Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 2. Time to say Good-bye (orig. Con te partiro)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 2 - 'Time to say Good-bye' (Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman) . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

It IS 'Time to say Good-bye'.

Why it's bad for a funeral:

Its English translation from the Italian is widely regarded as gobbledygook [see example below].

Line that's most like a Christian song:

Then I know you are here with me

Line that's least like a Christian song:

Mm. A lot to choose from, including lines shouldn't be in any song.  How about
'over seas that I know now, no, they don't exist any more.'

A Quote from (singer) Sarah Brightman:

'We are all made up of stars and all of us are billions of years old.  That's what I believe, at least.'

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

Because even if I did want a secular song I'd want one that I'd understood.

A better Christian alternative:

'When we all get to heaven
What a day of rejoicing that will be
When we all see Jesus,
We'll sing and shout the victory!'

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 6. Supermarket Flowers (Ed Sheeran)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 6 - 'Supermarket Flowers' performed by Ed Sheeran  . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

It was written for a funeral and it has God in it - although strangely the God in this song says, "Hallelujah" (which means Praise God . . .).

Why it's bad for a funeral:

It's a personal tribute song with little to do with anyone else's loved one.  A bit like listening to the funeral before the one you're at.

Line that's most like a Christian song:

So I'll sing Hallelujah

Line that's least like a Christian song:

'Poured the old ginger beer down the sink'

A Quote from (singer) Ed Sheeran:

Everything will be okay in the end.

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

It's about someone else's family and private grief.

A better Christian alternative:

Hallelujah! sing to Jesus,
  His the scepter, His the throne;
Hallelujah! His the triumph,
  His the victory alone . . .

The European Union (2)

My posts have temporarily been absent after the death of my Mum.  In another post or two I'll write about her.  She died at the beginning of June.

So disappointed

I don't have any words left.

I'm just too upset

It is a sad day

am deeply saddened

Just some of the kind of sympathetic, caring things friends and believers wrote to me in my bereavement.

Except that these quotations are not from my sympathy cards but are some of the more repeatable extracts from various believers - including pastors - posting their responses to the electorate making a decision they didn't like about the EU.

My Mum was a believer in Jesus who was saved by God's grace, blessed me, my daughter and very many people over very many years.

The European Union is a politico-economic bloc of 28 nations.

I fail to appreciate why an unwelcome political decision in a democratic country is attributed the same language that folk write in their condolences to me.  But if they think that the UK outside the EU is going to be like me without my Mum then they have a very poor grasp of death and bereavement.

Days to Remember: 2. A Year Ago Today

"Grandpa is no longer with us."

With those words my daughter passed on the news that made this, for me, a memorial day. Who would have thought, when I was growing up, that I would hear the announcement of my Dad's death on a telephone speaker in my car?  Life moves on, and yet it doesn't.  That announcement boils down to the same bereavement whether it is reported on a car telephone or, as in former years, sent by telegraph or by a horse-riding messenger.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

It also represents a brilliant commonality in the story of humankind.  It is hard not to be scathingly critical of militant atheists as they reduce death to evolution, to be sadly sympathetic toward religionists who have no true grounds for hope and to be brightly hopeful in the comfort that the Christian message brings by which death is a defeated enemy.  Yet for all of us alike death means someone is no longer with us.  If my Dad and I had been militant atheists our conversations in the past year would similarly have been nil.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

The great privilege of the Christian, however, is that when people are taken from us we have those who mourn with us.  This is something more spiritual and profound than social sympathy and it is birthed in the nature of God and the influence of the Holy Spirit.  No Christian who is part of a Church faces death alone.  It is the joy of Church that there are always people who remain with us.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

It stands out as an exact contrast to the end of the Gospel.  Never, ever, will that simple phrase be true of the Lord Jesus who ended up saying, "and Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age"   My Dad was great.  My Saviour is greater still and by far.

All Souls

This is an interesting day to me this year, the year in which I laid my Dad's remains to rest.  Mostly but not exclusively in Catholic settings this is All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.



There is unquestionably a fellowship between the Church on earth and the Church at rest but this has been an awkward fellowship to define.  It has alarming, spooky elements when Spiritualists or those inclined their way seek to speak with the Dead.  It is only a little better in the one way communication by which the Saints are allegedly spoken to in prayer (without any assurance that they can hear and no Bible promise that suggests they can).  In evangelicalism a peculiar two part problem arises when the Faithful Departed are dispensed with in somewhat the way of any text containing the word Thou, i.e. they are fine but they are history.  This, however is countered by a hope that in the sweet by and by we will meet on that beautiful shore and reconstitute our families.

