Grief and Our Response

Psalm 23; 2 Corinthians 1: 3-5

FPC; 9-14-08

          The turkey was in the oven cooking.  The Macy’s parade on Channel 5

          Suddenly, the ringing of the telephone pierced the air.  Those were the days when the telephone actually created a ‘ringing” sound (instead of a chirp or chime).  The ring did not sound that different from those of other incoming calls we had received that day: Aunt Toods bringing us Thanksgiving Day greetings from Atlanta; a kind woman in the Morningside Church calling to let us know of a few reasons for her thankfulness. I could tell from the somber voice of my Dad that this call was different than the rest.   

          After he hanged up the phone, he delivered the sad news.   “Brian Davis died, earlier this morning.”  “He was going somewhere with his Daddy in the car”, my Dad said to me with a sad yet comforting voice.  “An accident occurred.  Brian was killed.” 

          Up to that moment, my mind had no thoughts of the Davis family.  After that moment, I could not stop thinking of them. 

          Over the course of the next few hours, my mind flashed back to the times I had spent with Brian and his two brothers, Al and Kevin.   Their parents called on me, from time to time, to stay with the boys. 

          In their front yard, I organized games of tag and hide and seek.  When it was rainy, we played kick ball in the unfinished basement.  The steel support columns served as our bases.  

          “Brian Davis died earlier this morning.” 

          Wednesday night in the class I titled “Grieving Well” we defined grief as emotional suffering or sharp anguish or deep regret.  I asked “what are some of the events that precipitate our grief?’ 

          I didn’t mention Brian Davis Wednesday night, but his death precipitated grief, sharp anguish, here (in my heart).  So, did the deaths of Randy Rosser and Jimbo Stone and Scott Fann.  All of them were about my age; all of them were my friends. All of them died far too young.  

          The death of friends causes grief, but so do divorce and job loss and a whole host of other events and circumstances of life.

          A few conclusions we reached Wednesday night: 1) no one is immune from grief; 2) all of us need to give ourselves permission to grieve; 3) as Christians, our grief occurs within the broader context of Easter faith and Easter hope. “Though we grieve we do not grieve as those who have no hope,” Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians. 

          When grief occurs in the context of the church community, all of us are called to care.  Our efforts to care are grounded in a theology of incarnation. 

          In his book, Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart, Richard Haugk writes about the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.  “Tolstoy loved the workers on his family’s estate; for a while he worked with them and shared their food and slept in their primitive cottages.  But he was shocked when the workers told him, ‘We’re not really impressed by your coming to live like us.  You’ve got your rich father to fall back on.  You can stop living in poverty any time you choose.  But this is just what we cannot do.  You just act as if you were one of us.’”           

          To meet Jesus is to meet God in the flesh.  “Jesus did not merely act as if he were like us.  He became one of us.  He suffered like us and for us.”  The Apostle Paul can refer to God, as he does in today’s epistle reading, as the Father of compassion and God of all comfort because God understands suffering and pain from personal experience. 

          When tragedy happens in our lives the first of all hearts to break is the heart of God.

          The biblical passage used most often to comfort us when we are grieving is the 23^rd Psalm.  There, we find the beautiful image of God as a Shepherd.  Primarily, that text reminds us that, when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are never alone.  In our shepherding of one another, God’s presence becomes incarnate through us. 

          As Richard Haugk was writing his book, he met a certain woman who knew intimately what it meant to have God’s incarnational shepherd-love present to her.  That woman told him of being in the hospital following cancer surgery.  “Late at night I got extremely cold and frightened.  A nurse brought a warm blanket and then sat down beside me, calmly, gently stroking my hand.  I was so thankful and I told her [if was as if] …Jesus [was] comforting me.”   

          Have you ever felt as if Jesus was comforting you through another person?  Or, have you ever been the one to mediate that experience to someone else?

          “I’m afraid I’ll speak the wrong words, that I’ll make matters worse.”  That is a legitimate fear.  Unintentionally, statements such as “It’s not as bad as it seems”, “It’s all for the best”, “God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle” can have the effect of harming more than helping.  

          There is another valid fear that some people have when hearing the call to care: entering another person’s pain might cause us pain.  The word compassion means to “feel with” another person.  To show empathy, to be truly compassionate, means that we will assume a measure of the other person’s anguish and heartache.  That is enough to make us hesitant and even fearful of reaching out to a grieving person with the love and care of Christ.

          The question is: “will our desire to be Christ’s presence in the lives of hurting people outweigh the fear of doing so?” 

          In Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart, Richard Haugk closes one of his chapters with a section titled “The Power of Presence”.   When conducting research for that chapter, he interviewed a woman who was twenty-five when her mother died.  She said, “I don’t remember any words spoken by the people who visited me, only their presence…”  Another grieving person told Haugk, “When people came and were just present for me, they were a gift.  I felt love, compassion, and acceptance of the fact that I preferred silence over small talk.  I was able to be lost in my own thoughts, yet not alone.  They helped make a sad time a little more bearable.” 

          In a sermon I preached six or seven years ago, I told you about the tragic death of five year old Lee Webb.  He and his family were on vacation at Radio Island when the accident occurred.  What I didn’t mention in that sermon was my response when I heard of his death.  Alice, another member of the Pinetops Church and I got in the car that night and drove to Carteret County Hospital where Barbara Jean and Alton and their daughter, Laura, were overwhelmed with anguish.  During the course of that ninety minute drive from Edgecombe to Carteret County, I wondered what I would say.  When I arrived at the hospital and saw Barbara, I knew there was little I could say. 

She was seated on a loveseat located in a somewhat narrow hallway.  

          We just sat there with her and with Alton and Laura; we just sat there with them for a little while. 

          Haugk says, “Your presence is worth much, much more than words.  Your presence brings not only the gift of yourself into the relationship but also, in and through you, the gift of God.” 

          I suspect he is right about that.

          Before finalizing his book, Haugk posed this question to one of the focus groups he interviewed.  “What is your vision for yourself in being able to relate to those experiencing pain and suffering?”

          Among the many excellent answers he received, one person’s vision stands out:

          “I am a conduit of grace.  As I enter a room, I bring the full resources of God’s grace with me.  My vision is to be such a presence that [the] one who hurts may drink deeply of this wonderful grace of God.” 

          Let us pray.