Lament and Faith

                        Job 14:7-15; 19:23-27

Matthew 10:24-39

               Today we continue with our study of Job.  At this point in Job we come to see a man who is suffering intensely.  And his friends have been worse than useless: they have been adding to his pain.  Rather than being supportive listeners, they have basically been telling Job that it must be his fault, that he would not be suffering if he hadn’t deserved it somehow, that God was punishing him for crimes that he must have in his heart if nowhere else, and that he needs to repent in order to be released from his suffering.  Again, the book of Job confronts this idea.  One of the ways in which it does that is to show the errors of it in the form of Job’s friends’ speeches.  Like most of us when someone we care about is in pain, they are unable to do what is most helpful and most needed in difficult times, which is to simply be present with the person who is suffering.  Job’s friends also, unhelpfully, tell him to keep quiet, to shut up.  They tell Job that he has no right to express his pain and even less right to speak his frustration about his situation to God. 

But Job’s pain is total and all compelling.  And while his first response was silence, we have moved far beyond that at this point in the story into a totally different stage of grief.  As I said last week, he doesn’t ever curse God, but his pain is so full that he does curse his own life: the day he was conceived.  His pain has become so intolerable to him that he cries out in unbearable anguish.  He starts by yelling at his friends – who are you to tell me to shut up?  I’m upset, things are bad, I am in PAIN.  And finally in today’s passages he turns in his crying to God.

We are familiar with Job’s cries.  Especially now in this time and in this place.  Job’s cry is the cry that we have been hearing in our communities the last few weeks.  Job moves in today’s passage also from a crying out of sheer pain into a demand for justice, into an anguished request for things to be righted, for a system that is broken (in Job’s case, he believes God’s system is what is broken) to be fixed.  It is too much to bear.  We are seeing this now in our own communities.  The cries of the black community and those who care about them have moved from a place of deep pain into a lament and a long, deep waling that is a crying out for justice, for an unjust system of prejudice, racism, and oppression to change.  Job is crying out about a relationship that is so broken he can’t take it, and so intense that he can’t be rid of it.  And this is the cry of God’s people now. 

Job’s friends believe this to be unfaithful.  But Job’s pain declares that he is beyond caring if that is the case.  He demands for God to hear him.  He will be heard and he will not be silenced. 

But what I want to say to you today is two things.  First, I want to note the immense power that his speaking out gives to Job, for his own life, for his own experience.  Jewish belief at this time was that death was final.  It was absolute.  It was an ending and a separation from all that one had known, all that one had cared about.  It was THE END – written with capital letters. 

Job talks about the tree that, once cut down will sprout again.  I think about the fact that many of the trees in the middle east are olive trees.  At our house we had this huge olive tree that was a problem for a number of reasons.  First, it blocked the sun from coming into the family room.  But second, it also caused a huge host of allergy problems for my family as well as a huge olive stain mess in the house.  So we had it cut down.  But every year since we cut it down, little olive branches have begun to grow from under the ground around the stump.  The stump, the sign and symbol of what was a full life but is no longer is still there.  The stump is the scar that shows that the plant suffered the tragedy of being cut down.  But it kept trying to live again through these little branches growing up.  This is what Job would have experienced too – that cutting down the tree did not end the possibility of life, of renewal of new growth.  Job says that in contrast humans are more like a dried-up lake that can no longer hold water.  He expresses this as a reality, one that he has been taught through his cultural and religious heritage.  When he begins to speak he is in ultimate despair of the dried up water that will never regenerate.

As I read this, I again found myself thinking about our world at this time.  It is so easy for us to lose hope when there are so many problems that seem beyond healing.  The racism, the destruction of the environment, the huge growing discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the undeniable oppression of the most vulnerable in our society… it is too much.  Holding on to hope in these times feels difficult to say the least.

