As I returned from my two-week stint in Austin, I had the opportunity to read and enjoy Tom Long's new book, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral.  In it, Long explains how Christian theology promotes a response from the entire community of faith at the time of death.  A funeral, he observes, is a worshipful drama which is performed to symbolize and make sense of our experience of death.  The problem we experience today, though, is that some in the church have lost the intended script of the funeral and no longer identify with the role in which each worshipper is cast. When we attend a funeral, we each have a role to play.  We worship God with the dead.  We worship best when we sing.

History helps us understand this.  In first-century Palestine, bodies began to decompose so quickly it was common for Jewish people to be buried as soon as possible, usually within a day of death.  The body was wrapped and prepared for burial by the family.  A procession of family, friends and paid musicians would march to the place of burial outside of town crying and singing as they walked. Then, those comforting the bereaved would sit quietly with the mourning family for up to seven days in the time period called shivah.  The tomb remained unsealed for the first three days during which the family would frequently visit the body.  A year after burial, someone would reenter the tomb, gather the bones of the deceased and rebury them in a different location.

When it comes to death, Christians have always acted differently from the common people.  In Roman society, the poor and unattended dead were thrown in a common pit know as a paupers' grave.  Most did not want to touch the corpses, though it did not bother early Christians.  The gospel proclaims, "though the body is dead, the soul lives with God."  With this in mind, many Christians would gather dead bodies and provide proper burials. Early Christians rejected the more popular Roman custom of cremation and buried their dead.  They refused to use candles and torches like the Roman pagans and held their funeral processions during the day instead of at night.  Before burial, they would kiss the dead on the forehead and say, "May you live in God. Rejoice forever!"

We have lost a sense of our identity as the church because our funeral services have changed with modern times.  Some funerals no longer include a body at all.  Most attendees of a funeral in a sanctuary do not journey together to the place of burial.  Without such movement, the church has lost the Christian metaphor of our collective journey toward God. During a funeral, the church should instead move from one location to the next, accompanying the body on its journey and singing throughout.  Tom Long reminds us, "At death, the church gathers to act out the story of what this death means in light of the gospel" (Long p. 79).

At baptism, the faithful sing newly-professed Christians and babies into a new life in the church.  Nothing, then, is more appropriate than for a community to sing when a baptism is made complete in death.