Funeral Message

by Justin Neufeld

Jesus was with his disciples, making his way across the Jordan River and back to Bethany in Judea when he spoke to his disciples, saying, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to wake him up.”

On Saturday morning, at ten minutes to two, our pastor, friend, father and loving husband fell asleep in the arms of his Father in Heaven. Dad’s sleep, though, has not been long. Just as he used to pick up our tired and sick bodies as children, and mend our troubled souls as friends and family, so too did God reach down and pick Norm up from his broken, tiring body and give him not only eternal peace and rest, but eternal pleasures at his Saviour’s right hand.

Today, as we mourn the loss of our pastor and friend, our uncle and cousin, our father and husband, Dad is perhaps spending these minutes skating down the right wing, and with perfect vision spotting the opening between the goalies pads, and with two crisp pushes from legs with muscles as tout as steel, put the puck into the net.

Or, as we mourn, Dad is making up for all the desserts that his cancer robbed him of. Dad loved food—he always resented the fact that stomachs got full, and maybe now he is enjoying the feast that God has prepared for him.

Or, maybe as we mourn, Dad is at God’s side at last, talking to his Saviour as I talked to my dad—both as a father and as a friend. Dad and God are sharing with each other, and God tells Dad how much he loves him, and how glad he is to have him at his side for eternity. Dad’s vision has been make perfect, enabling him to see with his eyes what his heart has always known—the love of his Father in heaven.

The story of Lazarus is a fitting story for us today as we think about the life and legacy Dad has left his family and friends. Just as Mary and Martha sent a message to Jesus saying, “Lord, the one you love is sick,” so too did we, bound together as those who love Norm, send a message to our Father in heaven, saying “Lord, the one you love is sick.” Those pleas were especially frantic the last two weeks of Dad’s life as we begged God to leave his servant on earth for a while longer.

And Dad was God’s servant. But Pastor Norm did not restrict his service to his flock in Steinbach, his flock at Pine Ridge, River East, Parliament Community, Stoney Creek, or Onida. Dad served, cared and prayed for all the people he came into contact with. He served the same flock Jesus came to serve—a flock which Dad always knew he was but one member of.

As Dad lay in his hospital bed the last week of his life, he would often try to write us notes. But with his deteriorating vision, which was only make worse from the doses of prednisone, and the shakiness of body other medications induced, it was nearly impossible to decipher what Dad would call his “chicken scratch.” It could sometimes take 20 to 30 minutes to figure out the simple statements Dad was writing. True to who he was, Dad never got annoyed or exasperated, but remained patient, trying again and again to express what he needed to say. And even through the past week, Dad blessed us with his smiles. At one point, after Jason and I had been trying for several minutes to understand what Dad wrote, I said, “Dad, you must be ready to swear at us.” He smiled as broadly as he could, and kept working until Jason and I understood.

Dad kept trying to write until he passed into God’s arms. The last thing Dad wrote was about six hours before he died. But this time it was different. In big, strong, clear writing that needed no deciphering or interpreting, Dad wrote, “I feel so badly for the church.”

So we ask God, “How could you let a servant such as this go?” Dad only asked God for life so that he could serve him longer, and we are without a satisfying answer as to why God would not grant his wish and ours. It’s easy to say, but harder to accept, that the Bible offers no easy answers. The story of Lazarus does not offer easy answers. After Jesus was told that the one he loved was sick we are told that Jesus not only loved Lazarus, but his sisters Martha and Mary as well, just as Jesus loves Dad and all of us here today. Yet, after receiving the news sent to him by those he loved, about the one whom he loved, Jesus remained where he was two more days. Why, we really don’t know. Sure, by raising Lazarus from the dead Jesus was glorified, but we all could think of a thousand different ways Jesus could glorify himself without letting his servant die.

When Martha and Mary finally met Jesus, they fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Mary and Martha knew Jesus must have delayed coming because their messengers would have returned a full two days before Jesus arrived. Others surrounding Mary and Martha, who were mourning as we do today, expressed similar thoughts, saying, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Amongst these questions we find two things. As difficult and as cruel as it can seem, one thing the story of Lazarus suggests is that God is sovereign. He works on his own time and on his own schedule. He will not abandon us or forsake us; he will not deprive us of his comfort and peace. But the manner and the time in which he does it will often be unexpected, puzzling, and at times even frustrating and infuriating. This is because God is sovereign. The second thing I find is that despite appearances to the contrary, God loves us. Mary and Martha must have been absolutely shocked, angry, despondent, and in the depths of despair as they waited two full days for Jesus to arrive. Had he forgotten about them? Did he care? How could he let the one whom he loved die? Yet Jesus did not forget them, he did arrive, and when he arrived he offered Mary and Martha his comfort and peace, saying, “Your brother will rise again” and, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” Even more significantly, when Jesus sees Mary, Martha and those with them weeping, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Jesus was troubled and deeply moved in spirit. Jesus wept.

Jesus wept for us when we surrounded our father, when we realised that our dad was going to die. Jesus wept for us as we watched the life pass from Dad, and he weeps today for a church that mourns the loss of its pastor, and friends who lost a caring heart and a loving touch in their lives. But Jesus not only feels for those who mourn, he himself mourns as well. Jesus loves Lazarus, and when Jesus wept, those who were with Mary said, “See how he loved him.” I like to imagine that tears were rolling down Jesus’ cheeks, that perhaps he sat down with his head in his hands, his shoulders heaving from his heavy cries.

