One of a pastor's responsibilities is to conduct and to preach funerals. And in the past four years,

I have done so many funerals. I think I've done more funerals in the past four years than in my whole career combined, I think maybe easily.

There was one day I did two funerals in the same day for families that I was close to.

Young people, older people, friends. I did funerals for brothers, overdoses, cancer, accidents.

And whenever I do a funeral, in addition to the traditional passages that a pastor would read for comfort and to bring a sense of hope and we don't mourn like the rest of the world and all the things, I always read Paul's closing words from 1st Corinthians chapter 15.

And I don't ever explain them at a funeral because there's not time and it may not even be appropriate but one of the reasons I always include those

verses is I imagine those words from the apostle Paul are what he would want said at his funeral

but he didn't get a funeral.

It may have been the words that he was murmuring to himself as they marched him

through the back gate, through the city walls of the city of Rome, out into a forest,

had him kneel and beheaded him, maybe in the year 67 or even possibly 68 in Nero's Rome. Or perhaps these were the

words that as they marched him to where he knew he was about to die, perhaps he sang these words,

perhaps he shouted these words. And if for you, Jesus is just a ticket to heaven.

Jesus is just a comforter in your time of need.

Jesus is sort of just the Jesus that maybe was presented to you as a child, then the words,

I'm going to read them to you, they really don't make any sense.

They just, they don't fit within that box and that narrative.

And perhaps Paul, not perhaps, Paul knew something,

saw something, heard something, understood something that maybe a lot of us miss and it's not our fault. It's just the way that Christianity was presented to us as children or college students

or adults. This is literally, and I'm not making light of it, these words are literally

first century trash talk.

Um, not before a basketball game. These, these are the words of a soldier covered in a defeated

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