Loading...Sermon November 1, 2015
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
All Saints Day
Jesus began to weep. John 11:35
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment will ever touch them. Wisdom 3:1
Please be seated.
That October night, I hadn’t stayed up real late. I got a call close to midnight. My mother had died. When the nurses came to check on my parents in their room in the nursing home, they found my mother had died.
I immediately got up, packed clothes and started on the road from Silver Spring, Maryland to Mechanicsburg. Honestly, I don’t even remember packing. I called a good friend who lived in California, where it wasn’t so late and talked to her most of the 1 ½ hour drive.
It was after 1am when I got to the nursing home. The funeral home had already come to take my mother’s body away, so her bed was empty. I spoke to my father just long enough to tell him I had arrived in the area. Then I went on to my son’s home in York. Luckily I had a key, because all of my attempts to reach him and his family by phone had failed. I was just as glad, because I knew they’d be so upset and it would be difficult for them to get back to sleep.
My mother died late Wednesday evening. My youngest brother was still living in New York City, but had an upcoming job in England and was leaving in a few days. Also, when I’m grieving or in a tough position, I become very practical and maybe even mechanical. I spring into action. By that Saturday, we had the funeral and burial. It was a holiday weekend, so I didn’t have work on Monday. I stayed in the area and helped my father figure out what needed to be done next.
Yet, by that Tuesday, I was back at work. Yes, back at work, looking like my usual self.
Yet, I was grieving. I was grieving. I don’t remember much about that period of grief. What I do remember is what happened the next July, about nine months later. It was a Saturday. I got up, looked around my apartment and wondered how it had gotten so messy and cluttered!
Then I realized I had been walking around in a fog for those nine months. Yes, I may have looked okay on the outside, but I was grieving. I was not fully present to everything happening around me.
That’s the nature of grief. It’s something we go through. We live in a culture that expects our grief to be over in 3-5 days, if you look at the time we get off work, if we’re lucky. And various family members are deemed to have shorter grieving times. And for some we love dearly, there is no bereavement time given. My relatives in Italy dress in black for a whole year after a loved one dies. Everyone in the community knows they are grieving.
The first year is especially tough. I have a friend who talks about the first week, the first month, and the first year. That first year you especially feel the absence of your loved one. It’s the holidays, the birthdays, and even just a smell in the air or a meal you cook that reminds you of your loved one. Grieving takes time and there’s no time limit on it. Yes, life goes on and we don’t live in that fog as much or feel the pain of loss so deeply every single day, but we still grieve and there are moments and days that feel especially difficult.
In our grieving, we can be comforted, because we know that Jesus wept when Lazarus died. While our culture may deny grief and expect us to “move on.” We know we find comfort in our faith, which acknowledges our grief and lets us know that human beings have been grieving for thousands of years and crying out to God in our grief and distress.
My mother had a tough life. While her mother was born in this country, her father was not. In many ways she was a first generation American, which added challenges some days to her growing up. In her early 20s, about 2 years after I was born, she was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, or manic-depression as it was then called. In the late 1950’s there was little to do, but to drug her. Some days she’d be manic and other days or times, she’d be in a deep depression.
Luckily, when I was ten years old, she was able to go to the Hospital in Philadelphia and take part in the clinical trials for a new medication, lithium. Wow, that was amazing. And more medications were discovered, which changed life for all of us. Yet, there were still the periods of depression and challenge throughout her life, including at least one suicide attempt.
At the age of 60, my mother fell out of bed one night and ended up having a spinal cord injury. She spent a year fighting a major infection that nearly killed her, having a heart attack, and eventually going into a coma for about 5 months. When she came out of the coma, she had to have a variety of surgery and physical therapy. For the rest of her life, she’d be in a wheel chair and walker.
In addition, all of the medications she’d been on had ruined her kidneys and dialysis treatments had become necessary. She had hoped to get a kidney transplant, because she found the dialysis so difficult, but she was not a good candidate and none of us as her immediate family was a suitable donor.
Many of you can tell similar stories of loved ones. The ups and downs of illness, when a cure looked possible and then having to accept the inevitable fact that there was no cure. Many of you have been and are caregivers of your loved ones, walking beside them in their dying process. Some of you had to face the shock of a loved one’s sudden death.
The ache and the loss never leaves, does it, even if we’ve somehow managed to bury it deeply inside of us?
That’s why we read the Wisdom of Solomon today,
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment will ever touch them. Wisdom 3:1
We are comforted that our loved ones are with God. We are comforted that “no torment will ever touch them.” We are comforted that they are at peace.
Today, though, we touch the place in our very being…in our hearts and souls…where our remembrance of them dwells. We remember the ways they loved us just like Jesus loves us and asks us to love one another. We remember that they were human, of course, with all of their frailties, but we also remember the gifts they gave to us and how they taught us in the faith.
And we sing with joy that they are with God!
Amen
