Pentecost 14 – 2020
Matthew 18:15-20
Marian Free
May I speak in the name of God, in whom we have our beginning and our ending. Amen.
Those of you who have written a eulogy for a loved one will know how difficult the task can be. If the deceased has lived a long and rewarding life it is impossible to condense that life into just a few paragraphs. If the deceased is young, it is even harder. How do you make sense of the lost potential and find words to honour a life that was too short? Perhaps the most difficult eulogies to write are those for people whose lives have caused pain and trauma for others. I attended one such funeral. The deceased was known to have been an abusive person and I waited uneasily for the eulogist to stand and extol them, to gloss over their defects and to make out that theirs had been a good and worthy life. Thankfully, I need not have worried – what was said was an honest reflection of the life of the deceased. It referred to the usual things: birth, marriage and work and while it did mention the person’s achievements, it didn’t shy away from mentioning their negative characteristics. While the eulogy didn’t directly name the abusive behaviour, it did make clear that the deceased had at times acted in such a way as to cause harm to those closest to them. The eulogy allowed us to farewell someone whom we knew – not some idealised figment of the imagination.
Clearly, I believe that honesty at a funeral is important. Those present need to feel they are saying farewell to someone whom they know, not to a romanticised stranger. That said, a funeral is not, I believe, a place to settle scores or to air dirty linen – something that Bill Edgar has turned into a successful business. Edgar, a private detective, has morphed his role into what he calls “a coffin confessor”[1]. Clients can employ him to gatecrash funerals where he exposes the secrets and the hypocrisy – not of the deceased, but of the living. For a figure of $10,000 Edgar will attend a funeral to interrupt a eulogy and inform the congregation that the eulogist was trying to have an affair with the wife of the deceased. Or, he might be paid the same amount to escort from the church members of the family who had not visited the deceased for thirty years or more. If anyone tries to prevent Edgar from carrying out his instructions, his client will have pre-empted the situation and have authorised him to take the body away for a private ceremony.
Edgar justifies his role by saying that he has to respect his client’s wishes and by asking: “how many funerals have you been to and listened to absolute rubbish?”
Surely though, funerals are for the living and not for the dead, they are an opportunity to honour a life and to draw a line in the sand that helps family and friends to acknowledge their loss and to begin to adapt to absence. They are not the place to open or to rub salt into wounds, to exact some sort of retribution or to expose unresolved issues. Employing a “coffin confessor” in the end says more about the person employing him than those whom they see as having caused the injury.
As a culture we are not very good at dealing with conflict – but imagine reaching your deathbed being so bitter and so angry that you would want to cause irrevocable harm after you have gone. Imagine nursing a festering wound for months or years, not wanting it to heal but instead unleashing all its pain when the relationship has no opportunity to be restored, when no redress can be made, and no apology offered? Imagine how unhappy a person must be at the point of dying if they have stored up the hurts and grievances of a lifetime instead of confronting them? I wonder what satisfaction they think that they will get from exposing the perpetrators of that harm, when they themselves are no longer around to see the effects of their action?
One wonders what sort of vision such a person has of the afterlife? Do they really expect to spend eternity filled with malice and unhappiness – nursing their grievances but secretly pleased that they have been able to unleash havoc on those whom they hold responsible for their pain? Indeed, do they believe that there is a place in heaven for those who wish to lick their wounds and to gloat over the retribution that they have exacted on those whom they have left behind?
Today’s gospel points out the danger of not resolving conflict in this lifetime. In dealing with differences in the community, Jesus seems to be suggesting that what we bind and loose in the present is somehow bound and loosed for eternity; that there are some things that heaven itself is unable to undo. He implies that those issues that we do not deal with in the here and now cannot be dealt with in the hereafter but remain an integral part of who we are forever. The hurts we inflict, the injustices we create or sanction and the injuries that we harbour stay with us unless we are able to seek and to offer forgiveness, to work through our differences, and most importantly to let go of our egos.
There is no room in heaven for the sort of self-centredness that demands retribution from the grave and that wishes harm on others. Heaven cannot and will not make it right and it will be too late for us to make changes once we are dead. Any bitterness, resentment, frustration, fear, hurt or self-righteousness that we carry to the grave will remain with us. The endless joy and peace that we had hoped to inherit may be out of our reach in the future if in the present we are unable to find ways to be at peace with ourselves and with each other.
Let that not be us. May our deaths find us to be the people we hope to be for eternity.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-02/coffin-confessor-bill-edgar-reveals-secrets-of-dead-at-funerals/12619946
Swallowsrest 