Yesterday I attended yet another funeral. Funerals, as I have written before, are events that are guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. Indeed, after yesterday’s witness to the bizarre I told my wife that I am resolved that before attending any future funeral I will pop a Xanax. It is either that or not attend or upon attending get up and walk out and leave. I literally can not handle the embarrassment, stupidity, ignorance or sentimental twaddle any longer. If what I’m about to explain is what Christianity has been reduced to I would rather embrace the masculine religion and worship of Odin, Thor or some other pagan deity that hasn’t been castrated then the limp-wristed, lisping, eunuch deity of the Christian clergy that I constantly bump into who are officiating at funerals. I would far prefer a religion that sent me into the afterlife where the officiate lights my funeral pyre then a religion that sends me into the afterlife where the officiate belittles the matters of life and death and heaven and hell.
This member of the clergy perfectly fit the French proverb that, “there are three sexes — Male, Female and Clergy. He opened the service by saying that as the deceased wasn’t religious therefore there wasn’t going to be any ritual or religion at the funeral.
Here are a couple hundred people sitting in set rows, all facing the direction of the speaker, having gathered in honor of the deceased and in support of the grieving family and he says there isn’t going to be any ritual or religion at the funeral? Naturally, I sat their thinking… “Everything going on here is a ritual, — from the grieving widow surrounded and supported by loving family, to the “ministers” presence standing in front of us “speaking,” to the funeral luncheon afterward this whole funeral is ritual you moron.” I freely admit that I don’t understand how anybody, let alone a Christian clergy member, can honestly believe that they can avoid either ritual or religion. One never avoids either ritual or religion. It is never a question of avoiding rituals or religion. It is only a question of which ritual or religion will be embraced. So I had to sit there with this genius Clergy member thinking that if he isn’t explicitly Christian then he will have successfully avoided both religion and ritual. More on this later.
As the service began to unfold the sentimental twaddle began to pile up. I have seen this many times before and all I can observe here is that Americans have managed to turn the funeral into a advertisement for Hallmark’s precious moments. There is no longer any sense of gravitas in the average funeral. There is no longer any sense that at the funeral all in attendance are together standing in the portal between life and death and heaven and hell. There is no longer any sense in the Funeral service that men have come before a God who is not only kind and benevolent but also we have come before a God who is Holy and who is a consuming fire. Funerals no longer elicit the sense of awe associated with the the most important realities of existence but rather they elicit the sense of “playtime” that is associated with Kindergarten finger painting time.
Once we got into the “Christian Message” of the service I got to the “I think I’m going to have a stroke” part of the service. His “message” started w/ quoting part of Malachi 2:10, which says, have we not all one Father Did not one God create us?
From there he said, “This scripture obviously teaches that God is the Father of us all.”
Oh really? Did our Charles “Frickin” Spurgeon ever consider that the pronouns in Malachi 2:10 make a difference? The “We” and “Us” of Mal. 2:10 is significant because the statement here is referring to God’s covenant people. The “We” and “Us” in Malachi 2:10 in context are referring to God as the Father of the covenant people. They are not referring to God being the Father of people regardless of their relation to the covenant.
God is only the Father of people who have Jesus Christ for their elder Brother. God is only the Father of those who trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. All other people are alienated from God and have need to be reconciled. All other people have God as their judge and not their Father.
Our minister then went on to quote part of Gen. 12:3 saying, “all peoples on earth
will be blessed through Jesus.”
From here he implied that obviously everyone here has God as their Father (Mal. 2:10) and is blessed by Jesus (Gen. 12:3). The clear implication is that even though people aren’t religious and don’t have any love for the community of the saints we know that they have God as their father and are Blessed by Jesus. After this statement he talked about how when we all die we all go to heaven.
There was a fleeting comment about God’s righteousness but there was absolutely no connection between God’s righteousness and the need for people to repent and trust Christ. Indeed, I’m not even sure why the fleeting comment regarding Christ’s righteousness was mentioned.
Afterward I caught up with him for a 30 second conversation. I couldn’t handle any longer. I asked him if here were a Christian or Universalist minister. He laughed and said he wasn’t a Universalist. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, perhaps you are a Buddhist, I’m sorry for asking if you were a Universalist.” He said, “Oh no, I am a Christian minister but I am part of a denomination that doesn’t emphasize religion”, and he added that “as the deceased wasn’t religious I was trying to avoid religion.”
Sigh.
I knew that the conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere so I smiled and walked away. I wanted to say to him, “So, you concluded that since the deceased wasn’t religious those listening to you shouldn’t be exposed to the Christian religion either.”
It was clear during the service that this guy was embarrassed by what many people refer to as the “cringe factor” of Christianity. Those things he avoided and which he considered “religious” are the very truths that the Christian “wizards of smart” consider as Christianity’s “Cringe Factor.” He avoided the truths that make people uncomfortable with the Christian faith and then said he was only avoiding religion. He avoided topics like sin, God’s just wrath against sin, God’s Holiness, a bloody cross, propitiation and expiation, and the need for repentance and in my estimation he did all that fully believing that by avoiding all that “religious stuff” it would make it easier for people to accept Christianity.
Pass the sedatives please!
And to finish this piece off allow me to briefly explain why funerals like this drive me insane. A death is one of those few events that has the ability to really unsettle people and to breakup their worldview belief system. At a funeral people are brought face to face with the several realities that many of them spend their whole lives running from. At a funeral people are forced to consider their own mortality. This is especially so for those who are themselves aged. They are sitting there realizing that there death isn’t far off. A funeral forces them to ask once again a question that isn’t merely a exercise in the conundrum, “what will happen to be when I die.” A funeral is the opportunity to answer that question for them in such a way that they might quit running from the obvious answer and embrace Christ. At a funeral there is the potential urgency present in people to actually consider the character of God both as to his Holiness and as to His love.
And at this place … at this event, which has so much potential all we get from clergy today is obscene banalities and gross sentimentalities.
Your experience at the funeral is a microcosm of the state of affairs of the Christian Chruch today. There is very little Biblical teaching enunciated from the pulpit and the Churches are permeated with the cancer of Feminism. The Churches are full of sissies and weak men. At the same time, you have many testosterone-filled women who do not understand their Biblical role in the family, Church, and society. Feminism has de-feminized women and feminized men.
One of the main areas that I struggle with people at Church is the role and application of God’s Law in our lives, churches, and culture. Many of the Christian men have been thoroughlly modernized and secularized that they are incapable of receiving a lot of God’s message in His Word (especially the Old Testament Scriptures).
A genuine Reformation will come once the forces that are enslaving us to secularism (and its many diseases that come from it) are destroyed. May Almighty Yahweh bring it about.
Your article was greatly appreciated and needs to be read by many Christian ministers who don’t seem to realized that, through their calling, they are in a teaching position within the church. They are responsible to God for what they teach during those “teachable moments” of a funeral service where they have a captive audience. every funeral service should be a grand opportunity to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Woe to those who ignore James 3:1.
Most women are complete ninnies; the *progressive* ideas of today’s gov’t policies depend on women’s support. Pretty pathetic that progressives rely on women to push their agenda through! There’s a reason why women used to no be allowed to vote. My hope is that church leaders of all denominations will staunchly hold to promoting traditional roles in the home and keep women from holding the priesthood (their abilities are better used elsewhere).
Did I mention? I am a woman.
Sonia,
I couldn’t agree more.Thank you for the stellar comments.