As empty as a Monday morning church: the grieving heart

Have you been to a funeral lately? Did they sing upbeat praise and worship songs? Maybe even with a worship band? It’s happening more and more frequently instead of singing the old traditional sad hymns with the organ. I do understand that increasingly the trend in funeral services has been to “celebrate the life” of the deceased loved one. And this makes sense, but, personally I’m concerned about losing the older balanced approach, a balance of two very important experiences. At a “good” funeral, we should have space to grieve and space to express our hope as Christians, a balance of sadness and joy. In my opinion, we increasingly minimize the space to grieve. When I was able to deal with my mother’s death, some months after the funeral, in my late teenage years, I came to value Ecclesiastes 7:3, “Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart.” It is good for us to grieve.

This was on my mind last week because over at the Mere C.S. Lewis blog, I was posting quotes from A Grief Observed which C.S. Lewis wrote while grieving the death of his wife. It’s raw and difficult at times, but he shows us what happens to us when we grieve. At the Mere C.S. Lewis blog, I don’t present my thoughts as it’s all about Lewis, so I’m bringing that post over here! In the following passage, Lewis candidly talks about his experience of God during this time of mourning. For me, it connected very well with my own experience. What Lewis and I have expressed in preaching and in print, Alan Jackson has captured in music (and video). If it’s true that “a sad face is good for the heart,” I believe you will be richly blessed in the next few moments, especially if you allow your heart replay your own sadness. Lewis wrote:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him 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. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed pg. 7-8)

You left my heart as empty as a Monday morning church
It used to be so full of faith and now it only hurts
And I can heart the devil whisper “Things are only getting worse”
You left my heart as empty as a Monday morning church (Alan Jackson song)

For me, both Lewis and the song capture the intensity of that experience of God’s silence in my grief. And yet, He is there. Why else am I praying? Why is Lewis writing? Why does the widower go on singing? Even though our words sound faithless, they are still, in effect, being offering to God. Though it hurts now, I can remember my heart being full of faith. Even when I am faithless, God proves himself to be faithful (1 Tim). Yes, the church is empty on Monday morning, but how long will it remain so? Will my heart always ache? C.S. Lewis continues from the previous quote, writing:

I tried to put some of these thoughts to [a friend] this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?
    Not that I am (I think) 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.’ (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed pg. 8)

“Blessed are those who mourn,” says Jesus. We are not left alone. God is present with us, though we may experience only his silence when our grief seems the loudest. Lewis’s friend is more on track than Lewis in the above paragraph. The turning point in my experience was when I realized that the pain of the grief was drawing me closer to the suffering of Jesus. Many years have passed and many more experiences of grief, mourning and suffering have come, and today I am much closer—I can almost honestly say with the Apostle Paul, “For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:5, NIV 2011). And only then do we experience the transformation of grief into something of great value.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
(2 Corinthians 1:3-4, NIV 2011)

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Never Have Your Faithful Dog Stuffed

I finally found a new metaphor for understanding Jesus' instruction not to pour his new wine into our old wineskins. I could understand Jesus' metaphor; he explains it well, but it's just that we don't use wineskins anymore. Jesus said, "Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved" (Matthew 9:17, TNIV). Jesus is doing something new and we shouldn't expect to contain him in the old wineskins of our limited expectations. Alan Alda's biography titled Never Have Your Dog Stuffed introduces a new metaphor for understanding this wineskin concept.

When Alan Alda was eight years old he experienced a great trauma. "My father was trying to stop me from sobbing because we were burying out pet dog," so as Alan explains, "my father said maybe we should have him stuffed." It turned out to be a bad idea. When the dog came back from the taxidermist, he didn't look right. Alda continues, "We kept our stuffed pet on the porch and deliverymen were afraid to make deliveries. There are a lot of ways we stuff the dog, trying to avoid change, hanging on to a moment that's passed. There's a lot of my life that was learning that lesson over and over again."

Well, I loved Alan Alda's biography and I am so thankful that he gave me a new metaphor for what happens when we try to put Jesus' new wine into old wineskins. Sometimes we think we've finally got this "faith in Jesus" thing figured out. That's when we try to preserve it. We try to stuff the dog with our expectations of how things work with God. We want him to be predictable. We want to know that we understand how faith works. Alan Alda is right: that's just stuffing the dog and try to hold on to what we already know. Jesus is telling us that our faith is alive and will grow and change and expand and we better have new wineskins! Immediately, Matthew details two events to illustrate what Jesus meant. I want to quickly comment on the second one.

Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, "If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed."

