I am writing these words on the first anniversary of my father's death. Before he died, he suffered for nearly three months with bowel cancer. He had a tumor removed a year earlier, but the cancer reappeared. He was eighty-two, and he did not want further surgery; he was eager to go home to be with his Lord.
As a family of seven children (all married, with an extended family of thirty-five grandchildren and forty-two great-grandchildren), we had, with our mother, come to terms with this reality. We even talked about his funeral; he wanted us to focus on Lord's Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism. I asked him once, as he was dying, "Isn't it hard to be talking about your own funeral?" "Oh, not at all," he said. "I have lived my whole life with the awareness that this is what would happen in the end." Little did we know, as a family, that as we were waiting for our father to die, our mother would go first. She had a heart attack, and her funeral was exactly two weeks before Dad's. They had been married fifty-eight and one-half years. Suddenly they were both gone.
How Do We Do Funerals?
Having been in the ministry for nearly twenty-five years, and having conducted dozens of funerals myself, I had given much thought to this matter of funerals. I had seen a variety of customs surrounding the dying of both active church members and non-churchgoers—first in Alberta, then in Michigan, and now in Ontario. My parents had lived for several years in Holland Christian Homes in Brampton, Ontario. There they had acquired a taste for a new tradition: there would be a private burial service to be followed either immediately or some time later by a memorial service. Our father wanted us to do that for him; we decided that we would do the same for our mother.
What we ended up doing was having a family service (see A Family Funeral Service) at the funeral home, followed immediately by the burial. From the cemetery we went to the church for a worship service, followed by a time to greet our friends in the church's fellowship hall. I recommend that procedure highly. We, of course, had a huge extended family, so there were plenty of people (about a hundred) at the family service in the funeral home. There we sang some hymns, offered prayers, and told one another stories about the person who had died. We laughed and cried together; it was intimate and holy.
We went from the private family service to the cemetery, knowing that the burial was not the end of the process. It was important, in my mind at least, to know that a worship service would still follow. I have stood at many gravesides and felt people wanting to linger. If the graveside is where the day is to end, there is almost no way to make that service a positive experience. As we gathered at the graveside, we knew we still needed to go to the place of worship to praise the God of the parents we loved. Those closing worship services were indeed worship services, not times of mourning. After our mother's funeral, my mother-in-law said to us, "That was so beautiful; now I am ready to go too."
A Call to Rethink
We in the Reformed tradition have not been given much help in preparing for Christian funerals. I often lamented that in my earliest years of ministry.
John Calvin gave the churches of Geneva simple instructions about avoiding superstitions in their burial practices, but he did not say what ought to be done instead. The Reformers objected to prayers while kneeling before the body or chanting in procession to the grave because they saw such practices as belonging to the church of Rome and denying the doctrine of "salvation by grace." So, as often happens when overreaction sets in, these Reformers abolished funeral ceremonies altogether (although Calvin did say that a sermon might be helpful following the burial). The Synod of Dort (1618-19) endorsed this attitude toward funeral services.
It's not surprising, then, that liturgies or prayers or readings at the death of a believer are not found in the Reformed tradition until some three hundred years after the Reformation. Until 1940, the Church Order of the Christian Reformed Church, for example, read "Funeral sermons or funeral services shall not be introduced." In 1940 that Church Order was changed to read, "Funerals are not ecclesiastical, but family affairs, and should be conducted accordingly." It was left to individual taste and local custom to define "accordingly."
In the last decade or two, that thinking has changed. And rightly so. In an age in which youthfulness and vitality are worshiped, and death and dying are covered up in hospitals and funeral homes, the time has come for the church to proclaim louder than ever that "Death has been swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor. 15:54). The church of Jesus Christ has never had a greater opportunity to witness to the world that death is more than an occasion for mourning; that while we grieve, we still have hope. Death is the greatest opportunity we will ever have to give voice to the hope of the resurrection.
If the question of Reformation times was, "How can we avoid the superstitions of the dominant culture?" the question today might be, "How can we celebrate the fact that 'Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep'?" (1 Cor. 15:20). If the multitude of the redeemed in heaven (Rev. 7:9-17) is rejoicing, and we believe our loved ones have joined that mighty chorus, that "great cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1), should we not also be rejoicing?
In our Christian funeral services we do not need to engage in the world's death-denying customs. Instead, we offer the truth of the gospel, that for the Christian the sting of death has been removed (1 Cor. 15:55). The world needs a stronger message, and the church needs an opportunity to testify to the victory Christ has given us. We have a new hope to shout about, a new song to sing!
