JR. Forasteros - November 19, 2017

The Shadow Self

Good Grief

We build our lives around all kinds of things that make us feel secure, in control or valuable. But these things cannot give us the meaning and purpose we crave. In Lamentations 4, we see God strip these things away from the people of Jerusalem that they might return to worshipping God alone. How can we return to God before our own idolatry ruins us?

From Series: "Good Grief"

We avoid pain and grief as much as possible. When faced with someone else's grief, we avoid or offer platitudes. But the book of Lamentations invites us to sit with grief, to enter into the prophetic process of Lament. In this series, we'll explore how to grieve and how to be a friend to the grieving. Ultimately, we'll see how the process of lament invites us to be agents of healing in the larger world.

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You’ll never hear more bad theology than at a funeral.

One of the most difficult experiences in my pastoral career was in Ohio. A seventeen year old member of our church was killed in a car accident with her friends one night. The whole community was rocked, and as a result, several hundred came to her funeral. As one of the pastors, I stood with her parents in the receiving line, offering handshakes and hugs to mourners before they offered condolences to her parents.

If you’ve ever stood in those lines, you know that’s where people say some truly awful things. Things like, “God needed another angel in heaven.”

Really? God’s so needy he takes children? God can’t just make more angels?

Or, “Everything happens for a reason.” As though any reason is adequate to bring comfort in the midst of grief.

We say those things because we’re not good at grieving.

Other people’s grief makes us very uncomfortable. We feel an anxiety that makes us want to push all that away, to fix it, to do SOMETHING to make everything feel less awkward.

So we offer a cheap platitude because then we DID something and we can LEAVE and not feel like we’re abandoning someone.

Times like right now, when we’re not in the middle of the ickyness of grief, it’s obviously the wrong way to respond.

But what DO we do? How DO we respond to pain (and not just individual pain, but the pain in our culture, in our world)? What is a good, helpful, appropriate response to grief?

We’re going to talk about how to be WITH each other in our grief. To be honest about the pain, to bear witness with each other.

When we can be honest about our grief, we enter into the process of lamenting, which is how God invites us to heal, to grow and to become agents of healing in the world.

Join us Sunday as we learn how facing the pain of grief begins the process of healing.

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