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When Grief is the Ground of Hope
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 14, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 32:1-15; 24-25; 42b-44 Mark 16:1-8
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid….I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or, perhaps hard to want to take it in. Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, you have no sense of needing [God], so happy that you are tempted to feel [God’s] claims upon you as an interruption….But go to God when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.” Lewis’ words struggle to bring to speech the personal grief of one who has loved and lost to death the beloved. Yet his words are words that also hold in solution the experience of a people who walk in darkness: the fear, the numbness, the desperate need for a greater hand to hold, the rejection, the silence. This nation tasted such grief when the towers collapsed and tastes grief even today in what we have ceased to be in the world. Fiction alone has led me to imagine the grief now stalking the streets of Baghdad and Kabul or darkening the alleyways of Rangoon and Mogadishu. Jews dispersed throughout Europe were awash in a grief beyond comprehension as they boarded trains bound for death. No doubt peoples long lost to our memory have born the same grief and carried the same sorrows as we to graves unmarked by human history. Yet the story of the grief of God’s people on the eve of defeat and deportation is the story of a grief held within the purposes of God, a grief that is the ground of hope. As God’s present day people whose future is also always at risk, we tell one another this story again and again because, like a contrapuntal voice juxtaposed to fear and darkness, there sounds in its verses the strains of an angelic host singing, “Fear not!” Listen again! In the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar King of Babylon, Jerusalem is under siege, her fall to Babylon immanent. Within the year, both palace and temple would be reduced to smoldering embers, the line of David deposed and the people sent into exile. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God spoke to a people grown fearful and numb, to a nation that did not want to hear. Therefore the counsel of Jeremiah to surrender to Babylon and so submit to God’s judgment could only be taken in as treasonous. Jeremiah is placed under house arrest, held by order of the Department of Homeland Security. But God’s word, that knows no bounds, will not be silenced. To this point in Jeremiah, the word of the Lord has been a word of judgment and lament, of pain and pathos and grief: My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. (The voice is Jeremiah’s…or is it God’s?) Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” (“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?”) “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? (8:18-22) “Go to God when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.” Yet here the door slammed has been slammed in God’s face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside is the sound heard by God’s prophet. After that, there is silence, a silence imposed by royal decree. God might as well have turned away. But now the story turns on an astounding detail. Through the thick walls of power, behind the closed doors of political deceit and miscalculation, against the pretense of truth clothed in denial, the word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah: Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.” Buy a field in Anathoth, says the Lord, when all was about to be lost: the nation, the temple, the Davidic line, the land, every evidence of Israel’s election to be God’s people cast on the sacrificial alter of power politics. Here grief, it seems to me, can cut two ways. The way we too often choose is the way of complaint and blame, of despair and inertia. We bolt and double bolt the door of our hearts, secure our sanity in the safety of the known, settle for a managed future, steel ourselves against further hurt, seek out voices which return us to the reasonable give and take of bearable losses. We do this singly and we do this in communities that have chosen religion over discipleship. We do this in families too wounded to attempt intimacy again and we do this in nations too manipulated to recognize the truth. Far from investing in real estate—say a fish hatchery in Haiti or a Habitat House in a condemned neighborhood or a clinic for the poor in Germantown or an organ tuned for praise in a dying church--we prefer to hedge our bets, hoard our possessions, let rust and moths eat away at us slowly, imperceptibly, until we lie to die. Jeremiah’s grief cut the other way. “As the report stands,” says Walter Brueggemann, “it is an awesome moment in which to act. It is 588 B.C.E., just one miserable year before the final collapse of Judah. [These details are familiar to us!] The inept Zedekiah is on the throne. The Babylonian armies are at the gates of the city. (“We look for peace, but find no good,” cry the people “for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.”) The prophet is imprisoned as a subversive agent. This is no time to wager on the future. The word of YHWH with a promise acts in contradiction to every social possibility. It is a free word of hope, utterly underived from or linked to the current circumstances. It is on this word that Jeremiah stakes his life and future.” And we who, against all odds, inhabit this piece of real estate, we have come to stake ours lives and future anew on the same word made flesh in Jesus Christ. For once, at the center and nadir of human history, God staked the life of a Son, an only Son, a beloved on us. The day is Friday and the hour is 3 o’clock. There is darkness and a quaking and then a cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “Go to God when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence….” He has borne our grief, carried our sorrows. My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick….“ Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” But early on the third day, when the disciples’ grief indeed felt like fear and the tomb had been bolted and double bolted on the outside and their need for God was desperate, the women heard, like a contrapuntal voice juxtaposed to fear and darkness, the strains of an angelic host saying, “Fear not!” “Easter” Brueggemann claims “is no isolated event. It belongs to Israel’s wide and deep practice of hope that appeals to a long recital of parallels but finally stakes everything on the unfettered ‘Thou’…upon “the trustworthiness of the One who…hovers somewhere between the fear so palpably grounded and the faith so fragilely embraced. It is the pivot point of hope: ‘Do not fear!’” Still, the hope that is hope this side of the grave comes down to a real estate transaction! Or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote while the storm gathered in Germany, “Christ’s body takes up space on earth. That is a consequence of the incarnation….A truth, a doctrine, or a religion need no space for themselves. They are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt an apprehended, and that is all. But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living men [and women] who will follow him.” In a world where grief would have its way with us globally and personally, the act of discipleship is counter-intuitive, contrary to all reasonable calculation, subversive in the face of realpolitik, new beyond our every wishful thought, and announced by way of a deed, signed and witnessed, hidden and buried in an earthenware jar. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land. Therefore two things remain for God’s people to do, for us to do together. The first “is to relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace what [God] has ended,” says Brueggemann. This is the lament we have learned in the psalms. Indeed, life will never be the same without him, the church is certainly not what she used to be, the hegemony of the nation is no more. An ending has come upon us. To fail in this task is to be a people turned backward. It is to miss what God has purposed in our grief. To embrace what God has ended is to wait in expectation for the future God alone can effect. The second “is to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by [God], to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what [God], beyond every quid pro quo, now gives.” You and I do not know what that will be. Sometimes I think I have glimpsed the gift in our children thundering down the aisle each Sunday morning and in the white or slightly balding heads who have not quit over a decade of change. Sometimes in the leaping generosity of so many and the talent offered without counting the cost I know just enough to thank God. Or when I find myself awash in the morning’s music and breathless at the end of a concert in this sanctuary reverberating still in my flesh or astonished at the artists who continue to hang around, beyond every quid pro quo I gratefully receive what God has given. But more! For the life we have been given together surely strengthens us for the gift of being sent as Christ’s heralds to announce tangibly, amid fear and at the null point, the nadir, the zero of another’s grief “fear not!”: houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in Chester and Pearlington and Norristown, in Baghdad and Kabul, in L’Ecule and Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitian, purchased by a people once bolted and double bolted against the God who has, in Jesus Christ, bought the deed and staked a claim to our hearts and minds and soul and strength. Fear not! Forge ahead! Thanks be to God. |