2023-11-13
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
November 12, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
I Thessalonians 4:13-18 The Federated Church, UCC
Along with so many of us, I have watched with horror the carnage in Israel and Gaza over this last month—the photos we see of wailing mothers and sobbing fathers, of vacant and ghostly faces gutted by the grotesque damage done by rifles and knives and mortars and bombs. These photos are so ghastly that I want more than anything to turn away. How can I gaze upon such desolation? And yet, how can I not?
Aside from the enormous cultural, political, and religious issues, the grief in Israel and Gaza is all but unbearable. That grief is perhaps the one characteristic that binds all parties together. Indeed, it is an experience that connects us all. Here, closer to home, parents lose a child. Siblings are orphaned when their one remaining parent dies. Friends die and leave the surviving elders to live their last years largely alone. Last Sunday, on All Saints Sunday, as we named and displayed the faces of thirty-one Federated people who have died in the past year, it was all-but-overwhelming, such a vivid and multiplied loss.
When people both far and near die, it can be utterly devastating. So we grieve. Or we make a stab at grieving. It can be difficult to do in this culture that so eagerly turns its face away from trauma and loss. “Be grateful and think about happy things,” we tell the person who’s just lost someone dear. “They’re in a better place,” we say to the person who can hardly bear the thought of going another minute without the one who has now left their orbit. And such remarks have the perhaps unintended effect of conveying to the one who’s grieving, “Cry for a little while if you must, but it’s getting to be time to move on.”
When my father died, almost fifteen years ago, I remember driving to Maine and going to the facility where he had been living. He had had hospice care for the last months of his life, and when we arrived where his body lay, the hospice social worker asked if I wanted to go into a room to talk with her. I had been busy trying to be “strong,” whatever that means. And when the door was closed and there were just the two of us, I just sobbed. I was wracked with sorrow. And I had the same experience when I later saw my father’s lifeless body. Painful as it was, though, weeping was exactly what I needed to do. And until those moments, I had been embarrassed about doing so. “Keep it together,” I thought. “Don’t cry,” I said to myself. “That’s not what strong people do,” I tried to convince myself. And I was so deeply wrong. That sort of weeping and grieving is precisely what’s called for. Such sorrow is entirely natural. It’s the price we pay for having loved each other. And not to express that bottomless loss can be to choke off what may be most freeing.
The apostle Paul writes a letter to the church in Thessalonica. In it, he offers wisdom to people who are trying to figure out what it means to live as disciples of Jesus. There he says something that I have long found to be captivating. He expresses the hope that they “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (4:13). And I can imagine that some of us hear in those words something that Paul surely did not intend.
Paul is not saying here that we’re not to grieve—though, in this world in which we run from grief, it might be tempting to hear those words that way. Far from dissing sorrow and tears, I think Paul, in these words, is explicitly validating grief. I think Paul is saying, “Oh, grieve, definitely grieve.” In Paul’s world that is filled with violence and endless threats to their existence, in a developing religious movement in which the Chosen One is put to an ignominious death, Paul must certainly have known how crucial it is to let the tears come. ‘Be sure to mourn,’ he tells them. ‘Never stifle that grief.’
It’s not that they’re not to grieve. It’s just, as he says, that they’re not to grieve as others do. There’s a particular way that followers of Jesus are to grieve, in other words. And what is it that’s to characterize their grief? They’re to grieve as people who are filled with hope. Grieve, certainly. Weep, wail, let the tears flow. But as people of faith, we are urged to remember that there is always another chapter to follow. Yes, life may seem utterly bereft, but there is something more yet to come. Yes, the sorrow may seem all-but-overwhelming, but that is not the end of the story. It never is. It simply never is. The end of the story is something that God is yet to reveal.
One of the numerous traits Jews and Christians share is the conviction that again and again God opens new chapters in our lives. “Behold,” says God in the book of the prophet Isaiah, “I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (43:9). Or, as Nan Merrill’s version of one of the psalms puts it, “Love will [always] act on your behalf” (37:5, Psalms for Praying).
