Broadway Christian Church
Columbia , Missouri

Morning Worship
September 26, 2004

Prayer of the Day

God, who is more than we can imagine, we turn our lives for your blessing.  We pray for more understanding, more comfort, more meaning, and more direction.  We wonder if we might, by the power of your love, become even more than we can imagine.  Help us trust your confidence in us.  May it be so.  Amen.

Scripture 
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

“My joy is gone,” says the Lord.  “Grief is upon me.  My heart is sick.  Hark the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land when they say, ‘Is the Lord not in Zion?  Is her King no longer there?’… The harvest is past.  The summer is ended, and we are not saved.  For the hurt of my people, I am hurt,” says the Lord.  “I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.  Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?  Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?  Oh that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for the slaying of my poor people.”

Message
Divine Tears
Kim Ryan

Exactly three months from today, 15 Broadway Christian Church members and relatives will be heading toward South Africa.  Plans, and preparations, and shots (unfortunately) are under way.  This trip has been a long time coming.  It’s been in the process for ten years.

Ten years ago, I was invited the first time to go to South Africa to assist with Bible- study training.  I actually got there because I never quite got around to saying, “No,” to that invitation.  It was so daunting for me to think about flying halfway around the world, being upside down on the opposite end of the earth.  The last three times I’ve gone to South Africa have each been daunting, as well.  As I think about this trip coming up, it feels daunting.

We are calling this trip a pilgrimage into the history and the culture of South Africa.  It will be a spiritual pilgrimage with spiritual companions and with brothers and sisters in Christ when we get there and into that experience and expression of the sacred and the holy of God in that country.

The anticipated traveling companions for that trip will be Chuck and Belinda Davis, Ann Meese, Jennie and Sarah Griffith, Jennie’s sister and her niece, Dave and Gil Gibbons, Audrey Spieler, Mary Jane and Jim Thorne, Melody Freeman, and Gage and Kim Ryan.

Personally, I call this stage of my preparation toward this trip “My Nauseous Phase.”  It all has to do with thinking about flying over large bodies of water.  So now and between the time we leave, I’m right on schedule.  This is consistent with every time I’ve ever gone.  I will be waking up at awful hours of the night, and my heart will be racing, and my stomach will be lurching as I think about it.  But interestingly enough, once I get on that plane, I’m fine.  During the 18 hours of flying time, I’m fine.  When I get off the plane, I’m great.  Well, as great as you can be after flying 18 hours straight.  But I’m OK once I’m on the plane.

The most exciting thing for me right now, beyond being in the midst of the nausea, is the other 14 people who are going to go on this trip, and our preparations together.  We meet monthly as a team.  We watch movies together, and we read articles, and we exchange information and books.  We are getting to know one another and the country of South Africa before we set out on this adventure.

One of the books we have been sharing with each other is a best seller by Alan Paton.  It is called Cry, the Beloved Country.  Perhaps you have read this book, or you have seen the movie.  It is a story of a black African Zulu pastor and his white African neighbor.  It is set in the years before Apartheid became the law of that land and before racial injustice had a firm strangling grip on the heart of the country and the hearts of the people.

Stephen Kumalo, the black African pastor, leaves his small village and goes to the big city of Johannesburg, which would compare to New York City or Chicago for us.  He goes there in search of his son, Absalom, who has left home for Johannesburg and for big-city life.  The family has lost communication with him, and they are worried.  The father is able to find lodging and help in his search, and he begins to trace the footsteps of his son’s activities with growing dread every step of the way. 

It becomes clear the son has been engaged in questionable activities with questionable friends.  The father is always just behind where his son has last been.  The father does not reach him in time, not before he and two of his friends, in the midst of a robbery in a house, are startled by the unexpected presence of the owner of the house.  In that moment of surprise, his son fires a gun and the man is hit and is killed instantly.

Ironically enough, the young man who is killed in the shooting is the son of Kumalo’s neighbor back home.  In that moment, two lives are lost.  It will take a trial and an execution to end the life of Kumalo’s son, but in the firing of that gun, both of those young men lose their lives.  Their families are shattered.  The woman who has given shelter to Kumalo observed his moment of deep grief upon learning of this fatal gunshot.

