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Of all the funeral sermons I’ve ever preached, I guess this is the hardest.


You may wonder why I picked the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter for a time like this. I picked it because, as I read it, I feel angry. If Jesus could do that for Jairus’ daughter, why not for *?


For anyone who has ever loved a child, this has to be a hard, hard time.


I remember a time once when I told a friend who had lost his daughter years earlier, 'In some ways I know how you feel,' and he answered, 'No you don’t. If you haven’t gone through it, you don’t know how we feel.'


I guess that’s the reason I’m such a great believer in the Compassionate Friends.


The Compassionate Friends is a support group made up of those who have had children, grandchildren, brothers, or sisters die. In reality, it’s a whole series of support groups in all kinds of communities across several nations.


Sometimes it helps to hurt in the company of friends.


'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' the psalmist cries, and he cries it in a worship, in the company of friends.


For me, Psalm 22 has always been one of the most powerful of all the psalms in the Bible. That’s the psalm where the psalmist describes his pain and suffering, and then says, '... they divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots.'


We take those words to apply to Jesus. And when Jesus cries, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' from the cross, he shares in the psalmist’s suffering.


I hurt today, and to me one message of the Scripture is that God hurts with me.


When Paul tells the Philippians of Christ Jesus who 'emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men,' he tells of a Christ who came to earth to suffer with us.


'And being found in human form,' Paul says, 'he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.'


So Christ too knew death, and God the Father knows what it is to have a child die.


But still, for me at least, that’s not enough.


How can I deal with my own pain in this situation, much less help you deal with yours? We can deal with it together. We can walk together, all of us, in a community of faith. We can understand that, in some ways, there is nothing to be said to make things better. We can ask our friends to listen when we need to have them listen and to talk when we need to have them talk.


We need to feel whatever it is we’re called to feel both alone and in the company of friends with other feelings.


In his moving speech to the 1989 National Conference of the Compassionate Friends in Tampa, Florida, Calvin Ijames, whose son Jeff died from cancer in 1983, told a story that I’ve heard before.


It’s the story of the little boy who took his kite with its large ball of string outside on a windy day. The kite flew better than he could ever hope it would until finally it was up above the clouds. It was little more than a string stretching to the heavens.


Then a lady came along and saw the boy holding the string. And when she came back a couple hours later, she found him right where he had been, still holding the string.


'How come you’ve been standing there so long holding that string?' she asked.


And the boy replied, 'My kite’s up there.'


'I don’t see anything but a string,' she said.


'I know,' the little boy said. 'All I see is a string too, but I can feel my kite still tugging on it.'


The kite’s still there. You should always hold fast to the string because you’ll always feel the tug, but, at the same time, you can find comfort in the company of others who understand and are willing to let you keep on feeling.


What can we say? God is a compassionate friend. Every Scripture I’ve used today says that. 'The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied,' the psalmist says in Psalm 22.


'Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh,' Jesus said in the beatitudes.


And in Philippians, Paul describes the exaltation of Jesus and then says of himself and us, 'But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself (3:20-21).'


So it is with *. When Jesus, in his pain and his compassion, raised Jairus’ daughter, he raised her to a life in which she would once again face death and resurrection.


That’s not so with *. Because God sent his Son to live among us, to suffer with us, to be raised again on the third day, we have the sure and certain hope of life eternal for her and us.


That may not be quite enough right now. We still feel the tug. We always will, and I can’t change that.


But we can feel it — openly and honestly, both alone and with others — and we can feel it in the sure and certain hope of God’s salvation.

Let Us Pray


Almighty God, you suffer with us, and we thank you for that. We know, Lord, that each of us has different feelings here today. Accept them, bless them, and help us live — alone and in the company of others — but always in the knowledge of your love and your salvation.


In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.



A note about the Compassionate Friends, Inc.


The purpose of the group according to its own statement is as follows: 'The Compassionate Friends is a self-help organization offering friendship and understanding to bereaved parents. The purposes are to promote and aid parents in the positive resolution of the grief experienced upon the death of their child, and to foster the physical and emotional health of bereaved parents and siblings.'


For more information about the group or for information about local groups in your area, you might want to write: The Compassionate Friends; P.O. Box 3696; Oak Brook, Illinois 60522-3696.



*Child’s first name