The following question came from an international in our worship service.
Q: One of my relatives passed away when I was back home. And we had a three-day worship for him … I know this situation will come again in the future because of the culture and what people think. So do you have suggestions on how to deal with this problem?
A: I’m glad you see ancestor worship to be a problem. Not everyone does. Sometimes people view ancestor worship as just a cultural way to express grief and honor to a relative who has died. You, however, see that while your cultural practices may indeed be expressing grief and honor, they are also doing something else.
What then do you do?
1. The first thing I would say is that you need to commit your heart and soul regularly to the Word of God, to prayer, and to God’s people. These things are essential to walking with God. I am not talking here about a specific course of action concerning this situation. I am instead talking about maintaining your spiritual health. This is just common sense. Healthy people handle difficulties better than sick people. Spiritually it is no different. You will need specific direction and strength to do God’s will. Both those things come from God. If you are not walking with God, you will conform to the culture in most every practice, but if you are walking with God, you will be in a much better condition to honor God at this difficult time. Maintain your walk with God. Don’t let that slip.
2. I would recommend that you find a mature believer from your culture and talk to him or her about this. I have not walked through this issue personally, but that believer probably has, and he or she will be able to give you more specific counsel than I can here. My response will stick with broad Biblical principles.
3. It is important in this situation that you honor your family. Your family needs to know that you love and respect them, even if you might not be able to perform every function they would like you to. This means that your attitude is important. You are not to be disrespectful or arrogant about burial customs, even if you disagree with them. If you must say “no” to something, let your family know that you love them and that you want to honor them. They may interpret your “no” as disrespect, but don’t actually be disrespectful, for then you give them evidence to confirm what they think.
In order to show respect, I believe it is important for you to participate in as many of the funeral customs as you can without violating your conscience. Then, if you must say “no” to the request that you pray to a dead man, your family will see that you are making distinctions. If you say “yes” as much as you can, you are buying some trust.
But what if every aspect of the funeral and successive ceremonies requires you to violate your conscience? In other words, what if you can’t say “yes” to anything? First, I doubt that will be true. When someone dies, you will have people to visit, care to give, arrangements to make, and all sorts of activities going on. I believe you will have an opportunity to help. Death is an open door for ministry. But if the main ceremonies violate your conscience, you may need to skip them. You need to be prepared for that, and if you do skip them, you need to find another way to honor and respect your relative and family. The Holy Spirit will be crucial in communicating to you where you have a green light and where you have a red light.
4. Because you need to honor your family, you will need to communicate well. Your family will not understand why you refuse to hold a vigil for the dead. You need to be clear to them where your boundaries are and why. If you must skip something, let your family know that your reason has nothing to do with disrespect and everything to do with the fact that you see the spiritual reality in a different way. Because you see the spiritual reality in a different way, you show honor in a different way, and you need to communicate that. They need to know that you are not rejecting them. What exactly you say, I will leave between you and the Holy Spirit.
5. Death brings out the spiritual side of the human race, and our funeral and burial customs often reflect specific spiritual beliefs. What you want to avoid is personal involvement in or endorsement of an alternate spiritual system. Worship of the dead, praying to the dead, leaving food out for the dead to eat, holding vigils for the dead, burning incense to the dead, reading unbiblical spiritual writings, and other similar practices are tied to a spiritual system. In Christ, you do not want to participate in that system.
Of course, your family may perform such practices while not believing any of the spiritual stuff. That does not mean, however, that the spiritual stuff is absent. When you pray to someone who is not God, you are doing something spiritual whether you know it or not. And if your family does not believe the spiritual teachings, their unbelief may be a path toward helping them understand you. That’s common ground.
6. Some questions to ask yourself to help navigate what you can and cannot do.
- Is the practice I am being asked to do tied to an alternate spiritual belief system? Not every funeral custom involves unbiblical spirituality. If someone asks you to bring food to the widow, you may be just caring for the widow. If a funeral custom involves viewing a body, you may be merely showing respect. If you are asked to give a speech about your memories of the person, you may be showing him honor. None of these practices is necessarily tied to an unbiblical belief. You can think of other such practices.
- How central are the spiritual practices to what I am being asked to attend? Let me illustrate. Are you being asked to attend a worship service for the dead? Or a memorial that may include objectionable elements? In the first situation, the whole point of the event involves an unbiblical spiritual purpose. In the second situation, the whole point of the event may be to show respect to your dead relative. In the first situation, your presence could be considered an endorsement of the spiritual belief system. That’s the point of the event. In the second situation, your presence is not necessarily an endorsement of the spiritual practices that go on. That’s not why you are there. You’re there to honor your grandfather. In reality, over the course of several days, you may be asked to participate in both types of events.
- Are you an observer or a practitioner? Are you watching someone burn the incense or are you burning it? Are you merely present when someone asks the dead for good fortune or are you asking the dead yourself? Do your parents have an altar to the dead in their home or do you have one in your home? Do you merely see the feast left to the ghosts or are you laying out the feast? It is true that in some situations, God may not want you even to observe, for sometimes observation is participation. But that is not always the case, and when you move from observing to practicing, you are going to a different level. Observing may be OK in some situations. You can’t control what other people do. But you can control what you practice.
7. Be prepared for difficulty. Peter tells his readers that they are aliens, exiles, foreigners, outsiders in their land (I Pet 1:1,17; 2:11). Christ makes us an alien where we live. In the case of ancestor worship, you see this. In Christ, you have become a spiritual alien within your own family. This is not bad. In fact, you can love your family better because of Christ in you, but it does cause problems. Your family may be angry. Your parents may slander and insult you because of your stance just as the Roman culture in the first century slandered and reviled the Christians Peter wrote to (I Pet 3:9, 16-17). You may face difficulty, but in Christ you are victorious in the end. Let that fact encourage you. Be patient with your family. They do not understand Christ. And if you must suffer their scorn, do so with joy, for God sees your faithfulness and He will reward it in the end.
I pray that when this happens again, Christ will fill you with His wisdom, grace, and strength to honor Him and your family.
