"A Foretaste of Things to Come"
Life in the midst of grief.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Text: John 11:1-15
It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and I had my car radio tuned into 680 News. I heard something that I normally don't hear - a reporter giving an account of an event with a trembling voice filled with nervousness and anxiety. More often than not, the reports that you get are well edited, clearly defined and precise, but it was evident from what I was hearing that this was an event over which the reporter had little or no control.
The reporter was giving a blow-by-blow description of what happened this past week in front of the provincial legislature, where a man in a van covered himself with gasoline and set himself alight. The reporter was trying to describe what was taking place, and stumbling his way through the event, for clearly he was frightened. It was obvious that something terrible was taking place.
Recollections by the police officers and the fire fighters of a similar event in Oklahoma city some years ago gave reason for worry and concern. So, I pulled over to the side of the road and did something I haven't done before while listening to a live report: I prayed for a man I didn't know; a victim I had never met; and for the safety of those who were trying to resolve the situation - a horrible event by any standards, and for those who must have witnessed it, even more terrifying.
It seemed to me, as I was listening to all of this, that the problems and the pains of the world come upon us with a pace, vigour and immediacy like no other generation has experienced. With mass communication, when suffering occurs in one part of the world, it has an impact right on our own doorstep, even if we are separated in space and time.
Similarly, when I watched the service in memory of the four slain officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last week, I noticed that there was grief and sorrow etched on the faces of all there. We were taken into their lives, into that place of worship, as if we were there.
I also watched those being interviewed in Madrid one year after the terrible bombing of the railway, and there was a tremour in the voice of those remembering what had happened. Even a year later, you could feel the grief in their voices. It was as if they were reliving it.
One thought of the man who threw his child and then himself off a bridge onto a highway last week. Somehow, it seems that our society this week is grieving. We might not know the people who have died or been injured. Their names might just be a line item in a newspaper. However, we are bombarded continually by what happened to them, and as a society, we grieve vicariously. For many, such events ignite within their own memory some loss they might have had in their own lives, and they come flooding back as if it was yesterday.
Collective grief can be personal grief when it comes into our living rooms and cars or onto our kitchen tables. I asked the question before me today: What specifically does all this have to do with faith? What can you and I as Christians contribute to a society that is clearly grieving and full of sorrow? What unique message do we have to bring?
A number of years ago, there was a movie called Shadowlands. The movie is about C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, and his magnificent love affair with an American woman called Joy Gresham. She was a fan of his work who came over to Britain to meet him. In order to stay in the United Kingdom, she married him in a registry office, and later became a British citizen. Not long after, she was diagnosed with cancer. By this time they were deeply in love. He married her again in a religious ceremony at her bedside, and soon afterward she died.
As a Christian, C.S. Lewis had to struggle with his grief and come to terms with loss. When the one that he loved died, it was no longer a matter of biblical theology or a matter of biblical faith, his belief became a matter of deep, personal devotion. He said, “When you are this close, you really come to terms with whether or not you believe.” The grief he felt over the death of Joy was something that challenged his faith, but it is a faith that I am pleased to say flourished despite his loss.
Grief does cause us to question our faith. Whether it is a private, personal grief or the grief of a society, what does the Gospel have to say to help us through it? This morning's passage from John 11 is the story of Jesus and his friend Lazarus. We read that Jesus performed many miracles: turning water into wine; healing a nobleman's son; helping a powerless man; multiplying the loaves and the fishes; walking on water; giving sight to the blind. He did many fabulous things, but this event is unique. It is the capstone of the Gospel, for what we encounter here involves Jesus' close friend.
Jesus is no longer healing a stranger. He is dealing with someone who is close to him emotionally and whose family knows him well. He has to confront it. He has to deal with a situation radically different from anything he has encountered before. Everybody else up till now has been sick or needing care, but Lazarus is dead. This is different.
This morning, I want to look at how Jesus dealt with the death of his friend, and what the story of the resurrection of Lazarus says to you and me, because in it is wisdom for the ages. Clearly, grief needs to be addressed. This we find in the story as clear as anything. You can't pretend that death has not occurred. You can't pretend that grief is something that you don't have to experience. Many people, when they find you grieving, will say, “Get over it! Snap out of it!” Surely there is a time when you should put your grief behind you, but sometimes people suppress their grief, and just push it as far into their subconscious as possible so they don't have to deal with it.
Sometimes, the only way we can deal with our grief is to find someone to blame, in order to make sense of it. Look at Martha and Mary in this story. On two separate occasions they say to Jesus, “Look, Jesus, if you had been here, our brother Lazarus would not have died.” Now, that is a heavy guilt trip to place on Jesus. In other words, if you had been attentive, if you had come here sooner, he wouldn't have died. On the one hand, it is a statement of faith in Jesus' power, but on the other it is a terrible indictment of Jesus, that he has somehow been lax.
The same thing goes for those around him goading him. They say, “If you can fix these other things, if you can perform these other miracles, how come you can't save your friend?” They belittle him and they make fun of him, and blame him again for what happened.
You see this even today. Look at the newspapers. A few days after the man threw his child off the bridge, the media ran front-page assessments by psychiatrists who had met with him seven months ago and wondered why they had not diagnosed the problem sufficiently. Finding someone to blame to make sense of it! Good news story! Great way to deal with it! Now, I don't know whether the psychiatrists should have done more or less, but I don't think the journalists know either, to be quite honest.
