A Service of Witness to the Resurrection

“When is a Funeral not a Funeral? When it is an Easter Service!”

Anna Ancher, A Funeral, 1891, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark.

(I didn’t mean to have a series on funerals, but apparently here’s part 2 on funerals)

I had the thought after last week’s post that a funeral is too focused on the Resurrection of Jesus to be a funeral. I started to trace that and see if that was true. I believe that it holds for the Anglican Burial Rite that I discussed at length in the last post, and so I will not belabor you with a repetition. I thought about running through the Catholic Burial Mass, but then I got a thoughtful reply on social media about how a funeral is more similar to an Easter service than a Holy Saturday service. (More on that later)

A Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastor wrote that he understands my perspective and finds it helpful to think of death as Holy Saturday with the hope of Resurrection Sunday. We witness the deceased's resurrection into eternal rest while grieving their departure. Our Christian witness embraces both sorrow and joy, grief and hope. It's essential to empathize with the grieving and avoid dismissing their sorrow with platitudes. Balancing this is a key pastoral challenge.

With the pastor’s comment in mind, I wanted to look at the rite as offered by the Book of Common Worship. I had recently attended a Presbyterian funeral, and it was nothing like the one the pastor was describing. It did not hold the tension between the sorrow of Holy Saturday and joy of Easter. I know that the Book of Common Worship is not prescriptive, while also knowing that pastors are turning to it for guidance or to follow verbatim.

Easter Service or Funeral Service?

What service does the following prayer belong to?

By his death on the cross
you revealed that your love has no limit.
By raising him from death
you conquered the last enemy,
crushed all evil powers,
and gave new life to the world.
In his victory
you comfort us with the hope of eternal life,
and assure us that neither death nor life,
nor things present nor things to come,
can separate us from your love in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Risen and ascended, Christ is alive forevermore,
and by the power of the Holy Spirit is with us always.
Reigning with you in glory,
Christ intercedes for us,
our high priest and our advocate.

Before I answer, there is a reason I read the prayer. I talked to another scholar, who is trying to answer the question, "How have contemporary worship practices, as expressed in evangelical funerals, reshaped the discourse, rituals, and theological narratives of evangelical eschatology," about whether they are finding connections between Easter services and Funerals. They said that they do not see many Paschal references in funerals but does see a pervasive use of worship and throne room language. That was enough to send me looking for a Book of Common Worship and think about the way they speak at a funeral as another way to think about how grief might be missing in the funeral.

The prayer above is part of the Great Thanksgiving, given during the preparation for the Lord’s Table during the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, which is what the PCUSA calls their funeral service. The name of the service pointed me towards a connection, and so did the prayer. So, let’s investigate to see if I am totally wrong.

The General Layout

We’re going to play a guessing game. I am going to provide a basic outline with some of the readings and prayers of the PCUSA’s Easter Service and their Funeral Service. I want you to see if you can figure out which is which.

Service A

Scripture Sentences

1 Rom. 15:13
May the God of hope
fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope
by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer

Eternal God,
our help in every time of trouble,
send your Holy Spirit to comfort and strengthen us,
that we may have hope of life eternal
and trust in your goodness and mercy,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen

Hymn

(Any Appropriate Hymn)

Psalm

(Any Appropriate Psalm with Most Laments and all Imprecatory Psalms Excluded)

Reading(s) from Scripture

Examples: Rom. 5:1-11, Rom. 6:3-9, Rom. 8:14-23, 1John 3:1-3

Prayer

Lord’s Prayer

Lord’s Supper

Blessing

The Lord bless us,
defend us from all evil,
and bring us to everlasting life.
Amen.

Service B

Prayer of Adoration

Prayer of Confession

Great Thanksgiving

Hymn

(Any Appropriate Hymn)

Psalm

(Any Appropriate Psalm with Most Laments and all Imprecatory Psalms Excluded)

Lord’s Prayer

Lord’s Supper

Blessing

Show us the joy and possibility in darkness that the dark may be for us and for the world the cradle of a new dawning.
or
Know that you are never alone
The One who Created you walks with you
Every step, every stumble, every fall
The presence of God, with every breath
The love of God, always, always, forever.

What Makes a Good Funeral?

Before we answer the question, let’s think about what makes a good funeral. In their article, “‘Funerals aren’t nice but it couldn’t have been nicer’. The makings of a good funeral,” authors Margaret Holloway, Susan Adamson, Vassos Argyrou, Peter Draper & Daniel Mariau make the observation that There is growing comment in both academic and popular writing about the shape and content of funerals today, with general agreement that we are seeing marked changes with a growing trend towards secularization and personalization.” In their study of 46 funerals in the north of England, they found that there was “considerable evidence of drawing on religious tradition and specific beliefs to locate personal meaning-making.” Our first criteria for a funeral to be good is that it is personally meaningful. “Thus, funerals today are presented as serving the needs of the bereaved, rather than commending the departed; as celebrations of the life lived rather than symbolically marking the passing on; as personally customized tributes rather than an acknowledgement of the individual existence within a wider existential frame for understanding life and death.”

