Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 28, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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Any fan of Charles Schultz’s comic strip “Peanuts” well remembers loveable Linus’s famous line, “Good grief, Charlie Brown.” It seems that Linus was always on the short end of something, suffering from another Job-like ordeal as he tries to hang onto his blanket or overcome low self-esteem, cope with a bossy big sister or deal with his dashed hopes for the Halloween appearance of a gift-bearing Great Pumpkin.

“Good grief, Charlie Brown.” Who hasn’t felt like Linus after Snoopy has stolen his blanket yet again or Lucy has blown up at her kid brother.

One of the classic “Peanuts” cartoon has four frames. In the first, Lucy is jumping rope and Linus asks “Do you ever pray, Lucy?” In the next frame she responds: “That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it? Are you trying to start an argument?” And then the next frame, her mouth even bigger: “I suppose you think you’re somebody pretty smart, don’t you? I suppose you think . . .” As she lets him have it, Linus gives her an innocent and dumbfounded look. And then, final frame, we see Charlie Brown and Linus, alone, talking, with Linus sucking his thumb and clutching his blanket, saying, “You’re right, Charlie Brown, religion is a very touchy subject.” (The Gospel According to Peanuts, 9).

Like religion, grief can be a touchy subject. We rarely speak in public about our grief, preferring to keep those conversations private or not to speak about it at all. Not too long ago when I preached on the topic of suicide, it was quite amazing the number of responses I received from people for whom that topic had touched a raw nerve.

Grief is so often an inner struggle and it can be hard lonely work. It can leave us feeling estranged from others and our normal routine and relationships, even sometimes estranged from God’s grace and love. Grief is demanding and difficult because we have to “work through” it on our own – no one else can do it for us. Most of us don’t know what to say to someone whom we know must be feeling the burden of grief, so rather than saying the wrong thing that we think might embarrass them or bring back painful memories, we often choose to say nothing at all. Suffering is like an iceberg: 9/10ths of it is not seen. Each of us has sat on the mourner’s bench. There is an old tale

While we might think of grief as primarily something that happens when someone we love dies, we can actually feel grief over any number of losses in our lives: divorce, a promotion that doesn’t happen, the loss of a friendship.

Dealing with loss is a universal human hardship. We might even go so far as to say that grief is the glue that binds humanity together. But it is also one of the hardest realities to face and to endure.

Grief is a touchy subject. I define grief as a form of depression that makes us feel as if we are groping our way, alone, across, an endlessly dreary and barren inner landscape. It is the unwanted experience of adapting to an unwanted reality. Life slows down to a crawl; it seems that we are trapped inside the dark night of the soul; there is no light at the end of the tunnel, at least that we can see. The experience of Job’s agony and suffering, the anger of Jesus from the cross about why God has forsaken him, or perhaps the utter despair of the prayer prayed by the Psalmist in Psalm 88 come to mind. These are portions of scripture that validate grief as a legitimate experience, an experience neither to be denied nor ignored. But what the person deep in grief doesn’t need to hear are verses like, “rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice” or some religious platitude like, “I know just how you feel” or “God always puts a silver lining in every cloud.”

I believe that the most profound message of the cross is that God is with us, especially when we find ourselves caught up in the turmoil of suffering and sorrow.

An American Church historian by the name of Martin Marty wrote a book entitled A Cry of Absence. He begins his preface with a dialogue between he and Elsa, his wife of 40 years.

She: What happened to Psalm 88? Why did you skip it?

He: I didn’t think you could take it tonight. I am not sure I could. No: I am sure I could not.

She: Please read it to me.

He: All right:

I cry out in the night before thee . . .
For my soul is full of troubles . . .
Thou hast put me in the depths of the Pit,
In the regions dark and deep . . .

She: I need that kind the most.

Martin Marty goes on to explain that this little midnight exchange between he and his terminally ill wife happened during the course of their reading through the Book of Psalms. Each night at the midnight hour for taking her medications, they would alternate reading a Psalm – he the even-numbered and she the odd-numbered. But when it came to Psalm 88, he wanted to skip it, but she would not let him. Later, after her death, when he wrote his book, he recalled that he and Elsa knew that “often the starkest scriptures were the most credible signals of the [divine] Presence.” We want to speak and hear the consoling words, the comfortable sayings, the voices of hope that have been preserved for us on the printed page. But they can only be truly heard, truly spoken to the extent that we face the dark truth of our grief.

