Memorial Service

We've been on vacation and I've got several ideas I want to process with you over the next few weeks, but for the moment I want to post a memorial service meditation I offered recently. I'm putting it up because it's basic. Sometimes I feel an urgent need to analyze and reach out to every individual in some uniquely meaningful way, when in fact, it is not any skill of rhetoric that changes peoples' lives, it is the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation (according to Paul in Romans 1).

The gospel is what people need. It's what I need every day to maintain faith, purity, wholeness, right thinking, right living, right being. Here's the gospel to you and to me as it came at the memorial service of a person I didn't really know to an audience I didn't really know:

Funeral services and memorial services like this share one thing in common regardless of where or when they are held: no one really wants to be here.

We gather for memorial services and for remembrances, but we would rather be gathered somewhere else with our loved one healthy and whole and living life along with us. We would much rather avoid death altogether, but the reality is, we cannot.

The reality of life is that each of us will be touched, wounded, by the death of others that we love, and one day, inevitably, others will be touched by our death. Most days we can get along quite well not thinking about such things. But some days, like today, death stands toe to toe with us looks us square in the eye and says to us, “Deal with me.”

The Bible says, “It is given unto every man once to die, and after that the judgment.” While we often use memorial services like this to remind us of the best things about the person we have loved, in the background, behind the remembering and the songs, behind the preaching and the prayers this question lurks: “What does all this mean for me?”

God created us for two things: to love him and to be loved by him. All too often, however, we live out our lives in love with ourselves rarely giving God more than a second thought. That failure on our part to enjoy a loving relationship with the God who created us is called sin, and sin is the reason judgment follows death in the Bible verse I just mentioned.

But here is good news. God loves us. God loves me and God loves you, and He has given us every reason to have great hope in the face of death and judgment. The Bible tells us that God so loved the world he gave his only Son, Jesus Christ, for us so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. The Bible informs us that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” And God’s word reminds us that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

These are words about preparing for death and having an answer when death stares us in the face. When we put our faith in Jesus, God forgives our sins and reestablishes that relationship of love we were created for. By doing that, God takes away any fear of death and judgment that may have plagued us in the past and replaces it with joy for today and hope for the future.

God’s answer to death’s challenge is Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and was raised from the dead opening the door to eternal life for all who believe in him.

How do we take advantage of this great gift from God, who reminds us in the darkest hours of our grief of his great love for us? Here again God points the way in his word. The Bible gives these simple instructions, “Repent and turn to God, so that your sins my be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.”

As you spend time this afternoon remembering your loved one, telling the stories that will bring her face to mind, that will ignite your love for her all over again, please remember that God loves you with all his heart and has made a way for you to face your own death without fear and with great hope. Put your faith in Jesus.