This latter hope has always bemused me given that my Grandad was also someone else's nephew or Grandson - so how would that work?  Jesus was asked a similar question about married reunion - what happens if a wife has remarried six times?  Who's she married to up there?  Jesus answer is authoritative and exactly explains what the future state is all about - one family in God not Mr and Mrs, Father and Son.

Or to put it another way, today a son celebrates not a departed father but a departed brother in Christ; a widower not a departed wife but a departed sister in Christ. 

There are other times when old relationships, contingent to this world, may be reflected upon with tears or cheers.  But once in a while it is good to remember our soul-fellowship; to remember that relationship in baptism which binds us eternally; to remember the Lover whose love modelled the best of our earthly love without ever being matched down here; to remember that unity in Him that holds us tighter to him and to each other than any imitation found in the relationships recorded on birth, marriage and death certificates. 

This is the fellowship planned and formed and preserved by the love of Jesus.

A Son's Tribute - Peace

The last hymn in my dad's Thanksgiving Service was amazingly opposite in origin to In heavenly Love Abiding, with which his service began.  Far from being written as calm poetry, this hymn was penned in the midst of almost unspeakable tragedy.

It stands as a beacon to all of us who pass through vales of suffering that a confident faith in Jesus is utterly transformational and offers the brightest of hope in the most overwhelming sadness.  Let us be clear - my dad knew little such deep personal sadness as Spafford's but he shared in that of others and did not enjoy the experience of a month dying in hospital in accelerating weakness.

But hey, where, indeed, O death is your sting?  All death has done when it has done all is usher a soul to his previously purchased-by-Jesus home.

 

 

 

Through

Yesterday I was at CCK Brighton for John Turner's thanksgiving service.  John was a truly amazing man of God who served that most famous of evangelical churches with quiet, faithful humility.  As with all the best people, the tributes from his family and his church - though from  different perspectives - described exactly the same man and his life.  In evangelical consciousness CCK will forever be associated with Terry Virgo, but like churches everywhere its blessing includes lesser known saints like John who bend their practical gifting to the service of God's people and their mission.  I never remember seeing John other than calm in life, so he will certainly not be other than calm as he rests in the presence of Jesus! 

I loved he wrote his own tribute to be read out.  I was born etc. etc.  This might seem the height of arrogance but of course he wrote it for the opposite reason - to ensure that the audience of the admiring bereaved gave the glory to Jesus, to whom it is rightly due.

One of the words we were led to in Psalm 23 was the word 'through'. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . Sure there are valleys.  But the valleys are pathways, not destinations!  Praise God. And death is now but a shadow of its former self.

Steps

Some time ago I was visiting another church.  The meeting was over and the night was dark for it was getting late.

"There's a woman out there with a child" said an elderly lady who had come back in after starting out for home."

On the steps of the church a woman had been sitting with her young child.  Invited in, we heard her story and prayed to the Lord for her and her family.  It was a story of tragedy, separation, lovelessness and despair.

But she had sat on the steps of a church.  There was no way of her knowing that a meeting had been taking place as, by the time she was there, everyone was in the meeting at the back of the buildings.  Yet she chose a church building over the nearby fast food places - all lit up and welcoming - or the Public House round the corner.  In her despair it had been something to her just to get to the steps of a place where God's people meet and sit there, crying.

It reminded me of the woman in the Gospel who touched the edge of Jesus' clothing. One of the worst mistakes a human being can make - but plenty of even religious people make it - is imagine that there is a lot of preparation required to receive God's response.

Sitting on the steps will do.

Whitehaven

I only went to Whitehaven once.  Yet I clearly remember it without my memory being jogged by the killings committed by Derrick Bird last week.

Just as it has come into the media glare for all the wrong reasons, so I remembered it as such.  Before I drove there during a lakeland holiday the name Whitehaven somehow conjured a vision a little like its namesake in Queensland, Australia . . .

I drove over the hill down toward the town to be confronted by something like this, only wetter and darker . . .

A more depressing sight set between beautiful lakeland hills and the sea it was hard to imagine.  And I fully expected to maintain this personal prejudice against the rain-battered bricks of Whitehaven until the day I die for I have certainly never intended to return as a holidaymaker to reassess my view.

My view has been reassessed however as a result of Derrick Bird's actions.  For it was also in the rain that the people of Whitehaven gathered last evening to remember and respect those who were killed last week.   A thousand people.

What is beautiful about Whitehaven is a community where people care and support each other and, however stumblingly, turn toward the Prince of Peace.  Deliberately, or accidentally, they have reflected to us all the character of God in a world that they know better than most sometimes reflects the darkness of another prince.