A Viking Funeral

A Funeral Homily

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The pines in Norway grow straight and strong, lush green towers amidst the mountains and the fjords. They are coveted the world over as Christmas trees par excellence. When faith in Christ came to Scandinavia, the hard-bitten Norse produced something uniquely beautiful: the stavkirke, or stave church. It is a house of worship designed to look like a Christmas tree, tall and stately, elegant and ornate.

The long columns, or staves, that gave the church its towering, spindly height moved freely within the structure, allowing it to bend and sway with the wind, like a pine tree, rather than crack or break in the storm. And it was all carved with the same natural, flowing lines that the shipwrights gave to those Viking longships so infamous throughout Europe and the North Sea in days of old. “From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us,” as the monks would pray. And the Lord answered by claiming the Norsemen as His own.

I say this because it is an image that I cannot get out of my head—of Astrid as the stave church, strong, flexible, elegant, original, faithful, unbreaking, far sturdier than it at first appears, and of course one hundred percent Norwegian.

She was absolutely a stave, a great pillar, of the community. She was an educator, musician, seamstress, heavily involved in the Church, heavily involved in the town. She had her priorities rightly ordered: she loved her family, her friends, her neighbors, and especially the children whom she taught and for whom she cared. I have been inundated with stories these last few days from generations of Astrid’s students, of how her no-nonsense feistiness brought joy to their music and passion to their classrooms.

She served at so many funerals that one thing she insisted upon was that at her own service we would all have ice cream sundaes. And so we shall, Astrid. So we shall.

She liked that her pastor was of Norse extraction, and made no secret of it. A while back she bought me a pair of dress socks with the Norwegian flag on them. And care packages from her cousins back in the old country were often used as enticement for home visitation. I would bring Communion; she would break out the krumkake.

I’ll grant you she wasn’t really big on the fact that I was Irish too, but I assured her that all the most important cities in Ireland were founded by Vikings anyway. And she assured me, in turn, that all those nasty stories people tell about the Vikings simply weren’t true. They were good people.

The thing that was so refreshing about Astrid’s pride in her roots is that it in no way denigrated others. They say that patriotism is a love of one’s country, love of one’s people, while nationalism is hatred of everyone else’s. Astrid, then, was a true patriot, a Norwegian American in the very best sense, even if she sometimes seemed to wonder how she’d ended up out here with all these Finns for so long. I was just glad I had someone to whom I could give the back issues of my Norwegian newspaper.

C.S. Lewis wrote that the love we have for our country, for our people, is a reflection of the deeper love we hold for God’s country and for God’s people. He imagined that Englishmen would see Heaven as the truer, deeper England, the homeland for which we have all yearned since long before we understood it to exist. I imagine that is what Astrid is experiencing now. Everything she loved rightly here on earth—her family, her children, her home—she now sees clearly, face-to-face.

The mountains and the fjords of Norway pale next to the glories of Heaven afar. We speak of Heaven here not in metaphor of some ephemeral ideal, but of a life, a home, a reality far more real than any we have yet known here below. Heaven is not some wisp of smoke. We are the smoke. Heaven is solid as the Rock.

We come together this day, at this funeral, not simply to reminisce, not to look back on this woman’s long, full life, and all the blessings ladled out upon us through her, as though her story were now written, her book now closed and done. No, brothers and sisters, for we are Christians here. And as such, we believe strange things, scandalous things. First and foremost, we do not believe for a moment that our sister Astrid’s story is done.

Astrid died the death that matters decades ago, when she was drowned and resurrected in her baptismal Font. Christ met her in those waters, chose her for His own long before she was able to choose Him for herself. And there in the waters of Creation, Christ bound her to His own death on the Cross, already died for her, that she need never fear death again, and to His own eternal life, already begun. In that promise, in that Sacrament, Astrid was made a Christian, a sainted sinner sent out to be Jesus for the world, dying every night to sin, rising every day in Him, until at last her journey here is complete, her race run, and she rises never to die again.

We will mourn Astrid. We will miss her. I confess this service to be harder than most. She lived her life for others, and in so doing became more of an individual than most of us have any right to hope to be. She reflected the Light of Christ in the world, and has gone home to be welcomed by her husband and her God. And so it is in the sure hope of the Resurrection that we say now to Astrid: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master.”

Gud har gjort ditt liv en vakker melodi, og du har avslutten sangen vel.

Until we meet again.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.