The Weeping Christ
June 26th Memorial Service
Sermon by Pastor Seth
The smell of anointing oils have long since succumbed to the scent of a body letting go, the linen wrap now collecting a thin layer of dust like an offering from the earth gently embracing the stilled form beneath it, a reminder of our beginning — dust cradled in the creative palm of God’s loving hand coming back home. It’s quiet in the womb of rock encasing the one now at rest, settled and secure behind the stone.
It’s too late; Lazarus is gone.
It’s been four days since his passing. A bereft Martha stands up and takes leave of her sister Mary and the company of mourners who have come to console them as they grieve the loss of their brother. Walking down the road, she meets Jesus upon his late arrival in Bethany, and Martha has some words.
“If only you had been here,” she laments. “My brother would not have died.” There is a heaviness to Martha’s longing for things to be different, confusion and frustration claiming her in the grips of her sadness.
“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus responds. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
There is a certainty and confidence to Jesus’s claims here in the passage preceding our scripture for this week — a solace to his words, engendering the hope of belief in him amidst the despair of loss. Upon hearing Jesus’s reply, Martha professes her faith in him: a seemingly stoic Christ with grand spiritual statements keeping his feelings in check and under control in the wake of his friend’s death. Something shifts, though, once Mary herself ventures out of the house to go meet Christ with the company of mourners in tow — an encounter that leaves Jesus no choice but to confront his own grief.
SCRIPTURE: John 11:30-35
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, remarks, “Beyond the crazed hunger in our culture to be exceptional, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world…We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief.” Having spent decades working with individuals navigating loss, steeped in his own personal familiarity with it, Weller has spent a career tending to the messiness of mourning — the winding, rolling terrain of denial and acceptance, confusion and numbness, despair and anger and everything else that breaks through our heart’s barriers in the face of death and dying.
“Grief punctures the solidity of our world,” he says, “shatters the certainty of fixed stars, familiar landscapes, and known destinations…We worry that this house of sorrow will be our final resting place, that our days will always be overcast, gray, and dulled by the sadness we carry.”
As a society, we are uncomfortable with grief, especially the expression of it. It makes sense. Feeling lost in the wake of loss and the full weight of overwhelm is a harrowing journey to make and be witnessed by others. Some of us try desperately to cling to what we can if we can at all — encouragement, distraction, clichés, life rafts to help bypass the murkiest of waters that threaten to drown us. We claw at hope in the hereafter — a see you later rather than a goodbye, they are with God now, death is not a period — because it is impossible to reconcile that they are gone from our lives.
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