In just several days Christmas will be here, and as we enter the Advent season, preachers will stretch their imaginations to search for inventive sermons on this most important and unavoidable annual event. There will be sermons on the Wise Men bearing gifts, and homilies about Mary being a submissive bearer of the Son of God. Santa Claus and his bold secularity will be scorned by the most fundamentalist of preachers. Sermons will feature the problem of increasing commercialism in our culture, most notably the lavish spending of the season.
And yet, with the approaching glee and stress of the Christmas season, there are those who cannot join in the celebration, because they have experienced the loss of a loved one. In this season, they need Jesus to come to their town, not just Bethlehem. They need some words of comfort in their silent night. Instead of a holy infant so tender and mild, what they really need is a strong friend to walk with them in the new fearful world in which they find themselves. Really what they need this Christmas is a Jesus who is alive.
Some of you may know of the difficulty of attending funerals too close to Christmas. I can personally relate to those who wade through snow to a grave on a cold dreary day instead of hanging lights on a Christmas tree and frosting cookies. But life does not respect holidays. If it did then all our funerals would happen around the month of August. Reading the obituaries in the newspaper confirms quite a different story, unfortunately.
As a nation, we have known considerable loss this year and many families will have an empty place around their Christmas dinner table. Forty years ago our nation was in a state of shock and grief when President Kennedy was killed just over a month before Christmas. So this is a message of hope for those who have known loss around Christmas; this is an Easter message to add to the Advent collection.
What words can we offer those who have lost a loved one? Isn’t that the quandary we find ourselves in each time we enter a funeral home to meet with a grieving family? This probing question is a fresh one for me, unfortunately, as I reflect on a recent unexpected death.
Howard was about my age, relatively young. I knew him as a youth in the little country church we attended with our families decades ago. His parents are faithful members of that church to this day, and they raised their several children to be honorable and disciplined. I remember Howard and his brothers all lined up on the church pew beside their father, not daring to misbehave.
Howard’s life went in a direction that was quite foreign to the life his parents knew. He was a good man, and well-respected, but a failed marriage and taking up smoking were experiences that would have been “unheard of” to his parents. What had been diagnosed as pneumonia in September was soon renamed “lung cancer.” His doctor had given him a year to get things in order but then a horrible and quick downward slide began. Howard was dead by the end of November.
One impression I will retain from the graveside service is Howard’s son, seated on the green turf near the open grave. He was leaning slightly forward, with strong drops of tears falling out of his eyes. I wish something dramatic could have happened, such as a bright light suddenly beaming through the trees, but nothing changed the starkness of that scene but all we saw was a startled family seated before a wooden casket soon to be lowered into an early grave. What possibly could we say to Howard’s family to make sense out of all this?
Fortunately the Gospels encourage and guide us in our times of grief. I would like us to turn our attention to a familiar resurrection account in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28. [Read text]
Our Journeys Toward Jesus Will Involve Surprise--Verses 1-4
What I notice about the two women, both called Mary, is that they went to see the tomb, as the text puts it, but something quite different happened than merely viewing a grave. They were in for a big surprise!
There is no proper or magical manner of approaching death, but we must leave the door open for God to surprise us with a different outcome than the one we were expecting. Rather than just peering into an empty tomb, they met an angel, and even encountered Jesus himself. They had an experience of surprise that day, and my prayer for Howard’s family is that they too will be surprised by a good outcome in the season of their sadness. I don’t know what that surprise might be. It may involve a strong infusion of comfort in the months ahead or perhaps someone who heard the Gospel at the funeral will discover Jesus in a living way for the first time, serving as an encouragement to Howard’s family.
The pastor who conducted Howard’s funeral shared an incredible story of resurrection surprise. He had been challenged by a skeptic to prove the reality of eternal life without using the Bible. This was a new concept for the pastor since the Bible is for him, like all Christians, the foundation and anchor of a belief in a life after this life. One day, as the pastor was spending time with a dying golfing buddy, the friend, while drifting into eternity, made a strange statement to his pastor friend. He said, “Your Mom’s name is Harriet.” What was amazing is that the pastor’s friend did not know the name of his friend’s mother. What a comforting surprise that statement was for this pastor who had already lost his mom to death and who was now once again waiting in the lonely corridor of death.
We make ourselves vulnerable to hopeful surprises when we journey toward Jesus in the time of death. The two Marys had no clue what was going to happen to them the morning they set out for the tomb of Jesus. Howard’s’ family do not know what the future will hold for them. They are people of faith, and I am confident that as they reach out to the Lord in faith, they will be surprised like the two Marys were surprised as they visited the Lord’s tomb. And the ultimate surprise is the presence of the Lord himself!
