I shared the eulogy from my mum’s funeral yesterday. As these things are still in the mind, I thought I would write up some thoughts on a Christian funeral. These are in no particular order, they are not especially well formulated, they are general thoughts and reflections.

1. Death is desperately sad and being a Christian mourning the death of another Christian doesn’t change that reality.
2. Death is both natural and unnatural. It is unnatural in the sense that it is not how God originally created the world to be and it is not as the world will one day be. But it is natural in that it is the ordinary way of things in the fallen world and it comes to us all.
3. Christians do not grieve without hope and yet it is a mistake to confuse hope with happiness. Hope changes how the Christian grieves; it doesn’t change that we are grieved. Hope changes how we view what has happened; it doesn’t change the reality of what has happened.
4. A funeral centred on the hope we have in Christ makes all the difference in the world. I do not know how unbelievers cope because without Jesus death is utterly hopeless.
5. The songs and prayers at a Christian funeral take on a deeper, poignant sense. It isn’t that the things we sing and pray in church each week are not truly believed on Sunday (they are), but they are brought into the sharpest relief at a funeral.
6. Perhaps the weirdest thing about a funeral is that it is the only life event where the person at the centre of the affair isn’t there to join in.
7. The person not being there means we are really dealing with body disposal and, in a sense, what happens to it is inconsequential. In another sense, how we treat the body matters because we are body and soul, we are not Gnostic and do not believe we are simply embodied souls.
8. It is my view (see here) that neither burial or cremation is of any consequence. What matters is how our treatment of the body is viewed in the wider culture. What are we saying about the body and this person in light of creation and the gospel? In wider British culture, neither burial nor cremation is viewed as mistreating the body. Both give opportunity to witness to the hope we have in Christ. The question of which is better is, in my view, moot in modern Britain.
9. Funerals of a close relative involve lots of conversations, all essentially saying the same thing repeatedly, where you speak to everyone briefly and simultaneously feel you didn’t really speak to anyone at all. This, it seems, is our culturally determined way to grieve.
10. Funerals of close relatives involve different wings of your life all coming together in the same room in ways they never would under any other circumstances. You can pinpoint different times in your life to different sets of people. It is very jarring to see them all together.
11. The sheer number of people at mum’s funeral spoke to three clear things:
    1. We have a massive family. Both my parents were one of six children, most of whom married, had children and now grandchildren.
    2. Church and mission are clearly key to our family. Both my brother and I were missionary and pastor respectively, the mission organisation my Dad once worked for and with which we have ongoing links was heavily represented, the respective churches to which our family belong were represented. People from Christian networks dominated.
    3. Mum was a people person who had a vast and extensive network of friends. Though Christian friends were a dominant theme, there were plenty of people with whom she worked or non-Christian friends from various parts of her life. Mum loved being with people and the room reflected that.
12. Emotions surrounding funerals are weird. You can move from joy to tears and back to laughter in the blink of an eye in ways you never would under any other circumstances.
13. Suits, ties and dress shoes are some of the most uncomfortable clothing a man can wear and yet cultural expectation demands them. I wish we could agree to change that because these events are uncomfortable enough already.
14. British Christian funerals involve the standard form British church buffet. If you have been to one, you have been to them all.
15. A lot of Christian events, and life events, revolve around food. Christian funerals are no exception. This is a fundamentally good thing.
16. I won’t speak for others, but I find socialising and making a lot of small talk tiring at the best of times. Being in a room full of people, fraught and dealing with with loss, makes it even more tiring. I feel there must be a better way to grieve but I have no idea what it is.
17. A room full of people from different parts of your life is, nevertheless, lovely. It is a measure of how well people loved mum and, in many cases, the rest of us too. It is nice to know.
18. There is probably no worse a testament than a funeral that nobody attends.