Our Sons

A Funeral Homily

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

You know, when we’re young, we each have our own personal greatest fear: heights, deep water, tight spaces, what-have-you. My college roommate was terrified of spiders. Yet once we become parents, we all inherit the exact same greatest fear. And it’s this one. This is the worst thing that we can imagine.

Blake fit a lot of life into his 18 years. Every single person to whom I’ve spoken this past week—parents, teachers, students, my own kids—every one of them has told me how good and kind and true Blake was, how genuine his heart. Sports, speech, baking, volunteering with children, the venue didn’t matter. Everybody loved him, and for good reason. We can see how many lives he touched today, just by looking around; in all who share his memory here, in all who mourn his death.

We have heard wonderful tributes to his short, bright life, from those who knew and loved him best. The ancient Egyptians once believed that a piece of a person lives on in this world until at last his name is forgotten. We will carry Blake’s memory, a little bit of his spirit, all throughout our lives. And we will honor him, each in our own way. That is of some comfort.

But we have no silver bullet, no magic wand to wave to make this all make sense. Because we all know, instinctually, that what happened to Blake is wrong. It’s unjust. It’s not the way things ought to be. Death is bad enough when it comes at the end of a long, full life. At least then it’s expected. At least then we’ve prepared for it, tried to come to terms. But to have a young man snatched away a week after graduation? A man with so much promise, so much hope? It isn’t right. It isn’t how the world’s supposed to work.

In a perfect world, a just world, bad things wouldn’t happen to good people. Bad things would only happen to bad people, and only good things would happen to good people, right? And yes, we’ve all got some good and bad mixed up inside ourselves. But for as many pains as we suffer that are indeed self-inflicted, there’s a whole lot of pain that we don’t deserve. Insofar as any of us earn anything, Blake deserved better. And that, understandably, scares us.

We try to rationalize it, try to explain it away, to convince ourselves this couldn’t happen again, couldn’t happen to us. So we play the blame game: “Oh, if only he hadn’t done this! Oh, if only we had known that!” We want to find a fault, preferably someone else’s. “Teacher, who sinned, that this man was born blind?” And this is very natural, very human. It’s also selfish.

Or perhaps we turn to platitudes. When tragedy strikes, people often worry about knowing “the right thing to say.” Well, I used to work in a trauma bay, and let me tell you, I don’t believe that there is a “right thing to say.” Just show up. Say how very sorry you are. Then sit with them in silence. What matters is your presence. What matters is that you’re there.

There are, however, wrong things to say. And that’s where platitudes come in. “I guess Heaven needed another angel.” Have you heard that one? How about: “I know it’s hard now, but this is all part of a grand design.” And whose design would that be, exactly? God’s? What kind of a monster does that then make Him? No, we can’t blame God for killing kids, no matter how some people seem to wish we could. God simply cannot do evil; if He could, then He wouldn’t be God. He would only be the biggest, cruelest angel.

Bad things happen to good people for one reason and one reason only: because this is a fallen world; a broken world, which does not work the way that all of us know that it should. And we can all see that, all grieve that, whether we’re religious or we’re not. Look no further than Jesus! We hold Him to be the paragon of morality, the only sinless Man, God incarnate on this Earth—and look what happened to Him. Look what we did to Him. Christ didn’t deserve to die, in the worst way we knew how. It wasn’t about karma or necessity or fate. It was sin, plain and simple. It was wrong.

We don’t need rationalizations, or platitudes, or blame. What we need is salvation. “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” If God is good, we wonder, why doesn’t He get off His throne and come save us? Ah, but of course, He has. We believe that, in Jesus Christ, God set aside His crown, His glory, His transcendence, to come down here, in the mud and the blood, to live and to die as one of us; to share with us our struggles and our pains and our joys; our memories and our hopes and our grief.

In Christ, God knows exactly what it is to die suddenly and unjustly; He knows exactly what it is to lose a Son. He will not abandon us to the same! It’s true, we might wish that God would snap His almighty fingers and force this world to be good. That’s what we would do, if we were God, don’t you think? But that isn’t how love works. Love doesn’t force; yet neither can love ever give us up. In Christ, God takes all of our wickedness, injustice, violence, and suffering into His own wounds—and there drowns them in the infinite ocean of His grace.

God did not want Blake to die. God did not roll that truck. We must never think such awful things of Christ and of His Father. But I promise you that Blake was never, and will never be, alone. Blake was baptized into Christ’s own death, already died for him, that he need never fear death again; and into Christ’s own eternal life already here begun.

Christ has gone before us into death to conquer Hell, shattering the power of the grave; and He has ascended into Heaven there to gather us in Him. There is no place that we can go where Jesus is not Lord. If we fall down into Hell, He is there; if we fly up into Heaven, He’s there. We cannot escape from the Kingship of Christ; we cannot escape from His grace. Thanks be to God! If you believe in nothing else, then just believe in this: that death has no dominion over love.

Years ago, I read a story that was one of the best and the worst that I’d ever come across. I promised myself then that I would only tell it in the most tragic of situations, when hope was all we had to hurl into the chasm of our grief. Now I tell it twice within a month.

Martin Luther had a little daughter, Magdalena, his favorite child. And she died of the plague. He sat with her the entire time, telling her that he loved her, and promising that she was going on to a far better Father than he. When they brought in her tiny coffin, that’s when he finally broke. He fled from her room, fled from their house, out into the yard in the front. But even there he could hear them, nailing shut the lid. And whirled around and cried: “Hammer away! She will rise on Doomsday!”

That’s the Christian faith: to face the worst this world can throw at us, and to shout out our defiance. For we know the God we have! We know His death has broken death, and His love outlives the grave. And just as He is risen, we too shall arise. This is all I have to offer you today. No reasons, no platitudes, no justifications. Just Jesus. Only ever Jesus, who shares in all our sorrows and raises us to life. And I swear, by all that’s holy, that He will not let this stand. His Resurrection will return our sons.

Our brother’s story has only begun. Let no man say the tomb is his end. Christ has died; Christ is risen; Blake lives in Christ. God forth and give witness to the world that death has no dominion here.

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