The Surprise of all Surprises!-- Verses 5-9
If it wasn’t enough for a glowing angel to speak to them, what did the women think when Jesus himself greeted them? The text says, “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’” For those who have lost someone close to them it would be a wonderful gift and a welcome surprise to be able to pick up the phone and hear the friend or family member simply say, “Hi____, how are you today?” But an even greater gift than hearing again the voice of a departed loved one is hearing the lasting inner voice of the One who said, “I will never leave you, I will never forsake you.”
Isn’t it somewhat ironic that the voice of Jesus--silenced by his death--became even greater than it ever was after his death? His followers heard his words and more fully internalized them even more than when Jesus was among them. Marcus Borg, in his popular book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, speaks of this phenomenon. He writes, “Beginning with Easter, the early movement continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death, but in a radically new way. After Easter, his followers experienced him as a spiritual reality, no longer as a person of flesh and blood, limited in time and space, as Jesus of Nazareth had been.”
You may sensed it already, that in our discussion of resurrection, we have moved into that territory known as faith. We believe that Jesus is alive and we believe that Howard’s family and other grieving families can find the real presence of Jesus in their time of sorrow and despair. We might even stretch our faith to believe that God will bring something good out of death. That is what faith is about, and although we are at a loss to adequately explain it, we can find it and know it as something just as real as death, and we can even come to the place where faith overcomes our fear of death. Indeed, faith is a mystery, just as life and death are mysteries we have come to accept.
One of the most awfully surprising events of my life was my own father’s death. He wasn’t much older than I am presently and he and my mom were vacationing in Florida when it happened. We were is such shock about it that when my older brother called me about accompanying him to Florida to join my mom he said, “Mom called. Dad had a heart attack and she thinks he’s dead.” He was dead all right, but just too difficult to imagine yet.
Even these many years later I do not possess the reasoning powers to satisfactorily explain why my father died when he did. But for all the uncertainty and disjointedness that came with that harrowing episode, I have, over the years, observed a “resurrection” of sorts that came out of his death. My mother, whose life revolved around my father’s life, found a life of her own. She learned how to drive a car for the first time after the age of fifty. She went on trips and made her own decisions, and began forming more of her own opinions.
While I wouldn’t equate my mother’s social emergence following my father’s death with the event of meeting Jesus, I do believe that just when our lives feel the most like cold and empty tombs, a life-giving surprise can bring us out of our darkness and lead us into a new day. To reach that new day, however, we must lay down our very real doubts and embrace the living hope that Christ provides.
Some meaningful songs have come from the soul and pen of Michael Card. As a student in high school, Michael worked for an ambulance company that peculiarly was also owned by a funeral home. Sometimes he would look at a dead body and think, “There is no way in the world this person is ever going to live again!” I don’t know the details of Michael Card’s spiritual journey, but I know that something more surprising that death itself gripped his life, for he later wrote this beautiful song:
Love crucified arose.
The risen one in splendor,
Jehovah’s soul defender,
Has won the victory.
Love crucified arose.
And the grave became a place of hope,
For the heart that sin and sorrow broke,
is beating once again.
I wish I could say with certainty that by telling you these stories of hope you would be able to summon the courage and determination allowing you to step out of your grief and stroll into God’s new life, like Michael Card. You might even be thinking, “I don’t want a new Jesus! I want my brother... my father...my sister back.” I can understand your feelings, and more importantly, Jesus can understand your feelings more than any one of us. If that is where you are at, then you may not be ready to imagine something good, something surprising coming out of the death of your loved one. So let me simply leave you with a few words that Jesus spoke to the frightened women who came to his grave that first Easter morning. He said...
“Do Not Be Afraid”--Verse 10
Grieving families are capable of holding down their emotions in a remarkable way following the death of a loved one. Some may even resort to comforting others. Something changes, though, at the graveside. An emotional light flickers off. It is as if someone just made a false turn down the most dangerous and unending dead end street. The preacher is almost done with the prepared words, and some of the mourners have already gone home. Now what?
No doubt about it, death, and anything relating to death, brings fear, because death is something we can’t figure out or tame. In our time of fear, it may be a comfort to remember that Jesus wept about the death of his friend, Lazarus and Jesus himself faced death with considerable anxiety.
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary reached a level of fear mixed with ecstatic joy when Jesus himself met them at the tomb and said, “Do not be afraid.” Fear is such a profound and powerful emotion that it can mentally and even spiritually paralyze those within its grip. But for those who hear the words “Do not fear,” and take them to heart, fear can be defeated. A most significant and essential goal for all those who grieve is to get to the place where they say to themselves, “I will not let fear overcome me.” Sorrow will remain over time, but fear is an enemy that must be defeated in order to move on towards a productive life.
