A Funeral Honoring Native Culture

This excerpt from the issue of Liturgy on “Liturgy in Rural Settings” is from Sharron Riessinger Blezard’s essay on funerals in the rural church.

Most mainline rural North Dakota congregations are not diverse, unless they are on or near a reservation, so it is rare for Native American traditions to be integrated into Scandinavian Lutheran funeral liturgies. Congregational leaders can be open, however, to incorporating Native traditions when the need arises. Not surprisingly, Native views of life and death and funeral practice are quite complementary on both a theological and social level to those of their Scandinavian-descent Lutheran neighbors, as both emphasize the power of community to accompany the family grieving death, food as a tangible sign of support and care, the gathering prior to the funeral for prayer, and the deep spiritual belief. . .   

 When David was approaching death, he wanted to make sure that we would honor his family’s Native American heritage and traditions, requesting that a drum circle be part of the funeral, that he be buried in a plain wooden casket with no vault, and that his buffalo hide be buried with him. He also wanted to make sure that, as he was a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War, there would be military honors. His wife of more than forty years also wanted the funeral to be held in the local Lutheran church where she was an active member and leader. 

 One of the sons arranged for a drum circle, and the ushers figured out the logistics, opening the accordion doors to the parish hall on the south side of the nave to make room for the drummers and overflow seating. David’s wife and I chose the one Dakota hymn in Evangelical Lutheran Worship,“Many and Great, O God,” for a congregational hymn. The words are particularly appropriate for a funeral, with the second verse ending “Bless us with life that has no end, eternal life with you.” 

 The church was packed with congregants, David’s tribal co-workers, family, and friends. A traditional Dakota star quilt draped the casket, and mourners brought additional quilts. The drum circle moved one of the ushers, a lifelong Lutheran, to tears. “I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he told me. “It’s profound. Beautiful. Holy.” 

 After the committal, David’s body was lowered into the grave in the community cemetery atop a windswept hill on a cold, late-February day. After the military honors, hugs, tears, and words of scripture and hope, one by one the mourners took turns dropping in handfuls of soil—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All around us were the stone markers where other friends and family members were laid, some adorned with flowers, angels, mementos, and small gifts, connecting lives past with lives present. Death is well-grounded in this place, this community, where the land and sky meet on a thin line, in a thin place between that which is and that which is yet to come. There will be grief and sorrow aplenty, but life will go on until it doesn’t, the trees will bud, the last clumps of soiled snow will melt away, and the farmers will sow the fields yet again.

The full essay is available in Liturgy 32, no. 4 by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Sharron Riessinger Blezard, an assistant to the bishop of the ELCA’s Lower Susquehanna Synod and a published poet, contributed to the Abingdon Creative Preaching Annual (2014–2016), and posts weekly lectionary reflections at www.stewardshipoflife.org.

 

Sharron Riessinger Blezard, “Grounded: Life, Death, and Funeral Liturgy on the Prairie,” Liturgy 32, no. 4 (2017): 25-31.

Funerals and Food ~ Part Two

Benjamin Stewart writes about the relationship between the funeral liturgy and the liturgy of the funeral meal in the April-May 2017 issue of Liturgy focused on Liturgy and Food Culture, guest-edited by Jennifer Ayres. Here, Stewart further explores the relationship between eating and the death of Jesus in order to bring to the funeral meal the weight it carries in comforting the bereaved.

Do our scriptural accounts of the Lord’s Supper bear evidence of an early ecclesial conflict around the meaning of food and death? In his work of liturgical-biblical scholarship, Gordon Lathrop suggests that Paul, in a project partly continued in the Gospels, seeks to reorient the Christian meal more directly toward the account of Jesus’ suffering and death for all the suffering mortals. (The Four Gospels on Sunday [Fortress, 2012]). 

 Paul is clearly determined to strengthen the link between the Christian meal and the death of Jesus. Some of Paul’s correspondents in Corinth seem to have been delighting in the life of the resurrection, especially at the table, without concern for the cross, and in Lathrop’s view, it is this mistake that leads them away from solidarity with the sufferings of the poor—those who share most visibly in the sufferings of the crucified Christ. Thus, in the scriptural meal narratives, especially of Paul, Mark, and Luke, Lathrop sees strong theo-ethical reforming interest in the meals of the church, accomplished especially by tending to the cruciform marks of the meal: “These central meal characteristics—the ones accentuated by the climactic Lukan narratives of the Last Supper and of Emmaus—are being urged by the Gospel exactly so that the meal keeping of the churches may be the meal with the widow, with Levi, and with Zacchaeus, and may thus become the breaking of the bread and distribution to the poor imaged in Acts 2:42–27. 

