When we all get to Heaven

It has been our lot in the last few weeks to have some of the long-time members of our congregations die. It is always a sad time for a church when one of its pillars is no longer in place. Sorrow, mourning, a sense of loss – all of these feelings are normal and necessary coping mechanisms as we deal with the void that such deaths cause.

I have always maintained that, as a church, we don’t deal with death very well. Oh, we can hold a dignified funeral with grand music and stirring liturgy. As a caring fellowship we comfort one another. We certainly do a good job of providing the bereaved with enough food to feed whomever might be in the house with them over the time of the funeral event. We do a pretty good job of that.

But that is all after the fact. The place where I feel that we are deficient is before death. I don’t think we do a very good job of preparing people. We don’t teach them how to die. Part of that is because we are death-denying people. Think about the funeral home experience. The casket is open and people file by. We hear comments like, “Se surely looks natural,” or “He looks like he’s just sleeping.” There is an illusion that surrounds the end-of-life experience that is not always helpful.

We are death-denying in the practice of medicine. We connect people to machines and other apparatus so that we prolong the function of life, even if we don’t have a technology that prolongs the quality of life. We try one more drug, one more procedure, or one more machine. All of this is in the hope that a life may extend another day or hour.

The church and its representatives contribute to this. I have been in more than one sick room where the patient was near their end. They would be quite elderly and had all the medical procedures available to medical science. The doctors had prepared the family for what they termed “the inevitable.” In the middle of this, someone’s in-law’s preacher shows up and says, “Let’s have prayer.” Then they pray for a healing miracle so that the patient will rise up and walk and live a full, vital life… and they leave. Now, I’m in the miracle business. I believe in miracles. In my judgment, I have seen more than a few. But I am also a realist. I have conducted enough funeral and memorial services to know that death is a part of the human experience. So, for these visiting clerics to pray for healing and get folks’ hopes up is irresponsible. I may have done all that I can to help a family come to a faithful preparation for the death of a loved one, when this drive-by prayer undoes days and weeks’ worth of labor in a few breaths. That is just wrong.

It has long been my practice – and I have begun to observe it here – that when a member of our church family dies, we take a moment in worship, call their name, offer a prayer of thanksgiving, and sing together a verse of “When We All Get to Heaven.” That is a song of hope. That is a song that allows us at the same time to speak of grief, hope, assurance and faith. It’s a pretty good way to deal with death.

Sing the wondrous love of Jesus,
Sing his mercy and his grace;
In the mansion bright and blessed
He’ll prepare for us a place! 

When we all get to Heaven
What a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus
We’ll sing and shout the victory.

I believe that if we sing that enough, we begin the task of preparation in a pretty good way.