Author Judith Viorst writes, “In the spring of 1970, within six shocking weeks, my good friend’s teenage daughter died of an embolism, my husband’s best friend died of cancer at age thirty-nine, and my mother’s heart failed just short of her sixty-third birthday. I lost my fear of flying that Spring--I’ll fly on anything now--for I had become re-acquainted with mortality and I recognize that even if I stayed grounded all of my life, I would still die.”
In the face of the deaths of those we love, we truly can become “grounded” with fear and uncertainty. We may even ask, “Why go on?” Yet in that time of emptiness, if we have the courage to listen, we can hear the Lord say to us, “Do not fear. You think that you have come to the end of the road, but you can make it much further, with the comfort and love that I have to give you.”
Christmas and Easter are festive seasons, with some reverence and quietness added to the celebration. An aspect of both events that we might miss is the ways in which fear could have gotten in the way of the celebration that first Christmas and that first Easter. Joseph, upon learning of Mary’s pregnancy, was afraid to continue his relationship with her, nut the Gospel reports that an angel appeared and convinced him otherwise. The shepherds out in the field were terrified with the appearance of the glory that heralded the birth of Christ. And today, in our Gospel story of resurrection, we find the two women running for their lives from the tomb of Jesus with fear in their hearts--and joy too.
So as we celebrate this season, we also remember those who have less to celebrate this season, the ones who have known recent profound loss. We pray that their mourning will be turned into a surprised awareness of the presence of Christ. We pray that they will hear a strong word of assurance from the Lord saying, “Do not be afraid.” And may this Christmas be a time of resurrection for all of us!
Background Paper of the Sermon
Something I have never attempted before, and something I may never try again, is the blending of two major Christian holidays into one sermon. I found it somewhat challenging to be thinking of Christmas, with all the richness it provides for sermon topics, and also pondering the power of Easter. What compelled me to do this is the unfortunate situation described in my sermon, which is the reality that there are those who must deal with death around Christmas.
Just a few weeks ago, I attended the funeral of a younger person from my past and was also reminded of my father’s passing which occurred about a week before Christmas, 1981. As a family, we had to get through Christmas and then we had to begin a new way of living in the weeks and months that followed.
Actually there are probably many deeper truths to be harvested from bridging the gap between Christmas and Easter. In both seasons we may be more open than usual to surprises and the effect Christ’s presence has had on the world and in our own personal experience. For Christmas, we recall the first appearance of Jesus in this world and for Easter we are drawn into the drama of the Lord’s disappearance--and then his re-appearing.
Matthew, chapter 28, begins with the two Marys going to see the tomb. Was it curiosity, or was it grief that drove them to the tomb? Maybe a combination of both. I think of the wise men traveling to bring gifts to the Christ child as I read of the women bringing quite different gifts--their devotion to Jesus and their determination to not just accept his death and go on with their usual daily lives.
In my sermon I hope to give grieving families a measure of hope, that as they trudge to the funeral and graveside, and as they try and make sense of their loss, that something surprising and renewing can happen to them in the midst of their sadness. Of course, these hopeful developments are not always immediate but happen weeks, months, and even years after the death. Sometimes, they may never happen for some. Enlarging our hearts to receive the presence of Christ in the midst of death makes comforting surprises more likely, however.
Not only does the gospel story include an earthquake, and the descending of an angel who rolled back the stone of the tomb, but at an already highly climactic moment in the narrative Jesus himself appears to the women. Other surprises such as comforting words and cards from friends are helpful in the grieving process, but ultimately what the women needed, and what grieving families need, is to know that there is an ongoing presence that can help fill the void left by the deceased, and Christ can be that presence for them.
Fear takes on various forms (milder or stronger) and it is a powerful emotion that can, as I put it in the sermon paralyze its victims. I do find myself asking, “What does fear have to do with grieving?” And yet, the more I think of it, the more important it is to get beyond that scary juncture when the death of a loved one informs us, in no uncertain terms, that we will never take another step with them in this life. Instead of being held in the grip of that lonesome reality, we who grieve need to hear the word of the Lord. “Do not be afraid.”
This is another point in which the Christmas story and the Easter story may correlate. Luke 1.30 has an angel saying to Mary, the mother of Jesus, “Do not be afraid, Mary,” and here in the Easter account the Lord is speaking the same words to the two Marys. So I ended the sermon with a strong emphasis on the need to hear those words of faith from the Lord during our grief.
