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Whenever I come to bury someone who’s lived in deep pain or great poverty, I’m almost overwhelmed.

I told a minister one time, 'Sometimes I wonder why people have to die the way they have to die,' and he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, 'Sometimes I wonder why they have to live the way they have to live.'

I have a friend who is a Christian clown. Everything she does is based on Scripture.

And one of her favorite Scriptures is the Scripture from Genesis that says Sarah laughed.

Why wouldn’t she have laughed? God promised her a child when she had grown old. How could even God do that?

We ask the same kinds of questions, don’t we? How could God allow ...? You can fill in the rest.

And we wonder how even God can turn our pain and our grief around?

In a sense, God can’t. Sometimes there’s nothing harder than to say good-bye, and sometimes all there is to do is to face the grief and 'walk through it,' hoping that some day we can find the other side.

But in another sense, for those who wait, God finally turns all things around. That’s the message of these Scriptures. Abraham and Sarah are the seed and root from which our faith has grown.

When God tells them that even in their old age, he can give them a child, God is telling us that he is faithful. God made a promise. 'I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations,' he told Abraham (Genesis 17:7).

'Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,' Paul says in Romans 4, and because he did, we too can know the faithfulness of God.

Did you hear the promise of the Scripture? 'No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us,' Paul says. 'For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

Because Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, Paul can believe, and we, too, can believe.

That’s why my friend, the Christian clown, can put on white face.

To her, the white face represents weakness and mortality. Whenever she puts it on, she remembers that she is a weak and grieving person.

But she also knows — and this is the important thing — that God is faithful, that God has an ironic sense of humor, that God can use her weak witness to bring someone else to God through Jesus and so turn even weakness into joy.

God turns weakness into joy.

Did you listen to the words of Mary’s song? 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.'

Henceforth, all generations will call her blessed, Mary says, and then she goes on to say that in Jesus, God has 'put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.'

Whenever I come to bury someone who is poor or hurting, someone who has suffered, someone who knew how to laugh and tell a good story — and I have to do that all too often — I like to remember the story that the Scripture tells.

'... He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty,' Mary says.

'He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his posterity forever.'

And there it is. God’s promise to Abraham is fulfilled in Jesus, that same Jesus who was 'put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification,' as Paul says in Romans 4. God is faithful. For those who wait, God turns even death and grief around.

Let Us Pray

Some things are beyond our understanding, and so we put our faith in you, almighty Savior. Hold us up. Help us claim your promise, the same promise claimed by Abraham and fulfilled for each of us in Jesus. Amen.


*Person’s first name
**Person’s full name