The scene in that plays out in John 18:33-37 is as close to the halls of power and influence that Jesus of Nazareth ever came in his lifetime. According to all four gospels in the New Testament, after Jesus was arrested, he was brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, at Pilate’s official residence in Jerusalem. You could say that we cannot overestimate the importance of this encounter between Jesus and Pilate. For one thing, it involves a biblical clash of titans: the religious authorities of Jerusalem, the civil authority of the Roman empire, and a reputed king of the Jews on trial for his life. For another thing, what transpires in Jerusalem after Pilate authorizes the execution of Jesus of Nazareth changes the course of human civilization. If that statement sounds to you like homiletical hyperbole—a preacher’s outrageous exaggeration, then remember that is only after Jesus’ death and the reports of his resurrection that spread among his disciples that the small and mostly Jewish movement that grew up around him in Palestine exploded into the most widely influential religion that the world has ever seen, before or since. So, you could say that we cannot overestimate the importance of this encounter between Jesus and Pilate.
But I think that we often do, and I think we especially are inclined to overestimate it on “Christ the King” Sunday. I confess to you that of all Sundays in the Christian calendar, “Christ the King” Sunday is my least favorite of them all. Since I was called to preach here in 2001, I tried to ignore it, but Glen Adkins won’t let me. I’ve tried to rename it “Global Missions Sunday,” but it comes too late in November to highlight our Global Missions Emphasis. Christ the King Sunday is my least favorite Sunday in the Christian calendar for two reasons. First, it’s not one of the ancient feast days of the Christian church. Unlike Easter and Advent, Pentecost and Lent, Epiphany and All Saints, whose practice in the church’s worship can be traced back for centuries among Christians the world over, Christ the King Sunday was not invented until 1925, when Pope Pius XI instituted it in a papal encyclical. We have members of this congregation who are older than “Christ the King Sunday,” for heaven’s sake! It was Pius the XI’s intent it should be celebrated on the last Sunday in October every year, a Sunday which, by the way, many Protestant churches already celebrated as Reformation Sunday in commemoration of the occasion of Martin Luther’s nailing his famous 95 theses for reform on the door of the church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. So, while Pius XI’s pious institution of Christ the King Sunday is championed in the church as targeted at the rise of atheistic communism, secularism and individualism, the timing of the thing suggests that it was equally aimed at Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists and other purveyors of Protestant heresy.
My second reservation about Christ the King Sunday is more important. It seems to me that this newfound feast of the church encourages exactly the kind of triumphalism and authoritarianism that has crippled the integrity of the church’s witness down through the centuries to a crucified Christ. The church has always been tempted to replace the cross with a throne, in spite of the fact that in the gospel of Mark, Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:42-45). “Christ the Servant” Sunday would make more sense to me if the teachings of Jesus were our guide.
When Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king, Jesus replies, “Who says so—you or someone else?” When Pilate says, “So you are a king?” Jesus responds, “You say that I am a king” (John 18:33-37). One thing Jesus did not do in the presence of Pilate is what Pius XI did in his encyclical when he called all other authorities in the world to submit to the authority of Christ (and to the authority of the church as well), and there you have one of the crucial differences between Christ and so many of the viceroys of Christ on earth in every generation. In the end, Christ the King Sunday was instituted not so much for the sake of Christ—after all, every Sunday is already “the Lord’s Day”—but for the sake of the power and influence of the church in the world. Would that Pius XI had called it “Christ the Servant” Sunday and called on the church universal to celebrate annually on that Sunday its commitment to serving the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the outcast, the marginalized and the disenfranchised—including especially those who are disenfranchised, marginalized, and outcast by the church. Then we’d have a festival of the church that would enhance and expand the church’s integrity and its witness in Jesus’ name instead of calling its motives into question. “My kingdom is not from this world,” said Jesus; “my kingdom is not from here” (v 36). Jesus’ kingdom is not about an ideological war against communism, secularism or individualism—or capitalism, spiritualism or collectivism either, for that matter. Our problem with the kingdom is that we want so badly for it to be from this world and from here on our terms in our time that we turn Christ the so-called King into Christ the mascot of our cause and our culture and our ideology.
