Death
Worshiping God through Our Sorrow
Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow.” It’s interesting that the posture of sorrow is similar to a posture of worship.
Few Christians are familiar with the term “orthopathos.”
We’re familiar with orthodoxy, which is “thinking like Jesus”. And many of us hope to be “orthodox.”
Some of us have heard of the term orthopraxy, which is “acting like Jesus”.
But orthopathos, which means “feeling the feelings of Jesus” is an idea that few of us are familiar with because so few of us believe He actually feels.
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It’s said that we become like the object/person we worship. And when you worship God, you become like who or what you think He is.
Do you worship God as patient?
Do you worship God as just?
Do you worship God as love?
You will eventually become all these things if you believe they are apart of God’s character.
What happens when you see God as immutable … as unchangeable?
What happens when you see God as impassible … as emotionless?
So many Christian traditions believe that God is utterly unable to change and utterly unaffected by emotion. Should it be a surprise that so many of us become unmoved and emotionally repressed?
So, when we say “orthopathos” most Christians think that the “proper way to feel like God” is to feel nothing at all. To never grieve, to never have joy, to never get angry … because the One they worship, the One they are trying to reflect has no emotion Himself.
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The ultimate example of orthopathos is found on the cross. The prophet Isaiah, in what is perhaps one of the more powerful prophetic utterances of the Old Testament writes,
“He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering,
and familiar with pain. …
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities ….
This laying on of the iniquity, bearing of our suffering, this taking of our pain, this familiarity with pain, this man of suffering who took so much of the world’s grief into his heart that it’s recorded in Mark 13:34:
“”My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”.
Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!
This wasn’t Jesus being punished by the Father per se, but Jesus taking the heart of the Father in human form by seeing what God sees, acting as God would act and ultimately feeling like God feels. It was the ultimate act of representing the Father in human form!
And then, I believe, Jesus died, not from the wounds of the cross, but from the wounds of the heart.
Sure, we can begin to understand right thinking, we can begin to understand right action, but who can feel the heart of God and live?
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Why don’t Christians feel sorrow? There’s a couple reasons: 1.) our theology doesn’t allow for it and so 2.), we think it’s unlike our God if we do so.
Wendell Berry’s famed literature character “Jayber Crow” states this:
I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. …. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.
Some of us will feel God’s missional love for the world, but all of us will feel the sorrow of death. And it’s high time that we as Christians believe it’s okay to sorrow. It’s high time we believe it’s okay to weep, for when we do so we aren’t becoming unlike our God; we are, in fact, worshiping.
Should Pastors Preach the Gospel at Funerals?
Yesterday a modified version of my “Why 99.9% of Pastors Agree with Rob Bell … at Funerals” was featured on www.ChurchLeaders.com. That post stirred up a lot of discussion on my website and it’s doing the same over at Church Leaders, where, I was told, it vaulted itself into the Top Ten most read articles at Church Leaders.
It was truly an honor to be featured at Church Leaders and I was so glad for the discussion it sparked!
There’s been a theme in the reactions from pastors to this post (and, I should add, I have the utmost respect for pastors and the work they do). And the theme response is this: “I don’t preach anybody to heaven, nor do I preach them to hell … I JUST PREACH THE GOSPEL!”
Such a response sorta misses the point of the article.
The point of the article is to underscore that pastors will often preach a wider hope during death that contrasts both their attitude towards the lost and their theology. Ultimately, my intention was that they’d see this contradiction and be moved to question both their theology and attitudes in light of the wider hope they have at the funerals of unbelievers.
Yet, not only do some pastors miss the point of the article, I think “Just preaching the Gospel” misses the point of the funeral.
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This is one of the more controversial topics that’s thrown around by families we serve. They ask, “Should we or shouldn’t we get a preacher who preaches the Gospel?”
Some families, even Christian families, are adamant that funerals are NOT a time for the preacher to use the death of their loved one as a platform for evangelism.
While other families are equally as adamant that funerals are a time to “take inventory” of the lives of the living.
Here’s my take on the whole thing: some Christian Pastors (and many of us Christians, including me) are losing touch essentially because we have a dualistic and individualist understanding of the Gospel!
How do I know we’re losing touch?
Because families, that would normally use a Christian minister are turning to other sources.
The Celebrant Movement is taking off, and quite honestly, they do an exceptional job in honoring the memory of the deceased.
