What I want said at my funeral

What I want said at my funeral

I quickly learned, when I began serving my first congregation in the Church of Scotland, in 2005, that I was expected to do the funeral service for anybody in the parish area who was identified as Protestant. Anybody. Regardless of whether they were a church member or not, baptized or not, ever set foot in a church or not.

I didn’t cotton to this “anybody goes” policy. In fact, it felt heretical. It went against the grain of my beliefs about church, membership in it, and membership in the here-after. How could I conduct with any integrity what we Presbyterians back in the States profess is a Service of Witness to the Resurrection?

Then I got a phone call from the funeral home about doing a service for a man who, as they put it, “had his office at the local.” That is, he’d spent his days in the neighborhood pub. And as they didn’t know of any family it was suggested that I make contact with the man’s fellow punters.

Great, a funeral visit for a Protestant alcoholic with a group of complete strangers who will’ve had one too many. I asked one of the church elders—because he was male, and he happened to be a teetotaler—to accompany me, and the next morning we called on one of the complete strangers—also male, and he happened to be drinking—in the strange man’s living room. He was able to tell us what he knew about his recently-deceased colleague all the while he stayed glued to a large-screen TV showing one horse race after another. He and I jotted down our respective outcomes.

           

Anybody could do this job, I thought, as I wrote verbatim: He had not been a very nice person, he always had to be right, he died owing money to his drinking buddies, and  they discovered when they went through his belongings that he had family with whom he had burned his bridges. Yet, in the end, they decided to pool their funds to give their pal a decent send-off.

That’s when I figured out that a Service of Witness to the Resurrection is really a service for anybody. Regardless. And the words I said at his funeral are what I want said at my funeral: She wasn’t always nice, she got some things wrong, and she left some debts unpaid, but there is one bridge that cannot be burned—the bridge with God.