For example, classical Christian liberalism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century wanted so badly and worked so hard to build the kingdom of God here and now through social activism on the left and legislation and public education and unionization. They prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” full well believing that it was a liberal kingdom that was the kingdom of God that they were building on earth. The successors of classical Christian liberalism in this country are the religious right who at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have wanted so badly and worked so hard to build the kingdom of God here and now through social activism on the right and legislation and dismantling public education and anti-unionization. They have prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” full well believing that it is a conservative kingdom that is the kingdom of God in the here and now that they are building on earth. But Jesus said, “My kingdom is not from this world; my kingdom is not from here.” “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (v 37).
This is not the first time in the gospel of John that Jesus talked about those who listen to his voice. It was back in chap. 10, when Jesus spoke of himself as the good shepherd, who “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. . . . and the sheep follow him because they know his voice” (10:3-4). “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus said. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (v 11). Of his impending death he said, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (v 18). Jesus said “No one has greater lover than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (15:12-13). Why not “Christ the Good Shepherd” Sunday, the one who laid down his life for hose who listen to his voice. Then we’d have a festival of the church that would enhance and expand the church’s integrity and its witness in Jesus’ name instead of calling our motives into question.
Again and again we call on Christ the King to play a cosmic Mr. Fix-It. “The world’s in a mess, Lord, fix it,” we pray, instead of praying, “Here am I, send me,” as Isaiah prayed in the temple (Isaiah 6:8). “Make all things right,” we pray—or “make all things left,” depending on our persuasion, instead of praying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” as Mary the mother of Jesus prayed (Luke 1:38). “Make them all serve you as King,” we pray, without noticing that Jesus said, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” You see, one of the fascinating things about Jesus of Nazareth in this morning’s gospel lesson is that he never even came close to the halls of power. Pontius Pilate was a pawn—he wasn’t even a knight or rook—in the Roman empire. His governor’s residence in Jerusalem was more than 1,200 miles away from the seat of imperial power in Rome. Neither Pilate nor Jesus was even close to the halls of power and influence. And as for those authorities in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish culture, its highest intellectual and religious expression in Jesus’ day, was not Jerusalem at all but Babylon, more than 600 miles away, where the descendants of the exiles from centuries before were cultivating the best of Jewish tradition that would result in the Babylonian Talmud, the preeminent collection of Jewish learning, law and interpretation of Scripture. Neither the authorities in Jerusalem nor Jesus were even close to the halls of power and influence.
This morning’s gospel lesson reveals that whether we realize it or not, the kind of kingdom we pray for when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” never has been a kingdom of “command and control” of political and social and economic power and influence. It is a kingdom where the king is servant of all, where the shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, where the first are last and the greatest are slaves, where lives of repentance are lived, where forgiveness is freely offered, where the mighty are brought low and the lowly are lifted up, where the hungry are fed, strangers are welcomed, the sick are cared for, the imprisoned are visited, the outcasts are taken in and sinners are reconciled to God and to one another. Don’t look for all that to happen any time soon in the halls of influence and power. It’s not that kind of kingdom. Instead, look for it now as it happened then—and become a part of it now as others before us became a part of it then—wherever the voice of Christ the Good Shepherd is heard and followed, wherever Christ the Servant is accepted into hearts and emulated, not in command and control but in service and sacrifice, because that is the kind of kingdom it was and is and ever will be, world without end. Amen.
This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Saturday, December 09, 2006
2 Samuel 18:33 - 19:8a--David Wept
When I posted the sermon “Suspicion, Trust and Good News” on my internet blog (October 16, 2006), an anonymous comment on it quickly challenged me to address “trust on the next level”: “Trust as it concerns the lives of your spouse, your children, your parents. . . . I too feel like I can [trust] when it involves just me,” the person wrote. But “When it involves my wife [or] child, placing my trust in God is harder to do and living with a bad result even harder to bear. How does the trust in God you just spoke about apply as it extends beyond just me?” I resonated immediately with the comment and with the question, and I thought first of a friend who has been through hell and back (and some days still only barely back) after the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter. The particulars of her personal life are no one’s business but her own, but those are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life, and somehow still she floats.
