Life! Life! Eternal Life!

The sun has risen in the East. The faithful at last celebrate Pacha.

Christ is Risen!

Truly He is Risen!

When I was a boy, we lived just above a funeral home. Dad is a pastor and occasionally folk would need someone to officiate. Dad was “on call” for funerals. Since (as far as I know) Dad has never lied, this presented him a challenge. How do you preach appropriately when you do not know the man or much about his character?

Worse still, what if you suspect he was a bit of a rounder?

If you were Dad, you were smart enough to stop, listen, and try to hear what God was saying. The one word that I recall that cropped up most often was hope. God is love and does not desire death to have the last word for anyone. With a good Father, there is always a chance until  the final “no” is said to paradise. Love demands that we have hope, even for our enemies.

Occasionally, Dad said there would be people who would be sent to the funeral home who were only nearly dead. Evidently, when preparing the body, a man might find his glasses steaming up, wipe them, have them steam again, only to realize respiration was happening. The body was only almost a cadaver or maybe other gas was exiting a truly, real cadaver. This was exciting, but disappointing since even when rushed to the hospital nobody made it.

If you are a pastor’s kid up the hill from a funeral home, you went to  a good many funerals. Death comes to lots of different people and who comes out in the end told a lot about the life just ended. I have been to wakes where so many people came the air conditioning could not keep up, funerals where the departed had outlived many of his friends, and funerals where people made a scene. Growing up, folks were expected to mourn and some people were good at loud grief, if bad at being convincing.

I did not like funerals so stopped going when I could, yet one good residue is stuck in my soul. Funerals remind me of life, strong, eternal, death defying life. See enough sincere old saints of God weeping to be separated from a family member or friend resting in a coffin in front of them and hear the certainty of life to come amidst the tears was good for me. They were not hoping. They had grown old enough themselves that this life was fragile. Some had died or come close to death and had seen things that gave them a blessed assurance.

They mourned, but not without hope and full of faith, substantial, evidence based belief, that death was not the final word.

“Life! Life! Eternal Life!” says Pilgrim as he flees destruction in Pilgrim’s Progress. 

Life! Life! Eternal Life!

This is what Dad preached and what I saw in many, if not all, funerals. Death was like a commencement: a bittersweet graduation from one good place to a better one. What Dad preached, the old men knew.

Nobody got revived once they made it to the funeral home down the hill.

Yet.

Easter was, is, and is coming.