One of the laws of life is: To get something, you must give up something. To gain, you must also lose. We call that the tradeoff principle.
We operate on the tradeoff principle every day. When you go to the grocery store and fill your basket, they have the audacity to expect you to pay for what you get. That’s a tradeoff.
If you go to the regular grocery store, they bag your things and put them in your car for you. But you can go to the discount store, where they expect you to bring your own bag, pack up your own purchases, and get them to your car the best way you can. Now do you want service or do you want low prices? That’s a tradeoff too. To get something, you must give up something. To gain, you must also lose.
The issues of life and death also involve tradeoffs. There are things which we must give up in order to gain. There are prices we have to pay in order to receive. Our God has so created us that, even though we must die and must suffer the loss of those we love, there is also something to be gained. There is a rich recompense for the pain of our humanity.
That is what I hope to help us see through these messages, this week and next. I hope to help us see that God is working to give us something wonderful just as something precious has been taken from us. Even when we grieve our losses, there is cause for rejoicing. Our God is able to replace what we lose with something else. It is a tradeoff, yes.
Tradeoffs are a law of life. But I hope we can see that despite the pain of death, we can gain even more than we lose.
You’ve heard many times that verse, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." I’ve had my problems with that idea. I didn’t want to think about the Lord taking away someone. And I especially didn’t want to fall into the trap of supposing that every time someone dies, whether in a terrible accident or after a long illness, that we could just shrug it of as "God’s will". I didn’t believe in a God that cruel. And I still don’t. But I do see that there is something right in the idea that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It’s the tradeoff principle again. We are going to lose; death is unavoidable. But, under the grace of God, we are also going to gain.
I am calling the messages this week and next, "Remembering, Reconnecting, and Rejoicing". And I am using a short, simple Scripture text, one which you have heard scores of times. But it contains precious secrets, and I hope we can reveal them together.
The passage is the little vignette, recorded in John’s Gospel, where they are standing around the foot of the cross of Jesus, just a few of them, mostly women. Stunned, I expect; pained, of course; embarrassed, for, after all, he died the death of a common criminal. And grieving. Grieving for him and for the apparent failure of all his efforts. Grieving for themselves and for the loss of his companionship. And grieving, no doubt, that such promise had come to such pain.
Listen to their simple story: John 19:25-27
I
Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene and the disciple whom Jesus loved.
Who were these people? And what had they been doing before coming to this lonely spot on a sun-darkened hill?
Mary his mother. Do you remember how ecstatic she was when she learned she was to bear the Christ child? "My soul does magnify the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ... " Like most mothers-in-waiting, a deep joy. And a solemn joy at his birth: "Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart."
But do you remember also that when she and Joseph took the child Jesus to the temple to be named, how the prophetess Anna had predicted, "A sword shall pierce through your own soul … because of this child"? And do you remember how she and her other children came to Jesus one day, determined to take him home, keep him out of trouble, so embarrassing had he become? Mary his mother; she had much to remember, not all of it pleasant.
Who else was there? Mary Magdalene. Tradition says she was a fallen woman, a woman with a past. If the suspicions be true, a woman who had tried fleshly intimacy with many men, but who found spiritual intimacy with only one, and now that one was hanging there with his life ebbing out. Mary Magdalene, remembering how her life had once been; not a pleasant memory.
And the beloved disciple. Again, by tradition, we assume it was John. John the brother of James, the sons of Zebedee; the sons of thunder, they were called. John had asked if he and his brother could be seated at the right and left hands of the throne of power, and he had been sternly rebuked. John with James and Peter had been asked to watch and pray with the Master, but John found it all a bit boring and fell asleep. The disappointed Jesus cried out, "Could you not watch with me one brief hour?" John the beloved, remembering times when he had been faithless, remembering moments when he had disappointed the Lord.
Remembering is a part of grieving. When we lose someone, we tell stories, don’t we? We tell stories that begin, "Do you remember? Do you remember the time we went on that trip together? Do you remember the day that was such a disaster? Grieving involves remembering.