Jesus turned and saw her. "Take heart, daughter," he said, "your faith has healed you." And the woman was healed from that moment. (Matthew 9:20–22, TNIV)

This event presents a challenge for us to understand since the cultural differences are enormous. The quick version: this woman had NO life. She was more desperate than we can imagine. When the text says that she "had been subject to bleeding for twelve years," it likely means that since entering puberty this woman in her mid-twenties had been enduring menstrual bleeding and hemorrhaging in between her monthly cycles. In a pre-tampon, pre-bathroom kind of culture where these kind of bodily matters were talked about more crudely and publicly than in our culture, this young woman would not only be publicly shamed, she would be a total outcast. No one would accept her or try to help her because this kind of bleeding makes one unclean and therefore untouchable according to the Jewish law. I don't think we can imagine this woman's pain and humiliation. How can we relate to the fact that due to her bleeding she has been overlooked in the expected practice of having your marriage arranged by your father?

Even if we can begin to appreciate her desperation for healing, we find her approach unsettling. It's like she believes that Jesus is magical. "If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed." (Mark's gospel really emphasizes this notion of magic.) There's something not right about that. We would've gone about it differently because we know it's about personal faith in Jesus, not about touching his clothing and experiencing the magic. We expect that we have to get our theology right first, before we ask, before we pray, before Jesus could answer us. And that is stuffing the dog! We want to put his new wine in our old wineskins.

Commending this woman's faith, such as it is, Jesus encourages her, "Take heart!" Jesus sees in her approach a "new wineskin" kind of faith. In total desperation she reached out to Jesus, believing that after twelve years of horrible suffering, she'd found the way out of it. And she was right! Jesus had compassion on her, "Your faith has healed you." Matthew wants us to understand that this is the "new wineskin" kind of faith that Jesus had been talking about. Plus, I suspect the TNIV (and other English translations) are weak in translating the Greek verb as "healed" when Jesus likely intended the more common meaning, "saved." "Your faith has saved you." She was saved, rescued from a horribly outcast life and brought into new life by the grace of Jesus through faith, "new wineskin" faith.

We expect that we have to get our beliefs right before God will act, but Jesus surprises us by having compassion on people who don't have it all figured out. He seems to race ahead when people show the slightest inkling of new wineskin kind of faith. A young preacher preparing for a huge stadium event in New York ran into a big problem the night before it was to begin. He was training a team of counseling volunteers who were to assist him but he could not be heard over the roar of airplane engines coming out of La Guardia Airport at the rate of dozens per hour. So the young preacher paused, glanced up and quietly said, "We'll have to do something about this noise. This just won't do." He bowed his head and said a simple prayer to the effect, "Lord we ask you to shift the wind and send these planes in another direction. Thank you. Amen."

Personally, I'm shocked that a preacher would pray that way. One of the volunteers that day wrote, "Well we were believers but this was a tall order. We weren't sure what, if anything, to expect. But God did it; he answered our prayers in a wondrous way! The morning newspaper reported that the winds had changed during the night, and the airplanes over the Stadium had to be routed another way. For several days thereafter, thousands of people came to Christ under Billy Graham's preaching. At the conclusion of the crusade, the winds reverted to their normal flow, and the airplanes returned to their normal flight patterns."

God works powerfully through those who like Billy Graham and the bleeding young woman have "new wineskin" kind of faith. Most of the time I still expect that I have to get my theology right first. I'm pretty good at stuffing my faithful dog. Alan Alda actually helped me to see that I've been doing that with my all of my life, not just my faith. Having new wineskins is all about giving God the space and the room to do something new, to actually change my life in ways I may not expect. My faith is to grow and change and expand, so I better be willing to contain it in a new wineskin, flexible and ready for what Christ will do. I am one of too many Christians who has been settling for a lesser faith, stuffing it with my own thinking about God and then putting this faithful dog out on the porch where it scares away any who might want to know more about faith in Jesus.

Note: The above picture of Jesus is a great painting called "The Touch" by Ron DiCianni.

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Expectations

The above blog posting is quite a "snip-it" from my sermon based on Matthew 9:17-26. We worship a Saviour who exceeds our expectations. This passage of Scripture has a pretty amazing approach to challenging our expectations and re-shaping our faith.

Beyond Physical Pain

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” (Mark 15:33-35, NRSV)

Apparently they understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic about as well as we do! But talk about adding insult to injury—in such a desperate cry as this, even then Jesus is alone, completely misunderstood. There is a pain beyond physical pain. Jesus’ passion, his suffering on the cross, is not just the intense physical pain and torture, but it’s also this pain beyond physical pain—it’s wrenching pain of the soul, deep suffering from within; pain which we describe with words like anguish, despair and dread.

