From Mourning to Morning
Sermon
ORDINARY PEOPLE, EXTRAORDINARY GOD
Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost
It was a perfectly lovely day and we had no reason to suspect that it would be anything but a typically happy Saturday -- a day to run errands, wash the cars and anticipate an evening with friends. But that all changed when, around 1:30 p.m., a phone call came from my wife's father in Cleveland indicating that her mother had unexpectedly died. A week earlier she had had a heart attack, but a full recuperation had been the prognosis, and so this word came as shock and radical disruption. Suddenly and without warning, we were all catapulted into the experience of grief. Within a few hours we were airborne, making our dazed way toward a rendezvous with a major loss. Intellectually, of course, we had known that such a day was inevitable, but now that day in reality had arrived, and grief had set upon us.
Most of us have had similar experiences, and while none relish talking about death and grief, they need to be explored. What's more, our faith is not silent about them. In fact, our faith contends that grief holds great promise for us all. Far from being a spoilsport, grief, as our faith sees it, is deliverer and healer. Phillips translates Jesus' celebrated lines like this: "How happy are those who know what sorrow means, for they will be given courage and comfort!" (Matthew 5:5) If I understand those words at all correctly, they are positive, promise-bearing, and restorative words. They also underscore the appropriateness of David's reaction to the death of his son Absalom:
The king was overcome with grief. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he cried, "O my son! My son Absalom! Absalom, my son! If only I had died in your place, my son!"
(2 Samuel 18:33)
Not an Aberration
Because we tend to sweep discussions of grief under the rug, there is always the risk that someone will assume there is something abnormal or unusual about it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Grief is not aberrant; it is salutary. Ironically, it only becomes pathological when it has been mismanaged in the first place. So if life, for whatever reason, has summoned you to be sad, be glad for the sadness. Your grief is God's plan to help you feel better.
Actually, there are gradations of grief. It is not, alone, the feeling we have when someone we love dies. When mother or father takes a job in another town, there can be a sadness about that departure for everyone in the family. That's grief, too. There is grief when a pet dies, when a friend moves away, and when we say farewell to one stage of life so that we can embrace another. Robert Johnson reminds us that even weddings have an element of grief in them:
Many of our wedding customs are actually funeral customs. In primitive weddings, marriage was celebrated as such; it was at once a funeral, a transformation, and a joyous outburst.
(She, p. 11)
Not a Time for Heroics
Keep in mind, too, that grief should never be construed as a summons to heroic behavior. I'm always a bit uneasy when, immediately following a death, I am told that those most directly affected are doing just fine. When a connection to one who has died has been one of profound and constructive bondedness, one does not "do well" when first it is terminated.
Following her husband's death at sixty-four years of age, Anne Brooks kept a journal for the first six months of widowhood. At the sixth-month point, she made this entry:
I still certainly am not fine. Nor whole, but I am functioning to the best of my limits. The limits define themselves at the strangest times and places. Shopping in a country store and wanting to share a "find" will bring tears to my eyes. "Mack the Knife" on the car radio, one of our favorite dance tunes, kept me crying for miles along a lonely stretch of road. The way my son ran along the station platform to greet me was so much like his father. These things hurt, and hurt painfully.
(The Grieving Time, p. 33)
At the end of her journal Anne Brooks adds, "This is a testament to love and loss. To withhold grief is destructive; to release it, healing. The writing of this book was my life-line. May the reading help your grieving time. You are not alone." (p. 35)
A few years back, a colleague experienced his father's death and it was his desire to preside at his dad's funeral. My wife and I attended, and how we wished that our friend would have allowed himself to be a grieving son and not a strong pastor. His mother sat in the front pew with relatives; his wife sang in the choir; and he conducted the service. There were times when he came close to crying, but always regained his composure. I think the saddest time of the service for me, given the fact that I knew his father in only the slightest way, was at the end. My friend was preceding his father's casket out of the church building, and as I turned and looked again in the direction of the chancel, I saw his wife sobbing and being comforted by a young boy from the church youth group. I had the strongest feeling that there was a decided misalignment about the whole arrangement. Role confusion is what it was. It was not a time for pastoral heroics; it was a time for the expression of very human feelings of grief because of loss. It was a time for a son to mourn.
Resource That Bolster
In our grief we are helped beyond measure by other people. More than once, grieving people have told me how they were struck by the outpouring of care and support. People have a very spontaneous and wonderful way of surrounding us when we need them. They send notes, bring in food, offer to run errands, and sit with us.
