grave itself was dug by family members, which was the custom at the
time. No Bobcats or backhoes to do the
digging. We waded through the blueberries to the grave and I made a mental note
never to wear a robe into a cemetery again because it got caught on the bushes.
After the committal each person took a handful of dirt – real dirt – and threw
it on the casket. No one left until the same gravediggers filled it back in
again.
During my time in Newfoundland I never stepped through the door of a
funeral home. Visitation took place in the churches I served, of which there
were five. And the services themselves were always from a church. When people
came to pay their respects they had what I thought was the creepy practice of
touching the cheek of the deceased with the back of their hand. There was a lot
of weeping and wailing all through the process, the louder the better it
seemed.
The curious thing was that when I returned to Ontario and conducted my
first services I wanted to ask the people present whether they knew that
someone had died. Everyone and everything seemed so subdued, so orderly. Hardly
any services happened from churches and there haven’t been any pick-up trucks.
I have been very fortunate through the years to work with some excellent
funeral directors whose professionalism and sensitivity to the needs of their
clients have been impressive. In fact I can’t recall any that didn’t fit that
description. That said, the business of dying has
moved away from places of worship in many settings in our culture.
Death, dying, funerals. We are big on affirming life
in the community of Christ, the wonderful promise of abundant life and eternal
life because of the empty tomb of Easter. But there was a grave for Jesus and
he died and was buried according to the customs of his day. Those who knew him
and loved him mourned his death. Those who witnessed the resurrection did so
through the tears and anguish and fear that are often the reality when someone
we love dies.
Last Sunday I told you for the three remaining weeks of January I would
speak on three related topics that tend to get “short shrift” in our United
Church. They are death, and heaven and hell. Someone asked the other day why I
chose that order and the answer is simple: we don’t really have to consider
heaven and hell as two aspects of the afterlife unless this life comes to an
end. And it does. Always.
The bible, the scriptures which are our guide
for living, speak often of death. Jesus acknowledged his own death in the
company of those who loved him. Before his terrible execution by crucifixion he
shared a meal with his friends and followers. The group included the twelve
disciples but many scholars speculate that because it was the Passover meal
others, including women and even children may have been there. The gospel of
John is by far the wordiest of the gospels about what went on at the table,
including Jesus’ reassurance that he was not abandoning them in death. I appreciate that the disciple Thomas piped
up and said in essence “well if none of you are going to say anything, I want
to know more because I don’t know where you are going. How can we know the
way?”
Like Thomas we aren’t always sure what to make of the reality of death,
even as Christians. We do shy away from the subject. The wedding vows of
another era offered the promise “Til death do us
part.” Now they say “as long as we both shall live,” which we have decided is a
little more palatable. One funeral director who is a churchgoer made the observation
that clergy are often reluctant to use the words “death” and “dying” in their
services and wondered why.
The great film maker Ingmar Bergman was a preacher’s kid who used to
sneak into funeral services when he was young. There was evidence of that
fascination in his masterpiece, The Seventh Seal. In one scene the
central character, a knight, ends up playing chess with the “grim reaper” the
personification of death.
Sometimes we address death with humour. I managed to find an old cartoon
that shows the Grim Reaper at someone’s door. Rather than being frightened she
figures he is the lawn-care guy and the caption reads “Okay, TEN dollars.
But you’ll have to do the front and the back yard, and trim the hedge along the
drive.”
Yet death is not funny for those of us who recently experienced loss or
still feel the pain of death.
When death comes calling, it is grim. Last week
I invited you to fill out a brief questionnaire on dying and nearly seventy of
you did so. Here are the general results.
1.Are you afraid of dying? Most of you said no, although some of you
jotted down that you aren’t in a hurry!
2. Does human suffering cause you to question God’s love? A fair number of you said “sometimes,” which I
appreciate because I would put myself in that category.
3. Do we have the “right to die?”
In other words, do we have the right to control our own destiny at the
end of life. The majority of you said yes.
4. Is this life all we can expect? Some of you did say yes, but
by far the majority said no.
5. If you could ask one question answered by God about death and dying,
what
would it be?
Why do some people suffer, why do the wicked prosper, and why do some
die too young?
Will I know those important to me in this life in the next?
Will God be my companion in death and into new life?
These are all worthwhile questions and of course we don’t get postcards
from the other side, so some of them simply go unanswered. My experience is
that we spend a lifetime preparing ourselves for the prospect of death and yet
we never have all the answers and we are never fully prepared. And because we
are taught to believe in a God of justice and love we are most unsettled when
it seems that death comes prematurely.
It turned out that this past week I had two funerals of individuals who
were much loved by their families and tears were shed. Still, both of these
good souls were in their nineties and so the families and friends had the
perspective which came from lives lived long and well. The gratitude we expressed
felt stronger than the grief.
It is when someone dies in unsettling circumstances that our faith is
shaken. The teen killed in a hit-and-run, the soldier who dies in Afghanistan, the teacher who unexpectedly succumbs to infection after
routine surgery, the loving dad who leaves behind a wife and kids because
cancer has taken his life. All these examples have happened in Bowmanville in the last year.
Some of the most difficult funerals I have conducted are for those whose
life was on the horizon rather than in the twilight. Premature births and
stillborn babies cause us to grieve for all that could have been.
All of this reminds us that we need to be open and honest about what the
apostle Paul calls the “sting” of death, even as we affirm new life in Christ.
You have probably travelled along country roads where there are billboards with
cheery messages such as The Wages of Sin Are Death or Prepare to Meet
Your Maker. Don’t you wonder who makes those signs and who puts them up? As
ominous as they sound, it is important to ready ourselves to meet our creator
in the life to come. So we need to talk with our children about death and
prepare for death by making the necessary arrangements for that eventuality. We
don’t need to be morbid, but we can be realistic, with a deep and reassuring
trust that God is with us “til death do us part” and
beyond.
Our other passage today was from the book of Ecclesiastes which in
chapter three contains the well-known words about their being a time for
everything, including death. What we heard this morning begins with birth and the invitation
not to be anxious about the end of life, but instead to live as fully as we can
each day. Rather than hurrying through our days or assuming they will go on
forever we should savour them as a gift from God.
Do not be anxious, Do not be afraid. It was the
message of an angel to Mary as she prepared for Jesus’ birth and it was Jesus’
gift to his loved ones as he left this life. Christ is with us and Christ will
always be with us in life and death and life beyond death, as our statement of
faith says.
John Donne was an English
theologian and poet of another era, and I will leave you with his thoughts.
All humankind is one
volume.
When one person dies, one
chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language,
and every chapter must be so translated.
God employs several
translators.
Some pieces are translated
by age, some by sickness,
some by war,
some by justice.
But God’s hand shall bind
all our scattered leaves together
in that library where every book shall lie open to
another.
Death may separate us for a
time, but there is a promise of eternal hope in Christ. For this we can say, thanks be to God.