The End of Life As We Know It (10th Sunday After Pentecost; Lamentations 1:1-7, 10-12; July 24, 2016)

The End of Life As We Know It

10th Sunday After Pentecost
Lamentations 1:1-7, 10-12
July 24, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We have a problem with emotion, and especially with some emotions, and especially in worship. We say it's because we're Midwesterners of northern European descent. We don't get excited. We aren't passionate. We say to our spouses, "Gee, honey, I love you so much sometimes it's all I can do to keep from telling you." Too much emotion is unseemly, undignified, just not for us. That's what we say.

But it isn't really true, is it? Sometimes, when the wind is just right, in the fall, on a Saturday morning, you can hear the cheering all the way from Kinnick Stadium. Okay, I made that up, but you know what I mean. We do emotion just fine when we're in the stands: exultation, joy, disappointment, astonishment, and anger. A wide range of emotions are not only demonstrated but whole-heartedly participated in at a sporting event. Just not in church, not in worship.

This, I think, is especially true of the so-called negative emotions. A restrained joy or a polite gratitude is acceptable. We can sing "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee" and "Now thank we all our God," although I'm not sure that a visitor who didn't know English would be able to pick out the emotions we are singing about. "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love; hearts unfold like flowers before thee, opening to the sun above." Psychologists call the gap between the emotion in our words and the emotion in our voices and on our faces "incongruence." A psychotherapist will pounce on it like a sparrow on a june bug.

But at least we allow these emotions a place in our worship. We may sing about them. We speak about them. Even if we hope they won't leak out where other people can notice.

But when it comes to sorrow our uneasy tolerance vanishes away. We can feel sorrow for our sin. At least we can sing words like, "What thou, my lord, hast suffered was all for sinners' gain; mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain." Again, note the incongruence.

When it comes to expressing full-throated grief, there is no place for it among God's people gathered for worship. We treat some of our experiences--our experiences of loss, for example--as though they were unspeakable, that is, unable to be spoken. We banish them from our shared story.

Why do we do this? I think there are two reasons. The first is theological and the second is existential. The theological reason comes from imagining that the resurrection means that we are not allowed to mourn any more. The Revelation tells us that God "will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. There will be no mourning, crying, or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." [Rev. 21:4] We act as though mourning now, crying now, or feeling pain now are a betrayal of some sort, even though this grief-less future is placed after the end of history.

We somehow imagine that grief isn't really Christian. We don't say that in so many words, but we leave clues to follow: In the church calendar every Sunday is a little Easter and we imagine that sorrow and Easter are not compatible. When John Wesley sent an edited version of the Prayer Book, it included a Psalter, but excluded those psalms he felt were unsuitable for Christian worship. I had a colleague whose church organist refused to play any hymn written in a minor key!

I believe that the flimsy theological reasons for excluding the full-throated expression of grief from worship are really a mask that protects us from seeing something much deeper.

Emotions, strong emotions, are problematic. That isn't the same as being a problem. Problems can be solved, at least in theory. A problematic is built into our reality and cannot be solved, only lived with. What makes emotions problematic is that they cannot be controlled. They are unreasonable. They don't play by any rules. They come out when it is least convenient.

When my Grandma Caldwell died, we took the kids out of school for a few days, and traveled to Ohio for the funeral. I was fine the whole time. Until the next time I made homemade chicken and noodles, a dish she used to make. I boiled and boned the chicken, rolled out and sliced the noodles, assembled it all, brought it to the table, served it around, picked up my fork to dig in, and promptly dissolved in tears.

Tears are anxiety-provoking. They leak out of a body whose boundaries are not secure. What threatens us in grief is that we will start weeping and never stop, that we will simply flow away in a salty stream, dissolved, unmade. What threatens us in grief is the loss of our selves, the death of our egos, that all of the effort we have put into maintaining control over our emotions, so that we don't stomp our feet and shed angry tears whenever we can't get our own way, for instance, will be undone and we will return to the state of helpless infancy at the mercy of our emotions. So we clamp down on them and keep them from leaking out. We damage ourselves rather than risk our loss of control.

