The Mystery of Grief

Scripture: Psalm 13; 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-14

Sermon: The Mystery of Grief

Topics: grief, suffering, loss, life, love

Preached: August 7, 2011

Rev. Mike Abma

Psalm 13

¹ How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

² How long must I bear pain^* in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

⁴ and my enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed’;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵ But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

⁶ I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.

1 Thessalonians 4: 13-14

13 But 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. ¹⁴For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.^*

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a book called On Death and Dying. In this book she outlined 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and lastly, acceptance. To her surprise, the book became a best-seller. Part of the reason it sold so well is because it seemed to put grief into such a nice, neat order.

The problem, however, is that grief —

that avalanche of emotions we feel when we lose someone we love dearly –

grief is never orderly, or neat.

It is dark, chaotic, and difficult.

It may be a universal experience,

but every person grieves in their own particular way.

Something happens to us.

Someone is torn from us.

And our world is turned upside-down.

C.S. LEWIS — A GRIEF OBSERVED

Many of you are familiar with the life of the writer, C.S. Lewis.

At age 56, Lewis met a woman named Helen.

After being a bachelor for so long, he was absolutely stunned by how thoroughly he fell in love with her. They were soul-mates.

They married.

C.S. Lewis describes their married years as the happiest years of his life.

He and Helen lived in marital bliss.

Then, just four years into the marriage, Helen’s cancer reappeared. She had been in remission – now it was back with a vengeance.

She struggled. She fought. But in the end, she died.

And C.S. Lewis was heart-broken.

To help cope, he began writing his thoughts and feelings in a journal.

Just before his own death, Lewis was convinced to allow this journal to be published under the title A Grief Observed.

At the time he wrote it, C.S. Lewis was the most well-known Christian author on the planet. You might have expected his faith to offer some comfort. Clearly he thought so too. But when you read this journal, you are quite shocked by how gut-wrenching his grief is. And his grief puts his faith through the ringer.

He writes that he called on God for help, but the door was slammed in his faith.

It wasn’t that he doubted there was a God.

It was that he began to see God as cruel, and heartless.

In ways, the opening words of Psalm 13 would be a fitting summary of his journal:

How long, O Lord?

How long will you forget me?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I carry this ache in my soul and this sorrow in my heart?

How long?

NO ROOM FOR GRIEF?

How long?

Well, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it should not be very long at all.

The DSM Manual is the guide book doctors use to diagnose mental illness.

In the past, any symptom of depression in grieving people was considered normal.

As of last summer, it is not —

Well, maybe if these symptoms last a few days, it is okay,

But anything lasting a few weeks is not okay.

According to the DSM Manual, that is when doctors can and should prescribe medication.

Why this push to hurry grieving?

Why this push to prescribe pills?

Well, according to the poet and author Meghan O’Rourke, we live in a world in which it is almost taboo to grieve. She writes that it is odd that we can be open about almost anything else in life, but we cannot be open about our pain and loss.^[1]

The impulse to hurry or hide grief has been around for a long, long time.

Already in 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called Mourning and Melancholia. In this essay, he basically said that too much grief is unhealthy. The quicker you can let go and get on with life, the better.

That was his theory.

But even for old Freud, putting this into practice was difficult.

The truth is, Freud lost a daughter named Sophie when she was only 27 years old.

And he never was able to “get over” her loss.

MAKING ROOM FOR GRIEF

The Psalms of Lament, like Psalm 13, give us, as God’s people the room, the time, the space, and the words to grieve, to complain, to be bitter, and to be broken-hearted.

For if you had to sum up the mystery of grief in a word,

perhaps the best word would be broken-hearted.

To help with his grief, the pastor and psychologist Bruce Vaughn began writing letters to his dead 8 year old son Taylor — Taylor had died of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.

He writes,

Dear Taylor,

Before you were sick, I thought the phrase “broken-hearted” was a mere metaphor.

Now that you are gone, it no longer strikes me as a figure of speech.

