Some Ways Faith Can Help You In Grief - Vince Brackett

(Please forgive the poor audio quality this week!)

SPEAKER NOTES

Opener

::I’ve been thinking this week about Ben Stiller’s character Chaz from the movie The Royal Tenenbaums.::

The Royal Tenenbaums was directed by a very quirky director named Wes Anderson, who I’ve always been really drawn to. I love his movies and his quirkiness. But many people have totally legitimate reasons for not liking him or his style, so if that’s you (or if you decide to watch Royal Tenenbaums on my recommendation now and hate it) that’s okay we can still be friends.

Flawed though he is, the thing I like about Wes Anderson and his movies is that he creates characters who are over the top, larger than life exaggerations, and then puts those characters in situations that are over the top and larger than life exaggerations, but this is all for the purpose of talking about very normal human experiences: love, loss, failure, friendship, betrayal, family, grief, hurt. All the exaggerations and quirkiness serve to sort of make the very normal, human moments pop.

Chaz, Ben Stiller’s character in Royal Tenenbaums, is a widowed father of two boys after a tragic accident kills his wife, and has become obsessed with the safety and security and protection of his boys as a result. (They are always in tracksuits, so they can be ready to run at any moment in case of emergency.) Chaz is hyper defended and angry toward his family because of his childhood and because he feels like no one supported him and his boys after his wife’s death, but he clearly bottles this all up.

In the climax of the movie a troubled, drug-addicted family friend, Eli, inadvertently runs over Chaz’s boys’ pet dog, and Chaz finally loses it. He chases Eli through a house and two backyards. He seems set on murdering Eli with his bare hands (and in another very Wes Anderson exaggeration, shows like super human strength at one point, demonstrating how angry he is) until ::both Chaz and Eli are exhausted by the chase and collapse next to each other.::

Eli asks quietly, “Did I hit the dog?”

“Yes,” Chaz says.

To which the drug addicted Eli responds, “I need help.”

And then the line that really gets me: Chaz replies, “Me too.”

His outburst is a breaking point for him, all of his defended-ness evaporates, and he realizes that, not so different from an addict, he needs help — to work through his grief and his disappointment. He is failing on his own, and he can’t continue that way. It is driving him mad.

It’s classic Wes Anderson: a totally ridiculous scene, filled with comedic moments, interrupted by something deeply heartfelt and real.

Intro

::Needing help to process grief or disappointment is so human. I resonate with that so much, as someone who has lost both a mother and a brother too early.::

And that’s our topic for today.

Today is our annual Remembrance Sunday, when we set aside a specific service to discuss grief, to remember loved ones lost by people in our community this past year, and to pray into that experience together.

Just to set the stage here: when we talk about grief, some of you here will feel your own griefs tugged. And then some of you won’t.

For those of you who don’t, you have the opportunity to create a safe space for those who do this morning, and for others in your life outside of this community who might be in grief. I wonder if your job this morning as we’re together here is the most important of all because of the healing or comforting impact you can have if you can commit to being present this morning. So I invite you to consider that, and help us create a safe space this morning for those in this community who do have grief to process.

Jumping off of my Royal Tenenbaums inspired idea that working through grief requires help we can’t give ourselves, ::here are a few things I’m currently thinking about…::

Some ways faith can help us in grief

It provides some structure to a reality in life that is hard to know what to do with

• A few years after my mom died, a friend of mine in high school lost his mom, and I felt an immediate desire to be with him in that. His family was Jewish so I got to have the experience of Sitting Shiva with them.
• This is a practice based on a passage from the story of Joseph (of dream coat fame) in Genesis 50 — for seven days, extended family and community come to be with a family in mourning, taking shifts, being there emotionally for the family but also just keeping their household going, insuring everyone eats, providing for their needs.

  ::On Screen:: So Joseph went up to bury his father… It was a very great company. When they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they held there a very great and sorrowful lamentation; and he observed a time of mourning for his father seven days.

• It was deeply sad of course to enter my friend’s home on the two of those seven days when I came to see him. But it was also deeply powerful that so many people from their extended family and community were there, round the clock, in shifts, always with food. This community took sitting shiva extremely seriously, interrupting their own lives to insure this family, the one among them in most need, was provided for. Sometimes my friend or members of his family wanted to be alone, and that was fine, they weren’t forced to be around those sitting shiva, people were just there if they wanted. There were set prayer times throughout the seven days, but most of the time people were just there talking amongst themselves, ready to be activated if needed — to do anything from listen and pray to run to the store for something.
• As I look back on that experience, it was the existence of a tradition or ritual, a community muscle memory if you will, that seems the most impactful to me — a sense of “this is what we do in this situation” just strikes me as so helpful, and so needed. American culture, particularly Millennial American culture, is by and large not instinctively good at traditions and rituals, because we are all such cultural mutts in the age of the Internet — we can learn from and borrow from any cultural source we want to to make who we are. And that’s wonderful, but it can leave us lost in the midst of hard things like grief, when we will need to resort to muscle memory to carry us, and googling “what do I do now?” just doesn’t seem to help all that much.
• So this is something our faith community here tries to provide — a sense of “this is something we can do together to work through grief” — and today is part of that.

