Easter 5 Year C 2025: Revelation 21:1-6

It is en vogue in mainline protestant Christianity these days to rebrand funerals as “celebrations of life”. We are very uncomfortable talking about - and admitting to - death. With all of the advances in modern medicine, we find it easy to forget that we all will someday die. We use euphemisms to avoid saying that someone died - I still remember getting the call from my grandmother saying, “we lost Grandpa”. If I didn’t know that my grandfather was sick, I might have been tempted to ask Grandma where they’d looked for him.

I was in conversation with some clergy friends about “celebrations of life” and one friend bluntly said, “you know what’s going on the bulletin at my funeral? The Burial of the Dead: Rite Two,” as it says in the Book of Common Prayer. Many of my colleagues have their funerals planned. We plan enough funerals, see enough families struggle to do what their loved one, who didn’t leave any instructions behind, would have wanted in a service, and we have enough opinions on liturgy, scripture, and hymnody, that it is only a matter of time before we just can’t help ourselves. I have mine planned. And it includes today’s text from Revelation, full of Christian hope for all who live in the present time of tears that there will be no more tears. No more death, or even pain. No more mourning or crying. But even more than the comfort of those words, for me the most comforting part is this: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” The closeness that is the presence of God Himself among us. A return to an Eden-like one-ness with God.

Market research company Yougov did a poll a while back where they asked if respondents had ever hoped or prayed that someone would die. I heard about the poll while listening to a podcast where the group of my generational peers were horrified at the idea that one would do so. How cruel, they thought, to pray for someone’s death. I was slightly perplexed at their horror. I pray for people to die quite often. I’ve prayed for people to die as I’ve sat next to their hospice beds, their breaths growing shallower as they prepared to breathe their last. I’m not surprised that the young, healthy people in that podcast did not understand praying for someone’s death. There’s a part of me that is happy for their naivete. 

While at my previous parish, in the midst of Covid, I was the first clergy person to have been fully vaccinated and so I was responsible for emergency pastoral care that needed to be in-person. A parishioner died who had been close with our deacon. I didn’t know Deacon Sally well yet, but when I got the call that the parishioner had died, I knew I needed to call Deacon Sally and let her know that her friend had died. For context, Deacon Sally was about 85 years old and was raised in Georgia, so she still had that soft lilting accent. I prepared myself to relay this difficult news and when she answered the phone I took a deep breath and said something like, “I thought you would want to know that your friend died.” I don’t remember my exact wording, but I do remember Deacon Sally’s response when she said, “Oh praise the Lord, I don’t think her husband thought she was ever going to die!” So it turns out that Deacon Sally didn’t much need the pastoral care that I was so prepared to give. She was unafraid of death, and when she died not long after, her daughter had to look in her calendar and call the person Deacon Sally was scheduled to have lunch with that day. Deacon Sally decided she was going to live every day, and when she died, she died.

I enjoy phone calls with funeral directors. In my experience, they treat death, and the deceased, with an appropriate amount of respect without being frightened. You can’t work so closely with death all the time and be terrified. It would be exhausting. I was officiating a funeral at Wyuka and one of the funeral directors was gracious enough to let me vest in her office. I saw this text as word art on her wall, and couldn’t help but take a picture of it. It read: “The Funeral / Helps confirm the reality and finality of death / Provides a climate for mourning and the expression of grief / Allows the sorrows of one to become the sorrows of many / Is one of the few times love is given and not expected in return / Is a vehicle for the community to pay its respects / Encourages the affirmation of religious faith / Is a celebration of a life that has been lived as well as a sociological statement that a death has occurred.” And as much of a mouthful as “sociological statement” is, and as much as I might theologically quibble with the idea of the “finality of death” being “confirmed”, the sentiment is why I like funeral directors. And why funerals - real funerals - are so important. Because an Episcopal funeral contains a celebration of life within the service but is so much more than a celebration of the life that has ended; it is a celebration of new life in the resurrection. Without holding both the grief and the resurrection together, it is either a hollow party or empty sadness.

The band Train has a song full of tongue-in-cheek death lies. 50 Ways to Say Goodbye is a slight homage to Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave your Lover, because in Train’s song she hasn’t died either. She just broke up with him, but he has decided he’s going to tell his friends she died, because that hurts less than admitting that she’s left him. It includes explanations like “She was caught in a mudslide / Eaten by a lion / Got run over by a crappy purple Scion”. We tell ourselves lies about death. We pretend to take it lightly - like it would really be easier to have our partner die than to be broken up with. There’s a whole genre of movie - “slashers” - where people die in brutal and outlandish ways. In some sense, we use gallows humor as a lighthearted attempt to hide our own fear. But we, as Christians, have nothing to fear in death. Not nothing to grieve - human grief is not un-Christian. But we have nothing to fear. We hold this promise, as seen by John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation, that God is making all things new.

Human beings are full of complex emotions where, in the words of writer Henri Nouwen, “sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.” I oftentimes say at funerals, “we can cry tears of happiness that she was here while we cry tears of sadness that we see her no longer.” I choose those words very purposefully. Because it isn’t “she was here and now she’s gone”. Our loved ones aren’t gone gone, they’re simply gone from our sight. Waiting, with the communion of saints, for our new heavens and new earth. Amen.