There is Hope

Preaching at Funerals

Paul Beasley-Murray

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789743623
• eBook ISBN: 9781789743630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

250,000 people die in the UK each year, and almost half will have a Christian funeral service. Preaching at a funeral is a vital part of pastoral ministry, but too often funeral sermons consist of generalities and platitudes used for multiple services rather than illuminating the hope gifted to us by the resurrection.

In There is Hope veteran pastor Paul Beasley-Murray offers practical advice to help Christian leaders craft meaningful, biblically driven sermons and preach with confidence and compassion at funeral services.

Drawing on his years of experience, he offers a sensitive, pastorally rich exposition of twenty key Bible passages, exploring how preachers can draw on them to show the hope beyond death that the Gospel offers. Alongside are funeral sermon examples that he has preached himself, as well as ideas, outlines and guidance for writing your own.

There is Hope is the perfect book for ordinands and preachers who are new to giving funeral sermons, as well as for experienced preachers and pastors wanting to improve and grow in their pastoral ministry and are looking for new ideas for funeral sermons.

Full of biblical depth, this guide will equip priests and pastors with all the tools they need to deliver comforting funeral sermons that truly deliver the message that even in death, in the Gospel there is hope.

Part 1

Introduction

The gospel is a message of hope

May the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

(Rom. 15:13)

Christian hope is resurrection hope

The good news is that there is hope – God raised Jesus from the dead! ‘God’, wrote the apostle Peter, ‘has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ (1 Pet. 1:3). It was ‘concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead’ that the apostle Paul was on trial (Acts 23:6; see also 26:6).

‘Christian hope is resurrection hope’ declared brilliant German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in his groundbreaking book devoted to the ‘Last Things’.1 This hope is at the heart of Christian believing, and what a difference this hope makes. When Cardinal Hume, a former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he rang to tell his friend Timothy Wright, the Abbott of Ampleforth, who replied ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you!’2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Christian who was put to death by Hitler’s henchmen, evinced a similar confidence in life after death when he declared, ‘Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.’ As he was taken away to be hanged, he said to a British fellow prisoner, ‘This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.’3

Christian hope is not a whistling in the dark but is sure and certain. In the Church of England’s committal service, the dead are committed to be buried or cremated

in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life

through our Lord Jesus Christ,

who will transform our frail bodies

that they may be conformed to his glorious body,

who died, was buried, and rose again for us.4

Christian hope is not a form of optimism. Indeed, according to the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas, optimism is a form of ‘hope without truth’.5 Rather, Christian hope is based upon a past reality, for the Bible teaches that in rising from the dead Jesus blazed a trail through the valley of the shadow down which those who have put their trust in him may follow too. In the words of Jesus, with which I begin every funeral, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live’ (John 11:25).

Yes, there is hope. Over the years I have had many occasions to study the New Testament documents. As a PhD student I devoted three years of my life to examining the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for the early church. Later, after using a sabbatical to study the resurrection further, I wrote a book for preachers, The Message of the Resurrection.6 Today I am more convinced than ever that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that in doing so he broke down death’s defences for all who believe.

Our hope for the future is secure

We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

(Rom. 5:2)

‘Christian hope’, said Pope Francis, ‘is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.’7

What a contrast there is between Christian hope and hope as understood by the ancient Greeks. My attention was drawn recently to the story of Pandora. According to a Greek myth found in one of Hesiod’s poems, Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and shared it with humankind. As an act of revenge, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to create the first woman, which he did out of earth and water, and ordered each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. Zeus named this ‘beautiful evil’ Pandora (‘all-gifted’) and sent her off to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus. Pandora had been warned not to open the jar (today known as a ‘box’ because of a sixteenth-century mistranslation), but her natural curiosity got the better of her. As she lifted the lid, she released every evil on to the earth, bringing the world’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but the contents of the jar had already escaped – all except hope. ‘This’, wrote Hesiod, ‘was the will of aegis-bearing Zeus the Cloudgatherer.’8

