Why You Should Think About Your Funeral
(avg. read time: 3–6 mins.)
This is a post that was tangentially inspired by a post earlier this month. The subject related to a song that I would like to be sung at my funeral, which got me thinking about the order of worship for my funeral. That may sound odd to you, especially for a man who is only thirty-four and without a terminal condition besides mortality. But I think it is something that should be more normal as part of remembering our mortality. So let us talk about why you should think about your funeral.
I want to preface this by saying, of course, I presuppose my Christian faith and my readers being Christians. I also acknowledge that any of my readers from traditions with well-established liturgies may have such orders of worship already established for them. If so, I encourage them to share those funerary liturgies to help others think about such matters and to reflect for themselves on what these liturgies convey of how we should think about life and death.
My own order of worship for my funeral is an outcome of one of my favorite classes I ever took, which was a capstone class on Death and Resurrection with Dr. Brian Brewer at Truett Theological Seminary. Since some of our reading naturally concerned Christian funerals in light of our hope of resurrection, our assignments included such things as composing a message for a funeral in response to one of a number of case-studies and putting together an order of worship for our own funerals. In part, this helped us to think about funerals from multiple angles. Since this was a class I took as part of my MDiv. program, it was particularly practical for most people in my degree program who planned to go on to or continue in some kind of formal ministry. For the exceptions like me, it was still a valuable reflective exercise.
It is important for all of us to reckon with our creaturely limitations. One of the most basic such limitations is our mortality. And if the Lord should not return before we die—and none of us can know when he will return—we will inevitably face death. Some of us are confronted with it more dramatically because of conditions we have or situations we have faced. Many, particularly in wealthier countries, tend to have a default assumption that they will die of old age, and so they put off thinking about such matters as attend their death until they reach that point, forgetting that there are any number of things that can upset such expectations. It thus helps to think sooner rather than later about matters like one’s will and testament (though in my case I do not have many things to pass on besides books) or one’s funeral, both in terms of what should be done with one’s corpse and how the funeral should be conducted.
But you may be asking why the funeral, as such, matters to you. After all, in that event you are dead, and you are not attending the funeral. And in case anyone should be confused, it is utterly vain to have your funeral be an attempt to control the narrative of your life. The point, though, is not what people are going to say about you.
There are two important points to remember. One, while your funeral does have you in a prominent position, the people who attend will attend because of their connection with you, something will be said about your life, and there may be pictures of you on display, the funeral is not actually about you. At least, if you are a Christian, your funeral should not be about you. If you share the Christian hope, your funeral is about marking the end of your story to that point but the end of your story altogether. You share the promise of hope with those still living. And your story connects not only with theirs, but it also connects with the larger story conveyed to us in Scripture, hence the call to make the gospel story our story. Your funeral ought to proclaim what defined your life, but it should not be focused merely on your life in recognition of the larger story it is part of.
Two, your funeral may be about committing your body to the earth—or however else it is passed on—and it may be a ritual of closure related to your death, but the funeral is not for the dead; it is for the living. Again, you are not attending your funeral, and since you are dead, you are not actively participating in it either. Whatever message is given is not given to the unhearing corpse; it is given to the living attendants. The living should thus receive a message that fits with your story that connects with the larger story you and they are part of. Your funeral should functionally be the final message you want them to hear from you until you are reunited at the resurrection.
Grief and mourning are expected responses to death. But we as Christians are to mourn as those who have hope that death cannot resist, squelch, or take from us. We have hope for the divine life that utterly conquers death, and for those who die before the eschaton, that hope also entails resurrection from the dead. This is the goal of our union with Christ, so that this union can be enacted everlastingly in the new creation when God’s kingdom will have come on earth as it is in heaven, and he will be all in all. Our mourning should be done accordingly, and our funerals ought to proclaim this message. We ought to think about how our life, our death, and our funeral conveys the story we claim to define us.
Since my funeral order of worship is for those responsible for committing me to the earth, whoever that will be, I will not be sharing it in its entirety here. I want my funeral to be suffused with Scripture. The featured quote, though not necessarily the text proclaimed in the homily, is Phil 3:8–12, a text I addressed at the previously noted link. Other scriptures will be referenced at the opening, in the reading before the homily, the homily itself, and at the graveside (where that Scripture should be John 11:23–26). I have opening music, a processional hymn, a middle hymn before the obituary, and a closing hymn after the sermon (which is where “In Christ Alone” comes in as a fine summary of the gospel story). The songs are not necessarily my favorite hymns (one of them, “At the Feet of Jesus,” I have never even sung in any worship service), but each one conveys part of a message I hope to leave with the living in the event of my funeral. As a special request, I have asked for my casket to be open throughout the service in the sanctuary and for it to be oriented facing the baptistery or cross. I have also included an extra special *demand* that there is to be no playing or singing of “I Can Only Imagine” at any point in the prelude, service, or any other time within twenty-four hours on either side thereof.