Job is right there with us.  Remember that he has lost everything: his home, his riches, but also those who worked for him and finally, his family – his children.  They are gone.  They are dead.  And no matter what follows, the loss of one’s children, and in his case it was all of his children – that is a pain beyond any I could imagine.  I found myself remembering a quote from the book The Life of Pi.  “My suffering was taking place in a grand setting.  I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still.  My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized.  And I could accept this.  It was all right.  [But] It was daylight that brought my protest: ‘No! No! No! My suffering does matter.  I want to live!’” (177) 

Job had lost everything.  And the despair that comes with that is obvious.  Hope is more elusive.  And yet, we see in this passage an alternating between his despair and moments of hope.  How did he find it when he believe that death was the end?  How could he hold on to hope when everything looked so dark, so foreboding.  When there is no guarantee that things will end well, but many signs that things will end badly, how does one hold on to hope?  Talk of hope without facing the reality of death is dishonest.  So when faced with death, what do you hope for?  To heal relationships?  To find peace?  At the heart of Job’s despair is a sense of isolation which death will only further. Again, the idea of resurrection was not part of this Jewish reality.   For Christians, this passage is often used on Holy Saturday, or the day before Easter in the Catholic church.  These passages reflect the quiet of a deserted road in the middle of nowhere: shock, danger, fear.  Despair.

But what I want to point out here is that in his speaking, this place, this idea of the ultimate end moves.  In chapter three Job was yearning and begging for death.  But here, he is hoping for and envisioning something beyond it.  There comes a point in the deepest of unjust suffering, which is what Job has been experiencing, in which the accused, the one suffering, the one being oppressed must make an ultimate decision: to give up and die in despair, or to find the will to fight.  Job at first was giving in, because one cannot choose to stand up and fight that kind of ultimate despair alone.  But he changes.  In these passages he comes to a certainty that a redeemer will stand with him.  And he comes to this through his own speaking, through his lament, through his decision to confront the God he believes is harming him.

I remember reading a book about trauma and the effects and scars left by deep trauma.  The author was following children in war times and now was looking at the children in Syria who had lost house, family, source of food, etc.  And one of the things he found was that children who were able to write, and who journaled their experienced, were psychologically much more able to handle the crises than those who had no place to voice their pain, no place to name it, to speak it.  Job is expressing his pain through words to God.  And the very expression of those words changes him. 

In his remembering the image of the resurrection that the tree offers, he also calls to his own mind another possibility.  “If someone dies, will they live again?  All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come.  You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made.”  And then, with even more conviction he continues, “I know that my redeemer lives,… and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.  I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another.  How my heart yearns within me!” 

There is hope here: deep, and sometimes inexplicable hope given where he comes from and what he has believed previously.  But it is there.  His expression of his pain has allowed him to move beyond complete despair and into the possibilities that he has not seen or understood the whole picture and that it might be bigger than he can imagine, more connected and more healing than he can imagine.

His words seek more than just hope for his own life: they speak of redeeming a compromised system.  A commentator from Feasting on the Word said it this way: “Such stories provide a nuanced and complex way of exploring the elements that lead to a failure of justice.  They allow for an honest confrontation of the corruption that besets even the best systems of law.  They also provide an alternative to the complacency of those who refuse to see evil and the cynicism of those who refuse to believe that anything can be done about it.” 

His words are incredible expressions from a man whose faith tradition is such that death is the end.  These are declarations of faith in a God whose love extends beyond any suffering, beyond any grave, beyond even death.  Despite everything, Job finds hope.  He finds hope in his own laments and speeches to God.  And that hope is on a grand scale.

               I’m reminded of these words by Rienhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

               Job’s crying out is healing of him.  Job’s crying out is what brings him hope.  Job’s crying out is the beginning of an insistence on justice, on help, on reconciliation and healing.

               Job’s crying out, his decision to finally speak to God, to say what he is feeling in all its fullness, his insistence that God hear him: these are acts of deep faith.  The practice of lament, of speaking out to God, of raising our voices in our pain: these practices are rooted deeply in our psalms, in the book of Lamentations, and here in the book of Job.

               Next week and the week following we will be talking about God’s response to this.  But for this week what I want to make clear is that lament is one of the truest expressions of faith because it declares a number of things:

1.        That God is sovereign (or there would be no reason to speak to God!)

2.       That God does hear us (or again there would be no reason to cry out to God!)

3.       That God’s love is big enough to handle even our complaints against God. 

4.       That speaking our truth to God is a way of being more deeply invested in the relationship we have with God: of pulling close to God, of trusting God with all of who we are.