Walter Bruggemann writes that Psalm 88 is “an embarrassment to conventional faith.” It is the cry of a believer whose life has gone awry, who desperately seeks contact with Yahweh, but who is unable to evoke a response from God. The Psalmist, indeed, narrates the dark night of the soul when the troubled person must stay in the darkness of abandonment, feeling utterly alone and bereft of comfort.

Hard words, this psalm. But grief can be like that – feeling alone and abandoned by friends, maybe even by God. Not the cheerful, everything-is-going-to-turn-out-all-right-in-the-end or the just-trust- that- it-is-God’s-will kind of faith. Good grief doesn’t settle for anything less than a deep wrestling with the inscrutable ways of God. And sometimes grief leaves us feeling like the Psalmist, “my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to Sheol, that place of utter separation from Yahweh.

One of the more powerful books I have ever read is a short bereavement book by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. Eric, his 25 year old son, died tragically in a climbing accident in Austria and this little book is his way, like the Psalmist, of crying out to God. Twelve years after Eric’s death, Wolterstorff was asked if his grief were as intense as it was at first. “No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over. Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides.” (p.5)

At one point, a friend said to Wolterstorff: “Why don’t you just scrap this God business . . . . It’s a rotten world, you and I have been shafted, and that’s that” Upon reflection on his friend’s comment, he writes: “Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it. I’m standing there now, over the chasm. I inspect the bridge. Am I deluded in believing that in God the question shouted out by the wounds of the world has its answer? Am I deluded in believing that someday I will know the answer? Am I deluded in believing that once I know the answer, I will see that love has conquered?” (p.76)

I am always a bit suspicious of theories that supposedly explain the phases of grief or provide a self-help process to manage one’s sorrow. Perhaps the most popular psychoanalytic explanation for the stages of grief was described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the late 1960s. She theorizes that there are certain definable stages that one goes through as a part of the grief process: denial and isolation, then anger, next bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

Other theorists argue that grief work needs to be task-oriented, that is, certain tasks must be performed before one’s grief can be pronounced complete, tasks such as experiencing all the feelings associated with the object of one’s loss, finding a place, a room, to honor memory, struggling with what it means to be a single person instead of someone with a partner.

Grief understood as either a series of stages or as tasks to be undertaken and completed can be helpful, but I think good grief is always much more complicated and frustrating. It is like putting a puzzle together: there are so many pieces and so many places to start, and sometimes you think a full, finished picture is emerging, but then again, the pieces you thought fit together really don’t and the edges seem to get ever more frayed and jagged the more you try to make them fit. Grief is like that.

For some people, grief is something that is more cognitive, that is, it requires an attempt at intellectual understanding; for others, grief is an activity of staying busy, especially by doing the things the beloved departed would have been doing; for still others, grief is a form of spiritual practice that calls the bereaved to look at God and search life for intimations of the new being born out of the old.

Over the years, I have heard so many people in so many different situations speak of their grief, that I know it is never simple, never easily resolved, and that it is always slow and lonely work.

But the good news, despite what the Psalmist in Psalm 88 says or even what Jesus might say in the garden or from the cross, is that we are never alone in our sorrow.

An old proverb goes like this: A joy shared is a double joy; a sorrow shared is half a sorrow.

Like the Psalmist in the 88^th Psalm, God can handle the prayer of anger, the wordless prayer voicing anguish and despair. The perceived failure of God to respond does not lead the Psalmist to atheism or doubt or rejection of God. Rather, it leads to an even more intense address of God.

Perhaps we might ask: what is a Psalm like Psalm 88 doing in the Bible? I thought faith was always supposed to be upbeat, cheerful, sunny, uncomplaining? Psalm 88 reminds us that scripture speaks to all of life, not just the good parts. Here, in this Psalm, faith faces life as it is. But note that the Psalmist is not so depressed that he is silent. Even in the bottom of the Pit, still, the Psalmist knows that God must be addressed, even when God chooses to remain silent.

To honor the memory of their son Eric, to resist amnesia and to renounce oblivion, Nicholas Wolterstorff and his wife commissioned the composition of a requiem in six parts, each part taking scripture to speak of the awfulness of death, lamentation over loss, the endurance of faith, and Christian hope. One of the middle parts of this memoriam requiem affirms that we are not alone in our suffering, but that God shares it with us. The two scriptures set to music for this memoriam requiem are both from Isaiah. I close with the reading of them.

In all our afflictions he is afflicted, and the angel of his presence saves us; in his love and pity he redeems us; he lifts us up and carries us all our days (Is 63:9)

He bears our griefs and carries our sorrows; by his wounds we are healed (Is 53:4,5)