But this image of Jesus is hard to reconcile with the Jesus who lingered for two days before he left for Bethany. How can this same man, who waited two full days before making his journey to his friends side, genuinely weep for those who mourn, and mourn himself? Lazarus was not just a tool Jesus used to demonstrate his power. Jesus and Lazarus had a love relationship. Dad had this same love relationship with Jesus as well. Yet we wonder why a God who loves did not give his servant Norman what he wanted, and what those who loved and prayed for him wanted as well. What could be better than giving a loving husband more years with his wife, a caring father more wonderful years with his children and future grandchildren, and a gifted and cherished pastor more years with his congregation? We do not know why God did not decide to exercise his power, perform a miracle, and heal Dad’s failing lungs. We are left with similar questions in the story of Lazarus. But what we do find is, despite the unanswerable, a love that God has for us that exceeds, impossible as it seems, the love Dad had for his family and the love we had for him. We are left with a picture of a God who loves, who weeps for those who mourn, and who mourns himself as well.

And God has said no before to the prayers of his servants. In the Garden of Gethsamane, Jesus prayed to the same Father in heaven to which we prayed and Dad prayed, asking him to withhold the suffering and death he was about to experience. God said no to his own son. His son had to suffer and die. God could have saved humankind any way he pleased, but he did not take an easy route. As a result of Jesus’ death on the cross, God knows precisely what it is like to lose a loved one. He knows what it is to mourn, and he knows what it is like to experience death. Jesus has passed through what our friend, father, pastor and husband passed through early Saturday morning. And Jesus was with Dad when he died. He was with Dad because he loved Dad.

Ultimately, for God, the pain of loss is too great to bear. He cannot stand to have his creation, which he loves, die and be lost forever. He cannot bear to be without us, just as our family finds it impossible to be without our father. That is why God does not leave us in the grave, and essentially Jesus has done for Dad what he did for Lazarus. He has brought Dad back to life, he has called him out of the grave. He has run toward as Dad approached from the distance, he has put his arm around Dad’s shoulders, he has looked Dad in the eye and said, as Dad always said to us, “Welcome here!”

So when I look at how my father’s life ended, and when I look at the story of Lazarus, I find questions without answers. But in the story that was Dad’s life, and in the story of Lazarus, we find a God who is sovereign and a God who loves. And I am convinced that a God who loves, but yet remains sovereign, is the only God that one can trust. I want God to be sovereign because only when God is sovereign can I trust that he always makes the right decisions. But if God has to be sovereign in order to always make the right decisions, I want those decisions to flow from a love for me. This constitution is absolutely necessary in order for us to trust God. It is obvious that if God does not love us he cannot be trusted, and it is clear that if God is easily manipulated or coerced that the decisions he makes will not always be the right ones. God, in order to be God, must not err. And the only way God cannot err is for him to be sovereign. The result of this equation of a God who loves and a God who is sovereign is stories like Dad’s and stories like Lazarus’ where questions easily crop up. But we must accept the lack of answers to these questions, because the God which allows these questions is also the only God which can be trusted.

In the end, I still find a God who loves us tremendously. A God who loved us enough to die on a cross, to experience death himself and to experience the loss of a loved one. Why did God do this? Because he cannot stand to be without us. The consequences of sin are death, but the consequences of God’s love for us are life eternal.

I said goodbye to my father, my friend and my hero. Many of us are doing the same. I cherished all these roles he had in my life. I would not substitute his role as a father for that of a friend alone, and it was his fathering and friendship that made him my hero. Watching him in bed the last week of his life, I desperately wanted him to sit up in bed, put his arm around me, and tell me everything is going to be all right. I wanted to snuggle up beside him in the hospital bed. I still wanted and needed my dad to take care of me, even when he needed the care far more desperately. And Dad did receive care. Our prayers and God’s love tended to him. On the day Andrea and I got married, Dad spoke about his days in the hospital recovering from the bone marrow transplant. At the time he said, and these are his exact words, “You have no idea, Justin, what it meant to me when both you and Jason individually and voluntarily would ask, ‘Dad, can I pray with you before we leave?’ Those late evening encounters, or the early hours of the morning, whatever it was, when you would pray for me and with me. It touched me most deeply. They will forever be carved on the walls of my memory. I’m so grateful for you and for Jason, when you as sons ministered to me at a profound spiritual level. I thank God for that and for you.”

It offers me and the family some peace to think how often we prayed for Dad in the final two weeks of his life. As a family we were able to offer him comfort. And we are thankful that this comfort is real, that this comfort is made true by the death Jesus on the cross. We all ministered to Dad in the last two weeks of his life—family, friends and congregation. Wherever you were when you sent prayers to God, God’s comfort was sent to Dad. Dad died fighting as hard as he possibly could. He had the heart of the fiercest competitor. But he was not afraid, and he was ready to meet his Father in heaven.

We will wake up in the mornings, now that our father, husband and friend has passed away, wondering how long we will have to wait until we can see Dad again. The wait seems far too long and painful. But Dad experienced these same feelings as well. His father died when he was 18 and I’m sure that on some days Dad would rise in the mornings feeling overwhelmed by the time and distance between him and his father. But in those years between his father’s death and his own, Dad led a wonderful life. He married a beautiful woman, had a wonderful marriage, a wonderful family, and blessed hundreds through his work as a pastor. And now he is in heaven with his father. I pray that our family will have many wonderful years serving God and growing in our relationships with Jesus Christ, until we see Dad again. And, that we not only long to see our father again, but that we come to long to see Jesus the same way we long to see Dad.

I’d like to finish by reading from Hebrews 4 verses 14-16: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”