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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Grief and Loss
Second in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

John 11:28-37 Good News Bible

²⁸ After Martha said this, she went back and called her sister Mary privately. "The Teacher is here," she told her, "and is asking for you." ²⁹ When Mary heard this, she got up and hurried out to meet him ³⁰ (Jesus had not yet arrived in the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.) ³¹ The people who were in the house with Mary comforting her followed her when they saw her get up and hurry out. They thought that she was going to the grave to weep there. ³² Mary arrived where Jesus was, and as soon as she saw him, she fell at his feet. "Lord," she said, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died!" ³³ Jesus saw her weeping, and he saw how the people with her were weeping also; his heart was touched, and he was deeply moved. ³⁴ "Where have you buried him?" he asked them. "Come and see, Lord," they answered. ³⁵ Jesus wept. ³⁶ "See how much he loved him!" the people said. ³⁷ But some of them said, "He gave sight to the blind man, didn't he? Could he not have kept Lazarus from dying?"

Roger Rosenblatt is a journalist and novelist who has written another book that he did not want to write. He has written about how his life changed after a death in the family. His 38 year old daughter, a very successful physician, and mother of three small children, died suddenly from a rare heart condition that no one knew about.  Her husband had to begin to cope with his pain and grief, and at the same time, care for and provide some semblance of stability for their three children.

Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblatt, dealing with one of the most painful kinds of losses, the loss of a son or daughter, made the decision to move in to their son-in-law’s home and to help care for the entire family. They became an anchor of love and stability for their son-in-law and three grandchildren, doing the mundane and important duties of child care, reading stories, helping with schoolwork, helping with housework, making different kinds of toast for finicky kids, thus the unusual title of the book, Making Toast.

And they write about what it is like to journey through grief, a journey that is familiar to most of us or will be familiar to most of us.

Grief is inevitable, it is complicated, it is a combination of all kinds of feelings, and it can even make us ask ourselves if we are going a little bit crazy.

Joan Didion, another writer, tells about all of her complicated journey through grief in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking.  Her husband of many years died suddenly of a massive heart attack at their dining table just as they had come back from the hospital where their daughter lay unconscious in an intensive care unit.

Grief is an unavoidable journey for us and one that we often do not give each other enough time to be on. To lose a spouse or a child can take several years to process, and things really don’t completely get back to normal because the death of a loved one always leaves a hole in our hearts.

Grief takes time. I did not give the time I should have given to my mother after my father’s death. They were married thirty years and he died suddenly of a heart attack in my first semester of graduate school, but that was not the only major loss that she experienced. Judy and I had just gotten married and moved away to Dallas, and then two months after my father’s death my sister got married and moved away, so my mother’s life was completely changed in a period of about four months, and I was not smart enough to see how drastic and potentially devastating all those changes could have been. I did not give her the time and the patience and compassion that she needed.

My impatience with her grief was wrong but, I am sad to say, it is not unusual in our culture. We often do not give each other enough space and time and patience to grieve a major loss. I think it is Rabbi Kushner who tells of a child in elementary school whose father died and the child was, expectably, not doing well in school for a while. The mother goes to meet with the teacher to ask for compassion and patience as the child works through this major life loss, and the teacher says, “well, after all it’s been eight weeks, isn’t he over that yet?”

No, of course not, and if one thing could come out of today’s worship theme it would be for each of us to be more patient and compassionate with persons who are grieving and to give them the time, the patience, and the listening ear that they need and not rush them through what is a longer journey than we think.

There are some things not to say to someone who has lost a loved one. Please don’t say what my fundamentalist aunt said to me when I got to my parents home right after my father died. Please don’t say that it was just God’s will as though God is a cosmic puppeteer pulling each of our strings when our time is up. We will talk more in a subsequent sermon about God’s will in times of suffering and loss. If you want a resource this morning please pick up the book by fellow Methodist Pastor, James Howells, titled The Will Of God, on our bookshelves.

Please don’t say, “I know just how you feel.” You probably don’t know just how they feel. Please just be present. They may not remember much of what you say, unless it is really insensitive, but they will remember that you were present and that you listened and gave them space and time and support.

Please don’t abandon someone after just a few weeks because it is later on when many people will have left that they may feel most lonely. Please stay in touch for as long as they need.

People grieve in different ways. Canadian skater Joni Rochette reminded us of these differences in her stunning performances this week just after her mother’s death. Most of us appreciated time with others who will listen. One of the many, many things I admire about Judy Martz is how she stayed very close to her long time friend Jane after Jane’s husband ended his life several years ago. Judy made sure that she and Jane had breakfast or coffee together every couple of weeks or every three weeks.

Grief takes time. It is often best processed with other people and that is why every three or four months we offer a grief support group through our church. We can process our grief by talking with others or even by writing a letter to the person who has died. This is a cathartic experience for most us of and something I did after the death of each of my parents.

Grief is a combination of many different feelings: emptiness and numbness at first; shock; anger at God or even at the person who is deceased (feelings are not rational-they are feelings); depression; denial; loneliness; guilt -“If only I had done, or hadn’t done-or hadn’t said…: experiences of seeing or hearing or sensing the deceased person after they have died. That is all typical. Grief is a matter of ups and downs, two steps forward and one step back-or some days just the reverse.

And of course we feel sad. We chose the passage from John’s gospel for a couple of reasons. One reason is that this shows the humanity of Jesus. When he goes to be with his dear friends Mary and Martha, after the death of his friend, their brother Lazarus, Jesus wept. It is the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus cared for Lazarus and he was mourning his loss, so he wept. Our tears are a sign that we love each other. I worry if people don’t express their feelings of sadness or other feelings when they have lost someone because the buried feelings usually come out later in different ways.

