[1]If you have been preaching long enough to have become comfortable with the rhythms of producing weekly expository sermons, you do not have to acquire some different skill set to be able to preach a good funeral sermon. If you have reached the point that you can pull together a good sermon from most places in the Bible, then you can write a good expository funeral sermon from more places in the Bible than you might realize. The sermon you preached last Sunday might easily have been developed into a funeral sermon, depending upon whose death the funeral marks.
They only difference between a regular Sunday sermon and a funeral sermon lies in the need to connect the sermon to the deceased. Learn to do that, and you’ll find a lot more freedom to move beyond those few “stock photo” funeral sermons that you may have used over and over. There are several ways to connect a person to a sermon that you are preaching.
First, the deceased can serve as the key illustration in a sermon about biblical truth. Occasionally, I may use a story from a living person’s life as an illustration for a sermon I am preaching on a Sunday morning. There’s the connection! If I were going to use this person’s life or some story about this person as an illustration in a regular Sunday sermon, what text would that be that would make me think of them?
Do you have a retired missionary in your church? What would it look like to preach an expository sermon from the Great Commission his funeral, using specific vignettes from his life to illustrate what it means to make disciples by going, baptizing, and teaching? A sermon from Luke 6:38 might make a great funeral message for the godly person in your church who gave very generously over the course of a life that God blessed. Paul Owens, the song leader at the small-town church where I grew up, cared for his invalid wife for many years before he died. Ephesians 5:25-33 could have produced a great sermon for his funeral. A sermon like this gives saints one last chance to let their light shine before men to the glory of the Father.
Second, the deceased can serve as application of the sermon. Is there something at this funeral that augments the congregation’s grief beyond the normal grief surrounding a death? If the journey through death and mourning that brought the congregation to the funeral is a peculiarly problematic one, the funeral sermon can help to apply comfort to the problem of grief. Is there a biblical truth that can give comfort?
This kind of sermon can be a little trickier to pull off. Make the effort to evaluate how sensitive the topic surrounding the grief may be and let that assessment guide you as you choose between being more direct and more indirect in making application. Suicides are difficult. So are deaths from childhood cancer, natural disasters or tragic accidents. In all of these cases, a pastor is probably going to feel the desire to apply some comforting bit of biblical truth to people who are in desperate need of both comfort and truth.
One example of this is a sermon I preached at the funeral of a lady in our church who passed through the journey of Alzheimer’s Disease. I preached from Isaiah 40:6-8, dealing directly with the particular grief of death that comes at the end of dementia. Those three verses occur in a chapter that is entirely devoted to good news, not bad news. Why, then, do those verses sound so much like bad news when read on their own? Alzheimer’s Disease had certainly caused the beauty, energy and vitality of this dear saint to wither like grass and fade like a flower.
Isaiah 40, though, is written not to tell God’s people that they were going to fade in the future; it is written to be read by God’s people who have already withered and faded. These verses are good news, not bad news, because they remind the withered and faded that there are eternal promises in the Word of God that will endure and be fulfilled in us when nothing else can renew us. These verses that gave hope to the exiled community of God can also be the source of great hope for those who have crawled across the finish line of caregiving for a withering loved one.
Third, sometimes it can be effective to move the deceased into the role of the preacher of a doxological sermon, so to speak. Has the power of God been shown remarkably in the life of the deceased or in the family? Is there a fitting text to inspire others and point them to Christ by letting the deceased tell his story? In this approach, the role of the deceased in the funeral sermon is that of a fellow congregant (this is what they are, both ecclesiastically and eschatologically) leading us in praise to the Lord.
My Dad received a cancer diagnosis in April 1997 with a six-months-to-live prediction. In four months, all of his cancer was gone. A month later, cancer had appeared in his brain. He died right on schedule. But the journey to the grave from his diagnosis had been so miraculous that his secular oncologist said of him, “You’re out there on the edge of what I don’t understand!” Dad, not a pastor, responded to God’s kindness during his illness by going to any church who would have him and talking about the greatness and the goodness of God. We took his funeral as an opportunity to extend what he had been doing. We focused on worship and on the grace of a saving God, allowing the praise that was on my father’s dying lips to echo forward into his funeral.
Finally, the funeral sermon can simply be a time to preach a passage that effectively tells how the deceased was saved. Was I around when this person came to faith in Christ? What scriptures describe the particular way that God brought them into his mercy and grace?
Think about how the story of Simeon in the nativity account describes an encounter with Jesus at the very end of life. “Now, Master, you can dismiss your servant in peace, as you promised. For my eyes have seen your salvation.” (Luke 2:29-30). What an opportunity to preach a passage like that at the funeral of someone like M.J. Box.
M.J. asked to meet with me. He was in his eighties and still tormented by some things that had happened to him in World War II. I spoke with him about the Gospel of God’s forgiveness, reaching any bad thing we had done, no matter what it was. He trusted Jesus for forgiveness that day, and having avoided the waters for so long, he let me baptize him shortly thereafter. He had been terrified of death, but then his eyes saw the Lord’s salvation, and he departed in peace.
By preaching funeral sermons this way, I think you get better opportunities to:
- give the family a more personalized experience.
- do better discipleship through funeral preaching by using a more well-rounded selection of passages that accomplish more in the way of teaching. After all, I have a lot of members of my congregation who are present for multiple funerals in any given year. Variety in my funeral messages gives them opportunities to learn more.
- join together speaking well of the deceased and magnifying the Lord so that these are not competing interests during the funeral.
- enhance evangelistic opportunities by closely harnessing the proclamation of the Gospel to someone the congregation knows.
I am neither the best preacher you have heard nor the best pastor you know, but I think these ideas are fruitful ones that the best preacher and best pastor you know could use to good effect. Dare to stretch yourself a little further in your next funeral message. The Word of God is profitable, even in the midst of grief.