5.        That speaking our truth to God is healing, empowering, and moves us into hope.

Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is that thing with feathers -that perches in the soul- and sings the tune without words-and never stops- at all.”

The book of Job in so many ways is an expression of lament, one echoed in psalms and lamentations and even by Jesus himself when he cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”  And we are in a time when the whole community is lamenting and begging for change.  We can join in that lament, that crying out to God, that crying out for justice.  Lament itself inspires us in hope, inspires us to action, and inspires us to our own healing.  Lament, crying out, expressing our truth – these are the acts of  faithful people trusting in God’s ability to hear, to move within us and to respond with resurrection, they are a way of trusting in God’s love. 

I want to end with a modern day lament about the book of Job.  You may not agree with everything in this poem.  Indeed, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this poem.  But again, it is the voicing of lament, and so I would like to share it with you today:

Editing Job

By Carl Denis

I'd cut the prologue, where God agrees

To let his opponent, Satan,

Torment our hero merely to prove

What omniscience must know already:

That Job's devotion isn't dependent

On his prosperity. And how foolish of God

If he supposes that Satan, once proven wrong,

Will agree to forego his spite against creation

For even a minute.

I'd keep the part where Job disdains

His friends' assumption that somehow

He must be to blame for his suffering,

And the part where he makes a moving appeal

To God for an explanation.

I'd drop God's irrelevant, angry tirade

About might and majesty versus weakness.

The issue is justice. Is our hero

Impertinent for expecting his god

To practice justice as well as preach it,

For assuming the definition of justice

That holds on earth holds as well above?

Abraham isn't reproved in Genesis

For asking, when God decides to burn Sodom,

If it's fair to lump the good with the wicked.

Let Job be allowed to complain

About his treatment as long as he wants to,

For months, for decades,

And in this way secure his place forever

In the hearts of all who believe

That suffering shouldn't be silent,

That grievances ought to be aired completely,

Whether heard or not.

As for the end, if it's meant to suggest

That patience will be rewarded, I'd cut it too.

Or else I suggest at least adding a passage

Where God, after replenishing Job's possessions,

Comes to the tent where the man sits grieving

To ask his pardon. How foolish of majesty

To have assumed that Job's new family,

New wife and children and servants,

Would be an ample substitute for the old.

Happy Birthday, Dear Daughter, during this odd time...

     Today is my eldest daughter's 20th birthday.  This was going to be her "big" birthday.  I know, usually it's 21 that's the biggie.  But Eldest is turning 20 on the 20th of May in the year 2020.  She's been anticipating this as the "big" birthday for years, and thinking through the specifics of this one for the last year: what she wanted to do (invite some of her friends to come out to CA to celebrate with her), what she wanted as a gift for this special day (the promise of a mom-daughter trip up to some place she could really see the stars), where she wanted to go to have dinner with family as well as friends, what kind of dessert she wanted me to make.  Even the last thing on the list hasn't worked out: we get our foods from Imperfect Foods.  Generally I love what they do.  But this time they left off an entire box of the foods we ordered which unfortunately included milk, eggs, and flour among other things.  This usually arrives late Tuesday, so we didn't know we wouldn't have these things until about 10PM last night. I called them about this mistake and they are "getting back to me" which probably means they will just discount the box.  That doesn't help me today, however. Wednesday is the day we record our worship services, so I just don't have time to stand in the long grocery store line to get the items we need to make her dinner and dessert.  I could go on, but you get the point.  It's just disappointing.  Today is disappointing, for my daughter, which somehow makes it doubly disappointing for me.  As I've said to all of you many times, grief seems to bring up past griefs.  Trauma brings up old traumas.  So this little thing, of a birthday not being what it should be, feels much bigger for me than it should, no doubt.  I woke up under a cloud, one that I will have to try to shake off before recording your service for Sunday morning, but a cloud, none the less.

      I know that many of you are thinking "wow, that is such a little thing compared to what many are suffering" and you are right in that.  It is a very little thing in the big picture.  We have a house, we have work, we have our family healthy and whole.  We have church, extended family, friends, we have community (even though we cannot gather yet), we are blessed today with bird song and sunshine, the flowers are in bloom and it is a beautiful day.  I am very aware that this little thing is just that, a little thing.  

