Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
November 6, 2005 All Saints Sunday
Isaiah 43: 1-3a; 49: 15-16
The phone rings. It is a Rotarian and friend calling. But she doesn’t want to discuss Rotary. Her niece, age 27, has been killed in a car accident. The family doesn’t have any formal church relationship but they need someone to lead a memorial service. Could I possibly do that? Of course, I say yes. I’m honored to be asked. It isn’t that difficult to change my calendar around.
But what is difficult is walking into that service filled two hundred strangers who themselves are filled with grief over this young woman’s tragic death. They don’t know me; I don’t know them. I look at the grieving parents; I look at a mother grieving the loss of her only daughter. I think of my wife and her special relationship with our daughters. I think of my mother who lost a daughter. Old griefs work their way to the surface of my life and now I’m supposed to lead this service? What can I possibly say? Smile, God loves you?
My mind goes to an article by the novelist, Martha Whitmore Hickman, an article which was a reflection on the untimely death of her daughter. Hickman herself was critically ill when she was a child and was not expected to live. But almost miraculously she survived. In the article, she speaks of herself in the third person.
“She is grown now and married, the mother of children – three sons and a daughter. She is a writer, a maker of stories. In the attic is her nativity set, the one her mother gave her when she was ill. Every year she takes it down. Her daughter helps her set it up. It is something they do together. One year her daughter cuts little shreds of paper to replace the thinning straw. They take turns holding the tiny baby Jesus. ‘Look at him,’ they say fondly to one another, smiling.
“Then, one day, her daughter dies.
“Grief immobilizes her, nudges her awake each morning, numbs her into sleep, shades her dreams. When she reaches for her husband, even then, she yearns for the child. She looks in the mirror. Her face is scoured with grief. Behind her hollow, burned-out eyes, she reads another message: You have failed as a mother.
She will rescue the child. Resuscitate her, write her back into life. She writes and writes. Stories about children. Memoirs of loved ones. It is her way of keeping up with her child. Her writing moves through her, saying what it must.
Other young women come into her home – friends of her sons, lovers, in time, wives. She loves them. There is room in her heart for many loves. But one room always remains empty. In the center of that room is a keening sound, like a moan. Often she goes steadfastly past the room. Sometimes, off guard, she is drawn in. Other times she opens the door herself. Inside is a hollowness like the hollowness of her own body, where her dead child once lived. But it is larger than that. It encompasses the whole world where her child once lived.
“She writes and writes. It is the best way she knows to reach out for her daughter, to make something of her hunger, to fill the empty room.
“Her sons marry, so she has other daughters. She thinks of herself as a happy woman – perhaps happier than most. ‘I am blest,’ she says. But in her mind there is always the significant exception. She does not speak of it as often now.
“Every Christmas she puts up the nativity set….She imagines the wise men approaching, searching the skies for a star shining in the east. She remembers how one night soon after her daughter died she stood on the veranda, looking across the valley into the high mountains, searching the skies and wondering, ‘Where are you? Where have you gone?’ She saw a single star slip behind a mountain peak and re-appear on the other side.
“‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ she said to the child’s grandmother who stood beside her. She knows that for the rest of her life she will be looking for her daughter. She expects to find her.”
“There is room in her heart for many loves, but one room always remains empty.” What a powerful, eloquent expression of grief. On this All Saints Sunday, the words of a poet come to mind:
‘Tis a fearful thing to love,
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream, and oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
But a holy thing to love.
For your life has lived in me,
Your laugh once lifted me,
Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
“Tis a human thing, love.
A holy thing, to love
What death can touch.
I stand up to speak. I look out upon the grieving family and friends, I look out upon you this day, knowing griefs you carry, and what can I say? What can I say? I want to say that it is a holy thing to love, to care, to open our hearts to others and let them in. It was Simon and Garfunkel who sang so long ago that “a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.” And they were right. If I never take the risk of loving, of letting another in, of sharing my life, then I will probably avoid a lot of pain. But how much better to have loved. I think of the saints in this church for whom I have cared and cared deeply. I think of the saints in my family – the places at the Christmas dinner table now empty. I think of the pain I felt when they died. But how I was enriched and deepened and gladdened and changed by their living. “Your life lived in me, your laugh lifted me, your word was a gift to me.” So many treasured moments. So I know I don’t want to be a rock. Every time, in the name of love, I choose to risk the tears. I choose
But as Martha Whitmore Hickman powerfully reminds us, as the poet reminds us, there will be tears. “Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” “One room always remains empty.” The people we cherish the most will die or have died. We are unprotected. In our own lives muscles weaken, eyes dim, memories fail. We come to grief and we grieve. What to say, what to say?
For our text today, I chose two passages from Isaiah that actually were chosen by Sara Gerboth to be read at her memorial service, two texts of hope and faith. “Do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine,” and “I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palm of my hand.”
I learned long ago in this business that in time of grief or loss, I have no magic words, I have never found the easy answer that can just make it all well, make the pain go away. Instead I try, in faltering words, to share my faith in this one constant: that there is an all gracious, all caring, all loving hand that can clam the oceans of our tears, warm what was chilled, and will never be withdrawn. “I have called you by name, you are mine.” That promise is sure and that promise is forever.
And therein lies our hope on this All Saints Sunday and indeed through all the days of our lives. It isn’t about us. Our hope is in a God who has come to us, shared our common lot, defeated death, and claimed us – and our loved ones – as God’s very own, in this life and beyond this life. As some of you have heard me say before, for Christians Jesus Christ has opened a great window into the heart of God and revealed there a God who suffers with us endlessly, who loves us endlessly, and who will never let us go. Because this God has intervened, death has no power here. Love has already won. As one colleague has said, “Our hope is not unfounded, it is not wishful thinking. Our hope for the future is based on what we know of Christ in the present…If our experience with Christ has taught us one thing, it is that our God longs to be with us, will do almost anything to be near us and will go to any lengths to have us. That is the story that we recite and celebrate every Sunday here in church...That is the basis of our hope. We are confident that the God who has gone to such extraordinary lengths to be close to us in life, shall not cease those efforts in death...Our hope is that the love of God is stronger than the devastation of death.”
It is a fearful and often painful thing to love what death can touch...to love, to hope, to dream and oh, to lose. But it remains a holy thing, this love. For we are not without hope. In this life and beyond this life, we are held tenderly in the palm of God’s hands. I have always liked this summary by Frederick Buechner: “We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of the mystery. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing. God knows. That is all that matters.”