Grief and Hope

"Grief and Hope"--May 2, 2017

"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." [1 Thessalonians 4:13]

The last phrase in that sentence makes a world of difference, and we need to spend some time with it.  We Christians do not grieve as others do, Paul says.  But that does not mean we do not grieve--it is simply that we grieve differently.  We do not grieve as though we "have no hope," Paul says. But we do grieve.  We do feel loss.  We just cling to the conviction that even that loss does not get the last word with us.

You really need both halves of that to get a complete picture of how we Easter people think about death--it can't be just one piece or the other, or else you'll lose something important.  On the one hand, we don't believe that death gets the final say over us.  We all constantly lean on the promise that God does not let go of us even through death--as Robert Farrar Capon says, in death, all we lose is our ability to hold onto our own lives, but Jesus emphatically does not lose his ability to hold onto them.  We are convinced--at least on the days our faith has not taken a beating--that we will be reunited with those saints who have gone before us.  And we are further convinced that those "saints" are simply all those who have been loved into faith in Jesus, not a special elite class or a select few.  So, not because God owes it to us to reunite us with those we love, or because the human spirit is somehow just unthwartable and keeps coming back, buoyant as ever, but rather because God is just deteremined not to let us go, we believe that death is not the end of us.  And that means death is not the end of our relationships with others.  We await both the resurrection of our friends, and the resurrection of our friendships, which is to say that we believe that even when death separates us, we will one day be able to relate to and love those we have lost.  Once again, we will be reunited and rejoined to those we love, and so our memories of them do not have to have the despairingly heavy weight of finality.  We are never at the end--at least, so we have come to believe, because we believe in the God of Lazarus, the God who raises the dead.  And so, just as Paul says, we don't grieve the way the world grieves--we do not grieve as people who have no hope.  We do have hope.  It is real, and we bank on it. 

But that said, we do grieve when death separates us from those whom we have loved. That's important to hear--it's not that Christians don't grieve, but that we grieve differently.  That keeps us honest, because it does hurt when we are separated from those we love.  It does hurt--it rips us open--to lose a loved one to death.  We may eventually land and settle in a place of peace about the God who promises to raise the dead and to roll away the stone, but the way to that place of peace is through honesty about our loss.  There's just no way around it.  So it's a distortion of our faith if we tell those who grieve, "Don't feel sad.  They're in heaven now."  We have that confident hope, yes, that our loved ones, those "brothers and sisters" in the faith whose lives God has not let go of, are indeed in the presence of God.  But we still feel sad.  We feel sorrow. We feel helpless.  We feel hurt--and to be honest, it is precisely because "they are in heaven now" and we are in our lives as usual.  It is the separation, our being pulled away from them, that makes us sorrowful, even if not the thought that their lives are lost.  Easter people still weep for those they love and have lost--there were tears, after all, on that Easter morning on the way to the tomb, and there were still sorrows even on Easter evening as those two walked the Emmaus Road.

In fact, it is because people matter, and matter so deeply, that we grieve when we are parted in death.  It is because we believe a human life is so precious and valuable that we hurt so much when their lives are separated from ours.  Even when we know full well by faith, even when we have rock solid confidence, that we will be reunited at the last with those whom we have loved in Christ, we hurt to be pulled away from them, exactly because they matter so much to us and we have loved them.  You could say it this way, I suppose:  it is because people matter to us that we grieve, and it is because we are convinced that people matter to God that we have hope. 

That surely gives a different spin to our way of talking about death and separation as Christians.  If all we had to offer the world was a forced, candy-coated, smile and the insistence that we are happy all the time even when we lose people we love, the world would see right through it and know it was a lie.  And for that matter, the watching world would ask whether we really cared about those for whom we grieve, even with our hope of seeing them again, if we never let our guard down or never admitted that it hurt.

But that cannot be the last word for us, either--Christianity is not just a program for learning how to be sad honestly.  There is hope--the hope that as much as we have loved those we have lost, the living God loves, and continues to love, them even more deeply, and has an even tighter grip on them.  That is how we talk about our hope and our grief together--with the honest confession of our wounds, and with the truthful hope, not just that there is one who will tend to our wounds, but who will never let go of those who have been pulled from us, and who indeed, will mend us all back together, on that day when "God will be all in all," as Paul says elsewhere, at the last.  Whatever of each of those two, grief and hope, you bring with you today on your way, in any case, what we are invited to do with both of them is to bring them to God.  We hold them in our hands, and we say, "You take these, and you make something out of them."  And we trust... with tears of one kind or another (grief and hope sometimes each take that form, as you know) that will be enough.

That is how mercy moves us out of the tomb.

O Lord, for whatever losses we have known, we offer to you both our sorrow at the pain of separation, and our hope that your grip will not let go of us.  Mend all things, as you have promised, Lord--both the rips between us and the tears within us.