Listen to this article (16:19 min).
This is an online article from the Christian Research Journal.
When you support the Journal, you join the team and help provide the resources at equip.org that minister to people worldwide. These resources include our ever-growing database of more than 2,000 articles, as well as our free Postmodern Realities podcast.
Another way you can support our online articles is by leaving us a tip. A tip is just a small amount, like $3, $5, or $10, which is the cost of a latte, lunch out, or coffee drink. To leave a tip, click here
John (not his actual name) was 21 years old. He died of an overdose. His father, Dan (also not his name), died suddenly and unexpectedly two years earlier. Dan was a convert, one of the first who had come to faith in the early years of my pastorate. Dan had been delivered out of a life of serial marriages, affairs, heavy drinking, and consistent drug use. John was born into one of those serial marriages and had since been raised by Dan, who had somehow retained custody. Dan was an enthusiastic convert but also rather confused about what to do with himself and what to do with John, who, at that time, was in his pre-teens. Except perhaps for the Navy, from which he’d retired, Dan had never lived within a functional community of relationships. He and John had never gone to church. Their extended family was broken by conflict and betrayal. Dan had many friends, but most of them were caught up in the lifestyle he had escaped.
After Dan was baptized, he threw himself into as many activities at church as he could and soon became a fixture, bringing a much less enthusiastic John along with him. As John grew into his teen years, it became obvious, at least from the outside, that his heart was not in the same place as his father’s. Dan continued to bring John to church and youth group, but when John could get out of it, he did. Dan died suddenly of a heart attack in 2016. His funeral was standing room only. John, sitting in the front row, wept the entire time. Before his passing, Dan had assured me on numerous occasions that his son had a true and living faith in Jesus. When asked, John would generally agree with his father on the status of said faith, but I could not tell whether this was just to please his father, whom he loved dearly. After Dan’s funeral, I asked John if he’d like to get together with me and talk. He nodded, but I never heard from or saw John again until I saw him in his open casket two years later. He had, in the intervening years, given himself over to drugs, even to the point of stealing. It all came to a sad and terrible end with John’s overdose. His biological mother asked me to preside over the funeral, and I agreed.
The Necessity of Mourning, Funerals, and Funeral Sermons
Anglican funerals are formal affairs. Every word and response, apart from the sermon and the Scripture readings, is laid out in the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgy bent toward the great work of proclaiming Jesus’s death and resurrection offers both the opportunity to grieve and the consolation of the hope of everlasting life and the resurrection of the dead on the last day (1 Corinthians 15).
It is not uncommon for families to ask that their deceased be remembered through what is often called a “Celebration of Life” rather than a traditional funeral. Friends and relatives have asked to bring in balloons, play rock or pop music, and tell wild stories about the deceased’s youth, all in an understandable effort to run from grief. But the human soul yearns to mourn in the face of death. It must be done. Death is the great enemy that divorces body from soul, the union we all know in the depths of our being that should never have been torn apart. Mourning must not be avoided or suppressed. And, thanks be to God, the church has, by and large, preserved her ancient liturgies, tried and tested by time, to meet this need. Words have been given to us, and acts, and ceremonies, prayers, and hymns that allow us to grieve, yet not as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
The sermon, however, is another matter, especially when it comes to funerals for people like John, whose evidence of faith in Christ seems lacking. What do you say? How do you remain truthful and yet comfort grieving loved ones? Do you tell what may be a noble lie, assuring everyone that the person’s soul is with the Lord in paradise? Do you confess your suspicions and warn about the danger of dying with an impenitent unbelieving heart? Do you say nothing at all about the departed and focus instead on simply preaching the gospel?
That last option, preaching the gospel, provides one-half of the answer. A funeral sermon is not a eulogy. Those are best left for family members and friends. The principal task of the preacher at a funeral is to proclaim Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Few other venues provide such an opportunity to reach people who have never heard the gospel. Weddings come a close second, but those at a wedding service are not, as a general rule, standing at the precipice of the grave and staring into the bleak unavoidable reality of their mortality. Funeral services are typically stocked with people who try, normally, not to contemplate death at all, much less the surety of it in their future. So, the preacher has before him a group of people, large or small, who need to know what God has done in Jesus to save sinners and shut the mouth of the grave, who, perhaps for the first time, are feeling vulnerable and even frightened of whatever sort of final accounting might lie beyond this life. To these cherished people, the preacher has the privilege of explaining the connections between sin and death, judgment and faith, and life and forgiveness through Jesus Christ and by His shed blood.
