The business of death. . .

You know how those surveys keep popping into your email box or up on the screen after a purchase?  How did we do?  Are you happy with us?  How can we improve?  Will you recommend us to others?  Who gets the surveys sent out by the funeral home industry?  Not the dead.  They have no say in the matter.  Even those who leave detailed instructions on their funerals can be overruled by family and their last wishes left unfulfilled.  No, the living decide about funeral arrangements and then decide if those arrangements are satisfying and meaningful.  This translates again into the power of the almighty dollar.  Money talks in funeral homes as much as in retailers across America or online.  So what has money said?

On the one hand, when money is not the object, death is lavish.  Even better than life!  The dead are all dressed up in their finest (even new or rented clothing).  The make up is applied to make them look as undead as possible.  The coffins are better crafted furniture than the stuff in the homes they plopped down on in front of the TV.  They are laid upon soft cushions appreciated more by the mourners than the bodies laid upon them.  They are lauded better in death then they were in life by those who seldom said the same kind words to them while they lived.  They are laid in cement or steel or bronze vaults designed to prevent the inevitable from occurring -- at least as much as it is possible for man to do.  The mourners feast and laugh -- usually at the expense of the dead.  Death is a consumer driven industry with every available option to those who can afford them.

On the other hand, when money is the object or convenience, death can be cheap.  The last year it was reported, some 56  percent of Americans were cremated with the trend indicating that will increase to 80% in 15-20 years.  Cremation is certainly easier, it allows the arrangements to be more flexible with respect to time and place, less expensive, and, it might seem, a better fit for our use of green space and other resources consumed by caskets, vaults, and cemeteries.  Here again, the consumer is king.  You want the ashes to take with you like fast food?  They come in a bag and a box (as well as more expensive urns).  You want them fashioned into jewelry?  You can wear the dead around your neck.  You want them scattered in all the old familiar sentimental places?  Road trip!  And I could go on and on and on.  

The Church once used funeral practices as a line of demarcation between the pagan and the faithful.  While that might be true in some places, it is no longer true within the American industry of death.  Faith or no faith, which faith or none, seems to matter little to the choices made with how to deal with the dead.  Older folks are still more partial to coffins and graves but that is also changing.  In fact, as a pastor I find myself hard-pressed to advocate for contending for traditional burial practices against the price points being extracted by the funeral home industry, the cost of perpetual care, and the fact that graves are gone and forgotten with the dead.  Some may argue that the old distinction still stands but I struggle to find evidence of it.  Instead, the whole scene is confusing -- driven more by convenience and cost than anything else.  Add to that the practice of relics and you have some Christians refusing to let the buried be buried and the dead be dead.  But that is another blog post.

In the end, Christians as well as those without any faith or hope for the resurrection of the body seem to feel the need to steal the sting of death by what they do and not by what Christ has done.  That is where the bigger problem lies.  Even Christians have adopted the whole circle of life idea, the conviction that a spiritualized life is both the least and the best we can hope for, and that the material ends up being a prison for the real person from which they need to be set free.  What we Christians will have to decide is if we think death a disposal of some part of us that is non-essential and maybe even a burden or if death is where we come face to face both with what sin has wrought and Christ has overcome.  St. Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 15 that the resurrection of the body and not merely of the dead is one of the key and essential truths of Christ without which there is no real Christian faith at all.  In the end what we do in death should be more about Christ than it is about the dead or the living -- at least for the baptized!  What we do in death ought to be a confession just like what we do in life is a confession of what we believe, teach, and confess.  I will not solve this dilemma but I will leave you with this.  The problem with funeral practices (especially for Christians) may be complicated by the fact that we no longer believe in or yearn for the resurrection of the body.  We may, instead, be content to join with nature and the life force of others in some grand but empty chaos that is no real life at all.  If that is true, we have more problems than simply with how we style the business of death.