Funeral Sermons and What's Wrong with Many of Them

I still remember the first funeral service I conducted. I was a senior in seminary and considered myself fortunate not to have had someone die from the little congregation that I served on weekends. My seminary training with regard to funerals had been highly inadequate: a short discussion about funerals and one of my classmates conducting a fake funeral service.

Then, toward the end of my senior year, a young woman died and I was called on to conduct a funeral for her. I knew that the service should include something about the woman and I knew that there should be a Bible foundation for the service, but how long should the sermon itself be? I asked an experienced pastor that question. "Ten minutes is about right," he told me.

Ten minutes, it turned out, was not about right. It was too short, and many in the congregation were surprised when I concluded the sermon part of the service. In fact, the next time someone died from that congregation while I was still the pastor, the family asked someone else to do the sermon!

Over the years, I have learned some pitfalls of funeral sermons, and being too short is not a major problem. To keep this article in context, I write out of the context of having been a Christian pastor. Your background and practices may, of course, be different.

First, some service hardly mention the deceased at all. I believe that a funeral service conducted by a Christian pastor should be Christ-centered and Bible-based, but that does not mean that I ignore the deceased. The reason we gather for a funeral is because we have lost a loved one or a friend. That loss and that person need to be acknowledged during the course of the service. I always ask the family members what they remember about their loved one and I integrate their comments into the service in some way. I remember attending the funeral for the grandfather of one of the young men in my congregation. After the service, which was conducted in the grandfather's church, I asked the young man what he thought of the service. His reply, "Based on the pastor's remarks, I wasn't sure who had died, my grandfather or St. Paul!" Too much Bible, too little mention of the deceased.

Second, some services mention the deceased far too much. I've attended funerals in churches where, if you didn't know you were in a church and the officiating person was a Christian minister, you would have no idea that the service was intended to be anything other than a "praise session" for the deceased. When members of the congregation get up and tell how great the person was and what wonderful things the person did, what hope does that offer to the people in the congregation who haven't done great things and who aren't so sure that there's anything good about themselves? Through the experience of gathering at the time of a person's death, many people who are present are confronted with their own mortality and the fact that they may be next. They need something more than hearing someone else praised.

Third, keep focused on who has died. In a community where I lived and pastored for many years, a community leader and his wife were involved in an accident that killed the wife and left the husband paralyzed. (The husband eventually told the doctors to pull the plug on him.) The couple did not belong to my congregation and I chose not to attend the service because I didn't know either one personally and because I knew their church would be crowded as it was. After the service for the wife, I was talking to someone in my congregation about the funeral. "The pastor talked more about her husband than he did about her," was the bitter reply. All I can say is keep focused.

Finally, and this should not be, many services contain too little mention of the Christian hope at the time of death. Max Lucado, one of my favorite Christian writers, is also a pastor. In one of his books (see source information below), he talks about funerals and how he always used to ask the family about the deceased in order to work it into the service. He says he still asks a few questions about the deceased, but now he knows what the family members and friends want to hear during a funeral: "What does God say about death?" Then he speaks about the Christian hope of the resurrection of the dead and eternal life spent with God. If that is not present during a Christian funeral, then I would question whether or not a Christian funeral has happened.

Remember who you are as a pastor and who you represent in this world, and conduct the funeral accordingly.

Source:

Max Lucado, A Gentle Thunder (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1995), 61.