Her struggle to trust God, which she has shared with me, has been nothing less than a Sisyphean challenge—after the character in Greek mythology named Sisyphus who was fated forever to roll a rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom to begin all over again. For years now, about the time she reaches the top of the hill, a demoralizing development intervenes and down rolls her rock. Another time, her foot may slip or her determination may weaken, or the wind blows or the ground trembles, and down rolls the rock and with it her trust in God. At least some others of us understand that challenge, even if the shape and content—the particulars of our struggle—differ from hers. Most of us have at least one rock with which we struggle up the hill, “and living with a bad result” is indeed “even harder to bear” when it involves the life and well-being of someone we love, a spouse, a child, a parent, a longtime friend.
Whatever else it is, “living with a bad result” requires of us grief work: the work that grieving is. One of the great grief passages in all of Scripture is found in 2 Samuel 18, when after the death of Absalom his son, we are told in v 33, David the king “was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Sometimes grief comes on us as it did on David as a result of the literal death of someone we love. Sometimes the death is not literal but it is no less real, as when we lose someone we love to addiction or to depression, to divorce or to dementia. Grief comes on us every time we experience what the anonymous commenter on my sermon called “the most anxious, terrifying, lack of control: . . . . When you are truly invested in someone else’s life pattern and doing everything in your power to move the results into the realm of acceptability. But other than trying to strike the right chord or provide a different vision you have no control over the result or their actions.” That’s when “living with a bad result is even harder to bear,” whether it is a literal death that grieves us or a death that is not literal but no less real. So when we pray “for those who are grieving,” we are praying especially for those whose loved ones have died, but it turns out that we are praying at the very same time for those who have experienced profound losses in many different ways.
Years later now, I still cannot forget the grief of a mother I know and admire whose teenage son drove one night while intoxicated, lost control of his speeding car and crossed the median of I-385 into the oncoming lane of traffic where his car struck another car head-on, killing its driver. It was his first offense ever, of any kind whatsoever, and it resulted in a felony DUI conviction that put him in prison for 15 years, where every Sunday morning she visits him faithfully. She would have gladly gone to jail for the rest of her life in his place, if the judge would have allowed it. But instead she was left to weep like David, unable to change or control the outcome, forced to “live with a bad result” that was even harder to bear because it was her child who had done an unthinkable thing that brought unthinkable grief to another family, and who in turn was suffering an unthinkable consequence for his actions. I could multiply the examples of which I am aware, and still I couldn’t begin to touch on all the griefs and sorrows that are borne by people I know. But there are several lessons we can learn from David in 2 Samuel 18:33 – 19:8a about “living with a bad result.” Let’s look at the process that David goes through in the aftermath of Absalom’s death.
First, David wept. David wept unashamedly. David poured out the pain and the loss, the anger and the hurt in his tears, no matter who else heard or saw or what they said or thought. He didn’t concern himself with the pretense of keeping up appearances or hiding the pain. He didn’t concern himself with what others would think or say. David did not bottle up his grief and hold it inside where it would corrode his heart and his soul. He embraced his grief, and he turned it loose in his words and in his tears. Grief that goes unembraced can never be turned loose. It gets dragged around like a ball and chain, worn like an albatross around the neck. It becomes a perpetually open wound that never heals. The “bad result that is even harder to bear” becomes incapacitating when we refuse to recognize and accept it for what it is, embrace it and turn it loose by naming it and crying it out. A hit song by country music artist Gary Allan that still gets radio time three years after its release is titled “Tough Little Boys.” In it Allan sings in the refrain, “When tough little boys grow up to be dads, they turn into big babies again.” It’s true, isn’t it, for many of us, at least. It’s true because “living with a bad result” is “even harder to bear” when something hurtful happens to your daughter or your son, your granddaughter or your grandson. When David wept, he named his grief, and he cried it out.
