Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons

2 What Is a Christian Funeral?

17 2 What Is a Christian Funeral? We need to know what a funeral is, and why have one. At a funeral, many things can happen, it can serve many functions. Some purposes are focused on the social and psychological needs of the family, community, or attendees, some are focused on the existential yearning to confront death and say something. By the era of silence and denial, these various and sometimes conflicting purposes and expectations could be discussed freely, along with intensive debates over the costs of funerals. We refer to the latter as the “consumerist” perspective. But for a Christian funeral, the primary purpose is to worship God. So say at least five generations of clergy writing “how-to” manuals for other clergy about Christian funerals. That there should be funerals is not a point of debate among Christians, especially not one hundred years ago. The debates raged, however, over what kind of funeral, and how to separate Christian practice and beliefs from inherently “pagan” customs. The latter excited wrath and disgust on the part of clergy. This early twentieth-century debate over funerals took shape right along with the solidification of the modern pattern of embalming, viewing , and professionalization of body preparation. Even before the University of Michigan started the first program in mortuary science in the 1920s, the practice of preparing the body had become a business for specialists . Embalming and a formal “viewing” became the ideal (if not the 18 Preaching Death statistical norm) by the 1890s. Earlier, before the Civil War, embalming had been perceived by ordinary persons as gruesome and mutilating. It was the need to embalm the dead soldiers in order to ship them home that began to make this practice seem humane and compassionate (Laderman , 1996, chap. 9ff.). The first fully embalmed on-display individual in American history was President Abraham Lincoln, whose funeral train provided a traveling public viewing experience for thousands of persons. The embalming job was horrible by modern standards, but at the time people were enormously impressed by it. It permitted mourners to say their last good-byes, facing a Lincoln who—while not alive— looked “lifelike” enough so that he resembled the person he would have been in life (Laderman, 1996, 157–63). This, according to American religion historian Laderman, is the true purpose of “viewings,” which are not intended to deny that the person is dead, but are meant to give the visitors a sense of encounter with someone whom they remember. Thus, embalming and viewing met psychological and social needs, customers desired these practices, and so this is how Americans became accustomed to what earlier generations would have found cruel and repulsive. Meanwhile, clergy could depict certain aspects of this funeral pattern, particularly its focus upon the body of the deceased, as “pagan” and objectionable and sub-Christian (Blackwood, 76). Yet what is most remarkable is that a pattern set as the norm by 1890 has continued as the norm, for this is what the phrase “traditional funeral” has meant for the mainstream Americans of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although a standard news story today is of “innovative” and “nontraditional ” funerals, these are set against a universally agreed upon standard, which surprisingly has endured for well over one hundred years. It is well to recall what preceded this professionalized “funeral industry ” model. The realities of “home-based” funerals were still close to many persons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including a firsthand familiarity with what a mess these could be. The family did the body preparation, and the only professional on hand was the pastor , who held the service in the parlor, not at the church. People raised on this pattern were therefore less nostalgic, and more grateful that difficult and unpleasant tasks could be delegated to trained specialists. Some of the risks of a preprofessionalized death ritual were gruesome . A fascinating glimpse of this is found in James Chrissman’s Death What Is a Christian Funeral? 19 and Dying in Central Appalachia, a close look at an area of the country so “backward” that the 1880s practices did not arrive there until after the 1940s. The situation for Appalachians can indeed be understood as the authentic American equivalent of Kübler-Ross’ Swiss village death from her childhood. Chrissman tells how “preprofessional” body preparation was done, and some of the problems typically encountered in the age before...