"I'm ready to go," says one man. "I've
had a long life, a good life. There have been really hard times, Pastor, but God's been
good to me."
"I want to see my husband," says a woman, "I still miss him after all
this time ... and the child I lost years ago. I'm tired. I want to go home."
"What do you want me to include in our prayer?" asks the pastor, holding the
hand of a man who will die that night. "Pray that the church will know there is no
retribution in the mind of God," he says.
"It's O.K., Mommy," says a 10-year-old girl close to death with leukemia.
"It's a good place, Mommy, I know. An angel told me. It'll be O.K."
All these people share several things in common: Each one is close to death and knows
it. Each one has developed a strong sense of the presence and power of Jesus Christ. Each
one is not afraid of death.
These four also know about Christian grief. And they know about Christian hope. If we
open our hearts to receive the witness of their faith, and that of faithful Christians
like them, our grief in the face of death is tempered by hope, as well.
The Apostle Paul writes, "We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and
sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no
hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God
will bring with him those who have died ... Encourage one another with these words."
Please pardon my double negative, but the Apostle Paul does not tell us not to grieve.
He assumes we will grieve and tells us not to grieve in the same way as those who have no
hope. That is very different than a belief and a commandment that as Christians, we ought
not to grieve.
Christian grief is rooted in Christian hope. We all know something of grief and loss.
The particular type of grief, though, which Paul is addressing is the grief that arises in
the face of death. To this type of grief, Christian faith speaks of the resurrection; of
life beyond death in the nearer presence of the God who created the whole universe and
created us; eternal life in the loving presence of the God who, in the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ has conquered death and evil for eternity. For a Christian,
the death of a loved one is one of the ultimate contact points between Christian grief and
Christian hope, Christian grief and the promise of resurrection.
There are no easy, or even moderately easy answers when we talk about grief, but as
Christians, we do have words of comfort and hope to say to one another and to future
generations. Death is not something to be afraid of, nor is it something from which to
shield children. Our trust in the promise of the resurrection allows us to feel the grief
and finality of death, but not to be paralyzed by it. And our faith compels us to teach
this truth to future generations.
One of the greatest privileges of the pastorate is the invitation to sit with those who
are near death and to experience their peace, their lack of fear, and their assurance in a
life beyond what we now know. I have listened to their dreams, their visions, their near
death experiences, and have experienced, myself, similar encounters with what I consider
to be the eternal realm of God. I have received the gift of Christian hope from faithful
folk as they have struggled against pain and suffering and the grief of leaving their
loved ones, and then as they reached a sense of acceptance and peace that is beyond our
understanding.
There is in Celtic mythology the notion of "thin places" in the universe,
where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. At such
places we find the clearest communication between the temporal and the eternal. Sometimes,
according to Celtic myth, these thin places are actual locations, such as a mountain. They
are also, I believe, experiences of joy and suffering and mystery that provide us an
opportunity to reach across the divide between the tangible and the intangible life and
encounter the mystery of the Divine. Death and grief and hope are, for the Christian, some
of those thin places in the universe where we come into close proximity with the Divine.
So when we grieve, we hope through our tears and we give thanks, through our tears, for
the sure promise of the resurrection, for the sure promise of eternal life. We have
reached through a thin place and been touched by the heart and hope of God. Grieve,
therefore, but grieve as those who do have hope.
Some people grow more cynical as they go through life. On the contrary, I find my faith
deepening year by year as I encounter the strength, perseverance, grace and hope of
faithful Christians in joy and sorrow, in struggle and victory.
I find myself growing in the acceptance of ambiguities beyond our mastery, and
appreciation for the mysteries that are beyond our capacity to understand. I stand with
the great preacher and theologian, George Buttrick, who once wrote that if he had to
choose between living in a world that included mystery or one in which all answers were
known, he would choose the world with mystery.
I believe in a God who loves us so much and has so much invested in this world and in
each of us that God could not possibly let life end with the grave. So I believe that
death is a comma, not a period. I believe that which is bound together in love in this
life is preserved in God's reign that is forever. I believe in the mystery that is eternal
life.
Our culture is afraid of death. We spend our lives running from it, but it was here
long before we arrived and it will be here long after we are gone. We accumulate material
goods and fill our lives with busy-ness to push aside our mortality, we try to make our
children into what we could never be as if we could live through them, we consider botox
and tummy tucks and face lifts as if our bodies will not age.
But death comes to the Ph.D. and the illiterate, to the rich and the poor, to those of
high degree and those of lowly status. Remember the old bumper sticker: "The one who
dies with the most toys wins?" Wins what? Nothing that has anything to do with the
Christian faith, that's for sure. And nothing that has anything to do with the Reality
that is beyond our human capacity to contain or know. Such an approach to life is just a
way to avoid the fearsome democracy of death. As an old Chinese proverb says, at the end
of the game, both king and pawn return to the same box.
I have never heard anyone say on their deathbed that they wished they had spent more
time at the office. When we encounter death and our hearts are opened by grief, we have an
opportunity to reset our priorities, and live out our hope. If God cares enough about us
and about this world that life does not end at the grave, but continues forward in God's
nearer presence, then God cares deeply and fully about what happens in this life too.
Christian hope in the face of grief becomes revolutionary because, in the words of The
Book of Common Worship, it enables us "to live as those who are prepared to die, and
when our days here are ended, to die as those who go forth to live." It places our
values and sets our vision on what really matters, and the world has never been ready for
that.
We often try to protect our children from the knowledge of death, and by doing so, we
do them a great disservice. They already know of death through the news and television and
movies. It is up to us to let them know that what they see in movies and the media is not
what death is. It is up to us to let them experience the grief and power and grace of
death in their grandparents and neighbors, their aunts and uncles, so that they can know
death is not the final word and it need not be feared.
It is up to us to let them know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.
Neither trouble, nor pain nor persecution, nor lack of clothes and food, nor danger to
life and limb, nor the threat of force of arms, nor death nor life, nor what happens today
nor what may happen tomorrow, has any power to separate them from the love of God in
Christ Jesus, our Lord. Nothing, nothing at all. How are our children going to learn this
great truth if we shield them from opportunities to develop the muscles of their faith?
How will we learn ourselves, if we are too afraid to let ourselves move through death and
grief into authentic Christian hope?
As Christians, we dare to remember our mortality, we dare to accept death as part of
life and we dare to grieve. We grieve as those who do have hope in the resurrection, who
know that our life is so important to the Creator of the Universe that death is not the
end, but rather our entry into life eternal. We grieve because we miss a loved one whose
voice we will not hear for a long time, whose face will not return our smile for a long
time, and whose hand we cannot touch for a long, long time.
But our grief is tempered by our hope in the resurrection. Someday, in ways beyond our
imagining, we shall be reunited with those we have loved and lost for a little while. Then
we shall remember that long ago when we were born, we were pushed by our mothers from the
comfort and security of the womb into the great unknown of this world. We found it
agonizing to leave what was known and comfortable. But we were welcomed into the loving
arms of our parents, and a whole new world was opened to us. Someday, we shall remember
the words of Paul and know that we need not be afraid, for when those we love die, and
when we ourselves die, we are being born into an unknown world we cannot yet see. On that
great and glorious day, we too, shall be welcomed into the loving arms of the One who gave
us birth, the One who will open to us a whole new way of being and shall be surrounded by
the great company of the saints who have gone before.
According to the Gospel of John, on the last night Jesus was with his disciples, he
said, "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. Not as the world give do I give.
Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid." If our Savior could be
so at peace the night before his death, and tell us to be at peace, then hope can show
through our grief as well. Amen.