Down through the centuries there has been much debate about the significance of hope in Pandora’s box. Does it imply that hope is preserved to make the sufferings of this life more bearable? Or, in what is a story of revenge, does it mean that hope is denied to us, making life all the more miserable? Or, like the other contents of the jar, is hope an evil, bringing torment to us? It is this third interpretation that Friedrich Nietzsche adopted: ‘Man’, he wrote, ‘believes the ill which remains within [the jar] to be the greatest blessing . . . Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man.’9

Whereas for Christians hope is a positive virtue, in the ancient world hope was viewed as a delusion. In a famous speech recorded by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War the Athenians declare somewhat cynically:

Hope, danger’s comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found wanting.10

Hope, as far as Thucydides was concerned, deceives and misleads. Or, as the agnostic American politician Robert Ingersoll said in a speech in 1892, ‘Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.’11

By contrast, Christian hope in God does not mislead. In the words of Stephen Travis, a Methodist theologian:

To hope means to look forward expectantly for God’s future activity. The ground of hope is God’s past activity in Jesus Christ . . . Thus the believer looks forward to the resurrection of God’s people and the arrival of God’s kingdom, confident because Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom and has been raised from death.12

Christian hope is an expression of faith in God. To quote the apostle Paul, ‘In hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?’ (Rom. 8:24). This relationship between hope and faith is helpfully defined by Jürgen Moltmann, who wrote:

In the Christian life faith has the priority but hope the primacy. Without faith’s knowledge of Christ, hope becomes a utopia and remains hanging in the air. But without hope, faith falls to pieces, becomes a faint-hearted and ultimately a dead faith. It is through faith that man [sic] finds the path of true life, but it is only hope that keeps him on that path.13

Anglican minister Sam Allberry has made the point that whereas we normally speak of hope as something we do, in the Bible hope is something we have:

It [hope] is about looking forward to something that is certain. I have the hope of eternity with Christ. We still don’t control the thing for which we have hope, but God does and has promised eternity to us. There is no degree of risk or disappointment. This hope cannot be frustrated by anyone. Unlike all our other expressions of hope, this is hope that won’t disappoint us.14

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not in the business of misleading his creatures. He is to be trusted. Our hope for the future is secure.

Hope for a world without hope

Without hope and without God in the world.

(Eph. 2:12, niv)

‘But there’s got to be hope!’ cries Mary in the film On the Beach.15 A nuclear war has wiped out civilization in the northern hemisphere and radioactive dust is drifting southwards, inexorably spreading radiation sickness, death and oblivion. The film tells how Mary, her husband Peter and other Australians on the coast of Victoria live out their last doom-filled months before the End.

We live in a world where hope is in short supply. In the years of the Cold War, nuclear threat was ever present. Since then, the population crisis has raised questions of whether the Earth can sustain the ever-increasing number of people living on her. More recently, we have become aware of the challenge of climate change: the world is getting warmer and warmer, but will its nations really be able to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide? As I write, humankind is in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic and, at this time, already over five million have died. Thank God, with the development and production of new vaccines, there is now light at the end of the tunnel. But how many more millions will yet die before the vaccines have been distributed around the world?

Underlying all these fears is the ultimate crisis, one which has always been with us: death. Although there have been remarkable advances in medical science, no one has discovered a cure for death: the mortality rate is still 100%. Death for most people is still ‘the most fearful thing of all’.16 Death, said Paul Ramsey, a Christian ethicist, ‘is an irreparable loss, an unquenchable grief, the threat of all threats, a dread that is more than all fears aggregated’.17

The apostle Paul described his contemporaries as ‘having no hope and without God’ (Eph. 2:12). Little has changed. We live in a world which is largely without hope and without God. For most people today, death is the end. When , at the end of the service at the crematorium, the coffin makes its final journey, it is quite literally ‘curtains’. As a result, many try not to think of death. Josh Glancy, a regular columnist in the Sunday Times Magazine, reflecting on the theme of mortality in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, wrote:

Over recent decades we have become increasingly allergic to death. We shy awa...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1
• The gospel is a message of hope
• Part 2
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Part 3
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• Part 4
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• Part 5
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• Part 6
• God loves us all
• Part 7
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Notes
• Search items for authors and subjects
• Search items for Scripture references