1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 CEB Brothers and sisters, we want you to know about people who have died so that you won’t mourn like others who don’t have any hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:13 CEB) Since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so we also believe that God will bring with him those who have died in Jesus. What we are saying is a message from the Lord: we who are alive and still around at the Lord’s coming definitely won’t go ahead of those who have died. This is because the Lord himself will come down from heaven with the signal of a shout by the head angel and a blast on God’s trumpet. First, those who are dead in Christ will rise. Then, we who are living and still around will be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. That way we will always be with the Lord. So encourage each other with these words. Change brings grief. After three years together, we have gotten to know each other, and with my leaving, there comes a whole gambit of emotions. Grief is not just sadness, it covers the entire lot of reactions that are connected with this change. Spiritual director and president of Faith & Grief, Fran Tilton Shelton, defines grief this way: “from the French word greve, or ‘burden.’ Grief is an all-consuming, involuntary response— emotional, physical, social, and spiritual— to detachment from someone or something that gives a person meaning.”[1] I have found meaning in serving as your pastor, and now, with this departure, I am grieving, and I know that you are grieving too. I want to give space in our service today to express our emotions around this separation. I want us to find a place to recognize our grief and that our grief is always tinged with the light of hope, God’s hope.
I want to check in with you. How are you feeling? Now, remember that there are no wrong emotions when it comes to grief, so please, if you feel called, share your feelings in this space… Thank you, I mean it, thank you. I do not want to shock you but everything that you expressed is part of grief. I have seen and heard it from you for the past three months. People have told me they are mad at the Bishop or the United Methodist Church for the reappointment. I have heard frustration about how Community Federated Church had me only long enough to get ordained, and that took a lot of time, energy, and investment from this congregation to happen! I have heard the sadness and the mourning as well because while serving as your pastor we have connected and intersected at big moments in our lives, and now, the next pastor, whoever they are, won’t have that same shared experience. They won’t be the ones who conducted your loved one’s funeral or held your hand in sickness and loss. Some have even sought to go back, to recapture the past, before things got so complicated. Can’t the church just return to having Rev. Cooper or Rev. Kershaw be our pastor again? Some of you might even be happy with the change. This is all grief, and it is all okay! I want to share how I am feeling too. I have an ache in my heart leaving all of you. It feels like we were in the middle of a journey together, and now, there has been this interruption! Being called to a new church in a different state, in a new city, brings a sense of sadness for everything I am leaving behind. That’s not just the mission and ministry we have partnered on but the people, you people that I care about that make it hard to leave. Yes, Redlands UMC in Grand Junction will be an exciting opportunity, and yes, I am excited about the new appointment but also sad about leaving. Our feelings are important to talk about, whatever they might be! We are not meant to hold them in or hold them back. We are supposed to be able to lean on each other precisely in moments like these, so I hope you will do that for one another. Grief is a burden, so how should we bear it better? This morning's scripture reading reminds us that Christians are to grieve, but we are never to mourn without hope. That doesn’t mean we just skip past everything that we are feeling, as “grief is the expected emotion when faced with the painful loss of a loved one.”[2] When Paul addresses the church in Thessalonica, he is addressing a church that is grieving over the loss of loved ones. Some people have died before Christ has returned, and this community is worried that they are gone forever, lost to them for good. Paul writes to encourage them, to tell them that they shouldn’t “mourn like others who don’t have any hope.” Their hope is our hope that our God is a living God and that all of us who belong to him will never be lost. Living or dead we are caught up together in the continual care and compassion of our Lord, so that “the grief of the believer is grounded in and defined by hope.”[3] Today's passage ends with the reminder that we are to encourage one another with this hope. This has a very practical side because when we grieve together, we help one another process these emotions. When we grieve alone we are stuck with our emotions as a constant companion, and we can become numb to their presence. However, numbness does not mean the emotion has gone away, instead, it means these emotions of ours, our sadness, anger, frustration, and everything else will come up at unexpected moments and often directed toward uninvolved people. I cannot tell you how many times in my first couple of years here I stumbled into unprocessed grief— anger and sadness exploding out, disproportionate to what was happening. When you bury grief, it puts it under pressure, and when another weak spot emerges like a new pastor coming in and changing something slightly, the pressure bursts out! This is where the community comes in as we are social animals, and we need to process our emotions socially to keep them from being buried. When we can do that through “acknowledgment, validation, and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing.”[4] When you and I take this weight of our emotions and share it among all the people here, it becomes lighter. Not that it is gone, but it is not quite so burdensome anymore. This sharing can happen in any number of ways. You can lift it up in prayer. When a wave of grief hits you, take a moment to pull aside one of your fellow community members to talk with them and lighten the load by allowing them to accept your emotions and tell you that they are valid. Grief will not be a single moment or season in life as change can leave lasting grief that will continue to echo and sting for a long time to come. It will even surprise you at the most unexpected and inopportune moments. At the same time, there is hope here, as at the end of the day, I am not lost to you nor you to me. At the end of this all, on the other side of glory, we will meet and worship God together again. Today, I want to leave you with something, a simple prayer to help you share your burden with one another and with our God who is always with us. Let us share a breathe prayer, together… [1] Fran Tilton Shelton, The Spirituality of Grief: Ten Practices for Those Who Remain (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 17-18. [2] Karoline Lewis, “Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Commentary on 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18,” Working Preacher, November 9, 2008, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-32/commentary-on-1-thessalonians-413-18-3 [accessed May 28, 2024]. [3] Ibid. [4] Sobonfu Somé, “Embracing Grief: Surredering to Your Sorrow Has the Power to Heal the Deepest of Wounds,” http://www.sobonfu.com/articles/writings-by-sobonfu-2/embracing-grief/ [accessed 5/31/2024].
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