A FUNERAL SERMON

Words fail on a day like this. Even though it may come after a long season of illness, even though there may be a sense of its closeness, death always catches us off guard, always comes as a surprise. Death remains that part of the human story that resists our attempts to control, our attempts to understand. When we have to describe its meaning, its effects--we are left speaking in partial phrases and incomplete thoughts. All of our philosophies, theologies, spiritualities, feelings warm and cold only get us so far and then each of us has to confront the fact that we don’t really know how to feel or what to think. Death makes us feel small and inarticulate, powerless and fragile. For all of our sense of grandeur, death reminds us that at the end of the day we are made of dust, and to dust we shall all return.

And this is why being here together today is the best possible way to experience the death of our dear friend. Christianity from the very beginning has been defined by its understanding of death; it is our bedrock principle. Christians do not deny death, do not defy death. We do not deny that death is real, that when a person dies they really die and there is a real experience of loss, of grief, of pain. Death is not an illusion. Neither is death sentimental. We do not stop at phrases like “passing on” or “gone to a better place.” Death is purely unsentimental. It has neither bias for persons nor concern for how much it disturbs us. Christians do not defy death. We do not treat death as something we can cheat or evade; death is not something that we can get out of or sidestep. Christians do not get out of death; we do not pretend at it. We must not deny it, we cannot defy it. 

Death is real. And that is why Christians defeat death. This is why the focal point of our church is the image of Jesus Christ on the Cross. We hold up as the symbol of our entire faith and religion a cross, a thing that produces death. But on that cross hangs the one through whom all things were made, the lord of life. When Jesus was crucified, He truly died. He did not avoid it, he did not pretend at it. He gave Himself to death and when death took Him, death began to die. Christ stripped death of its final say in human life. While death had swallowed up all who came before Him, Jesus was too much for death, He was bigger than death. So death was swallowed up by life. The instrument of death became the symbol of life. Jesus rose from the grave in the Resurrection and gave this power of defeating death to all who would put their confidence in Him. This is the gospel and the heart of Christianity: that death the unstoppable, death the incomprehensible has been brought low and made to submit to Jesus. Jesus taught us how to think about and how finally to understand the meaning of death. Jesus made our experience of death a part of his own life because He loves us; because He loves us He now makes His life to be our life.

Jesus’ story of defeating death was and is our story today. As a faithful Christian to the end, our friend has entered into victory with all the saints. She and Jesus shared in the fight with death, and now they share in the peace that follows. Her race is run and now awaiting her is the crown of glory. She has taken her place among the heroes of faith now to cheer us on and to pray for us that we also might follow and finish well. On a day with so much uncertainty surrounding it, we can have good hope and confidence that this triumph is the truth of her life, because she spent her life preparing to follow Jesus in her death.

It’s been said that where love is given, life is given, and she gave her life and love to many over the course of decades. With each person she loved, she practiced the giving away of herself. When death came, she gave her life again. When Jesus came for her at the end, she gave her life to Him. And all who give their lives to Christ defeat death never to fight it again. Death has become for them the path to life.

And so our dear friend and sister is with Christ now. And because she is with Christ she is with us through Christ. As Christians we confess the communion of saints, the fact that all those in Christ are one in an inseparable family over which death has no ultimate power. So today as we join in Communion, we will unite with Christ, in whom and through whom we will meet again. We will lift up our hearts to the Lord to enter in part into the Kingdom of the victorious faithful where all the saints have gone to their places. This morning is bittersweet for us because we must go back to the fight. We must go back to the struggle and constant practice of giving our love and life in the small and ordinary opportunities for kindness and patience that arise everyday. We must go back to lives in which there is a fresh and painful absence. We must go back to knowing that we too, one day, will have to die. 

In this there is suffering, and for that suffering it is okay to mourn. Let’s mourn together today; let’s mourn together and then remember together the rest of the story: Our friend has gone to be with Christ and now she’s going to be praying for us to follow. So let’s do what she would do: give our lives to Christ in the Eucharist, and then go out and give our lives in the thousand acts of love ahead of us, which God has prepared for us to walk in, which are nothing less than the road to the Resurrection, to reunion with all the saints, and to life and victory in Christ without end.