Good Mourning

How ya doin? fine?

If you were to walk into the church office on any given day in the month or especially week leading up to either Christmas or Easter and ask the frazzled looking members of your church staff “How’s it going” I have it on good authority that the most common answer that you would receive would be… “FINE.” I also have it on good authority that its not going fine. In fact we are all freaking out about one thing or another. It’s guaranteed. It’s just the way things are. But the pre-holiday service struggle around here is not the point of me telling you this, however just keep in mind as those holidays roll around year after year that we need your prayers and probably some hugs, and we like candy.

No, the point is that even though things are most certainly not fine, our natural inclination is to pretend that everything is under control, that we’re ok, even good. When we just aren’t.

And this isn’t just a thing that happens in the church office a few times a year. This is a thing that has become so normal for all of us when we are dealing with feelings and situations that we don’t know how to process or that we want to hide. “Everything is fine.” Fine means I don’t understand what I’m feeling. Fine means don’t ask me any more questions. Fine means “I’m stuffing my emotions.” Fine means “I’m afraid that if I tell you the truth, we will both have to come face to face with the fact that I’m not ok.

Perhaps this one of our greatest missteps as a human race. “I’m fine” is one of our most common phrases, and while it is seemingly harmless what it actually does is it puts up this dividing wall between us. It sets others apart from us and says “I’ve got this figured out. I’m good on my own.” And when we say this enough and have this attitude for long enough, it becomes a lie that we tell ourselves just enough to believe. And when we believe that we are fine, then we believe that we don’t need anyone else, and especially we believe that we don’t need God — if God is even out there anyway.

So for the next couple of weeks we’re going to talk about the danger of just being “fine” and how we can actually overcome being “fine” and move into living a life that is flourishing, despite the fact that everything that is going on around us might be quite the opposite of that. I know that we just wrapped up a series on forgiveness and now we are moving into another series that might be a bit heavy for some of us, and so I’ll be the first to say “We’re sorry about that,” but I’ll also be the first to remind you that you have to forgive us ;)

So, it’s fine… we’re going to call fine what fine is. It’s Feelings Internalized, Not Expressed. And fine, well fine is a sign that we aren’t practicing emotional intelligence. We aren’t processing and dealing with our emotions, we are simply stuffing them and hiding them in an effort to save our face or to save our heart. And the problem is… it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t work. We just keep stuffing and stuffing and stuffing until it feels like we are drowning is a sea of unprocessed emotions and we can barely keep our head up long enough and each breath gets harder and harder until finally we come face to face with reality.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Life’s going to show up in our lives, we are going to be burdened, hurt, and saddened by events that happen in our lives, but the good news is that these things — they don’t have to define us, because we are defined by a greater reality.

The Apostle Paul, when writing to the church in Rome, which dealt with its fair share of hardship, said these words:

The New Revised Standard Version Future Glory

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Paul’s words are a reminder to us, that suffering is so universal that even creation experiences it, but that there is a universal cure to our suffering. And guess what, Paul doesn’t say “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are fine.” He says that they are not worth comparing with what is to come. Things are difficult now, and we might not see what’s coming down the pipe, but we wait for it with patience because we know that its going to be so so good.

Maybe the most difficult of our sufferings to see through is the suffering that we go through when we experience grief. Grief is one of the most perplexing human emotions and experiences because of the deep way that it expresses itself in our lives. Grief and mourning are unavoidable aspects of humanity. Psychologists have been studying grief for a long time, and one of the widely accepted understandings of how we process it is called the stages of grief.

The simplified version is that we move on a continuum through five emotions and ways of behaving, starting with denial, then anger, then depression, then bargaining, and finally into acceptance.

While this is subject to scrutiny, and I’m pretty sure we can jump around or be in multiple stages at once, the general principal is that at some point we come to a place where we accept the fact that we have experienced loss, that we are never going to get what we lost back, and that it’s time for us to move into a new phase of life.

I think what is most important for us, as followers of Jesus and believers that the best is yet to come, and that there is hope beyond the pain of loss is what conclusions we make when we arrive at acceptance. I think that we have two options. We can choose to be hardened, to just settle with “this is fine” and accept that there is no hope for a better future, or we can choose to put our faith in the unknown, in the power that Jesus has to restore that broken and missing pieces of our lives in a new and unforeseen way. This is one of Jesus’s most powerful teachings, which he so plainly states in the opening of his Sermon on the mount:

The New Revised Standard Version The Beatitudes

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

And those are nice words, but I think it’s a bit better if we see them played out.

So in John’s Gospel, there is a story that really highlights the grief associated with loss and the response that God desires from us when we are faced with it.

So Jesus had a friend in a town called Bethany. His name was Lazarus, and he was the brother of two of Jesus’s other friends, sisters named Mary and Martha. It turns out that Lazarus became very ill, and that it was believed that he would not live for many more days. When word of this reached Jesus, he makes a really odd choice to stay where he is for a few days and then set out to see Lazarus.

Long story short, when they get to Bethany Lazarus they find out that Lazarus had died four days earlier… Well the disciples find out, Jesus already knew. What Jesus walks into is a scene where Martha and Mary are being consoled by a group only identified as “many of the Jews.” Thats important and we’ll get back to that in a minute. When Martha gets to Jesus, she’s not pleased. She says “if you would have been here, my brother would still be alive!” A fair point. So she pretty much asks him to bring Lazarus back from the dead, and he goes on to say some famous words about how he is the resurrection and the life. And Martha confesses that she believes that Jesus is the Messiah.