     But I am also giving myself permission, as I give it to you, to feel what you feel this day.  Grief during this time when things are not what they would be, could be, should be, is an appropriate emotion.  Sorrow for things that our loved ones have lost makes sense, even if it is not as big as what others suffer.  We don't make it better for them by denying our own pain in the midst of this.  If anything, our own senses of loss can give us a glimpse, an opportunity for understanding and compassion for what others are going through as well.  

       So I share this with you for three reasons:  First, to let you know I understand.  I understand the feelings of grief and loss that you are also experiencing.  This is a hard time.  And it is okay to name it as such.  Second, I extend this as an invitation to be gentle with yourself around your own feelings.  God has given us our feelings as a gift, and we are called to experience all that it is to be human.  I realize our culture tells us to "buck up", but we have the psalms to show us another way: one of being genuinely and humanly authentic.  Denying our feelings and our reality is, at some level, pushing God away, who is the author of all feelings and experiences.  Finally, my own experience is that acknowledging the grief and pain often makes way for the feelings of joy to return.  I think about the movie "Inside Out" in which it was sorrow that opened the door for healing and joy.  So allow yourself these feelings too.  Move through them, rather than avoiding them.  See what doors of feelings, ideas, thoughts and creative solutions are opened on the other side.

     Happy Birthday, my dear 20 year old girl.  

     I am looking towards next year for a better celebration.  

     For the rest of you, love and peace this day.

When the Struggles are Overwhelming

           This is a difficult time for all of us.  For some it is manageable, but for many, especially as the time goes on, it can start to feel overwhelming.  The number of people who are expressing different levels of anxiety and depression is really high right now and that is understandable.

In reaction to the challenges life throws us, I write about thriving through adversity and I believe we are called to do that. I write about the joy and support that God gives us in the midst of pain, and I know that this is real. I write about the fact that it is through crisis that my vision and understanding of life has deepened and changed.  I now believe with every fiber of my being that life is about growing - growing in love, understanding, and in our ability to forgive, growing in our relationships to God, growing in our compassion, empathy and relationships to others, growing in our relationships to ourselves.  I believe all of this.  I believe it, I feel it, I hear that it is true, I experience it.  I write about being thankful and being more able than ever before to see the gifts and blessings that surround me every day - including the challenges.  This, too, is a truth, deep and powerful, that keeps me connected with God, with Good, with amazing and loving people.
     BUT...
     But...
     We know that the saying "God never gives you more than you can handle" is just about as bogus a statement as there is, for a number of reasons.  First of all, I do not believe that all of the junk we go through in this life was "given" to us by God.  People are born with free will and as a result, people hurt each other, they mess up, we create pain and problems for each other that God does not wish anyone to suffer.  Where is God when we are in pain?  On the cross as well, suffering too.
    Second of all, we all know that there are things that people can't or don't recover from.  We know this. Sometimes people do experience "too much" and they have break downs, or they commit suicide, or they lose their minds.  To a lesser degree, some people become bitter, cranky, jaded...they fail to live full lives because they've been "broken" by their experiences.  We try to support each other and care for each other enough so that this does not happen.  We encourage a faith that is life-giving and meaningful so that people experience the love and insight that they need.  We do what we can to help one another and ourselves grow through pain and develop scars that are places of strength rather than open wounds that are places which get picked at and continue to bleed.  Still, I think that everyone has moments when they just have to say "enough!"  "No more!"  "Done!"

Where is the good news in this?  Where is the message of hope when what we are given seems to be over the top, over the limit, of what we can endure?
    There still is Good News.  The Good News is that "this, too, shall pass."  Having a larger vision - a vision that says that while today is hard, tomorrow is a new day - I think that vision is essential.  Annie's trite, cute song "The sun'll come out tomorrow" may seem Pollyanna-ish, but it is a truth.  If we can hang on for another day, another month, another year, things will change.  There's no choice in that.  Tomorrow will be different.  And while at times that may fill us with fear, mostly I think that is a great message of hope.  To put it in Christian terms, God does bring the resurrection out of death.  Yes, Jesus died.  Jesus died.  He suffered as we suffer and it was "too much" for him as well.  It overcame him and he died.  Unlike some of the Old Testament stories (like Daniel in the Lion's den and the story of Shadrach, Meshach, & Abednego who are saved from the fiery furnace), death does claim Jesus.  For three days evil does win.  But I find this much more hopeful than the stories of Daniel, et al, because we know this is real.  We usually aren't rescued from the furnace.  We usually aren't saved from the lion's jaws.  We have to go through it.  We do go through it.  The hope is not that we can avoid the pain.  The hope, the promise, is that there is life on the other side of it.  And while the three days that Jesus experienced in the tomb may seem unfairly short in comparison to the three weeks, three months, three years or even three decades that we sometimes experience, none the less, we need to keep our eyes open for that day of resurrection.  Our faith promises us that it will come.  And that is the Good News that can pull us through.  Hope.  Hope for tomorrow.  Hope for the sun to come out.  Hope for a new day.