Sometimes they will tell us that they don't know precisely what to say. That Saturday when my mother-in-law died, some friends took us to the airport. As he was putting our luggage into the trunk of his car, Ed remarked: "I just don't know what to say at a time like this." We responded, "You don't have to say anything. It's enough that you are here with us."
There are no right words for occasions like that. I would even go so far as to say that it doesn't make a great deal of difference what words you choose. People in need will read our feelings, not analyze our choice of vocabulary.
Then, too, our Christian understanding helps heal us. For Christian people, death is neither a bogeyman nor a robber. It's influence is both limited and passing. Death is not a wall, but a door; not alone an ending, but also a beginning; not an enemy, but a friend; not a squelcher, but a liberator. Hence, "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting." (1 Corinthians 15:55)
While it may be hard for us to articulate the nature of survival beyond the grave, it is enough to know that God cares and that Jesus Christ has gone before us. While some on this matter are so specific as to be arrogant, others are so silent as to be faithless. Thank God, then, for people like Samuel Miller, who steer a true course between arrogance and silence. Wrote Miller: "We may have a thousand doubts and be constrained by the most courageous candor, but we believe that death does not have the last word. Life has depths in it which death does not touch; it has heights which death cannot reach; it has powers which death cannot quell." (Man the Believer, pp. 139-140)
Following his mother's death in 1978, Henri Nouwen recorded his pilgrimage of grief in a volume he entitled In Memoriam. In that journal he writes of how his grief became a kind of seedbed for religious growth.
The deeper I entered into my own grief the more I became aware that something new was about to be born, something I had not known before.... Mother's death is God's way of converting me, of letting his Spirit set me free. It is all still very new. A great deal has happened in these weeks, but what will happen in the months and years ahead will be far more than I can understand. lam still waiting, yet already receiving; still hoping, yet already possessing; still wondering, yet already knowing.... Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about radical changes, new beginnings and great conversions. Yet I know that I must be patient and allow her who taught me so much by her life to teach me even more by her death.
(pp. 59, 61-62)
It is the witness of many brothers and sisters in Christ that our mourning can be, at the hands of God and God's people, transformed into a new and bright morning. I leave you with the witness of Frances Gray:
The first year was gone on December 19, and now I know why everyone says it's so bad. All your memories that year are we memories. Then suddenly you remember something which happened, and you can say, "I did so-and-so a year ago...."
My life is beginning to be different, slightly but detectably, almost like a changing wind....
"O sing unto the Lord a new song; for He hath done marvelous things."
Most of us have had similar experiences, and while none relish talking about death and grief, they need to be explored. What's more, our faith is not silent about them. In fact, our faith contends that grief holds great promise for us all. Far from being a spoilsport, grief, as our faith sees it, is deliverer and healer. Phillips translates Jesus' celebrated lines like this: "How happy are those who know what sorrow means, for they will be given courage and comfort!" (Matthew 5:5) If I understand those words at all correctly, they are positive, promise-bearing, and restorative words. They also underscore the appropriateness of David's reaction to the death of his son Absalom:
The king was overcome with grief. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he cried, "O my son! My son Absalom! Absalom, my son! If only I had died in your place, my son!"
(2 Samuel 18:33)
Not an Aberration
Because we tend to sweep discussions of grief under the rug, there is always the risk that someone will assume there is something abnormal or unusual about it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Grief is not aberrant; it is salutary. Ironically, it only becomes pathological when it has been mismanaged in the first place. So if life, for whatever reason, has summoned you to be sad, be glad for the sadness. Your grief is God's plan to help you feel better.
Actually, there are gradations of grief. It is not, alone, the feeling we have when someone we love dies. When mother or father takes a job in another town, there can be a sadness about that departure for everyone in the family. That's grief, too. There is grief when a pet dies, when a friend moves away, and when we say farewell to one stage of life so that we can embrace another. Robert Johnson reminds us that even weddings have an element of grief in them:
Many of our wedding customs are actually funeral customs. In primitive weddings, marriage was celebrated as such; it was at once a funeral, a transformation, and a joyous outburst.
(She, p. 11)
Not a Time for Heroics
Keep in mind, too, that grief should never be construed as a summons to heroic behavior. I'm always a bit uneasy when, immediately following a death, I am told that those most directly affected are doing just fine. When a connection to one who has died has been one of profound and constructive bondedness, one does not "do well" when first it is terminated.
