John 11:17-37
“God Faithful Will Remain: Mourn”
Preached Sunday, January 14, 2024
Today we are starting a new three part sermon series that will take place over the next four weeks. I am calling this sermon series “Trusting in God.” My hope for his sermon series is that it helps us process - all that was, is, and could be - here together as the people and faith community of *** United Methodist Church.
We will be talking about mourning, thanksgiving, and dreaming - all to help our church trust in God’s plan for us. And this sermon series isn’t just for those who are members of our church - my hope is that these sermons will have personal meaning for each of you as well.
And so, let us start with talking about mourning.
We are a grief-adverse culture. Anthropologist Margaret Mead says, “When a person is born, we rejoice, and when they are married, we jubilate, but when we die, we try to pretend nothing happened.”
I sometimes think part of this shift in our culture coincides with the removal of death from our day to day life. It used to be that people died in homes, in their own beds. In 2018, the CDC said that 62% of deaths occurred in hospitals or nursing homes. And up until about 170 years ago - viewings and wakes would happen in the deceased home’s. The funeral home as we know it in America began to grow rapidly during the Civil War as there were so many dead and they had to be shipped back home over a long period of time, and embalming grew as a practice. My point in sharing this is, as death became less or something that we interacted with in our lives, in our homes, I think we have also become more afraid of it, more distanced from the reality of the fragility of our lives.
In 2023, I read two books, both published in 2023, both fiction - that were about grief. But each book came at the idea of grief sideways. In one, a middle schooler, distraught at losing his best friend, processes his grief journey through looking for the cryptid Mothman. The other explores grief through the process of a man slowly becoming a shark and how it affects him, his wife, and all those around him. Both books were so strange and I think speak to our grief adverse culture - that we have to get at it sideways.
Another aspect of our grief aversion may be the rampant heresy of the Prosperity Gospel in Christian circles. The heresy called the Prosperity Gospel is the false idea that if we could just be “right” enough with God - give right, pray right, act right, worship right - then God will make us prosperous. That we won’t be sad or sick or in want… And this mindset is so pervasive, especially among Christianity in the United States. It can often cause those who are mourning, who have experienced loss, to want to quickly brush past their grief, diminish it, as to not think that they somehow deserved this or somehow messed up. As if we believed that in order to be a good Christian we have to always be happy and prosperous. Which is simply not true.
It brings me to 1 Thessalonians 4 - where Scripture says “Do not mourn as those without hope.” What the Bible doesn’t say is “Do not mourn.” It says instead, “do not mourn without hope.” Mourning is an important part of processing loss and what it means to be human - we all need to mourn - and we don’t mourn without hope.
I chose the story of Lazarus and Jesus today to talk to you about The God Who Mourns, The God Who Wept, Jesus, our God.
In the verses immediately following the passage I read today, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead…but I purposefully didn’t read that part. Some say that Jesus planned to raise Lazarus from the dead all along - that’s why he took his time getting to his death bed, for the miracle to be all that much greater, to give glory to God and to show who Jesus was. And perhaps Jesus did know that he could raise Lazarus from the dead and that is what he would do - his conversation with Martha where he calls himself the resurrection and the life certainly points to that. And yet, even knowing that resurrection laid ahead…Jesus stopped in his tracks. He wept. He mourned. He didn’t rush past his grief to what the future held, he attended to his grief, crying for what he, in that moment, had lost. Our God in Jesus knows the importance of mourning.
Why is it important to mourn? Why do we mourn?
Psychologist William Worden talks about the tasks of grief. They are: “to accept the reality of the loss; to process the pain of grief; to adjust to a world without the deceased or perceived loss; and to find an enduring connection with the deceased or past in the midst of embarking on a new life.”
We want to skip the first three tasks and jump to the new life…but grief doesn’t work that way.
Many are probably familiar with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We move through them, not always in order and not without backsliding, to get to acceptance. In 2019, psychologists with the approval of Kubler-Ross’s family, added a sixth stage of grief - reconstruction. Rebuilding a new life on the other side of grief.
And again, we want to skip all the hard stuff and move right into that new life on the other side of loss…but our grief doesn’t work that way. Unprocessed grief will keep holding us back.
So far we’ve been mostly talking about grief as it relates to death, the loss of a loved one - but grief isn’t just about the death of loved ones. I don’t know where it originated but pastors are always saying, “all change is grief” and there is deep truth there. Even change that we want. Even change that we plan for. Even that change is grief. Things like changing jobs, moving houses, entering a new stage of life, becoming empty nesters, losing the ability to do things we once did or move like we once did, etc, etc - every change is grief.
And in the life of the church there is certainly change and grief: transitions of pastors, the sunsetting or ending or programs, changing sanctuaries or buildings, the pews being less full than they once were, having less noises of children and youth among us, people who’ve left us whether through moving, disagreement, or death… and still even more change.
And so often we don’t mourn these changes, these losses, but yet we carry the grief around with us. And we can get stuck. A distinction I recently learned is the idea of yearning versus nostalgia.
Yearning is a strong desire to bring back what was lost. Think of those who are always talking about “the glory days” - in their own life, in our country, in our church. They often are wearing rose colored glasses regarding those glory days…and their desire to go back to the way it was keeps them from living in the present or moving forward to the future in productive and healthy ways. Being stuck in the past, being stuck in yearning, can actually be destructive to the present and to the future - it keeps us from facing the reality of the present and going in a new direction for the future.
Nostalgia on the other hand is looking back on the past having done our grief work, having mourned. Nostalgia is being able to look back on what was with gratitude and hindsight, connecting us to the energy and creativity of the past without shackling us to it.
Lutheran Bishop Michael Girlinghouse says, “The purpose of grief processing is not to wallow in the grief but to get to the place where we can take up life again. For a congregation this means finding energy for mission and ministry, new directions in congregational life and a deeper sense of God’s calling on the congregation in this present day.”
And so this morning, I would like to work through part of the process of grief together - by simply naming some of our griefs as they are related to the life of this congregation. During the pastoral prayer, I will give you several moments of silence to write on the inserted notecard in your bulletin. Write something that you have lost and are mourning in the life of the church - or perhaps something that you have already done your grief work around and look back on with nostalgia. It can be the name of a person who is deceased or no longer here. It can be a program or ministry that has ended. It can be a sense of time, culture, or place. You will be invited to write it on this card and put it in the plate when the offering is being collected. Acknowledging your grief and giving it to God. Keep your cards anonymous - don’t put your names on them. In two weeks when we return to this sermon series, these cards will be displayed in the narthex.
And now, allow me to end my sermon with this…
Not much is known about the history of the hymn “Be Still, My Soul” - the words are attributed to a German Lutheran nun of which very little is known. But what we do know is the deep sense of trust of God through change and grief that comes to us through the words of this beloved hymn. Perhaps with so little being known of the history of the hymn, it leaves us open to think of our own life changes and how God has guided us through each and every one of them to get to this point.
“Be still, my soul: the Lord is on your side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief and pain;
leave to your God to order and provide;
in every change God faithful will remain.”
In every season of our lives.
In every change
In every loss
In ever grief
In every ending
And in every beginning
God, the God Who Mourns, The God Who Wept, Jesus, our God - will remain faithful to us. Even in our mourning, may we trust our faithful God.
Amen.
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