Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, November 8, 2009

Last weekend, Tammy, Rein, and I stayed with friends we had not seen in 23 years, nor had we much contact over the last five. They were college friends of mine at UVM who have stayed in Vermont ever since. It was fun to catch up with them – to learn about their work lives, to meet one of their children, to be in their house (same one) again. It is bit hard to know where to start sharing when it has been so long. Yet, in the end, one of the most poignant ways we connected, and one of the most defining qualities of our lives in the ensuing years, came forth as we spoke frankly and honestly about the losses we have known in recent years. Within our four immediate families, we have witnessed cancer, Alzheimer’s, suicide, murder, divorce of loved ones, drug overdose, and the death of siblings. More than the success of our children, the accomplishments in our work lives, our love for our homes and families – it was grief and loss that helped reconnect our spirits while still living in two different parts of the country. This was not morbid, but rather a simple factor of living, being in relationship, caring for others and being attentive to the world around us.
I don’t think the four of us are unique. Were most of us to graph our lives, we would likely note many key turning points in our lives involve pain, suffering, grief and loss. Most of us have encountered loss in expected and unexpected ways; we have stood with and alongside others suffering loss; and we have come to see grief and loss as part of the human experience. In all our life’s journey’s, and in all of our “pilgrimaging” (or as spell check suggested “pilgrim aging”), grief and loss are often central.

In a wonderful new book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes that she was a professor of religion for several years before she realized that many religions grew out of suffering. What this indicates is that the conversation we had last week about how suffering and loss has shaped us is not a new or unique conversation, but it is vitally important. It is as timeless as the human condition.
“Pain is provocative and pushes all of our buttons, including “Why?” It brings out the worst in us and the best in us. We handle it in many ways. We can avoid it, deny it, numb it or fight it. Or, we can decide to engage the ache that comes with loss, giving it our full attention so it can teach us what we need to know about, as Taylor says, the “Really Real”(p.157).

“Suffering, loss, and grief make theologians of us all” – raising questions about our faith in God and our own abilities to manage, control, or understand life. It is one of the “fastest routes to a no frills encounter with the Holy, and yet the majority of us do everything in our power to avoid it.” (Taylor, p. 158).

Of all the biblical journeys, none is filled with more wrestling with loss than the famous, if oft misunderstood, book of Job. Misunderstood, because through all of Job’s pain and all of his questions of God, there is never a constructive answer from God. That the book made it into the Hebrew Bible at all is yet another sign of the breadth and importance of grief and loss in the human experience. It appears that uncensored honesty in the face of pain is valued more highly than easy doctrinal answers to it.

For reasons that are never clear, Job, who is a good man, upright and blameless, is the victim of a game between God and Satan, the result being the loss of his livestock, his children, his health and his livelihood. Like many of us, Job would rather die than live, but in a way that adds insult to injury, he is kept alive.

Like us, Job lets loose, asking God to leave him alone. The pain, he says is like being pierced with poisonous arrows. Crushed by a tempest, broken in two… Finally he asks the obvious, “why me?” In desperation and despair, he begins to doubt himself, his faith in God, the meaning to be made in life.

This is another common feature of grief and loss, it can ‘erase most of what you thought you knew about yourself.’(164). It strips away illusions about how strong we are, how brave we are, how patient and faithful. When we go through a relational breakup, when we lose a child or a loved one prematurely, when our home and all of our history burns to the ground or floats downstream in a flood – we often find our moorings coming apart, our sense of reality illusive, our world feeling strange in ways that defy words or description.
Job has three friends who try to help, although their advice reinforces the insidiousness of his suffering. You must have done something to deserve this, they say. Just repent and it will all be okay. His friends are either scared or more invested in defending God than they are in defending Job. However, he won’t have any of it. Job refuses to back down and say it is his fault, because he knows it is not. His furious responses are one of the bible’s great gifts – a witness of someone bluntly refusing to stop speaking into the divine silence. For 37 chapters, in fact, Job fills the air with his grief, saying things that would “have made his grandmother – or at least our grandmother- faint dead way if she heard them.” (167)

When God finally speaks, not because Job has been persuasive but because God has grown tired of listening, God does not give Job answers, but rather asks him 43 questions, beginning with “Who was there at the foundation of the world? Who sends forth lightening? Numbers the clouds?” And on and on. God continues on with more questions, testing Job. The point seems to be that despite his suffering and grief, Job is not God. His pain does not separate him from other living creatures. Rather, it actually brings him in communion with others. For reasons that aren’t clear, Job is satisfied with the answer, seems relieved to be put back in his place and repents in ‘dust and ashes.’

