Good Grief - July 29, 2012

GOOD GRIEF



Genesis 49: 29-50:3, 1 Timothy 4: 13-18, SPC, 8/17/08, D. Johnson


A pastor had just moved to the Deep South, to a county where there were several cemeteries. A member of the church died, and sure enough the pastor got confused as to which cemetery he was supposed to meet the family mid-morning for a graveside service. He showed up at one cemetery, but no one was there. He couldn’t rouse the family on his cell phone, and so he drove to yet another cemetery. No family there either.


He was driving down a county road, still unable to get the family on his cell phone, when he noticed a mowed, grassy area in which there had been digging. Obviously this was “the” cemetery and the grave he had been looking for. Stopping his car and getting out, he was so late that the mourners were long gone, having given up on him. There wasn’t a headstone in place, but, of course, it would be weeks until the headstone arrived. And so he stood by the freshly dug dirt that had been heaped back in place and thought a minute. Given that there was no one around, he could do a brief prayer. But no, this person deserved a proper sendoff, and so he went through the entire funeral service that he would have given had there been mourners there.


Half an hour later, returning to his car, he noticed that on the other side of the road there was a backhoe and two men, one older, one younger, eating their lunch. He had been so focused on finding the grave that he hadn’t seen them when he drove up. But now he nodded and they waved back. Then as he drove away the older one said to the younger, “You know, I ain’t ever seen no one do that, and I’ve been installing septic tanks for twenty years now.”


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There weren’t any mourners present when the pastor showed up, which has become a trend in America, even when the pastor is at the right place at the right time. Funeral home statistics show that the number of viewings on the evening preceding a funeral service is way down, and that the number of people attending funeral or memorial services is also down. Maybe the only statistic that is up is that increasingly families are choosing not to have a funeral or memorial service for the deceased. The bulletin cover today contains a message that will help keep us physically and mentally healthy, “Never, Never, Never, Stop Moving.” But the reality is that we all of us will come to a time when we will stop moving. Our concern this morning is that America is a death-denying culture, which is not healthy. So how do we deal with it?


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Contrast the denial of death nowadays to how Jacob’s family dealt with his death in our OT lesson. Jacob breathed his last, and “then Joseph threw himself on his father’s face and wept over him... Joseph commanded the physicians in his service to embalm his father… They spent forty days in doing this... And the Egyptians wept – along with Joseph and his brothers and their families – for seventy days,” a sufficient length of time.


No culture back then was death-denying. People knew how to deal with grief, starting with periods of formalized mourning. In fact, if you continue reading Genesis chapter 50, you will find that there was a great procession accompanying Jacob’s body from Egypt back to Canaan for burial. And when they arrived, they mourned for another seven days. Because of all this formalized mourning, Joseph and his brothers did not suffer ill effects from their father’s death. Sure, they missed him and his loss was painful. Still, they did not become damaged goods, as can people who do a poor job of mourning.


The Christian writer, Wendell Berry, once wrote a short-story for The Atlantic Monthly called Stand by Me. It is a story about a farming family that begins in the Deep South of the 1920s with two grown sons and their aging parents. The older son, Jarrat, gets married and moves into a house across a hollow from the family home, where his younger brother lives with their parents. Jarrat and his wife have two sons, and they work hard trying to build a life. But after a number of years, the wife gets sick and dies.


Jarratt is 38 when she passes, the two boys 5 and 7, which presents a dilemma to his parents and brother. Says his brother, Burley, “Jarrat wasn’t going to be able to take care of the boys and farm too, and they didn’t need to be over there in that loneliness with him. But Pap and Mam were getting on in years then. Pap, just by the nature of him, wasn’t going to be a lot of help. And Mam, I could see, had her doubts. Finally she just out with it, ‘Burley, I can be a grandmother, but I don’t know if I can be a mother again or not. You’re just going to have to help me.’” And so Burley and his mom go across the hollow, pack up the little boys’ clothes, and bring them to their house to live.


I find it admirable what the grandmother and Burley, the little boys’ uncle, did. The name of this short-story is Stand by Me, and the uncle stood by them from then on as best he could. In the first years after their mother died, Burley would find one or the other of them out in the woods in tears. And Burley would try to console the little boy who needed his mother. The boys’ dad wasn’t of any comfort to them, for as the uncle said, “How could he console them when he couldn’t even console himself.”


