JR. Forasteros - November 29, 2015
Learning to Fly
We don't like to wait. Especially when change is on the horizon, we'd rather just rush into the change. But growing is waiting, and waiting is an opportunity for faith. The journey of coming to know begins with naming our desires. To learn to name our desires, we listen as Jeremiah gave Israel the vocabulary to hope for the long-awaited Messiah.
From Series: "What to Expect When We're Expecting"
The future can be a scary thing – especially because it doesn’t come with a roadmap. But when God calls us, we rarely get all the details. How do we move forward faithfully when we don’t know where we’re going? Advent invites us to anticipate well, to look to our fathers and mothers as they longed for God’s rescue. Their stories teach us how to hope well and move forward faithfully.
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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.