Coming to Jesus

Acts 16:9-15

John 14:23-29

Today’s scripture is part of Jesus’ final speech to the disciples before his arrest and crucifixion.  It is a small part of a much longer speech in which he repeatedly says that if they love him they will follow him, love each other, do what he tells them to do.  He also repeatedly tells them that he is leaving them, and then he reassures them with promises that the Spirit will come to be with them.  Today I want to focus on this second part – Jesus’ telling the disciples that he is leaving and his reassurance about what is to come.  

Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt abandoned or left?  I imagine there have been times for all of us when we have felt that someone has left us.  If that someone is someone we cared about deeply, that loss, that abandonment can be devastating.  Sometimes those feelings of abandonment might not even seem logical to us, but still they come.  A loved one must leave on a work trip, or leave on a military deployment.  Or a person dies.  But even then, even when the loved one does not choose to go, it can still feel like abandonment when it actually happens.  We can still feel that we have been left, that they left us and as a result we can feel angry, hurt, devastated.

This feeling doesn’t just happen with people.  Have there been times when you have felt abandoned by God?  That God is somehow not there for a time when things are hard?  It is not sinful to feel that way.  As we will talk about when we do our series on the psalms, all of these feelings are normal and natural and acceptable to God, too. That’s why we have so many psalms that express these feelings.  They give us permission and words to express feelings of pain, of isolation, of abandonment, that are just plain normal at times.  Sometimes it is hard to feel God’s presence.  Sometimes God’s presence comes to us in different ways, ways we might not recognize as easily.  And I think that when we are feeling abandoned by a person or by people, it is especially easy to feel that it is actually God who has left us.  That somehow, if God really loved us, we would not have been left by the person we love, that they would have lived, or wouldn’t have gone away, or wouldn’t have moved or wouldn’t have rejected us.  And again, while that may not be logical, it is a very human experience.  It is very human to feel that it is God who has left when it is in fact a person whom we love who is no longer present with us in the same way.

I think about C.S. Lewis’ book, A grief Observed (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). C.S. Lewis, as many of you know, was a remarkable Christian author who wrote both novels such as the Narnia series as well as theological conversations such as “The Four Loves” and “Surprised by Joy”.  In 1945 he experienced the death of a close friend.  About this death he said, “The experience of loss (the greatest I have yet known) was wholly unlike what I should have expected.  We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere...” he continued, “No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying.  When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.” 

But 15 years later, in 1960, his wife of very few years, Joy, died. And that experience was also unexpected for him - but in the complete opposite way. As he said in the journal he kept following her death, “After the death of a friend...I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about Joy. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.” And in contrast to the experience of the presence of his friend’s death changing his faith for the better, after the death of his wife, his faith was tested beyond measure.  As he continued, “Go to (God) when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in the windows.  It might be an empty house...not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So this is what God’s really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.”

Deeply disturbing words of pain and despair from a deeply faithful man.  Have any of you ever felt that way?

God knows and understands this very human experience.  God expects and anticipates this very human experience.  It is for this reason that Jesus spends so much time telling his disciples what is to come and offering the reassurances he does.  Jesus is about to leave them, he is about to be crucified.  For all of our experiences of abandonment by friends or family, how much worse for those who knew Jesus?  Jesus was not only their friend, he was their Lord, their Savior, their God.  He taught them.  He fed them.  He cared for them.  He gave their lives new direction, new purpose, new meaning.  He opened up life for them, he touched them and connected them with God in a real, concrete, new way.  He became their all, their everything, their reason for being and living.  But now he tells them that he is leaving and asks them to be happy about it because he is going to God the Father.  He tries to add more reassurance.  He tells them he is sending the Spirit.  And he tells them he will send them off with his peace.  He tells them to not be afraid.  And he tells them to not let their hearts be troubled. 