 Lathrop argues that the reforming proposals of the Gospels—holding together the death of Christ and the meal, and therefore all of the suffering mortals—are always actively before the church. Among other reforms, Lathrop urges “better preaching conjoined with strong intercessory praying for a suffering world … [and] attend[ing] to what seems to be the counsel of both Mark and Luke, echoing Paul: hold no Eucharist without a collection for the poor and hungry beyond our assembly.” 

. . . While it is perilous to assert definitively the experienced meaning of any ritual practice (and the distinction between deathbed communion and bread for the corpse was likely of little significance for some), the church seems to have been wrestling here with two significantly distinct interpretations of bread at the time of death. One set of food practices suggested the transactional payment of a debt that comes due after death, while another set suggested nourishment and comfort for the living in the face of suffering on the journey into death. 

. . . Both food and funerals lead us back to the earth. It may be that in this age of ecological emergency we rediscover ancient wisdom in our encounters with food at a time of death: strict human limits along with the fecundity of God coursing through the good earth. Three final images hold together these themes of mortality: earth, God, and food. 

The entire essay is available to download through either your library’s subscription to Liturgy or your own individual subscription. Liturgy is published quarterly with each issue focusing on a theme.  

Benjamin M. Stewart is the Gordon A. Braatz associate professor of worship and director of advanced studies at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.

Benjamin M. Stewart, “Food and Funerals: Why Meals Matter for Christian Mortality and How We Might Respond Gustatorily to Changing Death Practices,” Liturgy 32, no. 2 (2017): 52-61.

Funerals and Food ~ Part One

The April-May 2017 issue of Liturgy focuses on Liturgy and Food Culture, guest-edited by Jennifer Ayres. Benjamin Stewart writes about the relationship between the funeral liturgy and the liturgy of the funeral meal, recounting scriptural references to food imagery in its connection with death and life and urging our churches to encourage meals as vital to the funeral remembrance. 

Christian funerals in North America have long been associated with food. A number of practices have been relatively widespread: food carried to the bereaved by fellow members of a congregation; the funeral communion rite; a post-funeral meal; and food traditions at the grave, including food offerings for the dead and yearly meal-sharing among the living. While its symbolism is complex and multivalent, food has proclaimed the power of life in the face of death, including through the sharing of food across the boundary of death. 

 Today, however, many of the food practices associated with Christian funerals are disappearing in dominant North American cultures. What is lost as these food practices wane? Especially given the trends toward delayed memorial services, declining communal participation in returning the dead to the earth, and replacing bodies with images on screens as the chief representation of the deceased, does the disappearance of long-standing food practices at death contribute to a larger trend in which communal, ritual engagement with embodied, earthly, mortality is receding, replaced by the ethereal and the virtual? . . . 

Prof. Stewart links food with faith in many ways throughout his essay beginning with the references in scripture to food as a metaphor.

Food may help us in the face of death to taste and see the goodness of God, and to know it as the land of the living. . . . 

 In the Gospel of John, Jesus describes his death as a single food grain dying in the earth to bear much more food. . . John represents Jesus’ death as that of a lamb slaughtered for the Passover meal: the first sighting of the earthly Jesus is announced by John the Baptist, “Behold the lamb of God.” 

 Jesus’ death in John occurs at the time of the slaughter of the lambs, and a branch of hyssop—used to sprinkle the blood of sacrificial lambs—is used to offer Jesus a drink of wine as he dies.  

 Paul reminded the community at Corinth that their eating and drinking is ongoing engagement with death: “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Paul suggests that trying to separate the Christian meal from the suffering and death of the body leads not to suffering-free life but rather, in a mystical reversal, to illness and death. 

 The understanding of Christians as themselves “body of Christ” extended to striking images of food offerings in some accounts of martyrdom. Ignatius of Antioch described himself as “God’s wheat … ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ.” Polycarp, burned to death in a martyrdom remembered in Eucharistic terms, was said in his death to have the golden appearance of baking bread. 

 With the study of ancient Christian catacomb art. . . it was commonly taught that Christians pragmatically used the catacombs as a hiding place to carry out secret Eucharistic gatherings during persecutions. . . . While, as we will see below, the practice sometimes drew stern rebukes from church authorities, eating food among the tombs seems to have left lasting influences on Christian practice. 

Further remarks about this important window into Christian witness will be offered on March 24. Check back!

Benjamin M. Stewart is the Gordon A. Braatz associate professor of worship and director of advanced studies at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.

Benjamin M. Stewart, “Food and Funerals: Why Meals Matter for Christian Mortality and How We Might Respond Gustatorily to Changing Death Practices,” Liturgy 32, no. 2 (2017): 52-61.