But while a funeral sermon is not a eulogy, neither can it be purely a gospel presentation untethered to the body in the casket or the dust in the urn. Something must be said about the person who has died, whom God knit together in the womb, and whom family and friends loved. I have presided over too many funerals in the last twenty-two years, a number of which have been for people like John who did not appear to have genuine faith in Christ. Over these years, I’ve found that the following four truths provide a helpful framework for crafting my words, which can also help Christians know how to encourage fellow believers who are unsure if their loved ones who died were believers.
You Do Not Know
The command, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1),1 from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the most well-known and oft-quoted Bible passage of our day. Popularly understood, Jesus forbids condemning another person’s behavior or drawing any conclusions about his or her character. But only five verses later in the same sermon, Jesus warns, “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs” (Matthew 7:6). The “dogs” and “pigs” in this passage are not pets or farm animals, but they stand as metaphors for people. Obeying Jesus’s command requires determining whether a person is sincerely seeking the truth or cynically pretending to do so in order to mock and revile the messenger. Such a determination requires drawing conclusions about another person’s character based on how he or she behaves. The popular understanding of Jesus’s command not to judge, therefore, cannot be true.
But what does Jesus mean? The command seems to be directed against the human inclination to usurp divine authority and prerogatives. The Pharisees, for example, elevated the traditions of the elders to the status of divinely revealed commands, thereby condemning Jesus and His disciples for violating them (Mark 2:23–28, 7:1–13). That was a form of usurpation. By contrast, God has revealed in Scripture that stealing is a sin (Exodus 20:15). If a man steals a wallet, I can rightly conclude that he has broken God’s law. In doing so, I would not be taking God’s place as judge but applying God’s revealed judgment to a particular case. But if I were to go further and say, “Because this man is a thief, he is damned for all eternity,” I would be stepping far beyond my authority. I can say, based again on biblical revelation, that if the man does not repent and turn to Jesus, damnation will be his fate (1 Corinthians 6:10). But I cannot see what he will do in the future, nor do I know the state of his soul in the present.
Likewise, while I can say that John broke many commandments and gave little evidence of repentance and faith, I cannot say that he did not repent and had no faith. I do not know what may or may not have passed between him and the Lord in his final moments. I do not know whether he sought the mercy of Christ. These are things only God knows.
God Is Merciful
Before taking communion, Anglican congregations recite the “Prayer of Humble Access,” which reads in part, “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.”2 To say that the Lord’s property (or character) is always to have mercy does not mean that He simply forgives everyone all the time. It does mean that whoever cries out to Jesus Christ for mercy receives it (Romans 10:13). No one who is in heaven now, excepting Jesus Christ Himself, deserves to be there. No one ever will. Thieves, drunkards, drug addicts, murderers, adulterers, prostitutes, the sexually immoral, abusers, mobsters, slave traders, war criminals, no sinner has gone so far or sinned so greatly that he or she is beyond the reach of God’s mercy because God’s mercy is both revealed by and grounded in the infinitely precious blood of His Son. The suffering and death of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, was more than sufficient to take away the sin of the world (1 John 2:2).
God Can Save Any Person at Any Moment
David wrote in a psalm, “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (Psalms 139:11–12). In the darkness of Elizabeth’s womb, John the Baptist, only six months from his conception, his body and mind still being knit together, rejoiced in the light of Christ (Luke 1:44). After a life of lawlessness and rebellion, death looming before him, a nameless man, his hands and feet pierced by nails, fixed to a wooden cross, joined the crowd and the Pharisees and the chief priests to heap his insults on Jesus of Nazareth as He suffered beside him. Then, suddenly, his eyes were opened as well as his ears and his heart, and he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus answered him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43). On his deathbed, after a life of excess and violence, Henry VIII had lost his ability to speak. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer “sat with him and held his hand….[He] asked the king to make some sign that he placed his trust in Jesus Christ. Henry squeezed [his] hand, and then died.”3
That last vignette hits home. I have, in the last twenty-two years, sat beside many people on their deathbeds. Some have been men or women who had, up to the point of my visit, rejected Jesus and repudiated the church. The approach of death tends to heighten a person’s spiritual senses. It is easy to scoff at heaven and hell when you are young and healthy, and the sun is shining. But when you are lying in a hospital bed with the respirator whirring and the tubes and needles pressing into your flesh, mortality and the weakness of the body and the fear of judgment rise up so that the conscience cannot so easily escape them. It is here that the pastor has the great task and privilege of setting out the offer of God’s pardon through faith in Jesus Christ with the confidence that, whatever a person’s medical condition or mental state, darkness is not dark to Him and His light is as bright as the day.
