Holy Week Reflections II

I have just returned from Good Friday evening service. Our pastor made the interesting point that in a way we are recalling the burial of Christ, but there was really no funeral. Easter morning the grave was empty. No funeral. I must admit that my mind wandered when he referenced “funerals”. As I have noted in a previous blog, funerals have always been a part of my life.

My father was a teaching minister in a rural Texas community. We lived on the extended church property, which included the church, the parochial school, the parsonage and the “teacherage” for the principal of the school. This extended property also had space to raise cows, chickens and vegetables. 100 yards from my house was the site of the cemetery with its many graves. Whenever there was a death in the church community I could accompany my father to the church where he tolled the bell to announce the death to the community. The next day I would watch the gravediggers work hard to get through the hard soil to prepare the grave. Of course, we went to the home of the deceased and viewed the body displayed there in the parlor. After the church service my father again tolled the bell as the hearse carried the coffin to its near-by final resting place. The ritual there always included the “ashes to ashes” and then I would watch as the gravediggers refilled the grave and the funeral director rolled up and carried away the artificial grass he had brought to surround the grave during the graveside rituals.  I must have observed this ritual well over a hundred times before I was a teen.

Later I served in Glendale CA near the massive Forest Lawn Cemetery. Everything there related to death has been sanitized. The grounds are meticulously manicured. The area around the graves is made to “look natural”: There are only discrete grave markers, not distinctive headstones. The organists and solo singers and even the presiding ministers are all professionals who preside at countless funerals. Any covering of the grave is done when the bereaved are nowhere around and they  “come back later” when all is neatly in place.

From there I went to Hong Kong. I learned to go to the street side shops and negotiate hard for the price of a made-to-order wooden casket. Then I negotiated with the coffin bearers to take the deceased to the gravesite. Once we stopped in the middle of the burial area when the bearers just set the coffin down in protest because the gravesite was farther up the hill than they had anticipated. They proceeded only after I had renegotiated the price and paid them their extra fee. I can assure you there was no artificial grass around.

And now I live in Southern California and among those with whom I interact there is almost never a funeral and certainly no open-casket viewing”. The accepted ritual is that there is a Memorial Service at which there is often present the urn containing the ashes of the deceased.  Or, as has been my recent experience, we board a boat and proceed to an appropriate site in the Pacific for an appropriate scattering of ashes into the sea.

 In due time during the service this evening my mind came back to the point, which the pastor made. We affirm that the death of Jesus was very real and the resurrection equally true, so that in the final reckoning it won’t really be that important what the details of our funerals looked like.

Holy Week Reflections I

This week I join millions of Christians in observing what is known as Holy Week, the week before Easter. It is the week Christians pause to recall especially the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. It focuses on the events in the life of Christ from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Sunday, through the agony of scourging and finally crucifixion on Friday. As I write this, I reflect specifically on Maundy Thursday. That strange and uncommon word “Maundy” is based on the Latin verb for  ‘mandate ‘ and recalls Jesus’ new  “mandate” the commandment that we love others as He loved us.  

In the Lutheran tradition in which I was raised Maundy Thursday was the time we young people received our First Communion. It was a big event. In addition to all its spiritual meaning it was for us a rite of passage. It marked our moving from childhood into adolescence. It meant that we were now officially allowed to become members of the church youth group called Junior Walther League. It also meant that for the first time we could participate in the youth sponsored Easter egg hunt, an interesting event enjoyed at that time by all of us who were 13 years of age up into the 20’s. On top of that confirmation meant gifts from our godparents whom we always called baptismal sponsors. Seventy years later I still have that now well-worn King James version of the Bible with its leather cover being twice replaced by craftsmen in Hong Kong!

Since that first time the dozen or so of us nervous teenagers first knelt around that altar in rural Texas I have received Communion (or celebrated the Eucharist or the Mass or The Lord’s Supper) in many places around the world, in magnificent cathedrals, around a cross on a hill overlooking China, in the Garden of Gethsemane, at a memorable New Year’s Eve in Karachi, with US Air Force chaplains and with people in their hospital deathbeds. All of these brought me great blessings at that time and memories which sustain me to this day.

However, as I reflect I also do so with a tinge of regret. When I was first taught about this holy ritual I was taught that very few were eligible to receive it. Only those who possessed the Word in ALL its truth and purity, only those who shared adherence to rather narrowly defined doctrinal principals were deemed appropriate to share this table. This Maundy Thursday I am grateful for the many people and all the meaningful events which have helped me to come ro what I believe to be closer to Christ’s original vision, a vision encompassing a vast array of many tongues, backgrounds, insights and religious labels whom Jesus must have envisioned when He said, “ Eat this bread, drink this wine, all of you. Do this to remember me.”