The Lord Bishop of Bristol, Mike Hill talks about how the Christian Faith has something powerful to say about death, and indeed on dying well.

Recently I attended the funeral service of a dear friend.  As I sat in the crematorium, it brought back memories of my second curacy where the local crematorium was in the parish and I officiated at dozens of funerals per month.

Suddenly, my attention was arrested by something that shocked me for a moment.  Someone had carved some initials on the rear of the pew in front of me.

Obviously, I have no idea whose initials they are.  I don’t know if the person concerned was recording their own initials or the initials of their loved one.  Was the person bored during the service?  Was it their bizarre way of coping with grief?  I’ll never know.

For many in our culture, a visit to the crematorium, coping with a death, even attending a church service, is very unfamiliar territory.  As someone put it well, they are exposed to the “matter of religion without having the manner of religion”.  As life expectancy increases, many people don’t have to face a death amongst friends or family until they have been around for years.

Maybe one of the few connections people make today with the world of religion is when someone dies.  The Christian faith has something powerful to say about death and indeed on dying well.  But how much of this message is heard today?

Dead men don’t rise!  In a world of often shoddy scientism, believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus is a big ask.  Yet, through the centuries, Christian men and women have believed it with such a passion that, in some cases, they have faced death with confidence whilst others were martyred for their beliefs.

Easter has come and gone.  Once again the Church proclaimed, “He is risen”.  What is less clear to me is the confidence with which we proclaim it.  My experience is that most of us don’t like to think or talk about death.  You start to wonder in our time, to quote St Paul, whether “death has lost its sting”.

So I thought again about whoever carved those initials on the pew in the crematorium and I wondered what I would feel were I at a funeral involving someone I loved if I had no belief and no hope.  I don’t know what I would make of it all.  I might even get my penknife out and do of a bit of carving (just so you know, I don’t actually carry a penknife!).

Recently, we heard that Anthea, my wife, has cancer.  Facing this contains a measure of struggle, but all the way through I have been grateful for my faith.  Fortunately, the prognosis is good but it has struck me forcibly again how faith is such a help in times of darkness and struggle.  To be truthful, I can’t imagine what I would feel if I didn’t have faith.  The faith that assures me that whatever I have to face in this life, God gives me strength to carry on, for:

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end He will stand upon the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another.  How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25-27)