How to Bury a Saint

Yesterday I attended the funeral of Mary Martha, who has been part of our church community for 88 years. Her seven children, 40 of her 46 grandchildren, and all but eight of her 33 great grandchildren gathered to bid their final goodbye, along with hundreds of friends. One of her sons came from Romania for the funeral and a daughter came from El Salvador. A grandson in Thailand and one in Bangladesh were unable to be here.

She lived in the tradition of the Biblical sisters Mary and Martha--like Martha cooking generous and tasty meals for housefuls of company, and like Mary, putting aside her duties regularly to fellowship with her Lord.

One of her sons, when he was a child on his way to the bathroom at four o'clock in the morning, found her sitting at her sewing machine. She wasn't sewing. "Mama, what are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm praying," she answered.

"Why are you praying?"

"Because I have five boys and I don't know how to raise them. I'm asking God to show me." she replied. Now, nearly 50 years later, it's clear that she heard from God and followed up on what she learned. Three of her children work full time in Christian ministries. Another son is a pastor in our church. All her children are faithful Christians.

I remember when I was an adolescent and Mary Martha taught our Sunday School class, she asked us one day if we knew the song "How Beautiful Heaven Must Be." Shy in the presence of our peers, none of us admitted to knowing the song, so she proceeded to sing it for us. I thought of her singing yesterday and reflected on the fact that she had been anticipating for many decades the beauty she is enjoying now.

All these happy reminisces and bright thoughts of heaven collide cruelly however with the earthy realities of needing to dispose properly of a dead body when someone dies. I understand why in many cases a casket stays safely perched over an open grave till the crowd disperses and the heavy equipment can be brought in. But I like the way Mary Martha was buried, and I hope our way of burial never changes.

Mary Martha's grandsons were pallbearers. They helped some of the brothers from the church carefully lower the casket into the hole in the ground beside her mother's grave. Then, as carefully as husky young men are capable of, shovelful by shovelful, the cavity was filled in around the edges of the casket. And then the parade of assistants began to step forward to relieve the pallbearers. One by one they took a shovel and helped to bury Mary Martha's worn-out body. Sons, granddaughters, pastors, nephews, nieces, friends, even a very small great grandson who noticed a few clods that rolled off the mound when the job was nearly finished and picked them up carefully and tossed them onto the pile--no one labored sad and alone, or hurriedly and mechanically to finish the task. Children looked on and learned about caring for each other when death visits. Hymns filled the air as the crowd softly sang along with the appointed singers. Mourners huddled shoulder to shoulder to break the force of the stiff and hot south Kansas wind to keep dust from blowing into the eyes of the family members seated downwind in the shade of a tent. Passing traffic droned and roared by turns. (The new highway turned aside for the cemetery, but the traffic intrudes nonetheless.) The pastor's voice rose above it all. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. . . the spirit has returned to God Who gave it. . . death is swallowed up in victory. . .

"Does death get any better than this?" one person asked during Mary Martha's funeral.

By helping each other around her grave, all of us together helped answer that question with a firm "no."