Letting Death Go
Sermon
The Culture Of Disbelief
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter
Some gardeners can grow everything and others cannot. Sweet peas are a particularly difficult plant for some. They sprout two little leafs and a withered string of a hand reaching up. Then they stop growing. Something underneath is wrong. In the soil. Down deep. They don't want to live.
People who have trouble with sweet peas try over and over to grow them. They load the soil with enough chicken manure to fertilize five gardens, much less the five square feet where they'd like to see light pink and purple and sweet.
A woman who carried twins who were dead in utero and delivered at six months identifies with the sweet pea gardeners. She had the greater burden, of course. She had them in her heart but never in flower. She had them immature but never mature.
What we know about both large and small grief is that time is its healer. The pain does pass. We get "over it" by going beyond it, under, around, and through it. By March most gardeners are usually fingering the sweet pea packets on the seed rack. Couples who lose babies make love again.
What parents who lose children to premature death do is to enter their difficulty with hope. They let the grief flood them. "Let" is too active a word. The grief floods them. This way they get to its other side. What gardeners do with the many griefs in growing is the same: we swim our grief to its far shore.
When Jesus speaks of death, he speaks of its inevitability and its hope. "He said all this [about his sure and certain death] quite openly." Peter rebuked him for his openness. But Jesus knew what he was doing. He was preparing his disciples for the inevitability of grief. He was assuring his disciples that his death was the will of God, because he willed it as well. He was giving up his life to gain it.
Sometimes we tell parents grieving premature death that their loss is not the will of God. Surely the most offensive comment made at children's funerals is this passivity: that God somehow might have willed it. Why, such parents ask, did God will my child to enter the other side and yours not to? It is a good question, fully appropriate to the hostility of shutting down the mystery of the unfathomable. We sweep the mystery out the door, like so much dust, with the brutal broom of "must have been the will of God." The grief doesn't get to hang around, to last long enough, to find its other side.
Jesus' participation in his Father's will is different. He is letting go of life on purpose. God does not choose some children, and not others, in this way. Instead, we are all invited to be sufficiently a part of death that life can show up on the other side.
Sweet peas are grown all over the world by some people. That is a fact. In our grief, we often can't face this fact. We need to wait it out; it needs to wait us out.
The time of premature death is not a time when we need to be morally or theologically combative. But we need to be prepared. People will say, right to your face, that these things are the will of God. They are not. God does not will the death of children. God does not want gardeners who adore sweet peas not to be able to grow them. God wills life and wills it abundantly. When we understand God's will towards life, things get even more difficult to understand, at first. What we mean when we say that God does not will the death of children is that, apparently, there are some things outside of God's control -- like stillborn twins and certain varieties of flowers in certain types of soil.
Both gardening and grief have an enemy. The enemy is control. This control is a matter of the heart and a matter of the will. I learned this by loving, and by amending soil with manure, and by watching a baby die. In love, and manure, and death, control is the thing we have to fear most. Manure the garden. Manure it completely. But don't extract guarantees of life from the soil. The soil can't give the guarantees.
A nursery school teacher said that when something hurt her it hurt in the heart and it was her heart that got swollen. A child reported that she was so sad inside that her heart was going to burst. The teacher didn't understand the child right away until she remembered her metaphors. Once we get into the right language, we can communicate. The teacher consoled the child with the news that hearts were the one thing that could swell up really bad but not get broken -- not burst apart. The teacher is right. The teacher speaks truth.
Swollen, yes; burst, no. Swollen, not broken. Heart, not will. The will can crack. The heart can't. God is the same. It was after all a Son who died in Jesus Christ. Surely that was in a place of the swollen heart, not a cracked will. No God would willfully kill a son, or make a sweet pea impossible. But a Son could choose to participate in suffering on behalf of his own and our larger life.
While waiting for the soil to improve and the right time to return for babies, we can do one more thing. While waiting for the chance to say yes to suffering, on behalf of life (not on behalf of suffering), we can just be there, stand there, do nothing, make thin remarks, or sound stupid even to ourselves.
When showing up at the sight of grief, often we are afraid we won't have the right thing to say. And our fear is correct. We will not have the right thing to say. But still we can show up, and stand there, and say nothing. Or say that we know nothing to say. But still we are here, swollen heart and all, but not broken by our wordlessness.