In reflecting on Jesus’ words, I remember this pain, I carry it with me, it has changed who I am. It is the time in my life which I dread to recall, it was at the point of darkest despair, when hope was gone and anguish settled in my soul. I feared that I would die, alone. I was isolated, untouchable, unforgiven. And God was silent. My prayers felt like they were unplugged. Ancient Christians call this experience the dark night of the soul; I suspect they too were reflecting on Jesus’ words from the cross. Desolation—where is God when it hurts so bad?

It took significant time for me to realize that God had not abandoned me and that he was unmistakably present with me through this dark night of my soul. I did not perceive it that way in the experience. This is what is profound about Jesus’ experience on the cross. What we perceive, this desolation, the silence of God, the pain of anguish, despair and dread—in the dark night of the soul, what we perceive, Jesus experienced it, beyond our pain. For the first time ever, Jesus, the Son of God, felt the distance, the darkness, the disconnection from the Father. “Eloi, eloi, lema sabacthani?” Can’t you feel the anguish, the despair and the dread? “My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?”

I remember singing in an Easter cantata, “The Father turned his face away.” The Son was left alone in agony feeling the anguish in his human soul beyond the pain we’ve suffered. Because he knows this depth of human pain and suffering, I know that I am never alone. So great is his love for me that he suffered and died.

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The Palms & The Passion
I have found there is great power in just hearing the Word of God on that Sunday before Easter rather than hearing a sermon. Each of the four gospels record various events and teachings from the triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the Last Supper and through to the crucifixion. I have prepared dramatic readings of the Biblical text (Matt, Mark, Luke or John) and would happily make them available to your congregation if you would like to try this on Palm Sunday or during a special worship service during Holy Week. I also have a short seminar, "Reading Scripture in Worship," for readers who like to make the Word more clear to their hearers.

"Hero" Redefined

Vulnerable. Unsure. Lonely. Insecure. Hurting. Hoping. Only a man.

And we had thought he was almost a god, invincible and invulnerable, a superhuman alien, the last son of Krypton. It turns out that the postmodern Superman is only a man is a silly red sheet, dreaming about the man he could be. It's not easy being a hero. I'm alluding to the song "Superman (It's Not Easy)" by Five for Fighting.

Behind the legend and the cape, there is suffering. Tom Welling in the TV series Smallville and Brandon Routh in the movie Superman Returns reveal this side of Superman to us (even more so than did Christopher Reeve in the classic Superman movies). This revisioning of Superman really does make sense. My childhood dream of being Superman and being able to defeat every foe and solve every problem and never be hurt and no nothing of this world's pain—well, it could just never be real. For a real hero could not be untouched and uninvolved in this world's suffering.

This new postmodern Superman sacrifices himself, experiences pain, pushes himself and goes through constant trials to be a hero. This is the Superman who struggles and must use every ounce of his ingenuity and strength to save a jet spinning out of control (Superman Returns). What a contrast to the Christopher Reeve - Superman who effortlessly rescued Air Force One by taking the place of its lost engine on the left wing (see my video contrast). All things considered, wouldn't you agree that the struggling and suffering Superman is more true to reality?

Heroes sacrifice themselves, suffer and sometimes die. Didn't we learn this from 9/11? So why does Christian triumphialism still prevail in the church today? Why do we think it odd when we are touched by and involved in this world's suffering? Why do we as Christians believe we should feel no pain and be healed from all disease? Why are we so prone to believe that God should intervene at every turn and save us from harm? Why do we protest when the way is hard and the path uncertain?

Could it be that the kind of heroes God calls us to be are the kind that are vulnerable, unsure, lonely, insecure, hurting and hoping? Could it be that we are to follow the example of our ultimate hero, Jesus?

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends. (John 15:13)

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10-11)

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)

They triumphed over him [the Dragon]
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death. (Revelation 12:11)

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How Does God Rescue Us?
This sermon, drawn from the experiences of David in 1 Samuel 19, explores the many different ways, both extraordinary and ordinary, in which God works to rescue David from danger. What can we learn about how God rescues us today?

Hope Endures
When life comes crashing down around us, we need more than a cliché quoting of Romans 8:28. How is it that Christian hope can endure even when life hurts? A deeper understanding of Romans 8:28 as understood by examining Romans 8:18-30 should be of immense help to those of us who are hurting, more than a cliché comfort.