I find Uncle Burley most admirable, but I find it hard to have much use for the boys’ dad, Jarratt. No doubt that he loved his wife and the pain of losing her was terrible. But this fellow Jarratt, who is the best worker in the county – there is no chore he can’t do in half the time it takes anyone else – won’t work through his own grief? He’s such a sad sack that it’s okay for him to give up his duties as a father and dump his boys on his old mother and brother?


All of us have to deal with grief multiple times over the course of our lives as we lose the persons we love. And we may feel like dying ourselves. Grief is a sense of intense sorrow, a deep sadness that sweeps over us. When a loved one dies, grief walks in the door. We don’t invite it, it just barges in. And so, if I call the sermon today, “Good Grief,” as opposed to “Bad Grief,” I want to point out that our grief is good when we’re working our way through it, bad when we give up and give in to it. For by fully grieving, by working our way through the sorrow to a better day, God prepares us for the rest of our life, a full life, as opposed to a diminished life.


As Uncle Burley in the story thinks about how people work through grief or not, he is reminded of a woman who once lived down the road. She married a man and had a little boy. Her husband died, and she handled that fairly well. But then her little boy got sick one winter and died when he was 9 or 10 years old. Burley knew that the woman took it awfully hard, that she was “grieved to death.” Indeed, as Burley said, “It’s maybe a little hard to believe that people can die of grief, but they do.” And she did.


After she died, her place had to be sold. Burley went out there with several other men to get it ready for auction. And how he dreaded going into the little boy’s room. “It was like opening a grave. It had been kept just the way it was when he died, except she had gathered up and put there everything she’d found that reminded her of him … every broom handle he’d ridden for a stick horse, every rock or feather or string she knew he had played with.” And Burley knew why she had kept the little boy’s room like she did. For when a person you love “is all of a sudden gone, never to come back, the whole place reminds you of him everywhere you look. You dread to touch anything for fear of changing it. You fear the time you know is bound to come, when the look of the place will be changed entirely, and if the dead came back they would hardly recognize it at all. Even so, this place is not a keepsake just to look at and remember. You can’t stop just because you’re carrying a loaf of grief and would like to stop, or don’t care if you go on or not.” God has more life in store for us.


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In our NT lesson, the Apostle Paul writes to members of the early Christian church who grieve their dear ones. And there was some confusion. Many Christians believed that Jesus was going to return soon to inaugurate the new world coming. Some also believed that to be a part of the new world, or kingdom of God, you needed to be alive when Jesus returned. And many of their loved ones weren’t. They’d missed out. But not so, says Paul. “Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever (as he inaugurates his kingdom on a transformed earth.). Encourage one another with these words.”


There is a greater world than this one coming. Encourage one and all to keep moving toward it. Burley says about the relation of these two worlds, “What gets you is the knowledge…that the dead are gone from this world. As has been said… you are not going to see them here anymore. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you ought to have asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don’t.


“And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart gets to know them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead were alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they died. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”


That’s an interesting way to put it, a bigger world. As I think about the new world coming, or the bigger one into which this one will one day be incorporated, it seems to me that there is one more thing to be said about the good work of grief. Namely, by working our way through our grief rather than giving up and giving into it, not only does God help us prepare us for the rest of this life, but God fashions us for the new life to come, a life in which there is no death to separate us from our loved ones. Grieving well is difficult in a death-denying culture. We might even say it is an art. If so, then it is an art worth learning. There is a bigger life to prepare for yet. Amen

Pastor's Column - July 29, 2012

Pastor’s Column. One of today’s greatest spiritual misunderstandings is the idea that the spiritual and material are separate. Jesus continually proved otherwise.



When the 5,000 people came to Jesus, he didn’t give them “pie in the sky;” he gave them fish and bread. He was as much concerned about their shrunken bellies as he was their shriveled souls. And when he was confronted by people with illnesses, he didn’t just say, “In heaven there will be no pain.” He healed the person, made him/her whole. Jesus is why we have missionaries who start medical clinics and schools. He’s why churches have food pantries.


Physical life is not a be-all and end-all, but neither is it inconsequential. In Jesus, the spiritual has broken into the physical world. Jesus became incarnate, took on material form, a human body. Jesus felt human hunger, thirst, exhaustion, injury, and aging. In one of his last teachings before his arrest and suffering, he said that those who are righteous are the ones who provide food, water, clothing, and friendship to those in need. And if God is on the side of anyone, the Bible makes it clear God’s on the side of the poor, those deprived of material necessities.