The move to personalization “began with a reaction in the 1980s against the impersonal way in which many religious funerals were conducted (Littlewood, 1992 Littlewood, J. 1992. Aspects of grief. Bereavement in adult life, London: Routledge. ) and the meaninglessness of the Christian liturgy for the majority of mourners (Bowman, 1975 Bowman, L. 1975. The American funeral, Westport, CT: Greenwood. ).” The main reason for the feeling that religious funerals are meaningless is due to the movement of a lot of people away from the Church. The researchers continue, “However, instead of meaning-taking derived from handed-down beliefs, forms and rituals, this study found a process of meaning-seeking and creating, which results in meaning-taking only after each unique funeral has been created and taken place. It is this active participation by all actors in the co-creation and enacting of the funeral as a meaningful event.” That ties in with the second reason for personalization, the funeral is not giving what the people want from a funeral. From their research, we can say that a good funeral is one that is full of meaning for the mourners and for the deceased.

Another set of researchers developed a study trying to understand how religiosity influences attitudes towards funerals and satisfaction in the service. They looked at the spiritual focus of the service, how the service flowed, whether it had opportunities to process grief and receive support from others, whether or not the service gave the mourners the ability to think about the deceased and their own mortality, and if the funeral made the death feel more real and was a fitting conclusion to a life. They found that “the most important feature of funeral satisfaction” was the “social negotiation of emotion, the confirmation of one another’s emotions” that happened during the service. They also found that people compared funerals against each other and that people judged funerals against their bias towards or against funeral practices.

Thomas Lynch, in his article, “The Good Funeral and the Empty Tomb” lists four essentials for a good funeral. The first is that the body has to be there. The dead have to be present. the second is that “there must be those to whom the death matters.” Thirdly, “there must be some narrative, some effort towards an answer, however provisional, of those signature human questions about what death means for both the one who has died and those to whom it matters.” It is not that there has to be an explanation, but there needs to be a framework given. Fourthly, “it must accomplish the disposition of the dead.” The dead need to be “buried, burned, entombed, enshrined, or scattered,” or whatever their final repose is during the funeral.

Distilling down the findings, we find the following criteria for a good funeral:

1. It is full of meaning for the mourners

2. It feels like what the deceased would have wanted

3. It flowed well, without awkward transitions or silences, and without weird shifts in mood.

4. There was an opportunity to grieve and share grief.

5. There was an opportunity to contemplate one’s own death.

6. It felt like the other funerals that they had attended (and avoided the parts of the funerals they attended that they did not like).

Is the Witness to the Resurrection a Good Funeral?

First, let’s answer the unanswered question. Service A is the Witness to the Resurrection service and Service B is the Easter service. Hopefully you figured that out, but I also hope that you got it wrong. Let’s look back at Service A and stack it up against our criteria.

I believe that the funeral hits the first three criteria and possibly the last three, though I’m more hesitant on points four and five. If a PCUSA member went to a funeral that followed the rite, they would feel at home. The funeral follows a very similar structure to the regular PCUSA services with only some of the Scripture being read being different, depending on the lectionary. And if the attendees had mostly gone to PCUSA, criteria six would have been met. If the deceased was part of a PCUSA congregation and had meaningful experiences at a PCUSA funeral, then point two would be fulfilled.

Points four and five are harder to say are fulfilled. Let’s look a little deeper into the PCUSA funeral with these two points in mind.

• The service starts with reminders of baptism in the opening words and in the first scripture readings.

• The Resurrection is brought up in the first Scripture readings

• Comfort is brought up in the first Scripture readings

• The first opportunity for the officiant to name the deceased is in the 3^rd optional prayer right before confession and after the readings of scripture. (Of course, I would guess that they are named early due to the officiant going off script.)

• The service then turns to confession of sin and declaration of assured salvation

• After the congregation is assured of their salvation, there are prayers of thanksgiving, supplication, and intercession. (This is where the person is named for the second time)

• After supplication, the service moves to the Lord’s Supper, which has a prayer that names the person for the third and last time.

There are opportunities to grief, but as soon as death is mentioned resurrection or hope is mentioned in the next breath. There are more moments to consider your (and the deceased) sinfulness than there are carved out spaces to grieve death. The service is also centered around Christ instead of the deceased. Jesus is mentioned over 30 times in the service and the deceased is explicitly mentioned 3 times, though there is room to talk about the deceased in the sermon\homily.

The service fits most of the criteria and should be labeled a good funeral if no weight or special treatment is giving to any of the points. However, I think we should give some weight to points four and five and less to the others. The studies linked above weighted their results similarly. However, I am operating from the hypothesis that a funeral exists to facilitate the grief of the mourners, while offering a little bit of comfort and hope, inside of a framework that is familiar and formative. The Witness to the Resurrection service does not meet that reasoning and I would say, that as it is written, it is not a good funeral.

