1
Be God’s Grief.
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
I have to start this sermon with a disclaimer. Last week our focus was Be God’s
Vote or Voice – in anticipation of the election. If you were not here – you can read
it on our website. Today’s focus is connected to All Saints Sunday so if you haven’t
yet – vote – vote your faith. Back to today.
Be God’s Grief.
The seminary I went to had a moto it was the School of the Prophets. As we
studied and prepared for ministry there it was assumed that we would go out into
the world to be prophetic. So when I arrived at my first church in rural Colorado I
thought that meant that I was to lead them in conversations of LGBTQ equality
and challenge them to love their Somalian Muslim neighbors. And we did do
these things but I often wondered if I was really being prophetic because my style
isn’t comparable to the biblical prophets.
If you don’t know a lot about the biblical prophets, they are quite a crew, from
Ezekiel who ate a scroll then laid on one side for 430 days before turning over to
do the same on the other side. Or Isaiah who preached without shoes…and
clothes for 3 years! Or Jonah who jumped off the side of a boat to avoid telling his
most hated enemies to repent and be saved. So this was not me, but even though
I didn’t know it at the time, the prophet Jeremiah and I were much more aligned.
My first week I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be doing and so I spent
time getting to know our homebound members. Two weeks later a beloved
member passed away. It was my first funeral and I was confident in my ability to
2
guide the family through this sacred time. But then another church member died,
one I had gotten to know fairly well. And then my first summer as a full time
pastor, 9 months into this ministry – the man who had served as the Volunteer
Youth Minister for 17 years, who was an Elder, who had just began a career of
teaching, with two young sons, who had just the month before spent his birthday
at the church for a workday – died suddenly. It was the first time I had confronted
a death that made no sense. The sermon or actually the entire service that next
Sunday day was a blur as I cried through most of it – beginning with the children’s
sermon and not concluding until long after the sanctuary was empty. Which is not
what a prophet should do, right? But I felt like my feet had been knocked out
from under me and I was struggling to stand back up. And then 5 weeks later
another beloved church member died, and then her husband, then a new born
and a 30 year old mother of 4. When we think of saints of the church we think of
those elderly folks who quietly passed into the night but this season taught me in
a way I had never known, that the saints of the church are sitting right next to
you. This is true not only because we don’t know when someone’s time will be up
but more importantly because no matter how long their life, your life, my life is –
we touch others – we make an impact for the kindom.
We kept losing the saints of the church – folks who were imperfect and lovely and
their lives beautiful and tragic. Ultimately in 5 years I officiated 48 funerals for a
church who only worshiped about 70 people on a Sunday. And every time I was
charged with standing before the congregation to speak to each life, each loss.
My job I thought was not to cry about it but to preach good news in the face of
despair. But there were times in the midst of this that I would be getting ready for
a funeral and I literally could not stand up. I would be sitting on the floor doing my
3
hair because that was the best I could do. I kept crying, not always but often I
heard rumors I was referred to as the weeping pastor at first frustrated me until I
remembered Jeremiah. And that there are different ways to be a prophet - Some
yell, some eat paper, some threaten, some walk around in their birthday
suits…but some cry. The prophet Jeremiah was referred to as the weeping
prophet and from him and this season of numerous deaths in ministry what I
found was that death was a moment, even the funeral was an event you just had
to get through but grief – grief was the real antagonist. You can’t look away from
grief, it is honest and bold and nuanced and work. Grief is work. Work you didn’t
ask for but work you have to do in order to heal.
But the thing about grief is that, Grief is not a news story. It doesn’t attract a
crowd, and yet it is full of fear and anger and sadness and isolation and
sometimes relief which brings on guilt. Or as my dear friend Robyn who lost her
14 month old says, “grief is all the feelings.” Which means that there are
moments in grief that are not gut-wrenching. There are feelings of comfort and
support from your community, there is joy in celebrating life and reliving
memories that had begun to fade until memories were all you had left. But we
just don’t want to go there.
The reality is we don’t like death and maybe more so we want to avoid grief at all
costs. Grief is painful and unpredictable. It is messy and hard and good and ugly
and beautiful. And grief is long, maybe unending. It morphs, sure, but for those
that have lost someone significant to them, grief becomes a part of who they are
and how they relate to the world. And it becomes a lonely place because people
want quick fixes – they want to be a part of the solution, to say the right thing or
4
to focus on the positive as if a few words can take away a pain this deep. And
while we are a church of action and we believe we are called to do – sometimes
what we can do, what we must do is just to sit and be in grief.