Let me share with you the poetic words of description:

“But it is saddest of all about the son, and after their custom they have wept and wailed for him.  She and Gertrude [another woman in the house] talk endlessly about it, indeed it is the only thing they talk about now.  The old man is silent, and his face has fallen into a mold of suffering.  But she hears it in all of his prayers, and feels for him in her heart.  And though he sits long hours in the chair, and stares in front of him out of tragic eyes, he will stir to life when she speaks to him, and his smile lifts his face out of the mold of its suffering, and he is never otherwise than gentle and courteous towards her.  Indeed when he plays with [Gertrude’s] child, there is something that comes out of him so that he is changed.  And even then sometimes there is a silence, and she hears the child asking and asking unanswered, and she looks through the door, and he is sitting there silent, alone with his thoughts, his face in the mold of its suffering.”

Those words which captured my eye in that paragraph were “his face in the mold of its suffering.”  Those words went straight to my heart. 

In 24 years of ministry with all of the honor and the privilege of being present in some of the most wonderful of times in people’s lives, I also have had the honor and the privilege of being present in some of the most painful times of people’s lives.  I have seen that “face in the mold of its suffering.”

I knew, in a heartbeat, when I read those words exactly what that woman was seeing on that father’s face.  I’ve seen it.  You’ve seen it.  I’ve even felt it on my own face at times.  More likely, you have felt it on your face.  We know exactly the ache of such a face. 

But today, from the Scriptures of Jeremiah, we are given an amazing glimpse – some would even say a rare glimpse – into God’s face.  Did you hear that in the Scripture reading?  Did you catch that imagery, the metaphor: “God’s face in the mold of its suffering.”  The words that were spoken, “I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.  Oh that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slaying of my poor people.”

Have you considered that before?  The face of God molded in its suffering.  The weeping of divine tears. 

This week I spoke on the telephone with Kim Hull as she is in Denver with her family.  Kim shared with me the particulars of the death of her nephew.  Jacob was 14, and he was playing freshman football just last weekend.  He suffered an injury, collapsed on the field, got back up, collapsed again, and he never regained consciousness.  He passed away on Saturday.

Kim and her Mom drove out there to be with the family.  I will tell you what I said to her on the phone on Monday.  I could hear her suffering in her voice.  I could almost see her face.  I told her, “Kim, there will be a lot of people coming to your family saying things that will be attempts to be comforting, and encouraging, and supportive.  They really want to be helpful.  But there will be someone, at least one, who will say to you that this was God’s will.  In fact, the minister who performs the service for your family may say that this was God’s will.  I want you to know that your minister does not believe that.  I want you to know that I believe God’s heart broke when Jacob collapsed on that field, not once, but two times, and the grief you and your family, and Jacob’s friends are feeling right now is an experience of God’s grief with you and for you.”

Some of you have heard me say this before at funeral services where we have gathered following sudden and rather tragic deaths in our church family.  You may already know that I am indebted to William Sloan Collin, who at one time was pastor of Riverside Christian Church in New York City.  I’m indebted to him for liberating me from the mental gymnastics that we sometimes put ourselves through to make it necessary for us to claim that a tragedy is somehow “God’s will.”

William Sloan Coffin lost his 20-something son in a tragic car accident.  The son had failed to get the windshield wiper fixed on his car.  In the midst of a driving rain, he couldn’t see.  The car went off the road and into a river.  People came to the Coffin home, as people do, and gave words of solace, and comfort, and well meaning.  One woman said what perhaps anyone of us might have said,
”Well, Bill, as a minister, you of all people must know that this is God’s will.”

William Sloan Griffin reports having said to her, “Ma'am, if you think this is God’s will, then you and I know two different Gods.  God’s heart was the first to break when my son’s car went into that river and the dark waters came over him.”

I heard his story probably 15 or 16 years ago.  I will tell you; it changed my ministry.  It changed my life.  It changed the way I see the face of God and the will of God.  It set me free to see the face of God molded by its suffering with divine tears.

