Let's Sit Together       

        During my forty years in pastoral ministry, I presided over hundreds of funerals.  Some of them were celebrations of long lives well lived, and some of them were tragic beyond all measure – an eight year old who died from asthma, several suicides, a young father of two killed hunting, a stillborn baby. 

        Of all the funerals I led, one stands out as the saddest.  The local funeral director, a member of my congregation, asked me to lead a service for an elderly woman who had died in a nursing home in a city a hundred miles away.  She had moved many years before from the rural area where we lived and now, in the funeral director’s words, was “coming home to rest.”  She was not a member of my congregation, but had belonged to another church in the community that was between pastors.  Her family was no longer local, either, and I would not be able to meet with them before the graveside service to have any conversation or do any planning.  In those instances, the best any pastor can do is “read the service”  -- Scripture and prayers from our Book of Worship. 

The day for the funeral dawned grey, cold, and rainy.  I drove to the church cemetery for the funeral.  The funeral staff had, as usual, set up a tent over the gravesite and placed chairs for mourners.  When I arrived, there were two mourners in the chairs.  I asked the funeral director if he expected more people. He did not.  I introduced myself to the two mourners and, at the appointed hour, moved to the head of the casket to read the service.  

 

At that point, the funeral about to begin, the funeral director and his wife and their assistant – all of whom were members of my church – came and sat with the two elderly women mourners.  I was stunned by their act of compassion.

 

I read the service, made a few generic remarks about the hope we have in Christ for eternal life, pronounced the benediction, and moved to shake the hands of the two mourners and tell them how sorry I was for their loss.  They left quickly.

 

Whoever that woman was, she had a life.  She knew joys and sorrows. She had loved and was loved.  At the end, on the dreariest of dreary days, only two elderly women were left to celebrate that long life, along with a hired gun of a pastor who knew none of the details.

 

But Bart and Margaret and Frank – the funeral home staff – came to sit with those two mourners.  They didn’t know their stories either, except that having done hundreds of funerals they knew more than anyone about mourning and loss and grief.

 

Two days after the election, it feels like a cold, rainy day that will never end.  A loved one has died, and we sit, numb, beside the grave.  Grief always isolates, so we sit – at least in our imaginings – alone.  Some are sitting by the grave, terrified:  women, immigrants, journalists, queer.  

 

Come, let us sit together by the grave.  Don’t talk.  For God’s sake, don’t tell me what we’ve lost is in a better place.  Don’t tell me it has passed, or gained its angel wings, or joined the heavenly choir of dead nations.  Let’s just sit together here in the cold rain.  Read ancient words of grief and hope.  Pray the ancient prayers.  Listen to the rain on the canvas.  

 

The time will come when we rise and break bread together.  There will be a time when we can talk about it.  Maybe someday there will be an Easter.

 

Let’s just sit together.  For now, that’s enough.