True Christians Fall into Terrible Sin, Yet Repentance Can Be Hoped For
Jesus said to His disciples, “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). Maybe less than a year later, on a cold night beside an open fire in the courtyard of the high priest, Peter stood warming himself when “one of the servant girls of the high priest came, and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him and said, ‘You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus’” (Mark 14:66–67). But Peter denied it. Several minutes pass, but the girl will not let up. “This man is one of them,” she tells whoever will listen (v. 69). But Peter denied it a second time. Then, “after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter, ‘Certainly you are one of them, for you are a Galilean.’ But [Peter] began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, ‘I do not know this man of whom you speak’” (vv. 70–71). The story is, of course, a familiar one. The great apostle, the rock put to the test, turns out not only ashamed to be associated with Jesus, but he calls down curses on himself. That is, he calls down God’s curse to substantiate his lies. The remarkable tally of sins here, from using the Lord’s name in vain and bearing false witness to swearing false oaths and cowardice, culminating in what could be characterized as bald apostasy, might well lead the average onlooker to conclude that Peter does not love nor trust in Jesus. Indeed, applying Jesus’ warning above from Mark 8:38 to Peter’s dark moment, one might even conclude that Peter has indeed damned himself.
But we know better. Peter does not end his life as an apostate condemned to everlasting torment and shame but as a martyr.4 After the last of his three fateful denials, Peter flees into the night and weeps until the morning. But in the morning, he returns. He rejoins Jesus’ disciples and remains with them until the morn of the Resurrection and until his restoration weeks later beside the sea of Galilee. Peter lost his way, but he belonged to the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine in the fold to seek after the one and when He finds him, He carries him home on His shoulders.
Peter’s fall and restoration warns against drawing grand conclusions about a person’s destiny based on a period of infidelity. People who love and trust in Jesus can and do fall into terrible sin, and they can be ensnared not just for a night, but for entire seasons. Hope lies in the truth that though we are faithless, the Lord remains faithful (2 Timothy 2:13). It is on the sure foundation of the faithfulness of Christ that we can rest our hearts when remembering those who have died in the throes of infidelity and sin, trusting that He brings to repentance and restores His own.
Holding Out Hope
Taking all of these points into consideration, I have made it my practice to always hold out hope to grieving families. Salvation rests in the person and work of Christ alone, who is both abounding in mercy and able to bring sinners to Himself at any moment and in any circumstance. To come full circle, I conclude with an excerpt from my sermon at John’s funeral. I do not presume to offer the following as the only model of what anyone should do or say in such moments but as one example of one way to administer both comfort and truth:
We are each born with different predispositions, different desires that draw us away from the light. We’ve all lived different sorts of lives. The thief who becomes a Christian should break the habit of stealing things. But he’ll probably always struggle with the desire to do it. There are Christian people with deep weaknesses that grief, loss, and pain bring to the surface. I’ve known genuinely believing people to get hit hard with something, and in utter misery turn to comforts the world offers, which are ultimately no comfort at all. Grief, sorrow, pain, fear…God uses these to draw you to Jesus for comfort. When you turn to anything else and use it in His place, it will ultimately bring you misery. But even Christians can get drawn in and trapped by things. So, we cannot say that because John plunged into this thing [drugs] after his father’s death, that he did not know Jesus or that Jesus did not love and tend and save John. Here’s what we can say — that not a single person who calls on the name of Jesus, even with his dying breath, will be lost. Our God is a God whose property is always to have mercy. And what did Jesus Himself say in the Gospel? “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40). I hope and believe that in the end, even if his vision was obscured by grief and the drugs he used to drown it out, John looked on the Son and believed in Him, and that he is now seated with his dad at the feast that never ends, where all the heartbreak, despair, loss of his life has been undone forever. And there is only joy everlasting until the day Jesus calls John’s name and death itself loses its grip and the dead are raised and all things are made new.
The Reverend Matthew M. Kennedy (MDiv, VTS) is the rector of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York.
NOTES
- All Scripture quotations taken from the ESV.
- The Book of Common Prayer, International Edition (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2021), 261.
- Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Press, 2013), 15.
- “Jesus Predicts Peter’s Martyrdom,” Ligonier Ministries, December 19, 2018, https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/jesus-predicts-peters-martyrdom.
