Rosedale United Church

“Tears For Fears”

April 03, 2011
Rosedale United Church

( Ephesians 5:8-14 , John 11:1-45)

Doug Norris       (click to open an audio recording of this sermon)

Some people take very seriously, which is to say, they take with great delight, with great exuberance, the change that faith has brought about in their lives.

I saw a woman not long ago – you’ve seen people in churches like this – she had her arms in the air and her eyes slightly closed as in prayer and she was gently but clearly calling out ‘Hallelujah!  Hallejuah!’.    She was unambiguous in her enjoyment of whatever God has been doing in her life.   So I didn’t have the heart to point out that we are in the season of Lent, and that the tradition in the more ‘developed’ churches is that we refrain from using ‘Hallelujah’ during Lent – we save it up for Easter.  I don’t think she cared too much about that.  I also decided not to point out that she was in the parking lot of the Home Depot at the time, middle of a Monday afternoon.

Being in the world differently because of our faith.   Here is the baseline assumption of the letter written, ostensibly, to the Ephesians – to the Christians at Ephesus.

The message was that to be caught up in the vision of Jesus, to be among his community, to seek his ways, is to live in the world differently.  Differently from how we did before, differently from others.  A distinct and life-bringing presence in the world.  (and it is unfortunately a short hop from that to the very unhelpful chest-thumping version of christianity which says we are the ONLY ones, we are the BEST – the rest of you be DAMNED!)  That is not, I don’t believe, the message, but it is that we are to be in the world differently.

Let me park that notion for the moment – what I really want to delve into today is more pointed, more specific.  And more difficult.  It is this :  how, as Christians, do we come differently  to the work of loss and grief?

There are a few reasons.  This next Thursday the Pastoral Care committee is offering a workshop with Jan Hatanaka, on a new way to understand loss and grieving.  This will be good.    It is Lent, and Holy Week is just 2 weeks off.    And we’ve just read the story of Jesus grieving and then raising Lazarus.

In the movie ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ there are two scenes involving Lazarus.  In the first scene we see acted out more or less what was in John 11 – news of his death, the scene of grief, the miraculous raising.

Then the second scene, a little while later, was very odd, and certainly not in the Bible.  We see Lazarus sitting near his house – he looks very weak, sick, like he never actually fully came back to life.  And two men come up to him, ask if he is Lazarus – he says yes – one of them pulls a knife, kills him, and they scurry away.

I couldn’t figure out why that scene was there.  But I have a speculation now.  I have always found the raising of Lazarus to be a hard story to understand.  I put it into the basket of Jesus stories I call ‘Magic’.   Things he did, or things people say he did, that are very cool parlour tricks but which don’t affect us.   Walking on water.  Finding a coin in the mouth of a fish.  Magic.  Maybe the film-maker found the Lazarus story odd too, and changed how it ends.

More simply put, contrary to what we read in John 11, we don’t get to see the people we love brought back to life.  When they end, they end, and that is what we get to deal with.

The passage in John, for my taste, should have ended at verse 35 : ‘Jesus began to weep’.

It is the shortest verse in the Bible – often simply rendered : ‘Jesus wept.‘   I understand why John went further – he was not a historian or a psychologist, interested in how Jesus grieved, he was a theologian with a project in view – to clarify that Jesus is the Son of God, to set out the proof – so John’s gospel works in miracles and signs.

But we don’t get that, so I want to pause at verse 35 and set off from there to understand grieving and loss, on the grounds that the One whom I follow and whose ways I trust also knew grief and loss.

And it is too much to take on in ten minutes, this massive an aspect of our humanity, so forgive me, as Kahlil Gibran put it, forgive me for beginning something I cannot end – the ending is still a love song on the wind.

To quote a less poetic source, I have referred here before to the warning of Miss Piggy – that one should never eat at one sitting something you can’t lift.  So let me carve off just a couple of aspects of this, and see if we get anywhere useful.

I’ll pick the story up at verse 32.  Jesus, who was away, has had several conversations with his disciples about Lazarus, the fact of his illness, his death, and he has seemed in control, calm, rational.  Then he comes to where the others are, to where they live, and:

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  When Jesus saw her weeping, and the others who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.  He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”  Jesus began to weep.

Here’s what I get from this : we live and we die towards one another.  Loss and grief are almost always about relationship.

