grief and loss: what lent forced me to face

I’m having a hard time believing it’s already April 3rd. It’s even more impossible to wrap my mind around the fact it’s Good Friday today.

This season of Lent has been unbelievably, wretchedly, unexpectedly long. Why? Well, I’m in my final year of Seminary, so the weeks of the semester seem to cruelly expand with the senioritis that has set in. I’m interning in a church, so when you consider that we started planning for Lent in late January, it’s not surprising that Lent seems almost twice as long this year. It also doesn’t help to live in Chicago, where whenever you get a gentle hint of springlike weather and warmth during February and March, you get slapped in the face by winter winds and vengeful snow the very next day.

On top of all this, I was preparing in the back of my mind a sermon on Grief and Loss during most of Lent, which I preached on March 22nd. Some sermons I’ve prepared seem more like an academic exercise where I’m learning more about the text, tradition, and different interpretations I didn’t know about before. For better or worse, they form mostly in my head, and it takes practicing them a few times before I feel like my voice sounds authentic and natural.

Not this one. Not at all. Occasionally the sermon I’m working on completely flips the tables and works on me instead. My head’s still in it, but my heart and my gut are wrenched in so hard it’s painful to keep going. It’s more painful to stop though, so I go deeper and deeper into a text and topic I would rather avoid, quite frankly.

That’s what happened with this sermon and this season of Lent. It’s left me tired and worn out, but oddly enough, with a sense of gratitude that I went through it (and that Easter’s almost here). The remainder of this post will be long - full disclosure! - but it contains a (revised) script of the sermon I preached a few weeks ago. Near the end, I share a little about Centering Prayer, a spiritual practice that I recommended to my congregation as a way to faithfully begin processing their grief and loss.

If you think grief and loss doesn’t feel very relevant to you right now, I understand. So did I. When I started this sermon, I was anxious it may come off as out-of-touch or phony. On the other side of preparing it and preaching, all I can do is be grateful I was open enough to listen and learn from what my faith tradition has done to help me acknowledge and face griefs I need to mourn. Here it is, folks:

Today we will be focusing on Grief and Loss as part of our “Faithfulness in the Midst of Brokenness” series. We will be looking at what the Scriptures say about how God’s people maintain their faith when they have broken spirits and broken hearts. We will talk about the place of lament in the Scriptures and in our church, we will examine a few stories of faithful people in the Bible who grieved tremendous losses they endured, and we will reflect on how we can respond faithfully to God during our grief and sorrow.

What comes to mind when you hear the words “grief and loss”? The first thing I think of is mourning the death of a loved one. This is absolutely one of the biggest reasons we experience grief, but a book I recently read for school - All Our Griefs, by Kenneth Mitchell and Herbert Anderson - expanded my understanding of grief and loss. This book explains that grief is a lifelong human experience. It is not rare or infrequent; it occurs anytime we lose or weaken a connection with someone or something that we are attached to.

We can feel grief any time significant change happens in our lives because change always involves losing or weakening our connections with something or someone. For example, let’s say you move to a new apartment or house that you like better than anywhere you lived before. As excited as you are, there are things you’ll miss about your old home. There are memories of things that happened there, and neighbors and a community that are being left behind. There are people and things about this old home that you are losing, even if you’re moving to a “better” place. To put it more simply, we grieve throughout our whole lives because we love. We love people. We love communities. We love things - like our homes, our jobs, our possessions, our routines, the place we were born or grew up in, we even love ideas.

We cannot escape grief in our lives because humans are created to love.

Think of what Jesus said was the greatest commandment. In Matthew 22:36-40, a Pharisee asks Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

In that exchange, Jesus charges us to prioritize above all else:(1) love God, (2) love your neighbor as yourself, and I’d like to point out that the 2nd commandment - to love your neighbor as yourself - assumes that (3) you will not neglect loving yourself. Trying to love others without loving the person that God created you to be does not work well for long.

We are also called by God to love creation. Genesis 1 and 2 - which we focused on from the beginning of the year through the beginning of Lent - describes the beautiful world that God created, all the land, sea, sky, stars, plants, animals, and finally, humans, and God declares them all to be good, then commands both the man and woman to be stewards of creation.

And so, here we are today, the people of God stewarding what has been given to us during our time on earth, called to love God, love each other, love ourselves, and love the good creation we have been entrusted with. This call and capacity to love generously is the truest and most powerful way that we can live as images of God.

And yet, there is a dark side to this love, and that dark side is loss and the grief that accompanies it. You see, the people we love - including ourselves - and the things we love are not immortal. We are finite. We are broken. When Christ comes again, we believe that we will be raised up to live eternally with God in the new heavens and the new earth - but Christ has not yet come again.

Many of those who wrote the Bible were very honest about their experiences with grief. The Psalmists were especially open with their grief, writing beautiful but haunting laments about the grief they were struggling with. Psalm 31, which was read earlier, is just one example of a lament. Let me read the final few verses from our Scripture reading, just to remind us of its message and tone:

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away.

