New Book by Dr. Thomas Long Calls for a Return to Christian Funeral Traditions

From

The Bulletin

of Selected Independent Funeral Homes, Sep-Oct 2009Dr. Thomas G. Long, is the Bandy Professor of Preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology inAtlanta, GA. Professor Long has written numerous books and commentaries including

The Witness of Preaching

, T

estimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian

Beyond the Worship Wars: Building Vital and Faithful Worship

, and

Hebrews (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching)

. He hasdone extensive research on the theology and practice of Christian funerals, and his latest book,

AccompanyThem with Singing - The Christian Funeral

, will be available in mid-October.Thomas Lunch, author of

The Undertaking

has written, “To a culture accustomed to ‘obsequies-lite,’ Dr. Long prescribes a full-bodied, liturgical and community theater—funerals equipped for the heavy lifting of Christianity—acting out our faith and humanity, bearing our dead to the brink of real and eternal life.Accompany Them With Singing is an indispensible and luminous guide for clergy, families, funeral directors— all home-going pilgrims—on how we ought to deal with death by dealing with our dead.”Dr. Long recently spoke with

The Bulletin

in an exclusive interview in which he discussed his new book, thehistorical development of the Christian funeral and recent cultural trends in funeral practices.

Please tell us more about your background.

Long: “I began as a Presbyterian minister, the pastor of a church in Atlanta, GA, where I was born. I hadthe opportunity to join the faculty of the seminary I attended as its professor of preaching—Erskine TheologicalSeminary in South Carolina. I did my preparation at Princeton University’s Princeton Theological Seminarywhere I earned my Ph.D. From Erskine, I went to Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. In 1983, Ireturned to Princeton where I was professor of preaching for 15 years. I then had the opportunity to head up oneof the publishing corporations of the Presbyterian Church. In 2000, I accepted a position at Emory University’sCandler School of Theology where I am today.”

What are the most important things you seek to instill in your students?

Long: “I focus on two things in regard to the formation of preachers, and they are somewhat at oddswith each other. The first is a sense of the awesomeness of the task of preaching. It is not simply getting up infront of the Rotary Club and giving an after-dinner speech. Preaching is bringing to bear the wisdom of Scripture on the faith community. So, on the one hand, I want them to tremble a bit when they get into the pulpit, having taken on this sacred task. On the other hand, I want them to have humility about it. There is anartfulness, even a playfulness, to constructing a sermon that is sometimes missing in preaching. People can takethemselves all too seriously and have false solemnity. So I want them to develop the playfully creative sidewhile, at the same time, recognizing the awesomeness of the responsibility.“I think this is especially important in the American church scene. Preaching can so easily dissolve intoa kind of self-help wisdom, and I want them to overcome that. I think most of us who teach preaching take asort of a triage approach. There are born preachers, and we just get out of their way. They have an intuitivesense and a real gift for it. Then there are those who may be called into ministry of some kind, but preaching isnot one of their skills. It’s the group in the middle where we can make an impact—those who may not be polished but have enough raw talent with which to work.“However, there is another ingredient. Preaching is a form of public rhetoric, and it therefore rises andfalls with public rhetoric in general. We are starting to emerge from a time of low public rhetoric, and you cansee that in the political arena. Whether you agree or disagree with President Barrack Obama, you have to admithe has raised the level of the political rhetoric in this country. And I think that's going to have an effect on the

pulpit as well. It's sometimes difficult to teach preaching in an age when the television commands the rhetoricalcenter stage. A hundred years ago, orators commanded that spot and provided the models for public rhetoric.“I’ve been reading Jay Winik’s

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

and about how the Lincoln-Douglas debates played a role in the historical background of the end of the Civil War. What an event that wasin American life for these two orators to face each other! Compare that to the kind of diminution of rhetoric thattakes place in debates today where everyone is afraid of making a mistake. But Lincoln and Douglas soaredwhen they got on the public stage, and that provided models for ministry. And ministry also provided modelsfor political rhetoric. The Gettysburg Address is actually based on a funeral sermon—the sort of eulogizingministers were trained to do in the 19th century. Garry Wills, in his book

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The WordsThat Remade America

, makes the point that Lincoln had in mind the cadence and basic structure of a funeraleulogy.”

Of which of your books are you most proud?

Long: “I have been very gratified by the reception of a basic textbook I wrote a number of years ago andhave revised twice called

The Witness of Preaching

. In many seminaries around the world, it is the standardtextbook for the basic class in preaching. It's not my most soaring prose; it’s a basic textbook. But in terms of effectiveness and impact, it probably is the most far-reaching work I've ever done. The other piece I willmention was for a prominent series of biblical commentaries. I was commissioned

to write on the Book of Hebrews—probably the most theologically difficult book in the New Testament. It stretched me, but I'm proudof what ended up on the page. Pastors who never would have preached a sermon on the Book of Hebrews, because it is so forbidding and difficult, have ventured into it because of that commentary.”

Which authors have inspired you?

