Lent 2 C Grief

Lent 2C March 17, 2019 Grief

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

The last parish I served full time was Redeemer, Shelby, west of Charlotte, 1980 to 1989.  Redeemer recently called a new rector, the Rev. Caroline Kramer, from Christ Church, Ponte Vedra Beach, south of Jacksonville, Florida.

Lucy and I left Shelby with some unresolved grief. Between 1983 and 1988 we had lost all four parents to death, and that small parish grieved the untimely deaths of two young mothers – Florence Schwartz to cancer and Diana Macintosh to a tragic automobile accident on the way home from her grandmother’s funeral. Diana’s children were staying with friends in the parish and one of the hardest things I have had to do was to wake those children and tell them their mother had been killed. It was a second marriage and after the funeral the children had to go back to South Carolina to the biological father they had fled.

We all live with some kinds of grief and loss. I’m feeling some grief as Pat and Paul Hobart leave us after 20 years to go back to live in Wadsworth, Ohio, south west of Cleveland. And in today’s gospel Jesus expresses his grief over Jerusalem and its continued refusal to receive God’s love and God’s word revealed by the prophets. The first part of the gospel reading, the warning of Herod’s plot, we read only in St. Luke. Herod had murdered John the Baptist and killed many others he thought were a threat to his rule. Jesus is a man of courage; he continues his ministry of healing and justice. But he knows his ministry is not in Galilee, but to all God’s people, and he must go to Jerusalem. Jesus grieves over Jerusalem. In St. Luke’s gospel Jesus expresses his grief toward the end of his ministry in Galilee. In St. Matthew’s gospel (23: 37-39) Jesus says this in the Temple toward the end of his controversies with the leaders of the people. In St. Luke Herod plotted to kill Jesus because Jesus was a threat to his rule. In  St. Matthew the leaders of his people plot to kill Jesus because Jesus was a threat to their rule. We try to ignore Jesus, try to kill his influence in our lives, because Jesus is a threat to our self-rule. We are not autonomous rulers of our lives if Jesus is Lord.

We grieve our losses; we grieve losing friends and fellow parishioners when they move, when they die, when we can’t see them anymore. We grieve losing family members to death; we grieve the loss of their companionship, their expressed love for us, the opportunity to express our love for them. And in our reflective moments we grieve our sins, the things we have done and left undone that we have put in the way of God’s love for us and our love for God.     

We are forgiven sinners. By God’s grace in Jesus’ sacrificial death we receive God full and perfect forgiveness. We share in Jesus’ resurrection. Each day we have a new life. By God’s grace we can truly say, “Blessed is Jesus, who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Fifty years ago Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born Chicago psychiatrist, wrote of her experiences with terminally ill patients as they faced death and dying. She identified five spiritual and psychological stages through which they passed. They are tools to help us deal with my own griefs.

The acronym for the five stages of grief is DABDA, DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. They form a framework, a vocabulary to help us name what we feel. They are not stops on some linear timeline of grief. We cycle around through these feelings, each of us in our own unique way.

Denial helps us survive loss. We go numb, and we wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. God’s grace in denial lets us absorb as slowly as we need to. As we begin to absorb  reality, we can begin to heal. We can begin to feel our feelings; we can begin to recognize our continuing relationships.

Anger is part of the healing process. We live in an unjust world, a world of sin and death. Life is not fair, not just, and we sin, and are sinned against. Anger is an expression of fear, and it is also an expression of the strength of our feeling of love.

Bargaining is central in grieving loss. We get caught in feelings of  “If only…” or “What if…?” Feelings of guilt and shame come with bargaining. We want to make promises we know we can’t keep to relieve the spiritual and psychological pain we feel. God loves us as we are. We do not have to do anything more than open our selves to accept the free gift of God’s love and acceptance.

Depression.  When our bargaining doesn’t work , we may feel empty and depressed. Depression is a normal and appropriate response to loss. Sometimes depression feels like anger turn in on ourselves. Depression seems to absorb all our energy.

Acceptance.   But winter passes and eventually the sun comes out. We don’t cease to grieve, but we learn to live with the new reality. We can begin to feel bits and pieces of new life, new energy, new enjoyment, new relationships, a new understanding of God’s unconditional and everlasting love.  It takes time to come to acceptance. Frequently we cycle through grief again, and again. But in God’s good time we can come spiritually and emotionally to the good place to which Jesus calls us. We do come through Lent and Holy Week to Easter, to the place of saying, “He is risen!” We begin again to see Jesus at work in our lives and we begin to be able to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, DABDA.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”