{"id":896,"date":"2016-01-03T17:20:31","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T00:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/?p=896"},"modified":"2016-01-03T17:24:04","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T00:24:04","slug":"funereal-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/archives\/896","title":{"rendered":"FUNEREAL JOY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Candle.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-897\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-897\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Candle-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Candle\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Candle-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Candle-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Candle.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/em><\/strong><strong><em>\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">FUNEREAL JOY<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This morning I\u00a0attended\u00a0my first-ever Hutterite funeral. It moved me. But first things first:<\/p>\n<p><strong>GLOSSARY: <\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Hutterite<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0describes a group of pacifistic, separatist, German-speaking, religious dissenters from 16th-century Moravia\u00a0(of the same Anabaptist\u00a0rootstock as the Amish and Mennonite) who fled persecution and now live communally in\u00a0agriculturally based, one-hundred-soul colonies clustered mostly throughout the prairies of western Canada and northwestern U.S. <strong>I\u00a0am proud <\/strong>to call the Hutterites my\u00a0neighbours and friends. (Here&#8217;s a set of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hutterites.org\">photos and more info<\/a> for the curious.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Funereal<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is not a typo but the adjective describing the character &#8220;appropriate&#8221; to a funeral&#8211;generally thought synonymous with words like\u00a0<em>morose,\u00a0doleful,<\/em> or <em>bleak.<\/em> \u00a0The service I attended, with an estimated thousand mourners in attendance, honoured the financial manager of our\u00a0local colony, an influential Hutterite leader. The character\u00a0of his funeral was <strong>not &#8220;appropriate&#8221;<\/strong> by this definition.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Joy<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0(not gloom) was the attitude pervading the\u00a0very black-clad gathering of cousins, brothers, offspring, and all manner of extended family who attended from sister colonies as far away as Peace River (fourteen hours&#8217; drive). <strong>Tears flowed<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>but<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>joy abounded.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, with definitions out of the way, I have a simple observation: <strong>Death brings hope.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Of course, this is anti-intuitive and I&#8217;m not making\u00a0light of the sorrow experienced by those who will miss the face and voice and wise counsel of their beloved. But what I saw in that huge crowd of interconnected family (though the words of sermon and song were almost all unintelligible to me) was a founded belief that <strong>Christians know where we\u00a0are going<\/strong> when this life is over.<\/p>\n<p>The preacher&#8217;s brief English homily applied <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=rev+14%3A13&amp;version=GNV\">Scripture<\/a> so beautifully, reminding us\u00a0that <strong>blessing<\/strong> <strong>follows\u00a0<\/strong>those who die &#8220;in the Lord&#8221; (which assumes a life having been lived\u00a0&#8220;in the Lord&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>My Christian friends, in this new year (which has already begun dying), be <strong>filled with hope<\/strong> that our future is sure!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0FUNEREAL JOY This morning I\u00a0attended\u00a0my first-ever Hutterite funeral. It moved me. But first things first: GLOSSARY: Hutterite\u00a0describes a group of pacifistic, separatist, German-speaking, religious dissenters from 16th-century Moravia\u00a0(of the same Anabaptist\u00a0rootstock as the Amish and Mennonite) who fled persecution and now live communally in\u00a0agriculturally based, one-hundred-soul colonies clustered mostly throughout the prairies of western Canada [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":900,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions\/900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}