The second thing David did that we can learn from was to take the counsel of someone he trusted. When Joab, David’s most trusted advisor, came to him in his grief, David listened to Joab’s counsel. As an aside, I wish I had a month of Sundays just to treat this relationship between David and his general Joab. If you’ve read the book of 2 Samuel recently, you may recall that it was none other than Joab who struck the first blows against Absalom, and it was Joab’s own armor-bearers who killed David’s son (18:14-15), in spite of David’s order to “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (v 5) in spite of the fact he had rebelled against his father by leading an attempted coup that if it had succeeded would certainly have resulted in David’s death, among many others. Still, Joab was David’s most trusted advisor, and 2 Samuel 19:5 tells us that Joab came to David to tell him that it was time to move on. It was time to move on from embracing his grief and crying it out. And David listened.
The truth is, most of what well-meaning people say to us when we are grieving is unhelpful at best and downright destructive at worst. When the Old Testament character Job was grieving the loss of his family and his home and everything he had, three friends of his “met together to go and console and comfort him,” Job 2:12 says. According to v 13, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” And his friends were a consolation and comfort to Job—until they made the mistake of opening their mouths. When they broke their silence, the things they said only added to his grief and his suffering. But there are persons whom we can trust to tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it, and Joab was just that sort of person to David. Joab said, in effect, you have responsibilities to attend to. You have people who are depending on you. It’s time to let it go, Joab said. On one of my visits with the late Jack Dennis, a long-time member of this congregation, I asked him to tell me, father-to-father, how in the world he had made it through the drowning death of one of his young sons. His answer was simple and direct. “I had other children depending on me,” Jack said. “I had to be a father to my children who were living.” Jack Dennis was broken-hearted and he grieved. And then he saw to it that he didn’t let his grief over his son who died destroy the lives of his children who were still alive. Unfortunately, some people spend so much time and energy lighting candles for the dead that they leave the living in the darkness. There comes a time to let it go and move on. You may indeed be scarred for life, but you don’t keep picking at the scab so that the wound bleeds every day. You rub the scar and you remember the pain, and then you move on because you have responsibilities to attend to, you have living to do.
And that’s the third thing David did. He let it go, and he moved on. He turned to invest himself in the life that he was called by God to live, even though someone he loved, who meant the world to him, was no longer living. 1 Samuel 19: 8 tells us, “Then the king got up and took his seat in the gate.” David reinvested himself in the living. It’s not that he forgot about Absalom; he didn’t. It’s not that he no longer loved the son he had lost; he did. But he embraced his grief by naming it and crying it out. He listened to someone he trusted. And then he let it go and moved on by reinvesting himself in the living. When “a bad result that is even harder to bear” comes on someone you love, whether that bad result is a literal death or a figurative death that is no less real, the first work to be done is grief work.
You will recall that I began with a friend of mine of whom I said that the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life—and still she floats. Whenever she must, she returns to the bottom of the hill and begins to push her rock again. What she has been through and still goes through would have broken a stronger person than I into a million pieces. I would have sunk beneath the waves long ago, I am sure. But she still floats because she continues to do her grief work diligently and even daily, when necessary: embracing it by naming it and crying it out, listening to persons she knows she can trust and ignoring all the rest, and letting it go to move on to the living. It’s then and only then, in the words of hymn writer Brian Wren, that hope and sorrow unite and we begin to discover new and solid ground for trusting God, not because things turn out the way we want them to, the way we wish they would, or even the way we prayed for them to be, but because even in our grief and loss we come to hear God calling us to life and to living. And so we listen attentively for God even in our struggle to trust on our journey toward that place where hope and sorrow unite.
(My predecessor at First Baptist Greenville, Dr. Hardy Clemons, has written an excellent book on grief work titled Saying Hello to Your Life After Grief. It is available from your local bookseller or from Smyth & Helwys Publishing at http://www.helwys.com/ and also at http://www.amazon.com/, where unfortunately they have misspelled his name, so search under the title rather than the author!)
