I am conscious of my body at a funeral in a way that I am at perhaps no other time. In general, a priest is meant to fade into the background, subsumed into the office, a figure who represents the institution of the church, and who disappears as Christ is presented to the world. In one simple way, this is certainly my general experience; I have had many instances of people recognizing me with my clerical collar on, but not when I am in street clothes.

This is particularly true at weddings and baptisms, two of our “occasional offices,” as we call them in the Church of England, services held more infrequently and that mostly serve those outside of the regular worshipping community. You can often feel incidental in these events. The joyful wedding couple or the giggling, lively infant are the focus of all attention, to the point where you sometimes need to call people’s attention back to what is actually happening at these moments.

But at a funeral, it feels very different. Perhaps it is because at centre stage is a coffin, that enduring symbol of lifelessness. Here is no celebration of new beginnings, but a stark statement of finality. Where the body of the deceased lies motionless, my body is the one that moves and, in a way, becomes the focus of attention. The funeral director brings the coffin to the church, at which point I take over and escort the deceased all the way to their final resting place. I lead them into the church, I lead them out of the church. I lead the procession through town to the cemetery. I am the first to stand at the graveside, and the last to leave. There is no point at which my body is not there with the dead body.

Despite having presided at dozens and dozens of funerals, I still sometimes feel odd doing it. I am aware of inserting myself into a family’s story and sorrow, and the only thing that makes me feel like I belong there are my robes.

In that respect, I remind myself that I am not inserting myself into that context. I am inserting God into it. That sounds strange to say, because God is “above all and through all and in all,” as Paul writes in Ephesians 4:6. But as the Anglican theologian Austin Farrar once said, “Priests are an embodied reminder that there is a God to be reckoned with who calls us to love and serve him.” Perhaps that is nowhere more true than in the priest’s presence at a funeral, where they are in focus at every moment and pointing those present to realities that the vast majority of people do not consider at any other time in their lives.

At the same time, that presence increasingly jars with the expectations people have of funerals. As death becomes further removed from our purview by advances in health and medical technology, funerals become more a sort of memorial than anything else. Families wish to celebrate the life of the deceased rather than confront the reality of death. This accounts for the increasing civil celebrants and distinctly humanist funerals. But modern funeral rites have also changed in certain ways to accommodate this emphasis. N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope, laments the loss of the focus on resurrection in funeral services, and rightly so. The seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer, little used here in England any longer, especially for funeral services, is laced through with the sure and certain hope of resurrection, but the newer liturgies downplay that emphasis. While this makes some sense in a world where the majority of people we bury are not confessing Christians, Wright also notes that this shift does “little to enlighten [mourners] and plenty to mislead them or confirm them in their existing muddle” about the afterlife. Instead of a grounded hope, they are left only with a “vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.”

In response to this, a bishop once told me that, when he was still in parish ministry, he refused all attempts to make the deceased the exclusive focus of the service. He would put any eulogy or tribute near the beginning. Family members were welcome to stand up to pay their respects, but they then fade into the background. The service had to end with the priest standing alone so that Jesus would have the final word. For him, this was crucial to any Christian funeral.

To be sure, we love and serve our parishioners by joining with them in giving thanks for the life of someone they loved. But we fail to love and serve them if we do not take seriously that calling of the priest to represent Christ to the world. This is why I have carried that bishop’s wisdom into my own funeral ministry. My presence there with the deceased is not incidental, and I am not willing to allow it to be. If I am set apart by the church to represent Christ to the world, then my body must be present there from start to finish. Because life and death only make sense in the light of Christ, and that hope must be proclaimed to the world.

When I was first ordained, I had a number of conversations with a colleague about what it was we were actually doing at a funeral. Certainly, we had words we were required to speak—to declare the hope of resurrection in Jesus, to commend the deceased to God, to commit their body to be cremated or buried, to pronounce a blessing. But what were these words effecting?

This is, in some sense, a question that gets at the very essence of ministry. Because at least in the Anglican understanding of ministry, the pronouncement of words brings about new realities. The priest is given power to declare the absolution of sins, and in that declaration, those who have confessed are truly forgiven. The priest consecrates the bread and wine with words, and declares the Triune name in baptism, and in the speaking of those words, new realities come to be in powerful ways.