Should a Funeral be an Easter Service?

I am arguing against tradition here while trying to stay inside of tradition. I want to preserve the idea that the Resurrection of the Dead is one of the central doctrines of the Christian faith. I want to continue to confess the mystery of the faith, that:

Christ Has Died
Christ Has Risen
Christ Will Come Again

I want to celebrate Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection while thinking about the journey of the Christian from baptism to the grave and eventually to resurrection. I want to bring back the graveyards connected to the church to make that journey feel real and I want to wait for the Eschaton before calling anything completed or the way that it is supposed to be. Really, what I want is distinction between services. Not every service has to be an Easter Celebration. We need times to mourn and grieve over death, and the contemporary burial rites infringe on mourning due to their emphasis on Christ’s conquering of sin and death.

The Witness to the Resurrection service, with its readings focusing on the Resurrection are more appropriate for an Easter service, with some of the prayers for the specific person omitted. The readings focus on Christ defeating the grave and death, rising from the Dead, and resurrecting the dead. These are Easter themes. The service is not a witness to the death of a beloved member of our lives, as it primarily focuses on the death of Christ and ends with the Eucharistic Celebration inviting everyone into the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

We Should Speak Differently about the Gospel at a Funeral

I recently posted on a social media site’s group for worship leaders and got some helpful feedback. One pastor wrote that they “would never omit an opportunity for the gospel of the atoning work of Christ, and its implications for our future. Some people never hear a pastor except when they go to funerals. I certainly want the people at my funeral to hear the gospel hope by which I live and die and will be reborn.” I am not arguing for a Gospel-less funeral. I am arguing that the Gospel is phrased differently at a funeral.

The Good News at a funeral is that God, Creator and Maker of All, became Incarnate and suffered with humanity. And God, through the ministries of Christ and the Holy Spirit, is Immanuel, God with Us. God is not above or against us in our times of grief but is beside us. A funeral is a moment where we are vulnerable and weak, bearing our grief with others publicly and privately. And God is there with us. The God, who is with us, is also not a God who has not known sorrow and death. Yes, Jesus also knows resurrection, but that does not need to be emphasized at a funeral.

The funeral that I am speaking of does not remove the worries of the quoted pastor above. I am inviting those who have not heard the full Gospel a different way towards a full relationship with God and want those who only hear about God at funerals to hear of a God who loves the world so much that a member of the Trinity became human to dwell with us and continues to do so.

We Should Worship Differently at a Funeral

A different worship leader posted that, “I think it's fascinating to consider the various ways that churches are therapeutic in our current context. Because the primary emotive space for most modern churches is worship music - I've found that this ritual/practice carries over into funerals.” And if you have been reading my Substack, you would know that I agree. Since I think that is the case, then our funeral songs need to give words and language that engages grief in a Christian way which does not truncate our emotions.

There might be songs that we are, in our denominational contexts, comfortable singing. Some of those are probably not appropriate to sing at a funeral. Songs that focus on the triumph of Christ over death and the grave are not appropriate, in my opinion. Singing a song like “Graves into Gardens” or “Death is Defeated” sound inauthentic and false. Death, at this particular moment, is in front of us. The theologically astute might know that these songs are talking about capital “D” Death and not lower case “d” death and only addressing the fact that Death has lost its ultimate meaning due to the Resurrection. But does that allow for grief?

There are songs that would be contextually better and worse to sing, depending on the service. And that is okay. We should be comfortable with having distinct services for distinct moments in the life of the Church. We already do in liturgical churches that celebrate Lent and Advent. They have a different feel, or they should. We should have funeral hymns that take their cues from Advent and Lenten hymns that emphasis the “not yet” of Death being conquered and the Messiah coming to save us. Those hymns are still hopeful and full of the Gospel yet feel different and give the congregation a way to speak about grief and longing that the Easter hymns do not.

Physically, I feel like the space would feel different for a funeral, if like for Lent, we put a veil over the alter, minimized or did not light the Paschal candle, and made our sanctuary feel like death was present in the sanctuary. The sanctuary should be lit darker, giving the space a more solemn feel. The Eucharistic table might not even be present or off to the side, de-emphasizing the Resurrection. The physical changes would symbolize a disruption to the normalcy of the service and our worship.

We already have a service that is more appropriately approximated for a funeral and that is Holy Saturday.

Concluding Thoughts:

Am I off-base? Should we focus on the Easter joy and hope in our funerals, holding the joy in tension with our grief? Or should we have joyless, but hopeful and mournful, funerals in the Church? What would we lose? What would we gain? I have thoughts on the answers for those questions and will explore them more next week, but I want your thoughts.

Join me for part three of my series on funerals next week as I talk about how Holy Saturday and the liturgical service that celebrates and embraces our grief.