This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
Her struggle to trust God, which she has shared with me, has been nothing less than a Sisyphean challenge—after the character in Greek mythology named Sisyphus who was fated forever to roll a rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom to begin all over again. For years now, about the time she reaches the top of the hill, a demoralizing development intervenes and down rolls her rock. Another time, her foot may slip or her determination may weaken, or the wind blows or the ground trembles, and down rolls the rock and with it her trust in God. At least some others of us understand that challenge, even if the shape and content—the particulars of our struggle—differ from hers. Most of us have at least one rock with which we struggle up the hill, “and living with a bad result” is indeed “even harder to bear” when it involves the life and well-being of someone we love, a spouse, a child, a parent, a longtime friend.
Whatever else it is, “living with a bad result” requires of us grief work: the work that grieving is. One of the great grief passages in all of Scripture is found in 2 Samuel 18, when after the death of Absalom his son, we are told in v 33, David the king “was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Sometimes grief comes on us as it did on David as a result of the literal death of someone we love. Sometimes the death is not literal but it is no less real, as when we lose someone we love to addiction or to depression, to divorce or to dementia. Grief comes on us every time we experience what the anonymous commenter on my sermon called “the most anxious, terrifying, lack of control: . . . . When you are truly invested in someone else’s life pattern and doing everything in your power to move the results into the realm of acceptability. But other than trying to strike the right chord or provide a different vision you have no control over the result or their actions.” That’s when “living with a bad result is even harder to bear,” whether it is a literal death that grieves us or a death that is not literal but no less real. So when we pray “for those who are grieving,” we are praying especially for those whose loved ones have died, but it turns out that we are praying at the very same time for those who have experienced profound losses in many different ways.
Years later now, I still cannot forget the grief of a mother I know and admire whose teenage son drove one night while intoxicated, lost control of his speeding car and crossed the median of I-385 into the oncoming lane of traffic where his car struck another car head-on, killing its driver. It was his first offense ever, of any kind whatsoever, and it resulted in a felony DUI conviction that put him in prison for 15 years, where every Sunday morning she visits him faithfully. She would have gladly gone to jail for the rest of her life in his place, if the judge would have allowed it. But instead she was left to weep like David, unable to change or control the outcome, forced to “live with a bad result” that was even harder to bear because it was her child who had done an unthinkable thing that brought unthinkable grief to another family, and who in turn was suffering an unthinkable consequence for his actions. I could multiply the examples of which I am aware, and still I couldn’t begin to touch on all the griefs and sorrows that are borne by people I know. But there are several lessons we can learn from David in 2 Samuel 18:33 – 19:8a about “living with a bad result.” Let’s look at the process that David goes through in the aftermath of Absalom’s death.
First, David wept. David wept unashamedly. David poured out the pain and the loss, the anger and the hurt in his tears, no matter who else heard or saw or what they said or thought. He didn’t concern himself with the pretense of keeping up appearances or hiding the pain. He didn’t concern himself with what others would think or say. David did not bottle up his grief and hold it inside where it would corrode his heart and his soul. He embraced his grief, and he turned it loose in his words and in his tears. Grief that goes unembraced can never be turned loose. It gets dragged around like a ball and chain, worn like an albatross around the neck. It becomes a perpetually open wound that never heals. The “bad result that is even harder to bear” becomes incapacitating when we refuse to recognize and accept it for what it is, embrace it and turn it loose by naming it and crying it out. A hit song by country music artist Gary Allan that still gets radio time three years after its release is titled “Tough Little Boys.” In it Allan sings in the refrain, “When tough little boys grow up to be dads, they turn into big babies again.” It’s true, isn’t it, for many of us, at least. It’s true because “living with a bad result” is “even harder to bear” when something hurtful happens to your daughter or your son, your granddaughter or your grandson. When David wept, he named his grief, and he cried it out.