A minister stood in the hospital waiting with a mother to find out if her seven-year-old's spleen was as divided as the doctor said it was. It was. His mother didn't find out until morning. Her grief has swollen like an ocean after a hurricane so many times since that night of the long wait for the bad news. Up and down. Down and up. In and out. Sometimes she would just show up at the minster's office and say, "Just a hug," that's all, "Just a hug." Hugs and hugs later, we do get over these things. But we also never forget.
We imagine seven-year-olds hanging on a bar, hanging upside down, safe. The facts contradict this possibility. The car crash was a mild one. Matthew and his mother walked away from it. Eight hours later he died from a spleen cut in two. His father held him in his arms and watched him die.
This much I believe about heaven: fathers hold children in arms there. Sweet peas grow. Don't ask me how. There the children are different; they don't age. They hang upside down on bars in eternal agility. The soil is rich. Even the Ninja Turtles are different, more mellow, less violent. Connection -- the hug -- is there. Its reality is the eternal part.
One more thing that we learn from death. We must remember to mind the other children, the siblings, the lives ones, the ones who still have bodies. Gardeners who can't grow sweet peas have to pay attention to what they can grow.
With Matthew, there was a sister. Heather. She was seventeen at the time of the accident. She and Matthew had come from Korea together. She was entering her senior year in high school. Her parents were facing the empty nest suddenly. Not only would Matthew be gone but in one year Heather would be gone. Imagine the sheer work it took for her parents not to smother Heather. She might have stayed out of college for one year. "No," they said "love lets go; it doesn't hold on."
In Angels In America, a play about AIDS, the playwright Kushner says:
If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain, we will have to drag them out of the skies, and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst.
Christ as an angel is closer to what my faith can see than Christ as a baby or Christ as a sweet pea. Angels come down from above; flowers and babies grow up. God was with Jesus in a way "deeper" than God is with us. This relationship is on a spectrum. Jesus was also with God in a way "deeper" than we are with God. God sends grief, but God does not will our grief. There is a difference.
Grief is a part of the great unfathomablity. Great grief comes to the same world that receives great joy. Children are such great joy. We don't deserve them, can't control them, dare not crush them with our own fear, must let them go.
Our hearts will swell, but they will not break. Even if our flowers don't all grow, we are still invited to let them be. So that we may also let what can grow to, in fact, grow.
People who have trouble with sweet peas try over and over to grow them. They load the soil with enough chicken manure to fertilize five gardens, much less the five square feet where they'd like to see light pink and purple and sweet.
A woman who carried twins who were dead in utero and delivered at six months identifies with the sweet pea gardeners. She had the greater burden, of course. She had them in her heart but never in flower. She had them immature but never mature.
What we know about both large and small grief is that time is its healer. The pain does pass. We get "over it" by going beyond it, under, around, and through it. By March most gardeners are usually fingering the sweet pea packets on the seed rack. Couples who lose babies make love again.
What parents who lose children to premature death do is to enter their difficulty with hope. They let the grief flood them. "Let" is too active a word. The grief floods them. This way they get to its other side. What gardeners do with the many griefs in growing is the same: we swim our grief to its far shore.
When Jesus speaks of death, he speaks of its inevitability and its hope. "He said all this [about his sure and certain death] quite openly." Peter rebuked him for his openness. But Jesus knew what he was doing. He was preparing his disciples for the inevitability of grief. He was assuring his disciples that his death was the will of God, because he willed it as well. He was giving up his life to gain it.
Sometimes we tell parents grieving premature death that their loss is not the will of God. Surely the most offensive comment made at children's funerals is this passivity: that God somehow might have willed it. Why, such parents ask, did God will my child to enter the other side and yours not to? It is a good question, fully appropriate to the hostility of shutting down the mystery of the unfathomable. We sweep the mystery out the door, like so much dust, with the brutal broom of "must have been the will of God." The grief doesn't get to hang around, to last long enough, to find its other side.
Jesus' participation in his Father's will is different. He is letting go of life on purpose. God does not choose some children, and not others, in this way. Instead, we are all invited to be sufficiently a part of death that life can show up on the other side.
Sweet peas are grown all over the world by some people. That is a fact. In our grief, we often can't face this fact. We need to wait it out; it needs to wait us out.