Celebrants make the service incredibly community oriented, often bringing memory objects that help spur family and friends into sharing their thoughts and feelings for the loved one.
And that’s essentially what Celebrants do so well … they find a way to involve both the memories and voices of others in the service, creating a collage of memories by the voices of family and friends, all of which produces a great sense of life in the midst of death, as people are laughing, crying, hugging … all during the funeral service.
Some pastors are great at encouraging family and friends to speak (in fact, many in my community are really good at it), but others will take the funeral as a platform in disregard of the memory of the deceased.
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The reason for Pastors losing touch is because their Gospel is out of touch with the present, as it’s so focused on the future.
As I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, we’re more worried about getting the individual soul to heaven than about bringing the kingdom to the world. We’re more worried about getting “decisions for Jesus” than we are about making Jesus disciples who will transform the world now.
In the context of a funeral, part of “transforming the world now” is addressing death as real, our grief as real, acknowledging the sorrow of God over death, and yet planting that seed of hope in the Kingdom come and resurrection.
It’s bringing our memories of this world together with our hope of the world that’s been inaugurated by Christ and is here, but is still not yet.
It’s not about emphasizing sin over grace, or grace over sin, BUT EMPHASIZING CHRIST IN THE WORLD … TRANSFORMING IT INTO SOMETHING NEW!
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Should pastors preach the Gospel at funerals?
Yes.
And no.
The Gospel isn’t about bringing somebody to heaven. It’s about bringing heaven to us. Wasn’t that the Good News … that the Messiah had come to dwell with humanity?
And if heaven can be brought to a funeral, through good memories, love, tears, laughter, correction, and the hope of Christ, than by all means preach it.
To Those Who Would Comfort Me: A Guest Poem
Todd Hiestand is one of my best friends from seminary. I was privileged to meet his mom, Carol Hiestand, at a graduation party, and I shared with her what I do, and she shared some of the story of how she lost her brother.
Carol writes about the following poem and the death that inspired it:
My 49 year old brother (my only surviving sibling) was hunting in the Montana Mountain Wilderness early November 2005 and failed to show up later in the day after what was to be a brief “I’ll meet you down over the hill at the end of that road.” What followed was a 32 hour search and when found, he had already succumbed to hypothermia.
We were in Illinois helpless and praying and hoping. I wrote this a year later, right around the first anniversay of his death.
This poem represents a “Holy Saturday” experience that so many of us go through when we’re in the middle of death.
To Those Who Would Comfort Me
Don’t tell me you know how I feel
even if you have lost your brother!
You didn’t lose mine.
Don’t tell me how I will grieve,
even if you’ve journeyed through grief.
Your grief is not my grief.
Your journey is not my journey.
Instead, let me tell you how I feel.
Then hold me as I weep.
Don’t tell me God is Sovereign.
I know that.
Give me time to believe it once again
for myself . . .
for this time in my life.
Don’t ask me if I’m glad
my brother is in heaven.
Of course I am glad he’s in HEAVEN.
But right now I want him here with me.
And don’t talk to me yet of all the things
he is experiencing there.
I miss him too much for that to comfort me.
Someone wrote:
“For the believer, grief is not
about the one who has died.
It’s about the ones
who are left behind
who must redefine their lives
without the one they love.”
This will take time.
Don’t casually quote Romans 8:28.
I believe that too,
but I need time to internalize it
for myself.
in this situation.
This too takes time.
God, Thank you!
for the people in my life,
who walk beside me on this journey,
allowing me to travel
at the speed I can manage,
And cheer for me when I make it to
another milestone
they knew I would reach all along.
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Death has an odd way of producing silence even when so much wants to be said. Carol did such a great job at putting into words what so many of us feel or have felt.
No One Understands …
Probably one of the more insensitive things you can say to the bereaved at a funeral is, “I understand what you’re going through, and you’ll get through it.”
You don’t really understand.
Maybe you experienced the death of child, or a spouse, or a parent, but each person’s grief is different..
I had the unpleasant duty of picking up a baby who died shortly after birth from the hospital the other day. The security guard and I were talking about what it must feel like to lose a child and we were debating if we would rather lose a child at birth or when the child was older. We decided that we didn’t want either.
He said, “I never really could understand what it must feel like to lose a child until I had one of my own. The thought of losing him would kill me.”
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In Death, No One Understands …
A cliché I hear from young people goes something like this, “You don’t know what I have to deal with … you don’t know what I’m going through … you just don’t understand!”
This statement is particularly true in death.