This may be obvious to us in church – I hope it is – but it seems to be unclear to many secular people. Christianity is regarded as irrelevant by many because they don’t understand that spiritual life gives shape to material concerns. The two are not separate. –DJ (thanks in part to Len Sweet)

Pastor's Column - July 22, 2012

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Jesus said, “A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest/levite/Samaritan was going down that road when he saw him”… Luke 10:25-37



A seminary professor gave an extra-credit opportunity. The students who participated met him at the library to receive their assignments.


The professor divided the students into three groups. He gave the first group envelopes telling them to walk across campus to a lecture hall. He told them that they had 15 minutes, and if they didn't arrive on time, it would affect their grade.


A minute or two later, he handed out envelopes to the second group. They were also to walk to the same lecture hall, but they had 45 minutes. He then gave the third group three hours to get to the same location.


The students were unaware that their professor had arranged for three drama students to meet them along the way. Close to the beginning of their walk, one of the drama students sat, head in his hands, moaning aloud as if in great pain. About half way the seminary students passed a man who was lying face down as if unconscious. Finally, on the steps of the lecture hall, the third drama student was acting out a seizure. In the first group of students, those who had only 15 minutes, no one stopped to help. In the second group, two students stopped to help. In the last group, which had three hours for their assignment, all of the students stopped to help at least one person.


The professor had clearly shown these seminarians that being in a hurry affects good intentions. It would be ideal were we never in a hurry, but so often we are, and often enough we have no way of slowing down. Interestingly, the professor had also proven that groups such as retirees, who may have more time on their hands than they did when working, are a welcome addition to Christ’s ministry. -DJ

Pastor's Column, July 15, 2012

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Sometimes things aren’t as bad as they appear. A fellow recently took a flight that was diverted because of weather. Upon landing at the airport, the flight attendant announced that there would be a delay of at least an hour. The passengers could deplane, but please listen for a call to re-board.



The fellow noticed that everyone got off the plane except a blind lady seated nearby. A Seeing Eye dog lay at her feet. The lady evidently had flown the flight before because as the pilot walked by he said, “Sally, we’re going to be here for awhile. Would you like to get off and stretch your legs?”


The blind lady answered, “No, but my dog would like to take a walk.”


And so the pilot, who was wearing sun glasses, walked off the plane into the terminal with a Seeing Eye dog. Passengers who witnessed this not only tried to change planes, but attempted to change airlines. Still, sometimes things aren’t as bad as they appear.-DJ

July 8, 2012 - Pastor's Column

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Novelist and journalist Amos Oz says in How to Cure a Fanatic: “I think I have invented the remedy for fanaticism. A sense of humor is a great cure. I have never once in my life seen a person with a sense of humor become a fanatic, unless he or she has lost that sense of humor… Humor contains the ability to laugh at ourselves. Humor is relativism, humor is the ability to see yourself as others may see you, humor is the capacity to realize that no matter how righteous you are and how terribly wronged you have been, there is a certain side of life that is always a bit funny. The more right you are, the funnier you become…



“The antidote can also be found at home, virtually at your fingertips. No man is an island, said John Donne, but I humbly dare to add: No man and no woman is an island, but everyone of us is a peninsula, half attached to the mainland, half facing the ocean – one half connected to family and friends and culture and tradition… and the other half wanting to be left alone to face the ocean. I think we ought to be allowed to remain peninsulas. Every social and political system that turns each of us into an island and the rest of humankind into an enemy or rival is a monster. But at the same time every social and political and ideological system that wants to turn each of us into no more than a molecule of the mainland is also a monstrosity.”


-DJ

Pastor's Column - July 1, 2012

Pastor’s Column. One of the things we know about God is that God establishes boundaries. For ex., God says in Job 38, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?...when I prescribed bounds for the sea,… and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther?’” Or of the faithless amongst God’s people, God says, “They know no limits (boundaries) in deeds of wickedness;… shall I not punish them for these things?”



Do we and others take this seriously any longer? There is not much out of bounds on TV. Anything goes. An incredible amount of the news anymore is taken up by accounts of the abuse of children. What used to be a boundary rarely crossed with our young is now ignored by predators, witness Jerry Sandusky. And whereas people once observed the boundaries of modesty and humility, nowadays so many want to be celebrities.


And how about the wildfires in the west? We’re finding out that limiting forest fires as we’ve done the past century is setting an unrealistic boundary. We now know that wildfires are regular visitors to many ecosystems, often causing little or no long term damage; forest fires are inevitable; and postponing forest fires just makes the next fire bigger and more difficult to put out because there is so much more wood to burn.


A sobering thought in the midst of all this is Genesis 1: 28, when God says to Adam and Eve, “Have dominion over…the earth.” -DJ