The other reason that this story of Jesus and Mary and Martha is important for us is that Jesus does not come to Lazarus’ sisters with the clichés and formulas we sometimes come with to people who are bereaved. He doesn’t come to tell them not to cry or that Lazarus is in a better place or that this was just God’s will. He comes and weeps with them.

We not only see the sadness of Jesus in the presence of death as one Bible example, we can see the sadness of King David, in the Old Testament, when he learns of the death of his closest friend Jonathan. David mourns and weeps over his friend in a poem he writes in II Samuel in the Bible. This poem tells of the love that he had for Jonathan.

We grieve when we lose someone we love. AND we grieve over some different kinds of losses, as well, that we probably do not give each other permission to feel sad about. There are other sorts of loss that can occasion the same cycle of grief feelings in us, and we need to take those seriously and be good to ourselves and to others who are going through them. There is a scale of stress experiences, loss experiences, in your bulletin insert that has been around for a while. There are other kinds of loss that can deeply affect us or somewhat affect us. They include divorce. You can see that it is next on the scale after death. Also on the list is job loss, retirement, a move (we don’t give enough credence to how a move can affect us), an illness or the loss of health, pregnancy, or foreclosure on a mortgage. You can look at the list on your own and just know that these life changes, even the good changes, can still evoke some important feelings in us that we need to know about and be aware of.

At the same time, even in some of these major changes, the resiliency of our God given human spirit is just amazing. One of the books I was reading in preparation for today is the true story of Jean Dominique Bauby, a major French magazine editor who suffered a catastrophic stroke that left him sight in only one eye. He was barely able to communicate with only the blink of an eye choosing each alphabet letter for a scribe to copy down, and yet with those traumatic injuries his brain was alive and alert and he dictated the book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, in the last six months of his life. Some of you have seen the film made from the book. He maintains an appreciation for life and for beauty in the most discouraging of times.

Let me tell you about one other loss that, when I read about the person’s response to it, I took inspiration from and almost used it last week as we talked about burnout but ran out of time.

The story happened at the end of the American Revolutionary War. It was early 1783. The war was almost won but peace was not certain. The congress at that time was almost dysfunctional and they had refused to approve back pay for soldiers and the officers were threatening mutiny.

One letter writer, an aide to top American General Horatio Gates, had written a letter that encouraged the American troops to disengage from the British, to move out west and mock the congress, or to march on Philadelphia and seize/take over the government!!

In response to the letter, General Washington, whose birthday we celebrate this month, called a meeting of 500 officers at Newburgh, New York. He said in the meeting that he fully understood their grievances and would continue to press congress to grant them back pay and pensions. He said that congress moved very slowly. And he warned that if they did what the letter writer asked for, to withdraw from battle, that it would only serve the British cause when the war was almost won. The officers were not satisfied and the mutinous letter writer had warned them against listening to the General’s counsel of “more moderation and longer forbearance.”

But then the mood of the officers changed when Washington opened a letter from a sympathetic congressman and began to be distracted. He pulled out a pair of glasses which his officers had never seen before, and said this: Gentlemen, you must pardon me for I have grown not only gray but blind in the service of my country.”

His confession of that loss changed the entire mood of the group, caused the mutinous spirit to subside and reminded his officers of the affection for this commander who had led them through enormously unfavorable odds into victory. (Cited in a guest editorial by historian John R. Miller in the New York Times, February, 2010)

You may know something about Washington’s extraordinary leadership in a time when only about one third of the colonists believed it was a good idea to declare war on England, and when the outcome of that war was extremely uncertain at several times in its course.  If you want to read more about that watershed time in American history and about Washington’s critical role, I commend to you David McCulloch’s book 1776 and also Benson Bobrick’s book, Angel in the Whirlwind.

We can experience different kinds of loss, and this is a difficult thing to say, they have the potential to help us become deeper persons, more insightful about what matters most in life.

Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor and multiple times Tour De France winner, is quoted in the book we mentioned last week, The Resiliency Advantage. He almost died from a cancer that had spread to many organs. He had extensive surgery, underwent rounds of chemotherapy, survived the cancer, and went on to win again and again.  

He has said this in interviews: “If I had to choose between getting testicular cancer and winning the Tour De France, I would choose testicular cancer.”

The author of the Resiliency book goes on to say that Armstrong describes his bout with cancer as a “special wakeup call” that left him scarred physically and emotionally.  He goes on to say that, it was an unexpected gift and that his recovery ordeal changed him and awakened him to fully appreciate the blessings of good health, a loving family, and close friends. (The Resiliency Advantage, p 13)

Loss can help us be different and deeper persons.

We have resources to help that happen; our grief groups, our Stephen Ministers, the books and papers that are available this morning. And we have our faith in God who promises to be with us in all the times of life and whose own son, our messiah was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 52 and 53)

We have the promise of Christ that God offers to us, a peace that passes all understanding.

Two weeks ago we gathered in the skeleton of the new building to write our prayers on the walls. There were 29 of us including some youth and children. I wrote three or four different prayers, but the first one was that people who come to this place will experience the peace, the power and the purpose of God to see them though the challenges of life.

The phrase is not original, it is borrowed from fellow sufferer, Tim Hansel, who in his book, You Gotta Keep Dancin’, wrote about his journey through loss and pain and reminds us that God promises four things to every person. Do you remember what they are?

GOD PROMISES PEACE, POWER, PURPOSE---AND TROUBLE!   In this world you will have trouble, Jesus said.

And the peace and the power and the purpose are there to see us through the trouble. They come from our faith and trust in the God who walks with us even through the valley of the shadow of death, and because God walks through that valley with us, we do not need to be afraid.