And so, what do you think?  Do all the reassurances make it all okay?  Does it work for Jesus that because he has said all of these words, the disciples are therefore at peace when he is killed and are happy for him to be with God?  Are they untroubled and unafraid when the crucifixion comes?  Do they “believe” because he has reassured them and laid out for them what is to come?  Well, as we talked about last week and as we can imagine in the aftermath of today’s reading….Not so much.

The truth is that we are connectional beings.  We are people to whom loving and being loved are as important and crucial as food, water, and even air.  Babies who are not held and touched die.  If they have no one to whom they form an early attachment, they struggle to connect normally to others throughout their lives.  We witness this with other creatures, too.  There was an experiment some time ago in which some monkeys were offered food and water, but no care at all, while other monkeys were given stuffed animals and even others were held and cuddled and comforted.  The monkeys who were just offered food and water languished and died.  The ones with the stuffed animals did better, but still could not relate to other creatures.  Only the monkeys who were offered care and cuddling thrived and became “normal” adult monkeys. 

There is also the story I shared with you two weeks ago of Owen and Mzee.  Owen was a baby hippopotamus who was a sole survivor of a terrible storm.  He was rescued and put in a reserve with a bunch of other animals.  Immediately upon being released into the animal refuge, he attached himself firmly and completely to a cranky old tortoise named Mzee who wanted nothing to do with Owen for the first 24 hours.  Owen followed Mzee around and cuddled up next to Mzee and Mzee tried again and again to walk away from Owen.  But after only about a day, Mzee somehow got it that the hippo needed him, and maybe Mzee discovered that he needed the hippo, too.  The two became completely inseparable, eating together, sleeping together.  Both thrived through that connection, through that attachment.  And we experience this sense of abandonment with our pets, too – even those who appear to not like each other “grieve” when another family pet dies. 

I’ve shared with you before the wonderful story of the difference between heaven and hell.  In hell, there is a big feast spread out on the table, but the people sitting at the table have no elbows.  They desperately try to feed themselves, but are unable to get the food to their mouths because they cannot bend their arms.  In heaven the picture at first glance looks very similar.  There is a big feast spread out on the table, and again the people sitting around the table have no elbows and are still unable to feed themselves.  The difference, though, is that at the table in heaven, everyone is feeding each other.  And while this story points out that it is only in caring for one another that we are fed, that it is only in caring for one another that we are truly and deeply fed, there is another message here, too, and that is about the importance, the necessity of community.  We picture heaven as a place where our loved ones who’ve passed are waiting for us, a place where we can connect with those we love and stay connected.  Where loss, death, abandonment are no more. 

            But in the mean time, we have to face it.  Every human relationship will end in its human form.  We will lose everyone in one way or another.  People move, people change, people have tragedies happen and ultimately everyone dies.  So whether we are doing the leaving or being left, in human form, we will lose everyone.  And each one can feel like abandonment.  I don’t want to just ignore that, or lighten it, or push it quickly aside.  Those feelings are real, and they deserve our attention, our care, our time.  I think about what C.S. Lewis also wrote about situations in which well-meaning friends could not tolerate his pain, and how much damage that inability to sit with his pain caused..  They couldn’t tolerate it, and so they tried to shove it away with trite quips.  His favorite was “Well, she will live forever in your memory.”  And he found this created nothing less than an intense rage within him as he struggled to grasp, daily, that she was no longer alive, no longer with him in a way that he could recognize while he was in the midst of his deepest grief.  To tell him that she would live in his memory did nothing for him but make him feel completely alone in his grief - in other words, it had exactly the opposite effect of what was undoubtedly intended.  It did not make him feel better.  It made him feel misunderstood, isolated, and alone.  I do not want to do that by rushing through the real and tangible feelings that we have as we grieve.