Following her husband's death at sixty-four years of age, Anne Brooks kept a journal for the first six months of widowhood. At the sixth-month point, she made this entry:
I still certainly am not fine. Nor whole, but I am functioning to the best of my limits. The limits define themselves at the strangest times and places. Shopping in a country store and wanting to share a "find" will bring tears to my eyes. "Mack the Knife" on the car radio, one of our favorite dance tunes, kept me crying for miles along a lonely stretch of road. The way my son ran along the station platform to greet me was so much like his father. These things hurt, and hurt painfully.
(The Grieving Time, p. 33)
At the end of her journal Anne Brooks adds, "This is a testament to love and loss. To withhold grief is destructive; to release it, healing. The writing of this book was my life-line. May the reading help your grieving time. You are not alone." (p. 35)
A few years back, a colleague experienced his father's death and it was his desire to preside at his dad's funeral. My wife and I attended, and how we wished that our friend would have allowed himself to be a grieving son and not a strong pastor. His mother sat in the front pew with relatives; his wife sang in the choir; and he conducted the service. There were times when he came close to crying, but always regained his composure. I think the saddest time of the service for me, given the fact that I knew his father in only the slightest way, was at the end. My friend was preceding his father's casket out of the church building, and as I turned and looked again in the direction of the chancel, I saw his wife sobbing and being comforted by a young boy from the church youth group. I had the strongest feeling that there was a decided misalignment about the whole arrangement. Role confusion is what it was. It was not a time for pastoral heroics; it was a time for the expression of very human feelings of grief because of loss. It was a time for a son to mourn.
Resource That Bolster
In our grief we are helped beyond measure by other people. More than once, grieving people have told me how they were struck by the outpouring of care and support. People have a very spontaneous and wonderful way of surrounding us when we need them. They send notes, bring in food, offer to run errands, and sit with us.
Sometimes they will tell us that they don't know precisely what to say. That Saturday when my mother-in-law died, some friends took us to the airport. As he was putting our luggage into the trunk of his car, Ed remarked: "I just don't know what to say at a time like this." We responded, "You don't have to say anything. It's enough that you are here with us."
There are no right words for occasions like that. I would even go so far as to say that it doesn't make a great deal of difference what words you choose. People in need will read our feelings, not analyze our choice of vocabulary.
Then, too, our Christian understanding helps heal us. For Christian people, death is neither a bogeyman nor a robber. It's influence is both limited and passing. Death is not a wall, but a door; not alone an ending, but also a beginning; not an enemy, but a friend; not a squelcher, but a liberator. Hence, "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting." (1 Corinthians 15:55)
While it may be hard for us to articulate the nature of survival beyond the grave, it is enough to know that God cares and that Jesus Christ has gone before us. While some on this matter are so specific as to be arrogant, others are so silent as to be faithless. Thank God, then, for people like Samuel Miller, who steer a true course between arrogance and silence. Wrote Miller: "We may have a thousand doubts and be constrained by the most courageous candor, but we believe that death does not have the last word. Life has depths in it which death does not touch; it has heights which death cannot reach; it has powers which death cannot quell." (Man the Believer, pp. 139-140)
Following his mother's death in 1978, Henri Nouwen recorded his pilgrimage of grief in a volume he entitled In Memoriam. In that journal he writes of how his grief became a kind of seedbed for religious growth.
The deeper I entered into my own grief the more I became aware that something new was about to be born, something I had not known before.... Mother's death is God's way of converting me, of letting his Spirit set me free. It is all still very new. A great deal has happened in these weeks, but what will happen in the months and years ahead will be far more than I can understand. lam still waiting, yet already receiving; still hoping, yet already possessing; still wondering, yet already knowing.... Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about radical changes, new beginnings and great conversions. Yet I know that I must be patient and allow her who taught me so much by her life to teach me even more by her death.
(pp. 59, 61-62)
It is the witness of many brothers and sisters in Christ that our mourning can be, at the hands of God and God's people, transformed into a new and bright morning. I leave you with the witness of Frances Gray:
The first year was gone on December 19, and now I know why everyone says it's so bad. All your memories that year are we memories. Then suddenly you remember something which happened, and you can say, "I did so-and-so a year ago...."
My life is beginning to be different, slightly but detectably, almost like a changing wind....
"O sing unto the Lord a new song; for He hath done marvelous things."
