Funeral Preaching from Holy Saturday’s View: Another Reason to Observe the Vigil of Easter

This posting from the issue of Liturgy dealing with “Death and the Liturgy” is by Todd Townshend, dean of the faculty of theology at Huron University College in London, Ontario, and Canon Theologian for the Diocese of Huron. The excerpt here explores the valuable insights a preacher can glean from Holy Saturday for funeral sermons.

Everyone who has experienced the death of a loved one will know what Good Friday feels like. A number of years ago, while working pastorally with a family who had lost an adult child, I was given tremendous pastoral assistance while reading Alan E. Lewis’s book, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2003). . . to prepare for Lent and the great celebrations of Easter. The pastoral implications were almost limitless. Holy Saturday is a powerful perspective from which to preach, because Jesus is dead in the tomb. By sundown Friday, the first of the Great Three Days of Easter, Jesus was buried in a dark silent tomb. . .

 The followers of Jesus would not have known that this was “the second day” of the Three Great Days of Easter; they would only have known it as the day after the end. . . . Unless we celebrate the Vigil, we may tend to skip right from Jesus dying on the cross on Friday, to the empty tomb and resurrection on Sunday, maybe because nothing is said about the second day, or maybe because nothing was said on the second day. It was dark, and silent. God said nothing.

 . . . It is a moment of vulnerability. . . The manner of speaking in those moments of life is similar to the way we speak when we present ourselves before the cross or at Jesus’ tomb. We want to avoid overconfidence and giving the impression that we comprehend it all. God’s powerful weakness resists explanation.

 As those whose lives are bound to Christ in baptism, we know that we have died with Christ and so we also rise with Christ. Therefore, the preacher may explore what it means for us to live out of the Holy Saturday perspective. This takes time and some space for the imagination to work. If we want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, we go where Jesus went in our theological imagination so that we might better recognize the terrain in our own lives and choose the path of life and promise when death comes near.

 This imaginative work can be shared with worshipers, guiding them on similar paths, through the preaching. The theology, messages, and images offered to the faithful about death cannot be absent nor without ambiguity. Two or more contradictory or opposite truths can be true at the same time. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” When preachers and others use comfortable but worn-out phrases such as “Heaven as Home,” “Journey to the Angels,” and “Natural Immortality,” claiming that “death cannot defeat us,” we miss the creative tension that is revealed in the narrative of Christ’s death, entombment, and resurrection. The time of entombment, Saturday, is the time that many people experience in their own lives right now. This perspective can hold us in a better tension—with better integrity—as we seek to offer hope in the Gospel.

The full essay is available in Liturgy 33, no. 1 available by personal subscription and through many libraries. Here are some resources available for understanding the development and transformation of funeral sermons and funeral rituals (from a primarily Protestant American perspective):

• Lucy Bregman, Preaching Death (Baylor Univ. Press, 2011)
• Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (WJK, 2009)
• Luke Powery, Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, Death, and Hope (Fortress Press, 2012)
• Melinda Quivik, contributing ed., In Sure and Certain Hope: A Funeral Sourcebook (Augsburg Fortress, 2017)

 

Todd Townshend, “What Can Death Teach Us About Preaching,” Liturgy 33, no. 1 (2017): 49-55.

Pharaoh Among Us: Preaching Hope

Kenyatta Gilbert draws connections between today’s musicians and hip-hop artists and activists of the past. Offered here is an excerpt from his full essay in Liturgy 32, no. 3. The entire issue of Liturgy is on Pilgrimage, with this essay exploring the journey of African American experience and the language describing it as a traceable lineage particular especially to black preachers.

New Testament scholar Rev. Dr. Raquel Lettsome was the first woman to serve as the executive minister at the historic St. James A.M.E. Church in Newark, New Jersey. According to Lettsome, “God not only calls preachers to have a prepared Word, God calls for prepared preachers.” She contends that the preparation of the preacher can be summarized in one word: discipline. 

 Raquel Lettsome’s sermon Hidden Hope launches from Exodus 2:10, tracking the daring women (Hebrew midwives, mother Jochebed, sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter) who rose up at pivotal moments to secure the future of an endangered man-child, the prophet Moses.

 Lettsome sets the sermonic stage for drama and suspense, asking the question: Can hope be destroyed? Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months (Exodus 2:1–4).

 She assumes her listeners are well-acquainted with the story line and cast of characters. The sermon unfolds with an artfully sophisticated blending of sociolinguistic biblical criticism, theo-symbolic coding, and pastoral care. The sermon’s alliterated title and first segment signal to listeners that the preaching moment will be an exercise in aesthetical creativity. 

We are not paranoid. There really is a plot to destroy us, a plot that requires us to reckon with powers and principalities, rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in high places (Eph. 6:12) … . Truth is, just about all of us have already gone through, know about, and/or survived some assassination attempts in which people or circumstances seem to have conspired against us to kill our joy, peace, sanity, self-esteem, educational aspirations … . character. Because ultimately the thing on the hit list is our hope.

Because of its inductive movement and narrative outline, Lettsome leaves no useful detail unmanaged to set the stage. One might see this sermon distilled in three simple propositions: Hope is important. Faith is futile without it. Hope must be protected.

 Lettsome calls persons and principalities that plot our demise “hope assassins.” They “destroy dreams and vanquish hopes … [and] can fire at point blank range––a word of doubt here, some discouragement there, a roll of the eyes, a carefully placed sigh, or just be close enough to stab us in the back …. They fear us even though we have done nothing to them.” She continues that “the way we make it through these plots is God hides us. This was the case of Moses.” 

. . . Pharoah’s strategic plan to annihilate the oppressed Hebrews’ hope, she outlines, was to box them, limit their employment prospects, and conscript them into forced labor; confine them to slave status with no rank or respect; and if plan one and two fail, then assassinate them. The sermon’s message is unmistakably working on multiple levels, biblically and contextually. Lettsome follows the biblical narrative, but the beauty of her composition is in the sermon’s relation to the occasioned event.

The references and the complete text of this essay is available at www.tandfonline.com.

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, associate professor of homiletics and founder of The Preaching Project (www.thepreachingproject.org), Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, DC., is the author most recently of A Pursued Justice: Great Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights (Baylor Univ. Press, 2016).

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, “The Trek from King to Common: Exodus Imagery and Sermonic Lyricism in the Age of Hip-Hop,” Liturgy 32, no. 3 (2017): 38-46.