There is a part of me, as I’m sure there is in you, that resists this repentance, that finds this “ending” as another example, biblically sponsored, of ‘blaming the victim,’ of a bullying God. We resist the friends who blame him, we resist this image of God who seems to play with his life and then waits for unnecessary confession or repentance.

But, when we realize that this is a story written and told by people of faith seeking to make sense of life, loss, grief, suffering and their faith, it seems less a definitive picture of God than an effort to describe and understand our own human behavior.

In the face of grief and suffering, loss and pain, spiritual breakthroughs come when we do give up, or bury, the former, smaller life – as beloved as it was, stepping into the larger life that awaits those who have seen God’s face in the face of their loved one. We move from asking the questions of “why” to the question of ‘when.” What do we do when grief and loss show up at our door?

We have to be very careful at this point, lest we suggest to ourselves or others in the midst of grief and loss, ‘just get over it” or “it’s time to move on.” “Good will come of this.” If we are not careful, we too are just “blaming the victim” or minimizing the pain.

I remember the funeral of my mother, who had a long, 15-20 year protracted “good-bye” to life because of Alzheimer’s. Many words were offered of her former life, her energy, her gifts to others, her amazing spirit towards strangers and loved ones alike. However, it was one of my sisters who said that while many of those things were important to her, equally if not more important were those things that Mom taught her (unknowingly) in the midst of her Alzheimer’s fog. The need to be present in new ways, the need to listen and watch more closely, encountering the reality of grief and loss while one is still alive – these were just a few of the “gifts” that made my sister’s world “larger” than it used to be.

For someone to say – “oh Alzheimer’s will be a good thing for your family” would be cruel and thoughtless. My sister discovered it on her own. What most of us need is not a reason given by another, but the patient accompaniment of another in our pain. With such friendship or community, we will come to see the truth of our grief and loss, the way it fits with our own lives.

“The only reliable wisdom,” Taylor writes, “about (grief) comes from the mouths of those who suffer it, WHICH IS WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO LISTEN TO THEM.” When our suffering comes to us, maybe we will recognize some of the territory and remember those who went before us and what they told us about what it meant for them.

In truth, there is no way to account for the differences between those whose life becomes larger through loss and those whose life becomes smaller, petty and less noble. But through the experience of life and relationships with others, we get hints.(from Brown-Taylor’s book)

Generosity helps. “When Pat could no longer rise from her bed, she asked for her jewelry box to be set beside her. If you did not find something you like in there, then she would send you to her closet to choose a sweater or blouse. She worked hard to give everything away before she died, but people kept bringing her new things to replace those she had dispatched. When someone gave her a polished stone with a hole in it to wear around her neck, she did not know what to make of it at first. Then she brought it close to one eye so that she could look straight through the round middle of the stone. Ah, she said, now I see. This is the way through. “ (170-71)

Rituals help. As one of our beloved members was dying a couple of years ago, her family gathered at the hospice center. One of the children pulled out a guitar and the children sang hymns and camp songs to their mother for a whole evening, reliving together their life of faith, their love of church, their connection to summer camp. Did it stop the mother from dying? Did it help her? Hard to know how much the mother understood the music, but it was obvious that the family was strengthened and comforted by the music.

Paying attention helps. I remember asking my brother in a law a year after his teenage daughter was killed what helped him in those immediate hours after her death. He shared that a friend came to their house, read a psalm, prayed with them. And yet, he said, I don’t remember what psalm it was and I have no idea what the prayer was about. What I remember is that he was there. He paid attention to each one of us in the family. Looked us in the eye. Held our hand. Gave us a hug. Attentive and caring. That’s what I remember, he said.

The pilgrimage of Job, the pilgrimage of every faith tradition, the promise of the gospels is that in our humanness – in our joy and suffering, loss and grief – we have the potential to turn breakdown into breakthrough. It’s a journey we can’t predict, that we can’t do alone, that defines what it means to be church. May we be gentle and attentive to the Spirit’s work in our lives, and in the lives of others. May we, with Job, recite, Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I’ll return to the womb of the earth. In the midst of all that makes our lives human, God’s name be ever blessed. Amen.