Remember the old TV game show  – ‘ Who wants to be a millionaire’ ? – where if you got stumped on a question you could phone a friend.  And if the friend also had no idea then you both got to look like idiots on national television.    In my preparations this week I phoned a friend.  Actually I emailed about a dozen friends, members of the congregation, and said, more or less – sermon on grief and loss, you’ve been through this too, what can you tell me?

So I’m going to share some of their responses here today.

And one of the themes is that we live and we die towards one another.  As we live we lean on each other and and when we fall we fall on each other.  So much of grief, then, is about, and is triggered by the changes in this intricate network we depend on.  How can we any longer be who we have been when the web is torn?

‘“ I’m finding more and more that all people are hurting in one way or another.  Yet, we move on, work, play, and engage in life.  There is still this unspoken thread which binds us all together…”

“It was the people who are affiliated with a church who were the most perceptive and adept at noticing how I was…”   (Is there something about intentional community that builds us in a different way?)

“Now that I am a mom I understand these fears, about being so invested in relationship – my heart shatters when I think about the loss that her parents are feeling…”

Not a co-incidence that Jesus shifted from being in control of the situation, calm and collected, to simple weeping, at the moment he saw Mary, and her grief, and was in the place where they had, all of  them, met and talked and worked and eaten meals.

We live and so we die toward one another.

——-

In the grip of grieving it becomes very difficult to sift out exactly what feelings are present.  Sadness becomes anger and anger quickly drops into depression and suddenly there is laughter.  they are all real, all true.  Life is suddenly a boat in whitewater, unmoored.

Fear is almost always present.  Not, any longer, fear for the one we have lost – but for ourselves.

This was a theme in many of the comments I heard.

In fact, two observations.  Fear of the future, and what new version of ourselves we might now need to build, but also the fear of grief itself.

“I am afraid to grieve – none of us knows how to grieve – no one of us wants to be the one to bring the group to it’s knees…”

“Here is the great paradox : the big losses make you vulnerable and insecure – at risk – and a route to healing is to open up and and be even more vulnerable and risk even more insecurity!  Now that takes deep self-knowledge and skill…”

In the months when my father was dying, I realized that I had developed a pattern, in my commute out to the hospital in Mississauga.  When I got there, I would take the stairs instead of the elevator up a few flights to see him.  At the time I likely convinced myself that I was just staying fit.  But I was delaying, slowing down the arrival, not because I didn’t want to see him but because I was afraid of seeing me seeing him.  And on my drive home, I almost always took the Lakeshore instead of the Gardiner Expressway – not because I was relaxed and was taking my time – but because in the cocoon of the car I did not have to risk talking yet to others, afraid of what grief might look like when uncorked.

The thing Jesus said most of all. most often, in most situations – Don’t be afraid…

And we say back – but Jesus – we are afraid!  We don’t yet know how this all goes.  So I like verse 35 – Jesus weeping – himself not sure yet how it goes.  This is a Jesus I can trust.  Put away the magic, stay with us through the night…

Ultimately I suppose the raising of Lazarus is a metaphor – we are enlightened enough about the Bible as literature in our day and place to understand this.  John uses the story to make a point about Jesus himself coming back to life, and we can see the story as being about all of the ‘raisings’, the lesser victories, that give us hope – that we do in fact recover, we find our way.

I want to close with a thought from the letter to the Ephesians.  I learned from the commentaries that parts of this letter are actually bits and pieces borrowed from very early church rituals – snatches of language, poetry, that would have been familiar to the people who first read the letter.

This portion here was likely a quote from an ancient baptism ritual – the words spoken to a new Christian as they came up out of the waters of baptism – an elder or another member standing with them – welcoming them to the new family they have just entered, saying :

Awake, o sleeper, and get up from among the dead.
Christ’s light will shine on you.

Get up from among the dead.

We will spend time among the dead.  We are going to spend time in the valley of the shadow of death, including the valley of the shadow of our own deaths.  We will spend some time there because we are finite humans, we are, as Jesus put it, like the grasses of the field, beautiful, but here one day and gone the next – and because we live in relationship to others.  We live angled toward the other…

We will spend time in that valley.

But it is not where we live.  Gently the word comes – Get up now, from among the dead – there is still light.  You are still light, for the world…

Let there be light – we’ll sing it now – let there be light, let there be light, let there be light…