Why should we need someone to blame? Why this need to make the doctors scapegoats for the death of a person? That is not to say that at all times they are perfect, and what they do is perfect, more than any other professionals, but we need to find someone to blame, because that is the way that we deal with grief. We deal with it irrationally, and finding someone to blame helps us. That was the case here: “If you had been here, our brother would not have died.” That is what they said to Jesus.
In our grief, we sometimes go so far as to deny that the person is dead at all. Here is something that I read in a newspaper in South Carolina some years ago. A letter was sent from Health and Human Services to a resident in Greenville County. The letter contained this particular line: “Your food stamps will stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you! You may reapply if your circumstances change.” (Well, I suppose Lazarus could have got the food stamps again, but anybody else, I don't think so!)
Sometimes we most seriously deny that anything terrible has taken place. We close our ears and our eyes, and hope that it will pass. Now, in the Gospel story, that doesn't happen. On the contrary, there is very powerful affirmation: We are told the body is decaying. So Jesus says, “Roll the stone away.” In other words, let's deal with this. Let's get to the bottom of this situation. Let's find out what Lazarus' state really is. Jesus enters the situation in faith. He acknowledges the grief. He deals with it powerfully. He knows that it cannot be avoided. Let's roll the stone away, and find out what is really going on.
However, there is a twist, because grief is actually a wound that needs healing. It is not a case of dealing with just the facts; it is dealing also with the emotions. Like anything else, such as a physical ailment, grief can hurt. If the disease is not dealt with, it can be painful, and cause all manner of troubles: physical, emotional, spiritual.
Jesus deals with the grief, because he knows it needs to be healed. I was talking to our musical director this week about the memorial service for the fallen RCMP officers. What a powerful service of remembrance it was! He was saying that tears came to his eyes when Ian Tyson sang Four Strong Winds. Indeed, the service gripped everybody. Even though we did not know the deceased, even though we had no idea what had taken place, it was somehow important to express our grief, to put it in words.
If we do anything in the church, it is help people through funerals to memorialize their loved ones, to remember their grief, to express it, to get it out, but in a setting that is faithful, so that the grief does not linger in a dark recess of the soul. It comes out, it is expressed; and that is why one of the most powerful statements in the whole of the New Testament is the shortest verse: “Jesus wept.”
Jesus identifies with this problem. The emotion pours out of him. He feels the pain of the loss of his friend, and he identifies with those who are mourning. One of the steps towards healing is to express it publicly, to let the grief come out, to let it be articulated. It is what God wants us to do, and it is one of the really healthy things that the church gives to the community.
There is more. Grief can also be a profound source of hope and inspiration. In this story, Jesus is getting angry with Martha and Mary and the crowds. There are all the professional mourners weeping and saying “Isn't it just terrible that he died.” Everyone is full of remorse and grief. Fair enough. The problem is that all of them are looking at his death through the eyes of mortality. They are not looking beyond, to the possibilities of what God can do. All they see is before their very eyes. They mourn. They grieve. On one level it is healthy; on another, profoundly dangerous. There needs to be more, and Jesus knew there was more.
He knew that by being there he could change Lazarus: This man who had been wrapped and left in a tomb could be brought back to life. He knew that there was something more beyond the grave. It was a foretaste of his resurrection, of what was to come; a unique miracle, but a symbol of what he was able to do. Jesus, you see, didn't just look at Lazarus' death from the point of view of mortality, but from the point of view of what God can do eternally.
This is one of the themes the Christian faith offers to a grieving world: the promise of eternal life in Christ. This is the unique gift that we give to a world spinning in grief and full of pain and anxiety and death. It is also an important message of hope for those of us who continue to live. We can't allow grief to dominate our lives so that we don't live. I once read a poem that put it so profoundly:
There was a very cautious man who never laughed or played.
He never risked, he never tried, he never sang or prayed.
And when one day he passed away, his insurance was denied.
For since he never really lived, they claimed he never died.
Grief is something that must be dealt with, addressed, healed, expressed, but not allowed to dominate your life. The sadness and the sorrow and the mourning for the loss of all those we have seen die or get injured this week cannot prevent us from living: That is what Jesus was saying to the crowd. If only they would believe in him, then he could show them not only how to live, but also how to live again.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in an apartment building in Chile, when at two o'clock in the morning there was a rumble, and my bed began to shake, and all the paintings on the wall began to swing, and the china began to rattle. I realized that for the first time in my life I was experiencing an earthquake. A moderate one and one that the locals ignored, mind you, but for me, I thought it was the end of my life! I sat there and shook, and felt powerless. Afterwards, I wandered around in my room and finally sat on the balcony outside.
All of a sudden, I heard a crash, and looked down to see a car accident. People were getting out of their cars and screaming and gesticulating at one another. Thinking this was not a night that I was going to sleep very well anyway, I just stayed out there in the cool night breeze. It was amazing, because as I looked up, I saw something that I hadn't seen since my days in South Africa - the Southern Hemisphere night sky! At night, the southern sky is so clear and so bright that you feel as if you could pick the stars from the sky and put them on a plate - they are that close! I thought, as I looked at the stars, how insecure and frightened I was feeling at the events of the evening, and a quote that I had used at a funeral here about three years ago came to my mind: “Blessed is the night for it reveals the stars.”
I would put in place of that today: “Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall see the hand of God.” My friends, you might grieve, you might indeed feel pain in your heart and in your soul, but Jesus goes to the tomb and he says to Lazarus, “Come out.” Look beyond death to the life that is to come: a foretaste of the future. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.