Would you want the truth told at your funeral: the good, the bad—the ugly? Perhaps, if you could have the chance, you would prefer to do a bit of editing. I know I would.
Most of us have nothing to fear, though. It’s typically a friend or family member who gives the eulogy, someone who actually knew us. We expect them to share wonderful, sometimes humorous, stories to celebrate our life and accomplishments.
But just imagine someone who tells the whole truth at funerals. That’s what happens in Orson Scott Card’s novel Speaker for the Dead. Andrew (“Ender”) Wiggin is no longer the little boy military genius of Card’s earlier novel, Ender’s Game. He is now an adult, and he travels around as a sort of professional eulogizer. He is hired to investigate the lives of deceased people, to try to fully understand them, and then speak about them.
He has one challenge, however, that real-world eulogizers don’t face: Speakers for the Dead don’t just praise the deceased. They leave out nothing. Using honest—even blunt—terms, the Speaker for the Dead addresses all parts of a person’s life: the good, the bad, and, yes, the ugly.
That can be painful.
If this is beginning to sound a bit like an Old Testament prophet to you, give yourself a gold star. Those folks had to speak the truth—often bluntly—about the people of Israel, their community leaders, and their spiritual leaders. Sometimes there was good, and sometimes there was bad. And sometimes, yes, there was ugly.
This week’s selection from Isaiah holds some harsh truths that God told Isaiah to pass on to the people of Israel. The message? God is about to end them as a nation. God is going to send a conqueror to kill many of them, exile the few survivors to a foreign land, and even make the very soil of their homeland barren.
No doubt about it, that’s harsh. But in God’s view, the people of Israel earned it because they mistreated those who were in need, denied justice to the powerless, and exploited the lowly.
Isaiah was a Speaker for the Almost Dead.
Unlike a modern eulogy, Isaiah was charged with speaking the whole truth to them. It was something they needed to hear. But because he spoke of future events, ahead of the nation’s demise, there was still time for people to repent.
Praise God, we no longer live under the strictures of the Law of Moses. But even though we believers can depend on God’s assurance that “mercy triumphs over justice,” don’t think for a minute we can mistreat our poor and powerless without negative results.
Our actions influence what is said about us. Because we understand this, we get some “say” in the words that are spoken. We don’t have to wait for our lives to be over to know what’s in our eulogy. We write it every day.
Let’s give them something good to talk about.
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PHOTO CREDIT: Stroud Creek Cemetery, by Steve Orr
Read the lyrics while listening to Paula Cole sings I Don’t Want to Wait (for our lives to be over). Any Dawson Creek fans out there?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQILETlwGu8
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Join us Friday morning at DaySpring’s Lectionary Breakfast. We eat, we talk, we laugh. We meet at 8:00 on Zoom** and in person at Our Breakfast Place restaurant.
Blessings,
Steve
**Zoom link (Zoom allows you to mute the camera and the microphone if you don’t wish to be seen or heard.)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89947678414
SCRIPTURES FOR SUNDAY AND THE COMING WEEK
Find them here:
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts/?y=384&z=e&d=18
Print them here:
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Cx_FifthSundayafterEpiphany.pdf
Isaiah 6:1-8, (9-13)
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany (February 9, 2025)