Grief is one of the hardest, most powerful, deepest, real emotions any of us will experience.  If we are truly created in the image of God, why would we think that grief was somehow outside of the experience of God?  Could it be that our grief – those moments when our hearts break and our minds ache and we try to make sense of it – is a reflection of God’s grief and God’s deepest love?  What if we allowed grief to be just what it is, a divine and sacred response to tragedy, to injustice, to cruelty, to loss? 

How many of us felt moved to tears for the families in Russia when 325 adults and children were killed?  Now that may have been done in God’s name, but don’t try to convince me it was done as God’s will.

Why do we not allow this feeling to come from the inside of us rather than to force ourselves and guilting ourselves into believing somehow this is God’s will – that this must have been God’s will.  What if we allowed God to be our companion in our grief rather than the perpetrator of the tragedy?

I did some checking this week.  I used a handy-dandy little Bible tool called the “Concordance.”  It lets you look up a word, and you can see where it is in the Scriptures.  I looked up the word “grief.”  Do you know that nowhere in the Bible are the words, “Do not grieve”?  It is not there.  It is not a biblical mandate.  What is there, over 40 times throughout the Scriptures, are the words, “Do not be afraid.”

Didn’t our hearts respond to the choir as they sang those words to us: “You are precious in our sight.  Do not be afraid.”

Now the question that often comes: “If it’s not God’s will, then where is God in this or that?”  I can only tell you what I have seen and heard.  God is somehow present in the selfless generosity of Kim’s brother and sister-in-law who, in the midst of their grief, donated every organ of the son in order that life would continue in the midst of death.

God is somehow present between two women when one says, “I lost my daughter in a car accident less than a year ago.”  And the other one, across the table from her reaches over and says, “I lost my daughter 24 years ago.” And the first mother responds, “You give me hope I can survive this.”  In their hands and in their shared tears is the presence of God.

God is somehow present when communities like this one, like Broadway Christian Church, when we pray for each other, when we cry for each other, and when we hold our breath for one another.  We’ve been holding our breath for two weeks while Andy Thomas has been in the hospital with blood in his brain cavity and no answer to what is going on there.  He’s in ICU.  We are holding our breath for Andy and Margaret and their kids.

God is present in a community like this one when a dollar goes in an envelope to be sent across the United States to people we don’t even know.  It’s a message of hope to them to somehow rebuild their lives, and their churches, and their homes, and their cities. 

And God will somehow be present when 15 people step off an airplane in South Africa three months from now, because we will be welcomed there by a Catholic priest, Father Chris.  Not only will God be present, I will tell you that the spirit of Bob Combs will be present as well.  Because the first time I went to South Africa, Bob sent me off with instructions.

I was to find someone, some group, who would partner with Broadway Christian Church.  Ten years later that partnership is coming to fruition.  Fifteen of us will be there with the community at the retreat center that Father Chris runs.  That partnership would not have happened without Bob’s encouragement and without God’s honoring of that hope.

I want to return to the story from Cry, the Beloved Country.  It is an amazing story.  It’s a bittersweet story with twists and turns of relationship, and connectedness, and healing, and reconciliation.  At the very end, Father Kumalo goes to the mountain near his village, alone in the night.  He spends the entire night there into the morning – the morning his son will die.  He goes to pray, to remember, to weep, and to wait.  Hear this ending:

“He looked out of his clouded eyes at the faint steady lightening in the east.  But he calmed himself, and took out the heavy maize cakes and the tea, and put them on a stone.  He gave thanks, and broke the cakes and ate them, and drank the tea.  Then he gave himself over to deep and earnest prayer, and after each petition he raised his eyes and looked to the east.  And the east lightened and lightened, till he knew the time was not far off.  And when he expected it, he rose to his feet and took off his hat and laid it down on the earth, and clasped his hands before him.  And while he stood there the sun rose in the east. 

Yes, it is the dawn that has come.  The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying.  The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.  The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there.  Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also.  For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing…”

“Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

I believe that is true.  I have heard that is true.  I have seen that is true.  And I have felt its truth.  Thanks be to God.

And we say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

God of Compassion, we thank you for sharing our heartaches.  We thank you for the restoration of a peaceful spirit.  May our spirits rest in the affirmation that you never leave us alone.  In this truth resides our hope.  Amen.