July 25, 2004

"The Question of Grief"

There once was an attorney in Chicago named Horatio Spafford. He was going to take his wife and four daughters on a vacation in Europe, but some urgent business came up at the last minute. So he sent his family ahead and told them he would join them in Europe as soon as he could. Halfway across the Atlantic, the ship carrying his family struck another ship and sank in just 12 minutes. All four of his daughters, Tanetta, Maggie, Annie and Bessie, were among the 226 passengers who drowned. Mrs. Spafford was one of the few who were rescued.

Horatio Spafford stood hour after hour on the deck of the vessel taking him to join his grieving wife in Cardiff, Wales. As the ship passed the approximate place on the sea where his daughters had been lost, Spafford received comfort from God that allowed him to write these words, “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, when sorrows, like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well, with my soul.” In the midst of the most intense grief anyone can face—losing not one but four children—Spafford and his wife found strength and consolation in God.

Obviously for me it’s been a pretty crazy week, being with Bob’s family, preparing and conducting the funeral, making other Hospital and home calls. Through it all, I thought about what would be appropriate for a sermon today, having promised to look at some of life’s tough questions for the rest of July.

We keep coming back to the question of grief—it’s one of those issues that unite every one of us humans.

Every single one of us has already been confronted with grief, and all of us will face it again. The loss of a loved one is the number one grief problem, but there are other problems that make us grieve—the loss of our youth, the loss of a close friendship, the loss of a job, the loss of our health—all of these things can make our heart ache with grief.

But for now let’s just focus on the excruciating pain of losing a loved one—parent, grandparent, brother, sister, child. That’s the pain we’re most familiar with.

The first thing that all Christians need to understand is that it’s okay to grieve. Jesus said “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Now, nobody feels very blessed when they grieve, but what Jesus meant is that when your heart is broken, that’s when I’ll be closest to you. The word comfort is actually two words fused together, come and fort, meaning strength. So Jesus is saying, when you need me most, I’ll be there with more than just sympathy. I’ll be there with the strength that will let you keep on going and live a successful life.

But that doesn’t mean that grief doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean that recovery is quick and easy.

One of the most difficult aspects of grief is that everyone must experience it for themselves. No one can tell you about their own grief so that it will match yours. Each person’s grief is unique, because their relationship with the one they’ve lost was unique. As each person is unique in the world, no one had quite the same relationship that you and your loved one shared. And when the other died, part of you died, too. You were changed by their life, and you were changed by their death, too. Often people find that their outlook on life has changed because of their grief and the process of working through it.

There are many places in the Bible where grief is absolutely overwhelming, crushing, defeating. Last week we looked at the sin of King David with Bathsheeba. David’s life really began to go to pot after that pivotal moment in his life. In his old age David saw his son Absalom rebel against him, leading an army to try to kill his father and take the throne for himself. Absalom failed and was killed himself, but David, far from relieved, was so anguished that he locked himself up in the palace and cried out, “I wish that I had died myself instead of you.”

We’ve talked many times about Jesus and how he was affected by all the emotions that any other human being feels, including grief. When his friend Lazarus died, the Bible records its shortest verse: Jesus wept. He wept to lose a loved one. Jesus was also familiar with other kinds of grief, as when he cried the sight of the city of Jerusalem. He had come to save the city, a metaphor for all the Jewish people, but Jerusalem didn’t want to be saved, and that broke his heart. So when you feel so weighed down with grief that you can hardly breathe, know that Jesus understands just where you are, and he cares.

Scripture tells us that grief is like a blanket of gloom that settles over everything, strangling and smothering anything that even hints of happiness, and our own struggles with grief confirm that. The movie “Shadowlands” is based on the life of the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis, who married an American woman, Joy Grisham, only to see her die of cancer. In his book “A Grief Observed” Lewis wrote, “Joy’s absence is like the sky, spread over everything. There is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss.”

Yet Lewis was also grateful that he had been married and had known Joy’s love, acknowledging that love and pain are two sides of the same coin.

He wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken, it will become hard, impenetrable. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love—is Hell.”

Love is never entirely comprehensible to us, but we know instinctively that we want it. No sane person would voluntarily enter this horrible Hell that Lewis describes as a life without love.

Yet we also know that loving guarantees us that one day our heart will be broken. We will be plunged into the blackness of grief. When that terrible day comes, we’ll have to carry on with our lives, so we need to be ready with lamps to show us the road out of our grief. I would like to suggest a three part approach towards dealing with grief.

First of all, understand that there is nothing in your past that brought suffering upon you. But there’s nothing in your past that brought blessings on you, either. Did you catch that? You don’t deserve to suffer, but you didn’t deserve the good times, either.

Many people, when sufferings hits them, ask “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” The short answer is “nothing.” You didn’t do anything to deserve this grief. I completely and utterly reject the idea of a God who deliberately inflicts suffering on his children, no matter how badly they might have sinned. Sometimes God allows his children to suffer, but that’s another question. Robin and I were just talking about this yesterday—one way the problem of pain and suffering makes sense to me is that God allows us to suffer so that we will understand and be compassionate toward those around us in pain.

We need to understand something about our relationship with God—ever since Adam and Eve, all of us have fallen under the influence of sin, and all of us have fallen under the power of suffering and death. So while it’s not true to say that some sin of our past brings calamity upon us, it is true to say that we are vulnerable to suffering because we live in a fallen and broken world. God still sends good things and loving relationships into our lives, but he also allows us to experience the hurts of this broken world so that we will respond to those hurts in his name.

