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Organ music from Holy Trinity Cathedral,
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Five Funerals and God
The Rt Rev’d Richard Randerson, Dean
25th June 2006
This week the staff have had five funerals. I find such times very moving. One engages with a family at the deepest of levels, shares their grief, their reflections over the years with the one who has died, their anxiety about the future.
One finds many levels of belief and unbelief, although everybody has a belief of some sort. In cases where Christian faith has deep roots, a funeral is a very moving occasion and one of immense strength to all who gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to be uplifted by God’s presence.
At other times one is told “he/she wasn’t religious, you know”, which is usually a message not to bombard us with a whole lot of “church talk”. I don’t take such messages as negative, but see them more as a request to frame the funeral in a way that respects the views of the deceased.
Yet while people may not frame things in religious language, the issues they deal with are religious in the sense of reflecting those things which are ultimately important in life and death.
- in the case of a tragic death of a child or young person, whether from illness or accident, we are often asking WHY? We may be very angry with God whom we may hold responsible.
- we are coping with deep grief
- the death raises questions about the meaning and purpose of life
- we are anxious about the future
- we want to know in whom or in what can we trust?
- more positively, we affirm the importance of such qualities as love, compassion, sacrifice and service, such as were seen in the life of the one who has died.
The challenge is how to address such issues in a way that doesn’t turn people off because “the preacher is spouting religion at us”. Sometimes the challenge is posed in a more explicit way where, in one case recently, a family member said to me “I am an atheist, you know”. A funeral interview is not a time to get involved in a debate about the existence of God, but if one asks “What sort of God don’t you believe in?”, often the answer is “I can’t believe in God as a supernatural being”. In fact the terms atheist and agnostic are usually used in connection with this image of God.
Such an image is, of course, the traditional one. The scriptures, our liturgies, hymns and prayers are all couched in terms of our addressing an anthropomorphic God – one who hears, replies, does things, or doesn’t, just as we would expect of another human being. In dealing with mystery we are dealing with something that defies expression in human terms, yet human terms are the only ones at our disposal.
I participate in liturgy in a manner that is very comfortable with anthropomorphic language, yet without thinking there is literally some Being who is listening and who will respond like a human being will. I experience prayer and worship as an engagement with the transcendent dimension of life, with Spirit, with that which is wholly Other, or the ground of our being, to use phrases which theologians and mystics have used over the centuries. And I experience such engagement as deeply personal, even though I don’t have a sense of a Person who lies the other side of it.
Let me emphasise again that we are dealing here with images. It is the same God we encounter. For many the traditional image of God as a Being is very powerful. Others might find a different image works better for them. The image that works for me is one of Spirit. Spirit is a word we use in many contexts. We talk of team spirit, or school spirit, or national spirit. But what is that spirit? Does it have a separate existence? Is it an entity in its own right? Or does it come into play when enough people get together to feel it? I think the latter.
We may think of love in exactly the same way. Love exists between two people, or in a family or whanau, or between a whole group of people. But does it have a separate existence all of its own? Is it a commodity in its own right? Or does it only exist when it has happening between people? Again, I think the latter.
Now with both spirit and with love, we know the power of them, we can testify to their existence as real things, even if not visible like a person or an object is visible. And when the Bible says God is Love, or God is Spirit, could this not be the category in which we think? A different image for God, a God whom we experience as personal but in categories of Spirit rather than Person.
Again let me emphasise that we are dealing here with images of God. To find an image that works for us is the key thing. Just this week I was in conversation with a man with a terminal condition who said he was not religious, but was very comfortable with the idea of God as Spirit, an ever-present spirit of love that meant that he could face death without feeling alone.
Talk of mystery and transcendence can seem very vague. And there can be both positive spirit and negative spirit. For us the nature of God-as-Spirit, or God-as-Person, has been shown to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ disciples referred to him as Son of God because in him they encountered those realities that lie at the heart of human existence, such things as
- a love that will never abandon us
- a feeling of acceptance, of reconciliation with God, ourself, and with each other
- a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves so that we know that our life has meaning in relationship with all of Creation
- and ultimately that we can trust this God, whether Person or Spirit, that lies at the heart of this universal web of relationships, no matter what situation we are in.
Today’s Gospel, Mark 4.35-41, recounts the story of Jesus asleep in the boat on Galilee as a storm threatened to sink the little craft. When his disciples woke him in panic, Jesus rose and rebuked the waves so that they were still, and the lives of all on board were safe.
It is a story that has many symbols. Waves were often seen as a symbol of the forces of evil, and the boat can be likened to the Ark of the Church, so that Jesus becomes the Saviour of the Church when its little band is threatened by the forces of evil. It is also a story that has a strong personal interpretation, that when some of the darker realities of life, such as illness, pain, depression, loneliness or death threaten to overwhelm us, Jesus is there as the one whose healing power sustains us.
So then in life and in death, in sorrow and in joy, and whether we understand God in images of Person or of Spirit, our faith is in the presence of a God who will not let us go, and hence whether we travel in light or in shadow, we know that we are never alone.
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