The rupture in my heart is real – just as real as your absence from my life.”

Why do the Psalms of Lament, like Psalm 13, allow so much room to grieve, to question, even to complain to God?

It is because the Psalms know that grief, with all its pain, is so often a path that affirms life,

affirms love,

and eventually leads us to a deeper hope.

GRIEF…..AFFIRMS LIFE

Grief is all about entering the chaos

of loneliness, and pain, and silence, and darkness.

The thing is, throughout the Bible, God has a way of bringing life out of these very things.

It all starts in Genesis 1: there is chaos, darkness, a silent void,

and God calls forth life out of that.

Later, Israel enters the chaos of the wilderness,

a place of desolation and silence and death.

But that is where the nation of Israel is born.

Later yet, the Jews are hauled off into exile.

The nation looks finished.

The book of Lamentations is one long wail of grief for its apparent end.

And yet, God is not finished with his people.

And then there is what happens on the cross —

chaos, darkness, silence, pain, death.

But that too, is not the end of the story.

And so, grief, this entering into a chaos of feelings and thoughts,

has a way of affirming life

GRIEF …AFFIRMS LOVE

Grieving also affirms love.

Why do we grieve? We grieve because we loved.

Grief is so complicated because loved is complicated.

Grief is the companion of love :

every time we risk loving, we become vulnerable to grief.

In a very real way,

grief is about figuring out how to continue loving someone even when they are gone.

It is to go on loving without letting go.

That is why grieving people will

sometimes have dreams in which they meet the person they miss;

Or they will hear a voice or laugh in a crowd, and they are sure it is the laughter they have been longing to hear again;

Or they will suddenly have this strong sense that the one they love is somehow present in their home.

All these experiences are not disturbing – they are strangely comforting

because they are ways to go on loving without letting go.

GRIEF…..DEEPENS OUR HOPE

So grief can affirm life, it can affirm love,

and eventually it can even deepen our hope.

Yes, the gravitational pull of grief

can drag us deep into the dreaded territory of

darkness, and despair, and disappointment.

These are the first 4 verses of Psalm 13.

But there is another gravitational pull at work,

an even stronger pull,

and that is the steadfast love of God.

These are the last 2 verses of Psalm 13.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said the final stage of grief is acceptance.

To this, we followers of Christ politely disagree.

You see, we do not accept death – at least not that it is our ultimate end.

We trust in the strength of that gravitational pull of God.

We do not accept death.

We do not accept that this is the end of the story.

We refuse to believe

that death has the last word.

We tenaciously trust

that Christ’s love is stronger than death.

And we longingly hope for the day when

all things and all people, even those who have already passed away,

will be restored, renewed, reborn.

And so it isn’t closure we are waiting for or hoping for.

It is consummation – it is the return of the risen Christ

and the renewal of all things

and the resurrection of the dead.

CONCLUSION

Why preach a sermon like this?

Because even if the world leaves less and less room to grieve,

we as a church must always be a community

in which people have the room, the space, the time

to lament, to mourn, to be broken-hearted.

Ask people who have walked this path of tears how it has changed them

and they will often say something like:

“My faith is more humble, but also more important to me;

Even though I’ve had days I felt like an atheist,

overall, I know I have become a deeper believer.”

One last note.

We are not meant to grieve alone or to hope alone.

We may each travel though our own wilderness,

but we travel together.

Even though your pain may not be my pain,

and my heart-ache may not by your heart-ache,

nevertheless,

we sing songs together, to encourage each other along the way;

We open the word together, so that we can all receive our daily manna from heaven;

And we taste the bread and wine of God’s promises together.

And the hope that pulls us all forward,

is not my hope

it is not your hope

it is our hope .

I’ve come to realize that when people weep in church,

it isn’t only because of the pain of grief.

It is also because of the profound hope we share

in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

1. Meghan O”Rourke, in The Long Good-bye, and also in an NPR interview. ↑