A couple of days ago I presided over a funeral for a non-member of my church. This isn't particularly uncommon... there are plenty of people who are not regular church attenders who still see themselves as Christian and want a church funeral. What was different about this was that this man, until recently, had been a member of another church here in town.
My initial conversations with the funeral home director and family made me realize that there was more going on than was sitting on the surface, and so I dug a bit deeper and found out that this man had walked away from the church because they had refused to do a funeral for his sister, whom they had refused because she had not "adequately disciplined" her daughter when she got a divorce. (I really wish I was making this up.)
Fast forward to now. The man had no children, but his nieces and nephews all wanted him to have a funeral in their church. They were all members in good standing. But again, the church said no. He had made his decision to not attend and not donate, and they would not perform the funeral for him. The family explained the situation to their funeral home director, who recommended they call me, and so we set everything up.
The Funeral went well, and I had tons of people falling all over me telling me how great it was that I did the funeral when he wasn't a member of my church. how lovely and welcoming we must be. They were frustrated with their church, but just kind of shrugged and said that they kept going there because of "the values that it teaches."
And with a dollar for my swear jar I'll ask now what I wanted to ask then; "WHAT FUCKING VALUES?"
One of the final straws for me was when the Niece who I planned the funeral with asked if I could focus on the scripture of the Good Samaritan as a theme for the funeral, because this man had been kind, generous, and always willing to go out of his way to help others. That was backed up by story after story that people told when recounting how much they would miss him.
If you don't know the story, the cliffs notes version is that a man was attacked along the road by bandits and left for dead.A priest came by, saw him, and then passed on the other side of the road. Later a Levite (a member of the priestly caste) also came by, also passed by. Finally a Samaritan, an outcast, looked down on by pretty much everyone, came by, helped the man to an inn and treated his wounds, finally leaving, instructing the inn keeper to continue to care for the man and promising to return and pay whatever was owed beyond what he'd already paid.
And there it was, sitting in front of me. The perfect way for me to vent my frustrations. A story about people in need (the grieving family) and religious authority just passing them by, uncaring, until the outcast comes and cares for them in their need. I wanted to pin that church to the wall with it, to show them all how callous, and frankly unchristian, that institution was being.
I didn't for two reasons. For one, I have been trained to be highly suspicious of analogies where it turns out that I am the hero, second and far more importantly, funerals are for grieving and remembering the departed, NOT for the pastor who didn't even know the departed to get on a soap box. I've yelled at far too many other pastors for doing that to be anything but a massive hypocrite if I did it myself.
So I swallowed my rant and did my job, and smiled at all the people who told me just how wonderful it was that my church did what Jesus Christ said all Christians were supposed to do.
I don't know what to do about it. I want to scream it from the mountaintops, nail theses to doors, storm into worship services and say that a church that cannot even get its own head out of its ass to take care of its own members during their times of grief is not teaching any values worth knowing. I want to tell them that the Divine Banquet to come will not have bouncers, will not require a cover, a merely an invitation, and that as the church our job is not to screen those invitations, merely to deliver them.
Tonight is our Ash Wednesday Service. I get to preach about sin. Should be a good one.
No comments:
Post a Comment