The psalmists were not the only ones in the Bible to write of their sorrows and grief. So many of the most faithful people in the Bible experience deep grief and loss in the stories throughout Scripture. Hebrews 11 was our other Scripture passage for today, and I’ll briefly list off some of the people listed as great examples of faith in this chapter:

• Abel - who was killed by his own brother.
• Noah - who lost literally everything except his family, the animals, and the ark when God destroyed the world with a flood.
• Abraham and Sarah - who lost their homeland and left their families when God called them, knowing nothing of the land God was calling them to.
• Isaac -  who sent his youngest son, Jacob, away so that Esau couldn’t harm him.
• Jacob - who worked for 7 years to marry Rachel, was tricked into marrying Leah, had to work another 7 years to marry Rachel, and was tricked into believing his beloved son Joseph was killed by a wild animal when he had actually been sold by his brothers into slavery.
• Moses - who answered God’s call to liberate his people and lead them into the Promised Land, only to have the disobedience of God’s people result in 40 years of wandering through the desert, and then Moses died before they arrived.
• Rahab - the woman in Jericho who protected the Israelite spies and gained their protection, so that when the Israelites came and attacked the city, she and her household would be safe, and indeed they were not harmed, but their hometown and every single person and animal in it were destroyed.
• David - whose firstborn son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and in response another of David’s sons, Absalom, killed Amnon, then later started a rebellion that almost toppled David’s kingdom...I’ll stop here.

We need to remember that the Bible is not just some cut-and-dry “rule book for life” telling us what we should and shouldn’t do. More importantly, the Bible contains the witnesses of the saints who have come before us, people who have much in common with us, for they too have loved deeply and grieved deeply. Being faithful to God does not mean we stifle emotions, avoid acknowledging our grief, or seek out simple answers to our hard questions about grief. The truth is, no matter how faithful we are or how faithful God is to us, grief is a lifelong condition because we cannot help but love people and love creation. When the people and things we love are taken from us, we will feel anger, sadness, numbness, and the many other emotions that come with grief, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. God also experiences grief, because God’s love is so deep and so wide that nothing can separate us from the love of God. When we, the beloved people of God, are in pain, God grieves with us.

So what do we do? If grief is our lifelong companion, how do we not just give into despair? How do we keep our faith in God even in the darkest times of grief, when we may even be blaming God for the losses we have endured?

I won’t pretend to have the answers to those questions, because they are questions we will have to wrestle with time and time again throughout life. I won’t just say “God is enough”, because honestly, there are times it will not feel like God is enough. There are many times in the Scriptures when God’s people cry out, asking God why they have been abandoned. Has God indeed forgotten God’s people? No, but when someone is in the midst of deep grief, they cannot just pull themselves out of despair and pretend everything’s okay. The Bible gives so much space for people to express their grief, and we as a Church must also make space for our people to express our grief.

Our churches - Immanuel and CEC - have had much to grieve over the past few years. Beloved members of our congregations have died or moved away. We have endured different kinds of change and stress. In our own personal lives, we have all suffered loss. We must ask ourselves during this time of Lent, have we really faced our grief, or have we pushed it aside to deal with another day? As one of my professors at Seminary says, if you don’t deal with your grief, your grief will deal with you.

By the grace of God, we do not have to face our grief alone. As the Body of Christ, we are called to do life together - all of life, not just the easy parts. One of the best ways we can minister to each other during times of grief is to be a listening presence for someone. Sitting and listening to someone who is grieving provides a physical reminder that God has not abandoned them. As God’s people, we are called and gifted to be the hands and feet of Christ. However, we must be careful not to do what Job’s friends did. They were present with Job after he endured tremendous losses, but instead of just listening and supporting Job, they also tried to “help” Job by offering their explanations for why he suffered such loss and grief. God later rebukes those friends, and then doesn’t even provide the answers for why Job suffered. We don’t always get the answers to our “why, God” questions, but we will always benefit from the gentle, listening presence of one of God’s people.

There are many other acts of kindness and service we can provide for brothers and sisters who are suffering from grief. We can offer to bring meals, check in with them on a regular basis, keep them in prayer, or send them an encouraging note, among any other ways we think of to show them how loved they are.

Yet if we are the ones suffering from grief, what can we do? Besides allowing ourselves to face our losses and seek support from our brothers and sisters in Christ, what do we do when it feels like our world has fallen apart? Years ago, I decided to adopt the spiritual practice of Centering Prayer during Lent. Right at the start of Lent, I suffered a big loss in my life. Throughout Lent, Centering Prayer forced me to face my loss and begin processing my grief in a healthy way.

Let me take a moment to explain Centering Prayer. There are a few variations of this spiritual practice, so I’ll describe the simple way that I learned it. Centering Prayer is a time set aside to (1) sit still, (2) center yourself on God, and (3) simply listen. By sitting still, I don’t just mean not moving. I mean you try and still your thoughts and your anxieties. You try to clear your mind entirely. This is difficult, this is frustrating, but with practice, it becomes easier. Even then, there will be off days when it’s harder to do, and that’s okay. Often, people choose to focus on their breathing as a way to still their mind. Some people choose a word that they repeat whenever thoughts are crowding their mind. I find it helpful that when a thought enters my mind, instead of getting angry at myself, I imagine it drifting away. The point of this spiritual discipline is that once our thoughts are cleared away, we are free to be centered on the presence of God, and we just sit and receive this time with God as a blessing. There’s nothing we need to accomplish, or achieve, or ask, or do. We just sit in God’s presence and let the Holy Spirit renew us.

I’ll be honest, practicing Centering Prayer forced me to face my grief and loss intensely. Once I paused my busy day and sat in the presence of God, I could no longer go on pretending “everything’s okay” and that I was over my grief. However, Centering Prayer also helped me become okay with the negative things I was feeling - anger, frustration, regret, disappointment - and it helped me on my process of becoming whole again.

To close, we’re going to sit in centering prayer for a minute or two. Let this time be set apart to God, be patient with yourself as you learn how to do Centering Prayer, and I’d encourage you to continue this practice, especially if you are in the midst of grief. God is faithful, God loves you, and God grieves with you.