Long: “Anne Tyler, in her book

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

, has been a powerful literaryinspiration for me because she has a unique capacity to describe human beings and the conditions of their lives—all of the warts revealed. But she does so with tender compassion, deep empathy and forgiveness for her characters. I don’t think I’ve arrived at that point, but I have certainly been moved by her ability to see the depthof human beings and have compassion for them.“The writer who has inspired me the most in the area of funeral research is Thomas Lynch. He writes themost miraculous, liquid prose; it’s very beautiful and witty. He has a great deal of the Irish poet about him andan innate theological grasp of things. When I was doing research for A

ccompany Them with Singing

, I readeverything I could get my hands on about death, especially in the theological world. When I read ThomasLynch’s

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

, I felt he, as a funeral director, has written the best theological book on funerals and death. He's been a powerful inspiration to me.”

How did you come to write Accompany Them with Singing?

Long: “The idea for the book started when I was teaching at Princeton. Among other things, I wasteaching a basic course in worship in which we covered everything that a minister would be expected to do interms of leadership. There were sections on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, marriage, prayer, etc.; and there were plenty of good resources for all of them except on the funeral. There was plenty of material available aboutgrief, but the last good book on the funeral itself was

The Funeral. Vestige or Value?

written by Paul Irion in1954. It was a first-rate, state-of-the-art work about Christian faith and funerals at that time, and it was one of the first books written in what we now call the field of practical theology, where you start with the livedexperience and then work to find the theological implications.“But

The Funeral: Vestige or Value?

was dated by the time I was starting my interest. It assumed arelationship with the church that our society no longer holds. The grief process was just beginning to make its

way into the literature, and Paul's work was attentive to that. But I thought it was time for an update, so that’swhat I started out to do. I received a Henry Luce III fellowship for the book and began travelling across thecountry from Florida to Alaska assembling groups of ministers, funeral directors, cemetery owners and hospiceworkers—anyone dealing with death in any way.“I was trying to map the ritual life of America in terms of death. I found some very interesting things inthe research and was able to confirm that we are a very diverse nation in terms of death practices—from regionto region and sometimes even within communities. But I also found an underlying change in direction that washappening in American life. The surface manifestations were fairly well-known—the rise in cremation rate, therise in the personalization of funerals, the downsizing and minimizing of religious rituals. You could findexceptions to this, but it was more or less happening across the country. People noticed it and had opinionsabout it, but there was no coherent understanding of what was happening. I realized I had bitten off a fairlylarge project at that point and began to do further research. I worked with NFDA committees, talked to variousexperts and read everything I could get my hands on.“And then what I found in my research caused me to undergo a kind of ‘conversion experience’ aboutthe ritualizing of death. It took me over a dozen years to finally create the book, but I ended up writing againstthe position I started out with, which was to applaud, almost without qualification, the move toward the funeralas a facilitation of the grief process. I was going to write a good Protestant manual for ministers on how to provide a more tender, caring, grief-sensitive funeral. But I discovered in my research that in the last hundredyears, there has been a profound metaphor shift in most religious communities regarding an understanding of the funeral—one that I think is not altogether good and involves significant loss.“Here it is in a nutshell. For over 1,800 years, the primary metaphor of a Christian funeral was thedeceased as a baptized saint who has been on a lifelong, baptismal journey of faith toward God, and the days of death are the last mile of that journey. The funeral is the Christian community traveling with the saint duringthat last mile. It’s a fairly simple picture, but it’s actually very profound theologically. It involves notions of what Christians would call sanctification and the concept that who we will be in our future is revealed but notfully determined in the present—that we are traveling toward a new reality. It involves honoring the body andthe identity of the deceased, but it also involves the deceased moving toward a new community—thecommunion of saints. So the funeral becomes a piece of ‘community theater’ in which people act out what they believe about life and death. It is very public and profound, and it has deep traditions. And it provides care andconsolation for the grieving, but it’s not focused on that. That happens as an intrinsic part of the process.“Then a hundred years ago or so, we could no longer find ways to make sense out of the old metaphor,so it shifted. In many contemporary funerals or memorial services, it’s

no longer the deceased but the mourner who is traveling. And it’s no longer a theological and public journey but an intra-psychic journey. So the ritualsof death began to shift away from the deceased and move toward the mourner, focusing on grief management. Ifelt this was a big loss not only for the faith community but also for the human community as a whole. It opensthe door for a very private, individualistic service that are turned in on itself. It also allows for what Tom Lynch points out—that we are the first generation for whom, at funerals, the presence of the body of the

deceased isnow optional.“Well, we are not going to go back to the 5th century or the 12th or even the 19th. But I did set myself the task of discovering what it would mean if we were to recover the power of that original metaphor but applyit to the real circumstances in which we commemorate our dead today—a highly mobile, highly personalizedsociety. So that’s what the book is about. It is, in part, a recovery of an ancient tradition in very new anddifferent context.”

It’s been said your book pulls no punches.