However, all of this is complicated by two things. First, in the Church of England, funeral ministry is not just the preserve of the ordained, but is undertaken by authorized lay ministers as well. Second, when you are commending a dead person to the mercy and protection of God two or more weeks after they have passed away, there is a feeling that those words have less power.

It was the BBC television series Father Brown, loosely based on G.K. Chesterton’s fictional detective-priest, that first prompted these questions about what we actually do at a funeral. As I watched, I was repeatedly struck by the way Father Brown rushed to say words over the body of the murder victim. Nothing was more important to him at that moment, even in a place swarming with police and family members in a state of shock, than pronouncing words over the body of the deceased. His confidence in the significance of that ministry caused me to consider more deeply what I was doing at a funeral.

To be honest, I am still not sure I know. Father Brown is scripted, so it is easy to ensure the priest is there at, or very shortly after, the point of death. This is not the reality of life, however, and though there are times we are called to say the last rites, rarely are we there at the exact moment of death.

However, whatever my words may effect for the deceased, I am aware of their power for the living. Funerals provide a decided moment of closure for most people. The time between the death of a loved one and their cremation or burial is often a time of pain and confusion, a time that can bring old family divisions to the fore again, a time that is consumed with practicalities and executorial duties. In many ways, the first time those closest to the bereaved are given space to begin to let go of the person they loved is at the funeral itself. Here the church’s words come with power, because they vocalize that grief. They offer a farewell that is clothed in reverence and dignity, deeply rooted in a theological anthropology that recognizes the value of all human beings in the sight of their Maker. And they hold it all up to God, laying the deceased and the pain and confusion of the mourners at his feet.

Then we pray, “Now we entrust them into your care, confident in your goodness and mercy, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Whatever those present know (or don’t know) about God, the petition for his care, goodness, and mercy to surround their loved one often seems to have the effect of lifting a large burden off their shoulders. Why that is, I am not certain. I was told when I was training to be a priest that I should expect mourners to regularly ask me how God could let something like this happen. In reality, I have not once faced that question, but numerous times instead I have found that people take some comfort in the idea that the deceased is now “up there” somewhere with God, ambiguous as that may be. For myself, this final prayer is a great comfort too, because rarely do I know those I bury or the faith commitments they may or may not have had. But I do serve a God who “is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings” (Psalm 145:17). What I do not know, he does know, and no matter who lies in that coffin in front of me, I can trust that he will do what is best for them.

There is a charitableness to this, without which I could not conduct this ministry. But at the same time, it is not enough to point the mourners to God’s dealings with those who have died. That is why, at this moment in the Church of England’s funeral service, there is a decided shift in focus. After celebrating the person’s life and saying a number of prayers, our focus moves very pointedly from the deceased to the bereaved. After the prayer of commendation, we often make the sign of the cross over the coffin, and then turn our focus exclusively to those who are left behind. This becomes especially poignant at a burial, because this is the time when we begin to lower the coffin into the ground as we say words from Psalm 103, reminding those gathered of the mercy and grace of God, the brevity of life, and the everlasting nature of his love. We very clearly call them to consider that this is their own end, and from this point forward, to live in the light of the resurrection, praying for God’s support in doing so. God is just and kind in all his doings, but the fullness of his blessing rests on those who are willing to die now, united by faith with Christ in his death, so that they might be raised to new life with him. That step taken, we can pray, “Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This all seems perfectly natural for a Christian funeral. But it takes on a prophetic edge when the majority of people we bury and their grieving families are not confessing Christians. The church is present in this moment to reorder the world of the mourners. In what may only be the span of forty-five minutes, we situate their lives and the life of their loved one in the story of the gospel. Life is both not as they know it, and more than they know. We invite them into a new way of inhabiting the world in order to prepare them to inhabit their grave.

Here the physical embodiment of the church becomes profoundly important, and to me, a lot of the power of this prophetic ministry is lost in crematoriums, detached as it is from a physical and tangible witness. You are removed from a building that has stood for hundreds and hundreds of years as a testament to the resurrection, a building hallowed by generations of prayer, a building whose often-cruciform footprint standing at the centre of a community points to the event that stands at the centre of history, a building immediately surrounded by a community awaiting the resurrection. Instead, you find yourself in a sterilized chapel, merely a function room that is often far removed from the community in which the deceased lived (my nearest crematorium is fifteen miles away), and in which the final moments of the body’s passage to its final resting place are almost entirely mechanized. For those of us who have had behind-the-scenes tours of crematoriums, the clinical nature of the “storefront” and chapel are magnified that much more by the industrial feel of the area behind the curtains.