All the prophets I mentioned earlier did just this – it is referred to in scripture as
sackcloth and ashes. This is referring to is a practice that in moments of ultimate
weakness – like when you are repenting to God of wrongdoing or when you are
stricken with grief due to your sin or the loss of a loved one – you strip off your
clothes – wear only an uncomfortable rag as a sign of humility and sit in a pile of
ashes. It is symbolic of your place of brokenness but beyond the symbol it is space
– sacred space – where no one is fixing you and you can be there and be broken.
What I learned in the season of death I accompanied my church on was that this
is prophetic. This is being God’s presence in the world. When we experience a loss
– be it a loss of a loved one, a loss of a job, a loss of hope – as much as we wish
there were perfect words to take away the pain, there is not – and when folks try
it usually does more harm than good. But instead when we are broken – when we
are grieving we just have to sit down in sackcloth and ashes, sit down in our grief
and be there, be broken, be a mess. I imagine many of you have been there – or if
you haven’t you know some who have – and what we are called to do, to be
God’s presence is to put on the sackcloth and plop down in the ashes right next to
them.
It is from the ashes that Jeremiah speaks in our scripture. Throughout this book,
Jeremiah is warning the people of impending doom, he calls attention to bad
choices when they “went after worthless things” and “defiled the land” God gave
5
them. Something we know a little about. But instead of shaming the people as
destruction comes – he sits down and cries.
My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
my heart is sick.
He names the pain and then asks …
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored?
We are used to the promises of the song, “there is a balm in gilead” but Jeremiah
is not so sure. In this place he is not looking for a quick fix or a reassuring word –
he is teaching us how to be in and with those in grief - We mustn’t respond to
these questions by telling people that God has a plan or that God won’t give us
anything we can’t handle. Instead we listen, we pray, we sit, we light a candle. I
know in this season of enacting faith as we are discussing being God’s presence
that sounds counter intuitive but sometimes sitting, being with the pain, asking
the hard questions even when there are no good answers – that too is being
God’s presence for ourselves and for others. Because a life of faith, following the
God of hope and peace is not about easy answers or quick fixes. Remembering
the saints is not about idealizing the humanity we knew in those who have died. It
is about being real in our memory, real in our brokenness for The God we follow is
real, and real is much harder and much more powerful than fiction. It is messy
and ugly and beautiful and painful, it is scary and hopeful usually all at the same
time.
6
Be God’s Grief.
But you know Jeremiah was not grieving the loss of one of his dear ones. His cries,
why they do speak to those of us who have lost someone - his cries were bigger
than any one relationship, any one life. As was true with most of the Hebrew Bible
he is grieving with and for the community. The root of his grief is not the death of
one but the sin of many. And while there is work to be done, repentance that
must take place – in the midst of his call to reform – he takes time as does this
book in the midst of our Bible – to sit down and grieve. He calls us to look at our
sin, look at the ways we are hurting each other and hurting the earth and hurting
ourselves – to put on our sackcloth and cover ourselves in ashes and just cry. And
so, just as we are called to support one another as a way to Be God’s Grief –
maybe too we must do this together. To name the racism and sexism and power
and fear and violence and abuse and division and greed and self-centric ways of
our world – and though we are called to be a part of the solution to all of this –
maybe first we just need to name it, to see it and to sit down in a pile of ashes and
weep. I think we have to create space to be broken, to hear each other’s cries
before we can do the work of repair, of healing.
We cry for all the things we have been trying to avoid. We cry for the children of
Syria and their parents who are trying so hard to keep them safe. We cry for the
fear of terrorism and what it is doing to us. And we cry for our Muslim brothers
and sisters and the fear they live in not only from threats of terrorism themselves
but from the way they are wrongly feared. We cry for violence in all its forms,
from guns to drone strikes. We weep for the ways our bodies are treated as
battlefields for political agendas. And for the rape culture that glorifies sexual
7
violence turning a blind eye to the victims of sexual assault. We sit down in this
political season overwhelmed by the division we have allowed – even between
the most intimate relations of families and friends not to speak of the communal
divisions between us and them. And we fall to the ground in grief over the
damage we have done to our earth.
Grief is work. It is the kind of work you want to avoid, the kind that happens to
you but that you cannot run away from. Once we begin the work of grief we will
see that it is all the feelings – it is sad and hopeful, lonely and comforting,
devastating and empowering, broken and beautiful. And when grief is so
overwhelming that we cannot stand, we sit. We sit and look around at what we
have and what we have lost and who we are and who we want to be. And we
weep and we cry out, we demand answers…is there no balm in gilead…?
To be god’s presence in the world, as much as we are called to act (and again vote
if you haven’t!) but for today take a moment to sit, to cry, to acknowledge the
pain – we let it hurt because only then will we be ready to heal.
Amen.