Then this is what happens next:

The New Revised Standard Version (Jesus Weeps)

28 When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” 29 And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.

Ok so here’s where we need to take a look at some details that are hidden to us. Remember I said we were going to circle back to “The Jews” who are with Mary and Martha. It sounds kind of derogatory in our day and age, and I’m not saying this is even right… but John consistently uses the term “Jews” to talk about a certain population of Jewish people, particularly those who opposed Jesus. All of the disciples were Jewish, Jesus was Jewish, most of the people they encountered on a daily basis were, well Jewish.

What John is pointing out is that these persons were the Jewish people who were skeptical at best towards Jesus, and conspirators against him at worst. In this case, we are likely just dealing with some skeptics. Mary and Martha, both having had a deep relationship with Jesus and a faith that Jesus could have in fact healed their brother Lazarus’s illness are grieving the fact that what they believed to be true — that Jesus would heal their brother — did not in fact occur. They are standing in this gap between their hopes and their reality.

And so, while they waited for Jesus, some folks came by and did what good folks do. They tried to console the sisters. Likely they tried to just convince them to leave their unrealistic expectations that some rouge rabbi from Nazareth was going to save their brother, and then help them to prepare Lazarus’s body for a proper Jewish burial.

You can’t really fault them, coming from their perspective. But Jesus, well Jesus is a bit perturbed.

Another detail that we’ve got to understand is that English isn’t doing us justice in that last verse. We see that “Jesus was greatly disturbed” and we tend to think that this is saying that Jesus was sad. But that word in Greek means more of an expression of anger or displeasure. Jesus sees his friends, and these people who had come to plant seeds of doubt about him weeping over the loss of Lazarus, and he’s (for lack of a better word) mad. But why? Why are you mad at these people for doing exactly what people do when they experience loss?

I think Jesus is a different kind of mad than like fight someone mad. He’s more like… disappointed parent mad. Which is way worse am I right? Jesus is mad and he’s deeply moved, which really means that he is troubled. So lets see what happens next.

Everybody is weeping and Jesus is disappointed dad mad and troubled and so he asks them,

34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Right. This is why Jesus is feeling the things he’s feeling. Look at this. Jesus, faced with a truth that he knows, that his friend has died, has a deep emotional reaction. He cries. And in the presence of all of this emotion, these people continue to take it as an opportunity to discredit him and his mission.

You’re probably wanting to know what happens next, and well Jesus does what only Jesus can do. He brings Lazarus back to life. But thats not really the point of this particular message. That’s something that Jesus and only Jesus could do.

The point of this whole thing is that Jesus is deeply moved, or honestly deeply hurt by the lack of faith that this crowd of people is showing in the midst of their suffering. Not only their suffering, but Jesus’s own suffering. Martha weeps, Mary weeps, The Jews weep, Jesus weeps. Everybody is feeling the loss here. Everybody is experiencing the sting of loss and death. And Jesus, well Jesus is just inviting them to exercise a little faith and hope in his ability to make something new happen here.

But they can’t seem to do it. This whole narrative is surrounded in Jesus’s teaching that he is the resurrection and the life, and then him actually bringing that to a reality with the raising of Lazarus back from the dead, and he is just inviting these people to have faith in the midst of their shared grief that he is going to make something beautiful and new out of this mess.

And this is where we stand, day in and day out. These people had a choice — hope in what they can’t yet see, or grow calloused and skeptical. And so do we. You see grief requires us to mourn. Mourning is good, mourning helps us move beyond the place where we are stuck. Stuck with our emotions, stuck just being fine.

And grief and mourning are not just things that happen when we experience death. No, grief and mourning are the reality that we live with when we have to deal with any type of loss. The loss of a friendship, a relationship, a marriage, a job, the future that we saw for ourselves that has slipped away. All of these things cause deep emotions in us because they remind us that regardless of our hard work, our good intentions, and our faithfulness, that this world is a world filled with suffering still.

Jesus is simply inviting us to hope in the unseen possibilities that loom on the horizon.

I moved to Florida 10 years ago. I had a head and a heart full of expectations. And over the next 2 years I watched as my entire world burned down around me. First of all, I wasn’t following Jesus. I was married at the time and we were dealing with infertility. It didn’t take long for that pain to drive us apart. And it didn’t take long for that pain to drive me into a downward spiral fueled by “it’s fine” just have another drink. Each passing week more toxic than the last. Unable to deal with the grief of what I was losing, unable to mourn in a healthy way I just kept “i’m fining” it until I had no marriage, no job, no home of my own, and I was just a shell of a human.

But it was here, at the end of myself that I found what I had been searching for all along. All I could do was look back at what I had lost. I couldn’t see what was going to happen. I found the church. I found some people who taught me how to heal. How to start holding on to the promises that Jesus gives to make beauty out of ashes. When I look and my wife, and our baby boy, I’m reminded of the faithfulness of God. I didn’t know this was all coming. But when I decided to stop holding on to what I thought my life was supposed to look like, I was able to step into the life that God was planning for me.

This isn’t an overnight process. And if you just aren’t there yet, I get it. I’m not saying you need to get there today. It’s just important that you don’t lose hope. That you don’t lose that something to hold on to, that promise of a new and resurrected life.

But if its time, then this is our task. So ask yourself, how ya doin? Just... fine? Why? What piece of of the life that you thought you were supposed to have is still haunting you? What would it look like if you started to let God reveal to you the life that he’s creating?