Why Christians Must Gather at Times of Death

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend over the past year. The families of the departed have started to insist on no visitations, no funerals, and no memorials. Perhaps it has something to do with anxiety and fear surrounding the COVID virus. Perhaps it has something to do with the modesty of the generation that’s burying the saints who are passing away. Perhaps, through lack of teaching, we’ve simply forgotten why we have funerals and public rites at the church at the time of death. I’ve heard rumor that funeral homes have been recommending to families that churches and their rites should be avoided because the funeral home won’t be able to ensure COVID safe practices. If true, which I’m not convinced it is, that kind of subtle undermining of the church’s purpose and mission points to how far we’ve fallen as a society that would rather ignore death than come to terms with it. Whatever the reason, people who have grown up in or around the church and their children are fleeing from the rites for the dead.

I can understand their desire if the funeral rites aggrandized and glorified the departed. I know so-called “celebrations of life” do exactly that. But Christian funerals don’t lie about the departed. They tell the truth about the departed’s sin. More importantly, they tell the truth about the departed’s salvation. They publicly proclaim to friends, family, and the whole world that this person who no longer has breath has not been overcome by death. He or she has escaped the bitter fear of annihilation and torments in the hereafter. Why? Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death” (John 8:51). This means the Christian will neither know nor feel the despair in that last breath of being swallowed up by black uncertainty of what comes next.

The Lord Jesus is risen. The dark and terrible consumer of this world has itself been consumed by life, our Lord’s resurrection life! “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:8-11).

It’s been said that death has been sanitized out of our lives. It’s been said that the extremely aged and dying are quietly put away so as not to impinge on our self centered hedonism. But this active ignoring of death’s reality won’t prepare us for that moment when we are about to close our eyes for the last time. It won’t prepare us for that time when our loved one’s death is unavoidable to the point that I’m there and have to watch the life that brought be joy end.

Christianity doesn’t ignore death. It provides no opiate for the masses in that regard. Rather it takes the sting from death and robs it of its power to make us either live in denial or fear. Because Christ has died, ending the debt of sin the whole human race owed God, death is not the inevitable conclusion to our story. St. Paul preaches it elegantly to the Corinthians when he writes, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:56-57).

Jesus victory over sin and it’s end in death is by no means intuitively discerned. It’s not something that we wake up knowing as if by magic. It must be preached and preached repeatedly lest the devil recapture us in fear of death. Our eyes bear witness to the fact. See the lengths your neighbors are going to avoid death as if it still has its teeth! They don’t know that Jesus has come to “deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15).

The gathering around the body of the family in the moments after the departed has breathed his or her last is an opportunity to for Jesus to break the devil’s chains of fear. Call your pastor and tell him to come. Viewing the body at a wake, taking the time to grieve, and remembering Christ’s resurrection hope helps to settle our souls, not to disturb them. Don’t flee from godly grief. Gathering for the funeral and burial are not times to aggrandize or tell pleasant lies about the departed. This is the time when Jesus’ voice resounds with power to show both where sin leads and how he has overcome it for the saint now resting from his or her labor. This is the time for Jesus to teach us the high Christian art of hope.

Martin Chemnitz, one of the great and faithful fathers of the Lutheran Church writes this about why Christians gather. “For although they believe and know that the departed believers have already gone to their rest, nevertheless, because in the face of death there is great consternation and perturbation of the human mind, since the vision of the diviner wrath and the terror of divine judgment then touches and affects us more closely, and as it were dwells before our eyes, therefore we flee to God, seeking consolation in the Word and the Sacraments by reading, hearing, meditating, praying, believing, and hoping” (Examin, Part III, 268).

Don’t be afraid. Speak openly about death and what it means in and with Christ. Plan your funerals with Christ’s resurrection in mind. Tell your kids and relatives that you intend that they are comforted not by empty, pithy sentimentalities but by Christ when you die. Tell them to sing the hymns. Tell them to confess the creed. Tell them to listen to the pastor’s sermon and believe it. This is your last confession, dear saint. Make sure that it springs from your saving faith in Jesus’ name.

Pr. A. Brian Flamme