That being said, I am also called upon on Sunday mornings to deliver the Good News.  And the good news in this is huge.  First, we are reassured that death and separation are temporary.  No matter how it feels, no matter how bad it feels, we are connectional.  God created us this way and I believe God will return all of us to connection.  Also, even in this life, we have Jesus’ reassurances, which are not just about his leaving, but ours as well.  “My peace I leave you” Jesus says.  And “I will send the Spirit to be with you.”  That spirit is our advocate, our comforter, our companion when we are lonely and alone.  “Do not be afraid” he tells us.  For there is nothing to fear – God is with us.  And finally, “I am going away, AND I am coming back to you.”  The end is not the end.  Death is not the end.  Connection will continue.  God will continue.  Christ will and does continue.  And through Christ, we, too, continue in connection with God and with our loved ones.  Amen.

Easter

Christ is Risen Indeed!

Jeremiah 31:1-6

John 20:1-18

            It is understandable that there are times, at least, when we find the resurrection so distant from us that it doesn’t really affect our daily living.  We live in a cynical age, an age of pessimism and despair.  I listen to the words of popular songs on the radio.  20, 40, 50 years ago the words were things like, “Every little thing she does is magic” and “Love is all we need” and “I can see me loving nobody but you, for all my life!” and “God only knows what I’d be without you!”  But today words to popular songs on the radio include “I’m not going to write you a love song!” and “All these fairy tales are full of it, one more stupid love song, I’ll be sick!” and “Now you’re just somebody that I used to know!”  and “And now it’s clear to me that everything you see ain’t always what it seems.  Falling from cloud nine, crashing from the height.”  “Who died and made you king of anything”  “I don’t care for your fairy tales, you’re so worried about the maiden but you know she’s only waiting on the next best thing.  Once upon a time in a far away kingdom, man made up a story said that I should believe him, but go and tell your white knight while he’s handsome in hindsight, I don’t want the next best thing.”  “Gotta move on and be who I am.  I gotta do what’s best for me, You’ll be okay.” “No one said it was easy.  No one said it would be so hard.  I’m going back to the start.”  Even Christian lyrics express this broken idea of love, “How I wish we could go back to simpler times, Before all our scars and all our secrets were in the light, Now on this hallowed ground, we've drawn the battle lines, Will we make it through the night?”  Etc.

            I read a wonderful book called The Beethoven Factor by psychologist Paul Pearsall (Charlottesvill, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2003).  In it he discusses what he calls the eighth deadly sin or “Acedia”.  He says, “Acedia was removed from the list of deadly sins in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great, but this sin of living with fatigued apathy, cynicism, ennui, and general spiritual weariness is still committed by millions every day.  In fact, languishing now far exceeds depression as the number one emotional problem in the Western world.  Unlike those whose life crisis led them to discover the capacity to thrive, flourish and savor, three of four of us are missing out on the full gift of being alive.”

And this cynicism is not just relegated to the secular world.  It exists in our churches as well.  Gil Rendle’s book,  Journey in the Wilderness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010) looks at the alarming rate of decline in our Christian churches in the United States as well as the attempts over the last 50 years to stop the decline, to reverse the decline.  Every effort we’ve made has been unsuccessful, though we have tried many things with these different attempts.  And this does not just leave congregations fearful (especially where finances are concerned), desperate and needy.  It affects individuals and perhaps especially clergy.  There are increasingly too many clergy for the smaller number of congregations.  But it is more than that. 

Studies show that pastors work harder than ever now, with decreasing rewards as we are paid less, focus more and more energy on building our churches, and are often blamed for their decline at the same time.  I have a pastor friend of another denomination who went to a renewal of his clergy vows and was sharing with me the ethos of despair and pessimism and cynicism that he experienced among his colleagues who were there to renew their answer of “yes” to God’s call for their lives to be clergy.  They chose to do this renewal of vows because they love God and love the church, and yet there was a strong feeling of depression, of sadness, of despair, even in that renewal as they looked at the struggle to find lasting employment in declining congregations, as they struggled, sharing ideas about how to keep small congregations in shrinking denominations from dying, and realizing the many things that have been tried without success. Is it any wonder that we find stories of the resurrection distant?  Inaccessible?  Irrelevant?  That in many of our congregations people sit, even on Easter, and say “Christ is risen” as if they were saying, “It’s raining outside today” – as if it didn’t matter, as if it made no difference to their lives at all?

