Grief And Gratitude
November 3, 2024 - Hebrews 12: 1-2
It had been a week or more since my friend and Elgin community leader Ron Raglin’s unexpected death, when I found myself overcome with a jag of violent sobbing. I thought I had processed that grief enough for now at least enough to go boldly out in the world and care for other people. But it took over my whole body without warning. It was all I could do to safely put down my bags, stow my bicycle, and crumple into a heap where I landed while parking here at church. I was slightly amused and comforted that I had fallen apart for a moment here at in this building, where we do come to meet God. Perhaps, even though it is my workplace, I also know deeply in my bones that it is a holy, thin place, where even I can meet God and bring to God my yet unprocessed grief.
In the Bible, God is all powerful and beyond our understanding of time and space. “I am who I am, I have been who I have been, I will be who I will be,” God mysteriously tells Moses in Exodus. In Genesis we know God to simply speak the Creation into being. As big, mysterious, and powerful as God is, in the Bible, we learn God is also as close as our very breath, knows our every thought, and has a deep concern for the least powerful and the last, lost sheep. In the Psalms, we hear prayers of joy and prayers of lament. While the prayers of joy may be easier to read most of the time, we need the prayers of lament, too.
While we may have learned that it’s often easier to put on a happy mask because we can’t just trust all humans to witness our grief with respect and compassion, we can’t and don’t need to hide our grief from God. God is big enough, strong enough, and caring enough not only to celebrate our triumphs but also to meet us in our places of suffering, grief, and pain. When the church is at its best, one of the vital gifts we give to each other and to the world is to be a community who can embody a sacred kind of respect, compassion, and care.
Grief, as you may well know, isn’t always pretty. In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross famously coined her 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While these stages don’t always come in a neat order, it may be helpful to understand that grief is sometimes expressed in sadness and tears and it is also expressed in other ways, too. And while the death of a loved one is one reason to grieve, there are many other things we may grieve, too, like the loss of a job, a relationship, a home, a level of independence, or even the dashing of an expectation, dream, or hope.
Indeed, any major change may bring both good things and the loss of good things for which we may grieve. The church has experienced a lot of change - this church and the church at-large. Our whole world has experienced a lot of change as a result of a pandemic. Our ways of understanding how to be in community with each other are struggling with big cultural changes, too. Whenever I witness folks explode at the grocery store cashier, at each other on social media, or even come to violence in the street, I am reminded that anger is a part of grief. Often underneath anger and other related emotions, we may find a very real, deep, and urgent pain.
Most of us humans could use a lot of help learning to feel, process, and name our anger without becoming violent with others or ourselves. I am reminded that it’s very possible that so much of our anger stems from the real pain of endings, limitations, and suffering. As I watch the leaves change, fall, and die, I am reminded that death and resurrection is the cycle of life. It is the way of this universe that God has created and called good. I am reminded that God can bring new life out of the compost heap. I am reminded that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” we know we can trust that God will carry us beyond every ending into the new life that is to come.
Perhaps that’s a kind of cold comfort for those of us in fresh grief. It’s okay if that’s not something you’re ready to hear. It’s okay to just sit with wherever you are today. Because I’m not sure anything really makes the grief less burdensome other than finding the space, time, and resources to let it process. But I also know that since our grief comes from the pain of loss, there was once something beautiful to lose. There was a loved one who maybe wasn’t perfect but had our back, made us feel special, or was everything to us.
There was a job that put food on the table or gave us a sense of fulfillment. There was something we enjoyed doing so much but now it has changed, we can’t participate in the same way, or it is never coming back. There was a dream that we carried that won’t be achieved the way we imagined, but in it was so much beauty and hope. We don’t ever have to say that loss is a good thing. We can always mourn that loss. What we can do is be willing to feel our grief in order to also be willing to feel our gratitude for what or who it was that we so loved in the first place.
I think that’s the “joy” for which Jesus endured the cross. It’s the joy of holy love and life that are part of this beautiful creation. It’s that joy to which Jesus calls followers. It's not a Pollyanna joy of ignorance but a joy that abides through suffering and puts us in touch with deep and holy gratitude. For the love, life, hope, and beauty we have experienced may come to an end in one sense. In another sense though, those gifts are what endures. Those gifts are part of the eternal life to which God invites us all.
This fall I have begun to wear this Stetson that belonged to my grandfather. He taught me to play tic-tac-toe and to identify the birds at the window feeder. He always had a dish of candy to share. Mostly, he and my grandmother just made me feel like I was special and so loved. Now, I am doing my past to pass that on to my children and to the world around me, and when I taught my children the amusingly frustrating reality of mutually assured destruction for two evenly matched tic-tac-toe players, I remembered my grandfather and felt his love powerfully with me.
These days we could all use a little extra wisdom, a little extra support, and a little extra love. I am grateful to be able to turn to God and to the ongoing support of our ancestors - genetic, spiritual, or chosen by us to honor. They may be gone from this earthly life. They may even have left imperfections from which we are still healing. But the gifts they left behind, those will never really leave. For that resource, for the unending love of God, and for the trust we can have in the life that is to come, I give grateful thanks and pray to be upheld in grief that gives way someday, some way to joy.
“Therefore,” scripture tells us, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”
I trust that it is so, that has been so, and that it will be so for all time. Amen.