Ancient Israel did not have this problem. The psalms that they left to us in the book of Psalms, but also in other places like Lamentations, are a testament to their conviction that anything can be brought to Yahweh. No experience lies outside of their relationship with God. Any emotion can be spoken, if it is addressed to Yahweh.

None of this would be an issue, of course, if life would stay under control. We wouldn't need laments and songs of grief if our relationship with God protected us and kept our lives from being shattered. But that isn't the way life is. When our loss is unbearable and we are overwhelmed by grief, when our husband or wife or child dies, for example, an enormous hole opens under us and we find ourselves cast into an abyss.

Whatever sense we had made of the world collapses under the pressure of deep loss. Our reality changes in an instant and we simply cannot keep up. We wake up at night and we are certain that the other half of our bed is occupied; we can feel their presence in the dark. But when we reach out our hand to touch them, we feel only the other side of the bed, empty and cold. We hear our wife's voice from the living room and feel a thrill that instantly arises and is dashed just as quickly against the reality of death and grief. We see our husband sitting in his favorite chair but when we look again there is only the empty chair and the empty hole in our heart where he used to live. Although they can be frightening, none of these experiences is unusual. If you've had any of them you are not going crazy. You are only trying to accept the unacceptable.

In ancient Israel the collective experience of loss was the exile. They had thought that Jerusalem, Zion as they called it, would stand forever, protected by Yahweh's might and faithfulness. But it did not stand. The walls were breached. The gates were burned. The Temple, that holy place where non-Jewish feet would never stand, was trampled by the jack-booted thugs of Babylon, its utensils stolen to be melted down for the gold, its altar fouled. Life as the ancient Judeans had known it was over, ended forever.

The covenant with Yahweh was in shambles. God had been either unwilling or unable to help them in the hour of their greatest need. If Yahweh did not hear the cries of the people when they offered sacrifices on the altar in the Temple, how would Yahweh hear their cries with the Temple profaned.

Their world had been shattered. Not just the outer world of Zion, its towers and wall, its Temple, and its royal palace, but also the inner world of covenant, the rhythms of week days and sabbath, of holy days and seasons: all of it lay in pieces, hopelessly broken. Nothing and no one could possibly put it back together. It was the end of life as they had known it.

And yet.

And yet they had a song to sing. It was a song of lament, of pain, of grief and loss, of rage and resentment, a song of despair, but it was still a song:

Oh, no! She sits alone, the city that was once full of people. Once great among nations, she has become like a widow. Once a queen over provinces, she has become a slave. She weeps bitterly in the night, her tears on her cheek. None of her lovers comfort her. All her friends lied to her; they have become her enemies. Judah was exiled after suffering and hard service. She lives among the nations; she finds no rest. All who were chasing her caught her—right in the middle of her distress. Zion’s roads are in mourning; no one comes to the festivals. All her gates are deserted. Her priests are groaning, her young women grieving. She is bitter. Her adversaries have become rulers; her enemies relax. Certainly the Lord caused her grief because of her many wrong acts. Her children have gone away, captive before the enemy.

They still had a song. It was hard song to sing. It came only with tearful sobbing. But it was their song. It told the truth of their life with Yahweh without pulling any punches or seeking to remain in control or even respectable.

Not only that, they found that the song they sang, they sang to Yahweh. Even without a covenant they belonged to Yahweh and Yahweh belonged to them. They were in uncharted territory, but that didn't stop them from moving ahead. And when they moved they would move with Yahweh. That is what the people discovered.

Perhaps Yahweh had thought that he could just walk away, lose this recalcitrant people and, after a time, find a new people who might be less stubborn. But Yahweh discovers that this is impossible. What Yahweh discovers is that if Yahweh's people must go into exile, Yahweh must go with them.

The old relationship could not survive the abyss of exile; a new relationship would have to be worked out. What that would be, perhaps, neither God’s people nor even God could see. But they would do it together.

I am convinced that without the ability to speak harsh truth to God the people of God would never have survived. We need this same ability because both in our individual and in our shared life our path will eventually lead us into an abyss in which the sense that we have made of the world will no longer make sense. There are times when only the ability and freedom to tell the whole truth of our lives can make it possible to go on living.

Ancient Israel can teach us how to speak the unspeakable to Yahweh, to sing even when singing is impossible,when have reached the end of life as we know it.

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