What all of this means is that we are in no position to claim our rights before God. We don’t have rights before God. We are part of a human race that has rebelled against our father, just like Absalom, and we know instinctively that our rebellion has broken God’s heart. We may wonder why God sends so much undeserved suffering, but we also have to wonder why God sends so much undeserved happiness.

So the first step in dealing with grief and moving forward is to understand that God didn’t take your husband or your mother or your son away because he’s mad at you, because he’s punishing you. The only message God’s trying to send you is this: “I’m here. And I care. Together, we’re going to get through this.”

Second, understand that the Creator is always re-creating. Creation is not a one-time offer, not a carnival show where God brought the universe into being and then moved on to the next town. No, the Book of Genesis says that God sent his spirit out over the emptiness and made something wonderful. When we grieve we have this terrible void, this aching emptiness within us that we fear can never be healed up. But God sends his spirit out once more to address that void, to make something wonderful again.

There once was a king who owned a beautiful diamond. But there was a problem—the diamond had a flaw, a scratch down the middle. It could never be worn, or given, or admired. So the king sent word to the entire kingdom that he would bestow great riches and honor on anyone who could restore the diamond and take away its flaws. Of course, many people tried, not just from the kingdom but also beyond the seas. But no one could remove the scratch, and the king grieved. Then one day a young man arrived who declared his confidence that he could help the king.

The young man was granted a quiet place to work, but each day the king would come and demand, “Well!?” and each day the young man would say, “Not yet.” Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. And then one day, the young man came and presented the diamond to the king. Slowly a smile spread across the king’s face, and a triumphant “Yes!” filled the throne room. The queen and all the courtiers and knights crowded around to see how the flaw had been fixed. And they gasped—the scratch was still there. But the young man had carved a rose in the diamond, using the scratch for a stem.

Life has a way of inflicting some pretty deep scratches in our souls, which, after all, are more precious than any diamond. But God is the one who made our lives from—excuse the pun—scratch, and he is not content to see your life, or mine, or any other, be defeated by grief which dries up our hearts like farmland withered by drought. Psalm 65 says that the river of God is full of water that brings forth bounty, so that the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain and they shout and sing together for joy.

Finally, the way through our grief is illuminated by our hope in the future. The Christians in Thessalonika were grieving because they were expecting the imminent return of Jesus, as he had promised, and they feared that members of their community who had already died would be shut out of the coming kingdom, would be forgotten. So Paul wrote to assure them that life and death were no barriers to Christ’s reign. When Christ comes back, the dead will be raised and the living will be taken up to meet him in the air, and both will be taken off to enjoy the eternal reward for those who have faith in him.

Therefore, the Christian community, Paul says, still grieves for their loved ones, but they don’t grieve like those who have no hope. Because Christ’s love will give life to us all, there is no loss that is permanent, there is no hurt that will not be healed, no tear that will not be wiped away, no grief that cannot be set in a larger context that in God, ultimately all will be well. And with those words, Paul adds, we can encourage one another.

Even though we can and will experience many griefs over the course of a lifetime—lost relationships, missed opportunities, poor health, the suffering of the innocent, dreams that die before their time, loved ones who leave us, even the worst pain of all, the loss of a child—we do not grieve like those who have no hope, but even in the midst of grief we keep looking forward, even in the midst of grief we keep looking for the fulfillment of all our hopes in God. And so we are encouraged, we take heart to live the gift of life to its fullest, to be aware of the abundant life in Christ, and to share that life with those who need it most.

This week I was reminded of one of my favorite sermon illustrations. A man was walking down a dark street when he fell into a hole. In total blackness he felt around for a ladder or something to stand on to try to climb out of the hole, but he could find nothing. He cried out for help, and along came a doctor.

Hearing the man’s plight, the doctor wrote out a prescription, threw it down the hole and kept on walking. Then came a priest who heard the man’s lament. He wrote out a prayer, threw it down the hole and kept on walking. Next came a soldier, who threw down a gun, and kept on walking. Finally came a man with torn and ragged clothes, and no shoes. He heard the man’s cries and jumped down in the hole with him. “You idiot,” the first man yelled. “Now we’re both stuck down here.” “Yes,” the disheveled man replied, “but I’ve been here before. I know the way out.”

One of the most dog-eared, frayed and battered clichés of all is this one: Time heals all wounds. But you know what? There is a reason why clichés get to be clichés. Because they happen to be true. Time really does heal our wounds. God’s time, that is, and God’s purpose. The psalmist said it best: Though weeping tarries for the night, joy cometh in the morning.

Does anybody here remember the Ken Burns movie about the Civil War? In the segment about the Battle of Gettysburg, Burns discovered actual movie footage shot in 1913, at the 50^th anniversary of the Battle. Thousands of veterans from the North and South were still alive, and they gathered here in Pennsylvania to recall that terrible battle. At one point, the veterans decided to reenact Pickett’s Charge. Each side took their places, and then once again the South started to charge the North, except instead of rifles and bayonets, now they were charging with canes and crutches.

As both sides converged, the old men did not fight each other. Instead, they threw their arms around each other and began to sob. Half a century later, they understood with the wisdom of years that the war had been a great madness. They had every reason to grieve—almost everybody had lost a brother or father, but everybody had lost many comrades, all killed by the actions of the other side. But they weren’t enemies anymore. Now they were all just human beings, each with the same dreams, the same wives and children waiting for them to come home.

When we are deep in grief, we think that it will never end, that we will never find our way out of the blackness. But thanks be to God for the gift of Jesus Christ to the world, the Christ who came down into the pit and said, “I know the way out.” To him be all glory and honor and praise forever. Amen.