But the dirty little secret is that we not only remember the wonderful, positive times. We also remember the terrible, negative times. We remember the pain and the heartache involved. Every human tie has both the wonderful and the painful in it. Am I letting the cat out of the proverbial bag? Let’s get real here. You can’t live with or deal with anybody over a period of years and not have some unhappy times. It just can’t happen. You’ve heard them interview folks who have been married 50 or 60 years, and one of them will say, "Why, there was never a harsh word between us that whole time". O come on! What garbage! That just ain’t real. If you have real relationships, you are going to remember bad times as well as the good.
But the trouble is that those bad times we remember in secret. Those we don’t talk about. Those we postpone. We remember the moments of misunderstanding, some of which never got cleared up. We remember the hasty remarks that were never eased away. We remember all the good intentions which paved the road to this day. And we never tell a single soul about those memories. We never confess our unhappy memories and unresolved conflicts. We just keep secrets. And, friends, when we keep secrets, we deepen our grief . We don’t resolve it, we deepen it.
I’ve presided at many a funeral, and attended a good many more. I much prefer the honest funerals. Frankly, some of the best moments come when somebody is able to stand up and say, "This old boy was a tough bird, mean as a snake. I loved him, but I couldn’t always deal with him."
Well, no, I guess I haven’t heard it quite that honest, but I have heard some. Some of the contemporary Choir will remember the funeral service for your former director, John Higdon. What did they say about John? They said, "He was difficult. He was demanding. He was argumentative. He was all of those things. But he was also awesomely gifted of the Lord." Now that’s good honest stuff. That helps the grief to go forward.
Now sense with me what happens at the cross. In this ultimate moment of grief, when one woman is losing a son and another woman is losing a life saver and a man is losing a beloved mentor ... and they are all remembering all kinds of negative things, remembering how they have disappointed their friend ... what happens? What happens for them? "Jesus saw and said ... " "Jesus saw and said … "
I know there isn’t much material in the text, but I sense there the open, forgiving heart of Christ. I sense there acceptance: sheer, gracious, embracing acceptance. The dying Jesus has no accusation, no condemnation, just looks of love for those who are gathered around. All the misunderstandings of the past gone, all the unresolved conflicts irrelevant. They were there. They cared. And he forgave them, he released them. "Jesus saw and said ... "
Remembering. The tradeoff is that we lose someone we have loved. But we also gain. We gain a chance to face our old wounds, and heal them through the accepting love of the dying.
II
After we’ve learned to remember, the next step is reconnecting. Reconnecting. When we grieve, we are feeling the shock of our own aloneness. God has made us to connect with each other. And so when someone dies, a little of us dies too. Said the poet John Donne, "No man is an island, entire of itself. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." When we grieve, we are grieving that little death that lies in our own bodies. Someone said to me, after losing a spouse of some sixty years, "It feels just like part of my body has been torn away.”
Yes, of course. And at the foot of that cross there were those who felt that way too.
Mary. How painful a thing for a parent to see a child die. A number of you know that, intimately. All the hopes and dreams vanished. All the energy spent in raising that child, all the investment of time and money and love and emotion, evaporated. Mary: remembering the promise of the angel that he would be great, the chosen one of God. Mary: remembering the sacrifices she and Joseph had made to bring him up. How painful to have him torn away!
And the beloved disciple. John, the soul-mate. Some of us, you know, live in loneliness because we cannot quite find a soul-mate, we cannot quite find someone in whom we can confide, someone whose care for us is wide open. Again, if tradition be correct, John, a young man, just reaching maturity, not yet sure of himself, but in Jesus he had found a mentor, someone just to show him what it was to be a man.
That’s a very special kind of relationship, by the way. Did you have somebody who was your mentor? Is there somebody to whom you look for clues? Someone whose style you admire, you are modeling yourself after that person? Now the interesting thing about mentors and their juniors is that usually the day comes when the younger learner rebels against his teacher. The day usually comes when the junior rises against the senior and says, "I can do it better than you!" The teacher and the student, the mentor and the learner, usually come to a breaking point. When they break, it’s painful. I can imagine John, young as he was, having rebelled against Jesus, having indulged himself in the notion that he could do this teaching thing better I can imagine John now feeling devastated. His mentor is gone; there is no one to draw from and also no one to fight against, no one to be his leader and no one to rebel against . One of the reasons we need each other is that we need somebody to fight! Anybody here identify with this kind of grief?
