A Pastoral Letter to a Grieving Church

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Dear Beloved Ones,

The life of a church, like human life, is unpredictable. Things happen that no one was expecting and the collective body of Christ is left to deal with them. What is that quote about best laid plans?

I had planned to begin a series of meditations on the Kingdom of God. It is an important one right now. We have Christian nationalists calling for an American kingdom of God. But they get the kingdom all wrong. An American kingdom of God, or Russian kingdom or Chinese kingdom, can never be the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom defies any qualification of nation or singular people. A particular nation in front of God’s kingdom is an oxymoron, a contradiction that makes the kingdom of God kaput. Anyway, that’s all I’ll say about it this morning.

Why? Well, because that question of why? is so predominant these days amid so much grief, grief that this small body is enduring. 

Unexpected tragedies, deaths and terminal illnesses, a long winter filled with sadness and suffering. And that’s only within our church community. Add the political context that has so many worried and despairing, beyond concerned. I cannot avoid speaking directly to this reality this morning, a morning that began with a lovely sunrise through the baren wintry trees that surround my backyard’s view.

Why? Why all the suffering we see? Why all the sudden losses? Why all the unrelenting sorrow? Why all the chaos in the world?

Maybe you find yourself asking, why, God? Why? If you love us, and I believe you do with all my heart, why allow all this pain and heartbreak? Why take the tenderhearted among us? Why do the good die before we are ready, yet those who ignore the good live long lives? Why does your world heave with such inhumanity and hardship? Why?

Then I ask myself, why am I so angry? Why am I heart-sick? Why am I asking such questions?

I'll be honest. I can’t help it. I need to express my pain. And God can take it.

There are no easy answers. That’s just as clear as my need to ask the question. People across the generations, people much smarter than I and holier than I, asked these kinds of questions and found no answers. I can’t expect to. 

What I keep coming back to, and which makes the most sense to me, is this: God loves us so much, God loves the world he created so much, that to control the world and force it to defy the laws of nature with all its randomness would contradict that love. Love does not control, cannot control. Love creates, then loves what is created. That's it.

Imagine a painter who paints a universe. It is a masterpiece. Imperfectly perfect. It required one big update 2,000 years ago, an update that involved a cross. But it is a masterpiece that is imperfectly perfect. And the painter knows it. She loves the painting. She loves it so much that to change it in any way, to change it, to make it perfectly perfect, seems unspeakable. How can an artist really love their masterpiece if she is always seeing ways to change it? How can an artist really love their masterpiece if she comes to that masterpiece always with the intention to tweak the painting here and there? If you love something just the way it is, if that love for the painting is unconditional, changing it would be unfathomable. 

Instead, the artist spends time with the masterpiece, adoring it, being moved by it, being moved by the full panoply of the earthly experience, the good, the not-good, the joyful, the sorrowful, the heart-filled moments and the heartbreak. Being moved by us human beings, the pinacle of the masterpiece. The artist enters her creation’s world, enters our world, and simply and lovingly sits with us, reminding us that she loves us no matter what.

The artist, the Creator, interacts with us as pure love, and her superpower is her love. 

God declared our world good. God through Christ assured its goodness and its ultimate good end.

Goodness and suffering do not contradict. I can’t explain why. I can’t explain why I love my wife and my son so much. I can’t explain why that love makes my life good, good beyond measure, though I know they and I are not forever on this side of heaven. I can’t explain why we cannot have love without loss. But I do know the beauty and power of love is worth the cost of loss.  

God knows this. God suffers the same fate. God sees the suffering that is innate to the masterpiece he created. God cries with our tears. God is in our tears. Maybe the living water Christ said he was, maybe the living waters are the human tears he and we cry. 

Until we love despite the cost of loss and its flood of tears, we do not really live. 

Our tears of loss, they prove we are alive. Our tears of loss, they prove that in this life we love souls so much that it hurts. And this kind of love, without it, life would be meaningless at best, a long death at worst. 

Let me close with the words of that Psalmist who knew the cost of loss but chose love. David wrote,

Weeping may linger for the night,
    but joy comes with the morning…

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
    you have taken off my sackcloth of grief
    and clothed me with the joy of life,
 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
    O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

In the Care & Compassion of Christ,

Rev Don

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