This may seem like an odd subject to preach about on Gratitude Sunday, when new members join us. As we this morning offer our Intentions to Give for the coming year, though, this is a good part of what we’re declaring together. We’re saying, “I know things are bad. I know the world feels as though it’s teetering. And we grieve at that brokenness. At the same time, though, we know that that is not the end of the story, for ‘God is making all things new’” (Revelation 21:5). It pours raining, and then “Here Comes the Sun.” We make some grotesque mistake, and then forgiveness washes over us and we’re given a fresh start. And hard as it sometimes is to see, someone we love more than life itself dies. And we weep bottomless tears. And then, maybe when we least expect it, comes grace that nudges things in a new direction. This is God’s holy gift to us. And so, in gratitude for that sublime grace, we give—we give ourselves, and our resources—to the work of God here at Federated.
As new members prepare to join us today, and one of them will be baptized, this is what we’re called to declare together. It’s an enormous part of what we’re affirming for and with them. We’re declaring that no roadblock is too immovable, no evil too intractable, no sorrow too deeply engrained that God can’t break through and work with you and me on behalf of love.
In the last line of today’s passage, Paul makes clear what this hopeful grieving means for us in this community of faith. “Therefore,” he says, “encourage one another with these words” (4:18). When any of us experiences grief, the rest of us are beckoned to hold each other up and encourage each other—literally to give each other heart. We’re to continue to look for signs of joy, signs of love, signs of hope—those radiant and sublime moments when God, often through us, makes a way out of no way.
This, of course, is what it means to look forward, as we do, to the coming of the Messiah. Paul uses images in this letter that are entirely strange to our ears—the call of an archangel, the sound of God’s trumpet. And it may be tempting, as followers of Christ, either just to ignore these words and images because they seem so weird, or to get caught up in their details, looking for a sign here, an omen there. So it’s crucial to be reminded that those particulars about how the coming of the Messiah might play itself out are completely beside the point. Apocalyptic literature is not about the furnishings of the room or the sound of the trumpets or the choreography of the actors and dancers. Apocalyptic language is at heart about only one thing. It says: There is an urgency to life, and there is no more important moment than now. Right now. Apocalyptic language says: Pay attention! It says: What matters is that we live with an air of expectancy, that we continue to look around the corner for the next moment of beauty and elation and forgiveness. It’s still to come. It’s still to come. And there it is!
And this is true even, and maybe especially, in death. As awful and frightening as it can seem, even death is not the end. As Paul writes in another of his letters, “neither death nor life . . . nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Which means that no despair is too great, no evil too overwhelming that God cannot do something scintillating and transforming. So, as Paul says, we have hope.
We also, as Paul concludes, have this astounding opportunity, day after day, to put this hope into action by living with care and tenderness toward each other and the earth. Remember Paul’s concluding words in this passage: “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (4:18). Paul isn’t just giving us some dry, dusty, boring words about a theological proposition. He’s saying: hope works itself out in love.
Perhaps you saw the story this week about a St. Louis woman named Peggy Winckowski. At the urging of her teenage grandson Sam, a couple of years ago she started serving Sam and his friends breakfast every Wednesday morning before school. School started later that day, and it was a great way to begin the day, friends gathering and sharing a delicious meal and being a community. Then in July of 2022, at the age of fifteen, Sam was killed in a car accident. It was horrific, of course, says his grandmother, “a phone call you never want to get.”
“On the day of Sam’s death, a group of his closest friends—the same teens who always attended the weekly Wednesday breakfasts, congregated at Winckowski’s house.” And those teens came every day that whole week. “As the summer came to an end and the first Wednesday of the school year approached, Winckowski told the teens they were still welcome for breakfast. More students than ever showed up.” And it has continued ever since. Up to thirty teens will show up on any given Wednesday. And as Winckowski says, “There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t talk about Sam.” It has been just the place to process their shared grief. And one of the teens says about Sam’s grandmother, “She is the kindest, most caring soul . . . She is very selfless. It’s never about her.” Another teen says “it’s Winckowski who brings everyone together. ‘She shows everyone great compassion,’ he [says].” Winckowski herself says, “We’ll never get over Sam’s passing, but we can get through it together” (The Plain Dealer, Nov. 11, 2023, p. A17).
“Hope,” as Emily Dickinson said, “is the thing with feathers-/that perches in the soul-/And sings the tune without the words-/And never stops-at all.” Yes, we grieve. It’s a fundamental and crucial part of human life. And always we grieve with an eye turned to what God is yet to do. And as we see what God is doing, we join in—making peace where division reigns, conveying reassurance where fear stalks, and, where all may seem lost, offering ourselves in love. May it always be so.