Mary and John, both of them bereft because Jesus was going. So what does the Lord do? He gives them to each other. He fulfills their need to care for somebody and their need to be cared for just by giving them to each other. "Woman, here is your son. Son, here is your mother." Mother, here is somebody else to worry over, somebody else to guide. John, here is someone else to care about, and someone else to rebel against.
But Jesus gives us a tradeoff; Jesus gives us someone else. All we have to do is reconnect. One set of ties is broken; but God gives us reconnecting with someone else.
Over the years I have watched a number of you recover from your losses in wonderful ways. I have watched some of you care for an invalid spouse; you almost became recluses because of that tie. But then death came, and I have seen you reconnect with others. I have seen you blossom and flourish. You lost; but God gave you to someone else and gave someone else to you. You reconnected. And you grew through your grief.
I have seen people who lost their parents become sensitive to the needs of other older people. I have seen people who lose a child take on special care for some other child. Tradeoffs. God is giving us to each other, "Woman, here is your son. Son, daughter, here is your mother." Remembering, and reconnecting.
III
But there is more. There is more than remembering and feeling forgiven. There is more than reconnecting and finding some way to care and be cared for. There is also rejoicing. There is also the possibility that joy might return to our hearts.
Depression is a tough thing to explain and an even tougher thing to face. Nearly all of us get moody; nearly all of us have times when we just don’t want to face others, we don’t want to get at our jobs, we don’t want to do anything but sit and wallow in misery. I’m not putting that down. Depression is not something to blame ourselves for.
Depression is real and tough. But the strategy for handling depression is to tell it to someone who understands. Tell it someone who has been there. It eases the burden if you find someone else who has suffered, someone else who has known loss. Simply telling the story begins to clear away the clouds and make room for the first rays of sunlight. We need to be understood by someone who has been there.
On Christmas Day, 1988, I found myself withdrawing from my family and from all the merrymaking. I went down into my study, sat down in a chair, and proceeded to weep my eyes out. At first I didn’t even know why; but a little later I got in touch with my sense of loss because of the death of my father. Now my father had died more than five years earlier , and I really cannot say why the tears of grief waited so long to well up, but they did. And at Christmas. Why Christmas? Well, my father was a mail carrier, and when I was a boy he had to work so very hard at Christmas, with all the extra mail. Day after day, night after night, we wouldn’t see him, because he was out early in the morning and home late at night, exhausted. Then would come Christmas Eve, and all the mail had to be moved out. Not a scrap was to be left, and no, none of it got stored up in our home either!
Dad would work right up until 9:00 or 10:00, and would then hurry home and take a quick bath so that he could go sing in his choir at the midnight service. My young boy’s heart would fairly burst with pride to see him come singing down that church aisle; I always wanted to sit on the end of the pew so that I be near as he went gliding by. I loved him, I missed him, and I wanted to be with him.
I think that’s what I was feeling again, no longer a boy, but a 50-year-old. It was Christmas. I loved my father, I missed him, and I wanted to be with him. I was depressed and I needed somebody who would understand.
Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, the wife of Clopas, Magdalene, the disciple. Standing near the cross of Jesus ... the cross of the son of God. Can our puny minds even grasp it? The Lord and giver of life, who had given life to countless thousands of others, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth losing his life? The infinite, already become finite, now to be snuffed out? It seems impossible, too awesome for words.
But it is God’s tradeoff. In order to win us to himself, he had to become the word made flesh. In order to give us new life, he had to die. In order to enter into all that touches us, he had to taste even death. God understands. God does understand. He too has been there. He too grieves. And in his death he draws us near. Standing near the cross of Jesus ... standing near the cross we know that he does understand. When we know that we are understood, we are on our way to rejoicing.
Remembering, reconnecting, and rejoicing.
But that Christmas Day, that word-made-flesh day, became a spiritual turning point for me. For when I had wept my eyes out remembering, I went back to my family and saw them in a whole new way. Reconnecting. Husband, here is your wife. Father, here are your son and your daughter. Pastor, here is your church. Christian, here is your world. If someone like Jesus will understand me, then I can understand you. And together, wounded as we are, but understood, we will find our way to rejoicing.