Does it matter? Does it make a difference? We come here every week to proclaim the good news that Christ is Risen. We come here as a statement that it does matter.  It matters more than anything else in the world. It is the deepest truth we will know and experience and it makes all the difference in our lives.  I stand here and proclaim this every week because I believe that it matters.  I do it more because I have seen that it is true.  I have experienced that it is true.  I have experienced the presence of the risen Christ, and I have experienced again and again that death, especially death for others, out of care, out of compassion, out of grace, ends with the resurrection, with renewal, with new life when we are open to God’s movement and God’s ever-changing love.  The truth that began with Jesus’ resurrection that God will raise us from death, this is a truth that transcends everything.  It is a truth that is so deep, that is so important that even our fairy tales and classic stories espouse this truth again and again and again.  What is the most popular selling book other than the Bible?  The Harry Potter series made more sales than any other book in the history of publishing except for the Bible.  And how does the series conclude?  (spoiler alert - so anyone who hasn’t read the entire series yet may want to cover their ears for a moment), 1st Cor. 15:26 is quoted in the final Harry Potter book, when Harry visits his parent’s graves. He is disturbed by these words “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” but Hermione tells him that these are not words to be disturbed by but that they bring comfort. Harry finds that in order to stand up and defeat the evil in his world, Lord Voldemort, he has to defeat his fear of death.  It is the fear of death that he has to conquer, and to conquer it, he has to be willing to die to save his friends.  But as we know, that death, just like Jesus’ death, does not have the final word.  And while Harry Potter is a story, a fairy tale, I believe that a large part of its popularity is not just that J.K Rowling is creative and inventive, but that, like most deeply appreciated literature, it tells truths that tap deep into our psyche.  The truth of love protecting Harry against evil, the truth of love being a stronger “magic” than any other, the truth of a life lived connected to Love or God being stronger than even death, the truth of resurrection after death – all of these truths speak to us deep in our souls.

            Again, we see this in most of our classics.  The ones that are more existential in their faith end with the death – like in the Tale of Two cities – they end with the idea that love is being willing to die for another.  But the ones that speak to Christians the most tend to be the ones that include the resurrection following the death.  Authors such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, but also secular authors tell the same story.  And we love these books because they speak truth.  They speak the truth not only of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, but of ours as well.  They speak the truth that we all need to hear, that God loves us more than we can imagine.  And that it is out of that love, out of that love that transcends everything that we are given new life after every death if we only open ourselves to the God who gives it.

If we can see this, if we can embrace this, if we can experience the resurrection, we can live, not only in the life to come, but NOW as well – letting go of our fear, letting go of our languishing, living into hardiness, happiness, healing, growth and HOPE.

            Paul Pearsall told this story in the Beethoven Factor, “There stood Beethoven, gravely ill and totally deaf.  Eyes closed, he kept conducting the orchestra even after they had ceased their performance and the audience had risen to its feet in thunderous applause.  As a singer stepped from the choir to turn him around to see those whose shouts of “bravo” resonated throughout the concert hall, tears of elation filled his eyes.  Perhaps the worst loss a composer could experience had been the catalyst for a remarkably adaptive creativity that allowed him to transcend his tortures to become immersed in the thrill of conducting the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy”.  At that moment, and not only in spite of but because of his adversity, Beethoven had experienced the thrill of thriving through adversity.”

            As Christians we would tell the same story, with one extremely important difference.  We would put it in terms of the cross.  Because of the pain of the cross, there is a resurrection.  Because of Jesus’ willingness to die for love, new life, greater life, better life, God’s life can shine not only through Christ, but through us as well.  As a church, the story is the same.  Gil Rendle continues in his book to the promise that even for the church a resurrection is promised, though we will not know yet what that looks like.  All of us, as community and as individuals are invited into new life by the resurrection of our Lord.  Will we seize it?  Will we embrace it as we face challenges, hardships and even death?  Will we raise our voices in song, in exclamation, in praise for the God who calls us to LIVE into all the blessings of each day?  Will we say with enthusiasm and with conviction, “Christ is Risen, He is risen indeed!”  For that is the truth.  The deepest truth. 

     Christ is Risen!!

            “He is risen indeed!”