It points us to God as a close companion, rather than a distant puppet master

• In particular, faith in Jesus does this.
• Right after Jesus’ disciples suggest for the first time that he is the Jewish Messiah — God himself come to humanity, ::the Gospel of Matthew says this:::

  From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

• What does Jesus immediately pivot to the moment his divinity is recognized? The reality of suffering — This is so key! It is one of the fundamental distinctions of Jesus-centered faith — God is not removed from the human experience, God is deeply invested in the human experience. If you’re talking about a God who is cold, removed, distant, you’re not talking about the God Jesus showed humanity, even if you use Jesus’ name. You just have it wrong in that case.
• In all of the ways faith was presented to me after my mom’s death, this is the thing that most powerfully impacted me and still impacts me to this day. Jesus shows us a God who is a close companion, not a distant puppet master. This is what we will celebrate on Christmas next month - the incarnation - God becoming human — God’s power is not found in being removed from or above the human experience, God’s power is found in the intimate embrace of the human experience — this is what makes the God Jesus shows humanity trustworthy: this God knows the human experience, suffering and death and all, and therefore can guide us through any such experience of our own. It can feel threatening to believe in this kind of God, rather than a puppet master in the sky God, because in this view we can’t escape death and suffering, they are accepted as part of life, and so much of our instinct is to run away from the hardest things of life. That threat can feel so great that much of the Christian Church throughout history has preferred to paint a picture of God that isn’t always very Jesus-like, and ismore “puppet master in the sky God”. But for me, it’s the close-companion God Jesus presented that has consoled me. The puppet master in the sky view of god just sends me down a path of asking unanswerable “why?” questions… the close-companion view of God has helped me experience God’s spirit. My first ever spiritual experiences were after my mom died — I didn’t have any idea “how to pray” but that didn’t matter — being presented with a loving and close god was all I needed. And those experiences changed my life.

It promises us that death is not the end

• Deep in the Ancient Jewish/Early Christian approach to life was a belief in the resurrection of the dead — that at the end of all things all who have died for all time will be raised together, as Jesus was raised - that we will see again those we’ve lost and those who eventually lose us — common notions of heaven today are super flawed in a lot of ways but this belief is one of the things that has informed those notions in a good way — because it offers a wonderful promise and comfort The letter we call ::1 Peter in the New Testament:: has a great example:

  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.

• We see the idea there: in the end, we can all participate in the Resurrection of the Dead that started with Jesus.
• Some years back I attended a Catholic funeral for a friend’s brother, and the service made many references to this promise and hope of the resurrection of the dead, and as I looked around at the family and friends who missed this man so much, it was the first time that those scriptures really moved me. What if death is not the end? The tone with which this idea was considered during this service felt so comforting and kind. I realized all my previous experiences with such messages had been delivered with a trite tone, so they’d never really meant much to me. But from the heartfelt place we were in during that funeral what a wonderful question to consider: what if death is not the end?

It drives us toward a love that strains out our judgments

• You know, I’ve never been to a funeral or memorial service for someone’s loved one in which someone said “It’s too bad my loved one is in hell” Of course not! We look for reasons to believe someone is “at peace with God now” at funerals. I think even the most overzealous religious people, obsessed with judging who’s “in” and who’s “out”, get that it’s totally inappropriate to take funerals as a time to search for evidence of someone’s depravity. The fact that I’ve never heard such a thing in a funeral or memorial service gives me hope for humanity! One of the ways funerals can be so profoundly beautiful is the way they cut through the religious garbage that we humans can so unthinkingly subscribe to in life, judging who is in and who is out, and instead bring us back to an inclusive, grace-centered love. At a meaningful funeral or memorial service, there is no question of in vs out, there is only love for the one we’ve lost.
• It can be, and often is, complicated love, of course. When my brother died, I reckoned with all of the hurts he’d caused me and all of the anger I felt toward him throughout my youth, but the through-line that faith encouraged me to search for was love… and I found it! I was able to hold the negative experiences and feelings toward my brother AND my desire for my brother to be safe in the hands of the love of God for all eternity at the same time.
• That’s a beautiful thing that faith can do for us when we are experiencing grief - God can take even our most horrible losses and ruin their power over us by turning them into something that grows us, matures us, expands our capacity for love and grace. That sort of redemption is incredible.