Before gaining fame and fortune for creating “Star Trek,” Gene Roddenberry wrote for a popular Western called “Have Gun — Will Travel.” Having been born in early 1964, I missed the last episode by only a few months. So I never got to see Paladin travel the country, offering his gun as a solution for other people’s problems.
This inconvenient fact, however, hasn’t kept me from borrowing and parodying Paladin’s distinctive moniker for one of my own recent pursuits.
While the able gunslinger often charged steep prices for his aim, he also had a heart as big as his holster, because, for the down-and-out, he sometimes offered his services for free. In our equally generous way, there’s no specified fee for offering a few prayers, reading some scripture, and putting some stories and reflections and a thumbnail sketch of a person’s life together in a funeral eulogy. But it is amazing how often these days a total stranger is willing to pay us to do just that.
A lot of folks these days don’t have a pastor. A lot of folks these days apparently don’t even know a pastor, so …
Have Eulogy – Will Travel.
My wife, Amy, and I are both on the pastor-as-mercenary list with a couple of the local funeral homes, and the phone is a-ringing. What folks offer as an honorarium for our services won’t pay the mortgage but is too good to turn down when you’re paying two college tuitions. More surprising than the willingness to pay actual money for a hired pray-er, however, is that all these pastor-less people still think that when you’re getting “hatched, matched, or dispatched,” you need one!
We agree (you need one). We believe so much in what we do that we’re perfectly willing to be mercenary about it, especially for births and weddings and funerals. But why anyone else, who doesn’t need a church or a minister any other time, would feel they need to pay a professional to bury mama … well, this is much less obvious to us.
Our idea of a funeral is simple. It’s not about fear and evangelism, it’s about worship and celebration. Thank God and offer a “good word” (eulogy) about the deceased. This has been a winning formula for our almost 17 pastoral years. Thank God. Celebrate. And leave the speculation about the after-life for an appropriate setting — if there is one. Our services are roundly appreciated.”You wouldn’t believe what all we’ve seen at funerals,” one director told me, rolling his eyes!
I’m not bragging, just reporting. People most often seem surprised — joyfully surprised — at how up-beat and inspiring, even “enjoyable” a funeral can be. “You captured her spirit, perfectly. I’ve never been to a funeral like this. Thank you so much!”
Which makes you wonder, all the more, about their willingness to offer good money for… what? For an unknown preacher they, nonetheless, fully expected to offer a religion they’ve disdained and deserted for years? Go figure!
This will all be interesting to watch as time goes on. Most of the people we’re burying these days were in church, back in the good old days. Their kids know this, so it’s only appropriate for mama to have a good church funeral. But as non-churched children grow older, even as once-churched parents get farther from all those memorized hymns, there will be less a sense of the necessity, even the “ought-ness,” of calling in a minister.
We Baptists believe you don’t actually have to have a seminary degree or a signed ordination certificate to read scripture or offer the blessing of God, and I understand that you can actually have a funeral or wedding without any religious symbolism at all.
I just wonder what happens to the spirit of a nation when that becomes the order of the day. When life’s most significant moments are no longer imbued with any sacred significance whatsoever. When births are no longer “miraculous” and “mysterious.” When weddings offer no hint of a love that can transcend any moment. When funerals can no longer connect us to anything but a dead past. Then what?
Maybe the eulogy we will be paid to deliver on that day will be for the nation itself.