"So That You May Not Grieve As Others" – Preaching The Funeral Sermon
Suppose for a moment that someone asked you to rank the most important things you do as a minister. No doubt, nine out of ten pastors would list preaching funerals among their top three most important pastoral tasks. A funerals, or in some cases a memorial service, is the place where the Christian faith meets life's most grievous ordeal. Although we may speak about the victory in Jesus and the joy of resurrection, the experience of a loved one's death propels many people to the boundaries of anguish. Death creates emotions that many people rarely nurture and instead normally avoid. Yet, everyone eventually faces this reality of death. For human beings there is no other alternative. The power of death hangs over all our heads like Damocles' sword. Death stings us with the barbs of anxiety from the time we are old enough to understand our own mortality. Thus, via its preachers, the church needs to offer words of faith and hope for those stung by death.
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People who attend funerals are generally good listeners. This distinctive fact about funeral congregations differentiates them from usual Sunday morning congregations. Eugene Lowry's valuable as well as practical book on preaching, The Homiletical Plot (Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), addresses five stages of narrative format preaching with the first stage identified as the "upsetting [the listener's] equilibrium." Lowry suggests that effective preaching creates an "itch" of ambiguity or curiosity that the balance of sermon serves to scratch. This sermonic strategy focuses an otherwise distracted congregation.
However, on the occasion of a funeral sermon the preacher need not trifle with upsetting the equilibrium. The occurrence of death has already done this for the congregation, and this circumstance sets funeral preaching apart from a Sunday morning sermon. The presence of a body or simply the instance of death creates more than enough ambiguity for those present. Funeral attendees pay rapt attention. Death is the big ambiguity with which all humans constantly struggle. Thus, a funeral preacher has at least this one luxury: Those gathered at a funeral are ready to listen.
Christian funerals address what the Christian faith has to say about "the sting of death" (1 Corinthians 15:55). The funeral addresses both the specific circumstance and the individual whose death occasions the service. The funeral also speaks a wide-ranging word of faith to those assembled. This word of faith is particularly essential for those stricken by either the death of a loved one or a crisis of meaning provoked by death. Thus, a Christian funeral service addresses the general human circumstance of human finitude and the issues that death brings to the surface concerning the nature of human existence.
At the same time, however, the Christian funeral also attends to the death of a specific and unique individual. One of the things I have noted over the years is a characteristic imbalance of a funeral or memorial service. We hold in tension the specific person for whom we celebrate the funeral with the universal good news of the gospel that necessarily must be part of any service of death and resurrection. Thus we have both a specific person and the proclamation of the broad faith for which a congregation gathers.