Telling the truth at funerals

Jessica here, filling in for Jon while he's traveling to Colorado. I write a lot about grief and the life of faith, so it seems fitting to me that I'm stepping in to recommend essays from our current issue of the Century on preaching at funerals.

I'm not an ordained minister, but I've got some experience planning and attending funerals; I buried my mother, all my grandparents, and several other relatives before I was 25, and my best friend when I was 33. My maternal grandmother's funeral was a real challenge for my sister and me. There didn't seem to be a reverent way to honor her that also honored reality. I wish I'd had Roger Owens's "What I left out of my mother's funeral sermon" to encourage me as we wrote her eulogy: "The job of the funeral sermon isn't to capture perfectly the character of the deceased; it's to narrate truthfully the character of God."

If I could do it again, I would talk about the intensity of my grandmother's love for her daughter, my mother, and how the trauma of my mother's short and painful illness and death made her—made all of us—into people we barely recognized. I would talk about her "hurt, pain, and brokenness" but also God's "active, redeeming love....in relationship to our flaws, shortcoming, and sins, which it forgives and heals." Today is my grandmother's birthday, so maybe I'll offer those words for both of us in prayer instead.

Gary Simpson has preached more than 800 funeral sermons, and his "Black men I've mourned" is a moving meditation on how the loss of so many Black men, in particular, has internally shaped him, and how "every life, however blaring or quiet, is a unique expression of the strange coalescence of grace and mercy."

This is a heavy issue of the Century, but a necessary and helpful one for those of us who grieve with the grieving, which at some point falls to each one of us as Christians, ordained or not.

And it includes words of hope. Stephanie Paulsell's Faith Matters column leaves us with encouraging words about our work here at the Century, and the power of reading, noticing, and sharing "the bits of language that capture things we've felt but couldn't articulate." The essays in the Century are often full of such lines for me. I hope I've shared a few today that speak to your own experience.

Thanks for reading!
Jessica Mesman
Associate editor

What I left out of my mother’s funeral sermon

“I chose to keep things sunny, and it felt good to me. But by doing so I rendered a disservice to those gathered.”

by L. Roger Owens

Black men I’ve mourned

“I cannot deny that I am internally shaped by my own grief and loneliness around the loss of Black men close to me.”

by Gary V. Simpson

Underlined words

“Telling the story of this time is something we are all doing together, underlining and transcribing the galvanizing events, the sorrows and losses, the bits of language that capture things we’ve felt but couldn’t articulate.”

by Stephanie Paulsell

Living by the Word for July 17 (Ordinary 16C)

I wonder whether Martha could feel cared for by Jesus.

by Crystal DesVignes
 

Where our deep sadness and the world’s deep hunger meet

“Many days I really wish I had a different vocation—that I didn’t see describing the anatomy of life with cancer as part of what I’m called to do as a theologian.”

by Deanna A. Thompson

The church’s one foundation

“To the sailors who remain,
not confident, but at least
hopeful she isn’t going down,
who still stoke old boilers . . .”

poem by Bonnie Thurston