Where A Tree Falls, There They Lie

Lying about the dead is not kindness to the living.

There’s a certain Pastoral PTSD that afflicts many ministers that’s hard for laymen to really understand. Mine developed one evening about 11PM when an associate pastor called and said, “[Redacted] shot himself with his deer rifle. I’ll pick you up in five minutes.”

WE DON’T KNOW IF HE’S DEAD OR ALIVE

Five minutes later, and I was in a pickup truck headed toward a congregant’s house who I had only met a few times before. It was only weeks within the beginning of my pastorate there.

“We don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” my associate told me.

“He’s dead,” I responded. “We’ve been called to the house, not the hospital.”

Given that it was November, we both presumed it was a terrible deer hunting accident. But, it was worse. Amidst a fight with his wife, while she was piling the kids in the car to go stay at her mother’s house, he stepped out on the porch in view of his family, and blew off his head with a 30-30 lever action.

The next afternoon, I inspected the home to make sure that Restorex had done an adequate job of cleaning up the scene, because the kids would be home from school later that day. They did not. And then for the next hour, I scoured the ground for skull fragments and washed gray matter off the screen door.

Nobody warns you that’s in the pastor’s job description in Bible College. “How to clean up a crime scene” was hardly a course offered in the religion department.

But getting blood out of carpet stains wasn’t the hard task in front me. I had to deal with the task of the funeral, and what to say about the man, whose last act on earth was self-homicide to teach his wife a lesson.

I didn’t preach the man to hell, of course. Suicide isn’t the unpardonable sin. Some men get angry enough to put a hole in the wall. Some men get angry enough to put a hole in their head. Instead, I walked a balancing act, explaining that God is faithful to keep his promises, even when we are not.

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Apparently, those in attendance from the community who were trepidatious about what kind of comfort could be offered at a time like this, liked what they heard, and for the next few years I was called repeatedly by people who I didn’t know, to preach their loved ones’ funerals. I didn’t go around marrying couples I didn’t minister to, and so it never felt quite right doing funerals for people I couldn’t vouch for, but…I usually did them.

In situations like that, the funeral home charges the family a few hundred bucks and then passes it off to the preacher as an honorarium. But I never took the check, and figured what gospel could be given at the funeral was payment enough.

From that time onward, I didn’t take my phone off of ring, especially when I went to sleep. I was afraid, from that point forward, that I would miss a call that someone had died in the night. And those calls definitely came, all the time. The last time was when a young woman had died, and I woke up to my wife telling me in the early house, “[Her name] died in her sleep. They need you over there now.”

One might say that a first responder knows what it’s like to fear the ring of a phone. But they only have to scrape people off the pavement. Pastors have to sit with the families the next four or five days, and find them reasons to believe that God is still good.

Since leaving the pastorate, I’ve found it difficult to take my ringer off when it’s bed time. I have to remind myself there are now very few people who need me. And I thank God for that, and have learned to sleep well.

WE GOT A WEIRD ONE FOR YOU

The local funeral home called and told me, “Pastor, we have a weird one for you.” And weird, it was.

The oilfield was home to very few, but that doesn’t mean a lot of people didn’t live there. It’s just that it wasn’t home to them. They would stay for a year, or two, or more likely, just until winter came and they felt -35 degrees for the first time. The recently departed was one of those sojourners.

The middle-aged man worked for a major oil company, and died in a company vehicle. His only friend in the world, turned out to be his long-term girlfriend. He had no other family, no kids, no extended relatives, and no close friends. His next-of-kin was no kin at all.

“She wanted to do it at the Catholic Church,” he told me. “But she couldn’t afford the Mass. We told her you’d do it for free.”

When I sat down with the woman, I asked about his faith so as to know what kind of funeral sermon to craft. And that’s when she told me he hated God. Like, really, really hated God. Like, overtly. He wasn’t even an atheist; he believed in God, but hated him.

And then, with tears in her eyes, she asked me, “Is he in Heaven?”

…

Deep sigh. Deep breath.

…

“Well,” I told her, “I wasn’t given a list. But from what I know that God has shared, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely.”

I expected her to get up and storm out. Instead, she looked at me and said, “That’s what I thought, too.”

I explained that I could not “preach him into Heaven,” but that I’d be gentle. She surprised me when she said, “I don’t want you to be. Warn people.”

WHERE A TREE FALLS, THERE IT LIES

The funeral sermon was taken from Ecclesiastes 11:1…

Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie.

The inference is clear from the passage. If you die without forgiveness, you will remain without forgiveness. If you die in your sin, you will remain in your sin. If you die without grace, you will remain without grace. If you die without God, you will remain without God.

And let me tell you, that funeral had an altogether different vibe from the audience. At least two people condemned me on my way out. I figured that if the man’s only friend on Earth knew ahead of time what I would say, and if I had her blessing, then my conscience was clear. Truth-be-told, it would have been clear anyway. I didn’t warn her I’d be truthful in the sermon to get her blessing; I warned her so she would go somewhere else. That backfired.

But who didn’t condemn me was the deceased man’s next-of-kin. She continued to come to church, and I baptized her a few weeks later and, until this day, she walks with Christ.

Thankfully, the calls to conduct funerals for strangers ended after that.

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I’m thankful for the witness of Protestia, that has always refused to act as though Conversion by Death is a Christian doctrine. It wasn’t easy to publish some of our eulogies over the years, having to brace for impact of references to Westboro Baptist Church.

But one thing that Protestia has always done well, is speak truth at inconvenient times without showing a single care for the unpopularity of it.

Jimmy Carter’s recent death has provided another example of evangelical “Christian” leaders doing anything they can to not lead whenever leading is needed most. They are largely blind guides, soft-handed and weak-willed men with bloated potluck guts who view their role of giving comfort to transcend their role of giving truth.

This overshadows the fact that there is no discomfort quite like the discomfort experienced in hell. Logic would dictate, as well as the story of the rich man in hell (Luke 16:19-21), that the eternal weight of discomfort in a place of eternal, conscious torment outweighs the value of false comfort given to the living.

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Let’s look at a few examples of this, from popular evangelicals, and promise together never to waste an opportunity to point at a dead corpse and then, most importantly, to Christ.