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
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