Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash
I attended a funeral last week, which was a celebration of and a wonderful send-off for a much-loved wife, mother and grandma.
The church was unfamiliar to me, and I wasn't sure what to expect from the service but this prayer caught my attention. “Lord, help us to live life prepared for death” (or something along those lines; it didn’t feel respectful to take out my phone and make a note of the exact words).
The minister prayed this line near the beginning of the service, and the words stuck with me throughout, as we heard tributes from loved ones, and prayers of thanksgiving for a life well lived and well loved.
I wrote a blog post last new year (here) on the subject of befriending one’s death, and I’m thinking on similar themes again. (To me it seems only appropriate to think about death at the dawning of a new year.) But this time it’s very much in the light of the celebration of a long life walked with God.
I want to make the minister’s prayer my prayer: I want to live life in the shadow of death, not because I’m morbid or hastening the event! I want to learn to live a life which includes a healthy and realistic expectation and view of death. The minister at this particular funeral encouraged the congregants that this death was not a tragedy: it was the end of a life full of love and family, of enjoyment and adventure, in this case a long life, although actually one where the final years were far from easy. What is true of every life lived on this earth is that it will come to an end, sooner or later. (Some of us can see and feel our bodies wearing out before our very eyes!) What will that end be like for us, and for those who will attend our funeral?
The reason for the sense of hope at this funeral was a life walked with God: faith has a way of helping us to raise our gaze to a farther horizon, to add dimensions to our understanding of what life is and where life goes. Readings at this funeral were about hope in death: readings from the Bible about God’s promises of life ongoing; of all things made new, all things made whole. (Psalm 116, Revelation 21)
A comment made about the deceased was that even when she questioned her Christian convictions, she found she didn’t have the faith to not believe. In other words, it was too big a leap to think that this material world, this 70, 80, maybe 90 years on the planet is all there is. To me as well, that seems too far-fetched, too lacking in credibility.
The way our spirits are built for hope, the way we long for peace and justice and reconciliation, the human project of searching for meaning, all point to the truth I read in the Bible. As the Teacher put it: “He has put eternity in our hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). One day all things will be restored to their design: people will live in peace, and pain and death will be no more. The God of the Bible promises this end.
Some people talk of a plausibility gap when asked to believe in the God of the Bible, in the hope of resurrection to eternal life, in Jesus the God-man who died to conquer the final enemy, death. I find that the more I think about it (and the more funerals I attend) the more I find a plausibility gap when asked to believe that this life is all there is, and that there is no eternal hope. Now that really does take a leap of faith.
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