What We Left Them With

We had the service for Mom (my mother in law) the other week, at a small church in Penticton. The service began the way these services always do. A warm welcome. A prayer. A hymn, with the pastor’s wife at the piano. Then I gave my eulogy talk, which people seemed to receive well. Then my son Jeremy spoke, and he was better than well. Another hymn.

Then the pastor stood up and preached forty minutes on the wages of sin.

I sat there and watched a room full of grieving people, some of whom had not been inside a church in years, get told about hellfire on the day they came to say goodbye to their mother, their Granny, their beloved friend.

I was embarrassed. Not for myself. For the gospel.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. That family walked into the building carrying real grief and whatever fragile openness grief produces in a person. For a few minutes, in the eulogies, they were met with grace. Then the door closed and they were met with judgment instead, delivered at exactly the moment they were least equipped to argue back and most likely to simply absorb it as true.

That’s not preaching. That’s an ambush.

I don’t think the man meant it that way. I think he believes he was being faithful to Scripture, and I don’t doubt his sincerity. But sincerity isn’t the same thing as discernment. A pulpit is a position of enormous trust, especially at a funeral, and trust like that comes with an obligation to read the room, not just the text.

At the family supper afterward, I stood up and asked for everyone’s attention. I said that on behalf of Christians, I wanted to apologise. I said none of us should have had to sit through that.

I don’t regret saying it. But I’ve turned it over a dozen times since. Was that mine to say. Was it right to name a wrong out loud, in public, at my own mother-in-law’s memorial supper, hours after we said goodbye to her. I still think yes. Grief deserves better stewardship than that room got, and somebody needed to say so before the family carried that sermon home instead of her.

Funerals are one of the last places left where people who have drifted from faith will actually walk through a church door. That’s not nothing. It’s a narrow window, and what gets said in it either widens the door a little or slams it. I think about the people in that room who came in curious, or softened, or simply willing, and left with confirmation of every stereotypic reason they’d already had for stayi ng away.

Grace was available in that building that day. Jesus and the love of God could have spoken of in a winsome way. It just didn’t get the microphone for long enough.

I keep asking myself what Mom would have wanted said instead, if I’d had those forty minutes.

I wasn’t sure I’d publish this. But I needed to write it down, if only to ask myself honestly: when grace and judgment are both true at the same time, which one does a room full of grieving people actually need to hear first?