The second thing David did that we can learn from was to take the counsel of someone he trusted. When Joab, David’s most trusted advisor, came to him in his grief, David listened to Joab’s counsel. As an aside, I wish I had a month of Sundays just to treat this relationship between David and his general Joab. If you’ve read the book of 2 Samuel recently, you may recall that it was none other than Joab who struck the first blows against Absalom, and it was Joab’s own armor-bearers who killed David’s son (18:14-15), in spite of David’s order to “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (v 5) in spite of the fact he had rebelled against his father by leading an attempted coup that if it had succeeded would certainly have resulted in David’s death, among many others. Still, Joab was David’s most trusted advisor, and 2 Samuel 19:5 tells us that Joab came to David to tell him that it was time to move on. It was time to move on from embracing his grief and crying it out. And David listened.
The truth is, most of what well-meaning people say to us when we are grieving is unhelpful at best and downright destructive at worst. When the Old Testament character Job was grieving the loss of his family and his home and everything he had, three friends of his “met together to go and console and comfort him,” Job 2:12 says. According to v 13, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” And his friends were a consolation and comfort to Job—until they made the mistake of opening their mouths. When they broke their silence, the things they said only added to his grief and his suffering. But there are persons whom we can trust to tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it, and Joab was just that sort of person to David. Joab said, in effect, you have responsibilities to attend to. You have people who are depending on you. It’s time to let it go, Joab said. On one of my visits with the late Jack Dennis, a long-time member of this congregation, I asked him to tell me, father-to-father, how in the world he had made it through the drowning death of one of his young sons. His answer was simple and direct. “I had other children depending on me,” Jack said. “I had to be a father to my children who were living.” Jack Dennis was broken-hearted and he grieved. And then he saw to it that he didn’t let his grief over his son who died destroy the lives of his children who were still alive. Unfortunately, some people spend so much time and energy lighting candles for the dead that they leave the living in the darkness. There comes a time to let it go and move on. You may indeed be scarred for life, but you don’t keep picking at the scab so that the wound bleeds every day. You rub the scar and you remember the pain, and then you move on because you have responsibilities to attend to, you have living to do.
And that’s the third thing David did. He let it go, and he moved on. He turned to invest himself in the life that he was called by God to live, even though someone he loved, who meant the world to him, was no longer living. 1 Samuel 19: 8 tells us, “Then the king got up and took his seat in the gate.” David reinvested himself in the living. It’s not that he forgot about Absalom; he didn’t. It’s not that he no longer loved the son he had lost; he did. But he embraced his grief by naming it and crying it out. He listened to someone he trusted. And then he let it go and moved on by reinvesting himself in the living. When “a bad result that is even harder to bear” comes on someone you love, whether that bad result is a literal death or a figurative death that is no less real, the first work to be done is grief work.
You will recall that I began with a friend of mine of whom I said that the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life—and still she floats. Whenever she must, she returns to the bottom of the hill and begins to push her rock again. What she has been through and still goes through would have broken a stronger person than I into a million pieces. I would have sunk beneath the waves long ago, I am sure. But she still floats because she continues to do her grief work diligently and even daily, when necessary: embracing it by naming it and crying it out, listening to persons she knows she can trust and ignoring all the rest, and letting it go to move on to the living. It’s then and only then, in the words of hymn writer Brian Wren, that hope and sorrow unite and we begin to discover new and solid ground for trusting God, not because things turn out the way we want them to, the way we wish they would, or even the way we prayed for them to be, but because even in our grief and loss we come to hear God calling us to life and to living. And so we listen attentively for God even in our struggle to trust on our journey toward that place where hope and sorrow unite.
(My predecessor at First Baptist Greenville, Dr. Hardy Clemons, has written an excellent book on grief work titled Saying Hello to Your Life After Grief. It is available from your local bookseller or from Smyth & Helwys Publishing at http://www.helwys.com/ and also at http://www.amazon.com/, where unfortunately they have misspelled his name, so search under the title rather than the author!)
This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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