It is a place that simply seems to absorb a body into a void, a signal of a return to nothingness, profoundly disjoined from the hope of resurrection we are called to speak. Telling in this regard is the fact that funeral directors have whole shelves in their storerooms filled with ashes that family members never come to collect.

A couple of years ago, I did a funeral at a crematorium, and the family had requested that the curtains be shut immediately after the final prayer. However, when I pushed the button to do so, one of the mourners, a niece of the dead man, let out a shriek and ran to the front, through the closing curtains. The normally polished demeanour of the funeral directors and crematorium staff was entirely undone by this, as they scrambled to reopen the curtains, yet uncertain about what to do with this sobbing young woman, holding on the coffin and shouting, “No, no, no!” Only after several moments was another relative able to move her on, out the door.

Although I am not entirely certain what happened with her in that moment, she was distressed by the abrupt loss of something tangible and what I can only assume was the belief that this loss was permanent.

This has never happened at a burial; I have never seen someone leap into a grave as a coffin was lowered. Really, while I can only speak of this anecdotally, there is generally a more prevailing sense of peacefulness at a graveside. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that burial has been the normative practice in our society for so long; despite the prevalence of cremation now, it remains something much more recent, and in some ways at odds with the deep-seated notions of life and death embedded in our cultural imagination.

But I think it also has to do with the communal aspect of burial. It is true that I die, but it is also true that we all die. And a graveyard is a kind of embodied witness to this. We retain not only our connection with those we have loved, but a visible connection with our own end.

In this respect, one of the unfortunate things about municipal cemeteries, often put into use once a churchyard is full, is that they are located in much more hidden parts of town. The current cemetery in my town is hidden in the middle of a large housing estate, as was the one in the town I lived in previously. Of course, this move is logistical, as they are located where land is available, and that is never going to be in the town centre. But it is not hard to also see it as part of our move to relocate death to the periphery. Celebrations of life remain at the heart of community life, but the marking of death happens in a quiet corner, off the beaten path. The footfall in a municipal cemetery will mostly be those going to visit the grave of a loved one.

Churchyards, on the other hand, attract all sorts of people. I have seen ours used by children to play hide and seek, by others as a place to sit and chat with friends in the sunshine, by history buffs studying the dates and epitaphs on the monuments. Just yesterday, a young boy cautiously approached me to ask if there were zombies hiding behind the headstones, and when I assured him there were not, he was happy to make his way to one of the benches with his mother and enjoy his ice cream. In the midst of death, life goes on all around.

Of course, with the exception of rural villages, it is impossible to return to the use of churchyards. But that does not mean the symbolism of the place is lost. Because even though people are no longer interred in many churchyards, the procession of a funeral into the church still makes its way through the churchyard. Here is not just our connection with generations past in this local place, but the absorption of the lives of those in this community in a single story. From beginning to end, from baptism to burial, here is where the journey of life is held together.

But here we also assume a posture of hope. Those interred in churchyards face east, just as those within the church face the altar at the east end. Both in worship and in death, we testify to the resurrection. The building, the people, the deceased, joined together in an embodied and defiant statement that death is overcome by the one who holds all of life in his hands.

All of this said, funeral ministry is increasingly challenging. For all that I may understand and believe about what I am doing, I know that much of this is lost on those I minister to, as the world around us is increasingly detached from the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. And every year, fewer and fewer people request a church funeral.

Sadly, this has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Services in crematoriums here in the United Kingdom have been severely curtailed, in some cases down to as little as fifteen minutes. Funeral directors have even begun to offer “pure cremations,” meaning your loved one is shipped off to the crematorium without any funeral service. After all, when you can only mourn with five or ten members of your family at a distance, what is the point? Save the money now, and gather family and friends together for a party to celebrate Granddad’s life when all of this is over. What kind of repercussions this will have in the long run remains to be seen.

Yet however the world may change, my calling as a parish priest remains. This is a ministry of presence: I am set apart to make my body visible in a particular place and among a particular community of people, and in doing so to make visible Christ and the church. I am here for no other reason than to carry into my parish the only true story of hope and life, and to call others to take their place in that story. As those in my care face a world of confusion and death, there is nothing greater I can offer.