One thing has stuck in my mind from that funeral last week, and I keep coming back to it because it troubled me quite a bit.
The thing that bothered me was how all of those who attended reacted…or, more to the point, what it was that brought about a reaction.
You see, my uncle had an extraordinary life. When he was eight, his mother committed suicide, and by the time he was eleven, he was totally on his own. And this was during the Great Depression. I don’t know all of the stories about how he survived, but the ones I know are fascinating. For instance, I know that at the age of twelve, he bought a hog in Eden, and carried it on foot for twenty-two miles to Menard to sell it. That money from the sale provided his a few weeks in meals.
My uncle’s struggle to survive in such a difficult time was particularly damaging for his spiritual life. Eventually, his primary means of living during those early years was as the helper to his crooked uncle. His uncle was a bootlegger, a gambler, and a professional wrestler, and my uncle’s youth proved to be an asset in helping out in the bootlegging operation and in helping my great uncle to cheat at cards. This spiritually depraved part of his life culminated in my uncle’s entering the army. That was a place where his skills of surviving at any cost would be rewarded. He thrived in the army, and to all accounts, he came out of the service a cold, sometimes cruel, and spiritually empty man.
And then he became redeemed. This came about as a result of God working through the wonderful woman he married, the family he raised, and the church he joined. The man of the last forty years wasn’t the same man who would do anything he could to survive. The man who died last week was no longer the rigid, depraved man of his youth and was instead a strong moral person and a caring family man.
And that’s the story that I heard at the funeral. The preacher who did the funeral was excellent. He told about the terrible years of my uncle’s youth, and he told about the redeemed family man that developed.
And here’s the problem…nobody cared about that story of my uncle’s spiritual redemption. This was sort of a textbook example of Christian redemption, a powerful example God’s grace working to better a man’s life. But as I watched the people at the funeral when the preacher was telling about my uncle’s sacred journey through life, I saw only one reaction. With just few exceptions, the Christian interpretation of my uncle’s story only invoked boredom. As the preacher told personal stories about my uncle and as the preacher read appropriate scriptures, I looked around and saw that almost nobody was really paying attention. Eyes were glazed over and directed out the windows. The preacher’s efforts to show that my uncle’s life had such spiritual significance were futile. The Christian meaning of my uncle’s life actually had no meaning for the people gathered there. They had heard those words before, and they didn’t sound true anymore.
Perhaps more depressing was what followed. After the funeral, we went to the graveside service. The preacher read the twenty-third psalm, and he said a prayer, and once again, I don’t think anybody was listening. But then, as soon as he was finished, a person from the local American Legion stepped forward and began to speak. And to his words, the people listened. I was still watching everyone, and as soon as the man with an Army uniform stepped forward, the eyes of the crowd became unglazed, the focus turned from the ground to the words this man in uniform was speaking about. And he didn’t speak about my uncle’s love for God. He spoke about my uncle’s love for America. And for his “comrades.” And he said that it is the veterans greatest dream to “go to sleep” while hearing “Taps” played. So, of course, an old bugler played taps, and they did the twenty-one gun salute, and they presented my aunt with a flag. And that was the only time in the whole day that I saw people crying. And with that flag presentation, the funeral was over.
And that’s what bothers me. Almost nobody in this one-hundred-percent Christian crowd cared anything about my uncle’s Christian journey. They didn’t show to care about the sacrifices my uncle had made for God. They cared about the two years he spent driving a bulldozer in Alaska during the Korean War during the darkest period of his life. They didn’t care anything about the way God had led my uncle out from the valley of the shadow of death. They cared about how my uncle was being “put to rest” while hearing “Taps.”
That’s what bothers me. Even for Christians, Christianity no longer seems to have power to render life sacred, to make life meaningful. Allegiance to America, though, does have that power at the moment.
Funerals exist, in large part, so that we can convince ourselves that, no matter how absurd all this life seems, particularly at its end, it was worth living. To remind ourselves that this life that always ends in tragedy has meaning after all; there was something in this life worth dying for. I’m awfully worried, though, about where we are deriving that meaning from. It seems to me, more and more, that we are more American than we are Christian.
Labels: theology
