TEARS AND JOY, TOGETHER
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; John 12:1-8 By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper
March 25, 2007
These are the words of Drew Cameron, talking about his friend, Specialist Jose Perez, of San Diego, Texas:
I’d just like to talk about my friend Jose Perez. He was the guy I served with when I was in the Army. He was a Specialist and he was killed in Taji, Iraq in May of 2003. He was a Medic attached to our field artillery unit. I served with him for a number of years before we got went over there. Jose was the kinda guy who would give soldiers who didn’t have a car because they didn’t have enough money a ride to work. He is the kind of guy who would go out of his way to do a friendly deed. He was the kind of guy that you’ll hang out with in a beat on the weekends.
It’s a really unfortunate thing because this is a guy who really believes in his job as a Medic. He was the one tasked with taking care of us. You know he was the guy you could lean on when you had any sort of issues—like you needed IV ‘cause you were dehydrated. Or you needed something because you got injured. He believed in that and he really worked to his fullest to make that happen for us.
He was 22 years young and just like all of us sent over there, you know, kids. He’s from Texas, we lived in Oklahoma at fort Sail. And we all miss him.
Monday, March 19th, was the fourth anniversary of our war with Iraq. It was raining hard. Seventeen of us, old and young, men and women, gathered under the roof next to Errol Stephenson Hall to remember the ones who have died or been injured in that war, American and Iraqi. Three people read the names of soldiers from Oregon who have died in that war. Marcia and little Mary Louisa read the names of a few of the Iraqi civilians who have died there as well. I read short reflections on war and peace, quotations from the Bible, from history, from poetry. Luther Sturdevant, a retired United Methodist pastor who lives down the street, read short passages written by friends and family members of Americans who have died in that war. The stories brought tears to our eyes and sorrow to our hearts. We cried and sang, over and over, the words of the World Peace Prayer:
Lead us from death to life, from falsehood to truth, from despair to hope, from fear to trust. Lead us from hate to love, from war to peace. Let peace fill our hearts; let peace fill our world; let peace fill our universe.
And we hoped it would make a difference, in our hearts and in our world.
Tuesday, I talked with a woman who had not come to the event. She felt bad, she said, “But it hurt too much. I know that the vigils and all are about breaking us out of our apathy, but I just can’t do it. I turn the radio off when the news comes on. I just can’t listen.” Not because she doesn’t care, but because she cares so much. Like several of you, she loves someone who future winds through Iraq. Mention of the war brings her to the edge of her deep pool of tears, the one that sits right next to her, all the time, the pool of fear and worry and dismay and wrenching anguish that threatens to overwhelm her at any moment, if only she were to let it. A dozen of us are taking a Lenten journey together, in the form of a study, the Way of Transforming Discipleship. The author, Trevor Hudson, has been a pastor in South Africa during its profoundly wrenching movement from apartheid to constitutional equality. In the process, he has learned that nations, as well as individuals, each have their deep pools of tears, the pains we each sit beside but fear to enter, terrified that they will overwhelm us. Hudson writes:
Befriend your own pain; don’t run from it. Addictions result from covering up or running from pain. We do anything to keep the pain away and then wonder why we feel so dead. Whatever is in your pool of tears, befriend it. Find a wailing wall. And let your pain find its voice. God calls us to attend to our pain. Often it is there that we find the seeds of our own calling in the world. We see this so often around us. the recovering alcoholic reaches out to another alcoholic. The person who has lost a child reaches out compassionately to another parent who has lost a child. Parents of a mentally handicapped child reach out to others who have this experience. Through our own pain God speaks and often gives a sense for what God wants us to be about in this world.
We can dare to do this, Hudson claims, because we worship a God who meets us in our pain, who groans for and with all the suffering in the world. Think of it this way: we worship a God who groans. God, who has created us for joy and health, all of us together, groans like a deep rumbling running through creation, anguished by our wars and sufferings, by our brokenness and addictions. God wants more for us, wants better for us. God is there, to meet us in the places where we feel bereft and hopeless, to hear us and cry with us and hold us and lead us into our own visions of wholeness. God sits beside our pools of suffering, waiting for us, ready to take us into arms of love, ready to hold us and heal us. We are frightened and shy away, but God knows that it is in those scary places of greatest pain that we will also find our greatest peace and meaning.
Do we believe that? Isaiah told us, in our reading today, “Thus says the Lord, . . . Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Do we read this only for historical reasons, or do we believe that it could be possible, that God could be planning, right now, to do a new thing, maybe even through some of us?
In 2001, the same year that I came here, a United Methodist pastor in Washington, Karen Dahmen, wrote to her bishop that she was in a committed relationship with another woman and that they were raising a son together. The bishop believed he had to bring charges against Karen. She was tried and the trial court, made up of clergy colleagues from her own conference, acquitted her. Some of you followed her trial in the news when it happened. I was asked to write a reflection on her acquittal by the United Methodist News Service. I prefaced my reflection with just those words: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Some of the people who responded people who opposed what I was saying, deeply resented that I would use those words to describe the movement of God in our times, in these issues. to me, they were deeply truthful, and words of enduring hope, words that tell me that God is not simply a God of history, but a God of now, a God who hears our groans of pain and comes to meet us in our deserts, who sits beside us and holds us until we can imagine ways to open up, creating pathways, rivulets and streams that turn our deep pools of tears into rivers that can water our deserts and bring forth new life. We are living in that desert: we see the life blooming around us. How then can we not believe that God can do this? For real, in our lives?
We read a prayer this week, a prayer printed on an insert in your bulletin. Would you take it out, so that we could read it together, a prayer for each of us and all of us together?
God, we know that you are a joyful being. We know that as you embrace the beauty of this world, in your joyful heart there is a place of deep suffering. We want to stand with you. God, give us the gift of ears so that we can hear the groan of creation in all its vastness, of the trees and of the rivers, of the mountains and of the air. The groans of the animals that you have given us and the groans of our brothers and of our sisters outside our little bubble. Gove us ears to hear and to listen. Lord, give us the courage to face our own pain. We all sit next to our pool of tears, broken relationships, addictions, darknesses that don’t seem to go away, an aching loneliness, a deep grief. And sometimes when our mouth is wide with song, people do not know that we cry. Help us, Lord, to befriend our pain and to know that in that place you meet us, to weep and to grieve with us. Help us somehow to live beyond our pain. Call us forth, Loving god, and may our pain become a gift that we offer to others. Lord, we want to hear your intersession. We thank you that you are praying for us. Even in those moments when we seem prayerless, we are never prayerless, because you are always at prayer within us. Help us to hear your deep intersession for this world and give us the faith and the courage to respond. Amen.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, the Psalmist wrote, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. . . . Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
Yesterday, many of us gathered here to remember the life of Rae Rosenquist, to grieve and to laugh, to cry and to celebrate. Today, we sit in the presence of the sheaves of laughing daffodils gathered for that event, a constant reminder that even in our tears we are ever so near to the joy of a God who loves us, all of us, with a startling and boundless love that is so much bigger than any pain. May we never forget. Amen.
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