Relationships are special, individual and irreplaceable. What you have with a loved one is only between you and them and it can never be fully understood by someone else.
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No One Can Understand … Except maybe God.
In some sense, God shares a special relationship with everyone in the world. You could say that each of us, whether we want him or not, are his children.
Nicolas Wolterstoff stated, while journaling about the loss of his son, that the tears of God are the meaning of history.
In other words, the heart wrenching pain that God feels when He loses a son or a daughter is His very motivation to move and change history. You can almost picture God as a wondering and dejected parent looking for his children to bring them back home. It’s a frightening picture.
In some sense, God understands.
A couple years back, a parent who lost his child wrote a poem that he handed out during his child’s funeral. The poem was almost a diatribe against God. He wrote something to the effect of, “God if you knew what it was like to lose a child, maybe you would have cared enough to have spared mine.”
The more we think about God’s experience as recorded in the Bible, there’s little pain He hasn’t experienced.
He’s lost a son.
He’s been rejected.
He’s lost what He called His wife (Israel was his wife in the Old Testament).
Joseph, the husband of Mary, most likely died when Jesus was young. Jesus probably had to financially provide for His mother.
In the end, Jesus was murdered after an atrociously unjust court hearing.
God has been as subject to pain as we have been. Even with His great power, He’s still unable to escape the hurt that is involved with intimacy.
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He Understands and Has the Strength to Help Us
He’s experienced all the effects of sin, all the injustice and pain, just like us; yet, he’s never sinned, very much unlike us. That’s why we can say He understands our pain and yet He, unlike so many others, has the fortitude of character to lead us out of it.
Cheating On Your Local Undertaker
(Preface: If at anytime you are are utterly confused by this blog post, please skip to the bottom and read the postscript.)
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I know who you are. You can’t hide it.
You simply don’t allow my charming smile to affect you. My attempt at small talk is given the cold shoulder. And you won’t even look into my eyes.
You’ve already been taken. You’ve already given your heart to another.
I understand how it is.
Maybe he buried your mother. Maybe he buried a close friend.
And he has your heart. You talk about him like he’s the best thing on God’s green earth … his tender touch; his compassionate eyes, the professionalism he exhibits in that suit have won your hurting heart over. You’ll never bury with another.
It doesn’t matter that my funeral home is larger.
It doesn’t matter that I’m younger.
It doesn’t matter that my services are cheaper.
It doesn’t matter that I’m on call all night long.
You will never cheat on him … after all he’s done for you. You’ve pledged your faithfulness to him.
I understand.
Even if I speak tenderly: “Please sign the register book. And here’s a memorial folder.” But you just look down. Averting your eyes.
I know my voice is tempting you to connect with me, as you raise your eyes and whisper, “Thank you”
Suddenly, guilt envelopes your heart, as pictures of “the one” funeral director who was the last one to let you down start flashing through your mind. “Did I just connect with him when I said, ‘Thank you’? Did I commit an act of unfaithfulness? Did I cheat?”
Oh, I know what I’ve done. I sniffed you out as soon as you entered through the funeral home door. You were afraid to like me. You were sold out on YOUR funeral director and had all but forgotten any other funeral directors even existed. You came to this viewing to see your friend who had just lost her father and you didn’t expect to see me. But, when you saw me you started to wonder … your world started to open up.
I know you have a history with him. I know he treated you well. I could tell by the way you averted your eyes from me and spoke to me so coldly. You’re probably from a neighboring town, close enough that you COULD, POSSIBLY leave the funeral director in your home town and come on over to me.
And I know, that this meeting won’t be enough to entrust your heart to me. But, I can bet the next time you see me, you’ll reciprocate my smile. And the meeting after that, you might return my small talk.
And, our meeting after that might be slightly more personal. You might entrust me with your hardships and pain, and let my tender touch and compassionate eyes ease your pain.
I know what I’m doing. I’m going to be your next funeral director.
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(Postscript: It’s funny how you can tell who’s committed to another funeral director. Like I mentioned, they’ll often give you a cold shoulder. The relationship between a funeral director and their families is like few business relationships because of its personal nature. There’s a real commitment that takes place, and when a family “cheats” (takes their business to another funeral home), it often does feel like they’re personally rejecting YOU! And, I know of a number of funeral directors who play the temptress, and try and lure our families over to their funeral home through different marketing ploys. It’s kinda silly and kinda immature … and, it’s kinda funny.)