The time of premature death is not a time when we need to be morally or theologically combative. But we need to be prepared. People will say, right to your face, that these things are the will of God. They are not. God does not will the death of children. God does not want gardeners who adore sweet peas not to be able to grow them. God wills life and wills it abundantly. When we understand God's will towards life, things get even more difficult to understand, at first. What we mean when we say that God does not will the death of children is that, apparently, there are some things outside of God's control -- like stillborn twins and certain varieties of flowers in certain types of soil.
Both gardening and grief have an enemy. The enemy is control. This control is a matter of the heart and a matter of the will. I learned this by loving, and by amending soil with manure, and by watching a baby die. In love, and manure, and death, control is the thing we have to fear most. Manure the garden. Manure it completely. But don't extract guarantees of life from the soil. The soil can't give the guarantees.
A nursery school teacher said that when something hurt her it hurt in the heart and it was her heart that got swollen. A child reported that she was so sad inside that her heart was going to burst. The teacher didn't understand the child right away until she remembered her metaphors. Once we get into the right language, we can communicate. The teacher consoled the child with the news that hearts were the one thing that could swell up really bad but not get broken -- not burst apart. The teacher is right. The teacher speaks truth.
Swollen, yes; burst, no. Swollen, not broken. Heart, not will. The will can crack. The heart can't. God is the same. It was after all a Son who died in Jesus Christ. Surely that was in a place of the swollen heart, not a cracked will. No God would willfully kill a son, or make a sweet pea impossible. But a Son could choose to participate in suffering on behalf of his own and our larger life.
While waiting for the soil to improve and the right time to return for babies, we can do one more thing. While waiting for the chance to say yes to suffering, on behalf of life (not on behalf of suffering), we can just be there, stand there, do nothing, make thin remarks, or sound stupid even to ourselves.
When showing up at the sight of grief, often we are afraid we won't have the right thing to say. And our fear is correct. We will not have the right thing to say. But still we can show up, and stand there, and say nothing. Or say that we know nothing to say. But still we are here, swollen heart and all, but not broken by our wordlessness.
A minister stood in the hospital waiting with a mother to find out if her seven-year-old's spleen was as divided as the doctor said it was. It was. His mother didn't find out until morning. Her grief has swollen like an ocean after a hurricane so many times since that night of the long wait for the bad news. Up and down. Down and up. In and out. Sometimes she would just show up at the minster's office and say, "Just a hug," that's all, "Just a hug." Hugs and hugs later, we do get over these things. But we also never forget.
We imagine seven-year-olds hanging on a bar, hanging upside down, safe. The facts contradict this possibility. The car crash was a mild one. Matthew and his mother walked away from it. Eight hours later he died from a spleen cut in two. His father held him in his arms and watched him die.
This much I believe about heaven: fathers hold children in arms there. Sweet peas grow. Don't ask me how. There the children are different; they don't age. They hang upside down on bars in eternal agility. The soil is rich. Even the Ninja Turtles are different, more mellow, less violent. Connection -- the hug -- is there. Its reality is the eternal part.
One more thing that we learn from death. We must remember to mind the other children, the siblings, the lives ones, the ones who still have bodies. Gardeners who can't grow sweet peas have to pay attention to what they can grow.
With Matthew, there was a sister. Heather. She was seventeen at the time of the accident. She and Matthew had come from Korea together. She was entering her senior year in high school. Her parents were facing the empty nest suddenly. Not only would Matthew be gone but in one year Heather would be gone. Imagine the sheer work it took for her parents not to smother Heather. She might have stayed out of college for one year. "No," they said "love lets go; it doesn't hold on."
In Angels In America, a play about AIDS, the playwright Kushner says:
If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain, we will have to drag them out of the skies, and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst.
Christ as an angel is closer to what my faith can see than Christ as a baby or Christ as a sweet pea. Angels come down from above; flowers and babies grow up. God was with Jesus in a way "deeper" than God is with us. This relationship is on a spectrum. Jesus was also with God in a way "deeper" than we are with God. God sends grief, but God does not will our grief. There is a difference.
Grief is a part of the great unfathomablity. Great grief comes to the same world that receives great joy. Children are such great joy. We don't deserve them, can't control them, dare not crush them with our own fear, must let them go.
Our hearts will swell, but they will not break. Even if our flowers don't all grow, we are still invited to let them be. So that we may also let what can grow to, in fact, grow.
