VIDEO EHS Intro Week 5

Transcription

1 Theme: Begin the Journey to Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Enlarge Your Soul Through Grief and Loss Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 at First United Methodist Church, Durango Scripture: Matthew 26: Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, Sit here while I go over there to pray. 37 He took Peter and Zebedee s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. 38 He told them, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me. 39 He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine. 40 Then he returned to the disciples and found them asleep. He said to Peter, Couldn t you watch with me even one hour? 41 Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak! 42 Then Jesus left them a second time and prayed, My Father! If this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done. 43 When he returned to them again, he found them sleeping, for they couldn t keep their eyes open. 44 So he went to pray a third time, saying the same things again. 45 Then he came to the disciples and said, Go ahead and sleep. Have your rest. But look the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46 Up, let s be going. Look, my betrayer is here! VIDEO EHS Intro Week 5 Enlarge Your Soul Through Grief and Loss I want to invite you to take out of your bulletin your Message Notes, this sheet of paper folded in half. You find the title of the sermon on top and then a number of highlights from the sermon today that you may want to refer to. I believe the Holy Spirit has something it longs to speak to each of us so if you hear something today I hope you will write it down and take it with you throughout the week. We also have books that go along with this sermon series you can find in the Atrium. Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 1

2 You will notice there are no Meditation Moments in the bulletin and that is because we want each of you to have this Day by Day devotional for this series and the season of Lent. We have plenty as you leave today so if you did not get one last week I hope you ll take it one with you today. I think you will find it to be a blessing in your life to spend some time with God each day, cultivating a relationship that can be sustaining. We are in week 5 of a sermon series on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality as part of the season of Lent, the 40 days and 7 Sundays before we get to Easter. The intent of this series has been to go deeper in our faith and ask ourselves how we can get our interior life and faith and belief in God to match our exterior in terms of how we live and act in the world. The big idea of this series is that emotional health and spiritual maturity together unleash a revolution. Each week is meant to be very profound and deep because the topic of our spiritual lives and emotional maturity are inexhaustible. Our theme this morning is, Enlarging Your Soul Through Grief & Loss, and the key word here is enlarge. The reason this is so important is because from the moment we re born we are going through loss. You may not remember, but when you left your mother s womb that was a loss. There is shock as we move from being enclosed in this warm environment to being out there in the open air. And one day we will lose everything. Each of us is headed to a moment when we will be like Job and we will have lost all of our relationships, all of our health, and all of our possessions and achievements and we will stand before God utterly naked, having being stripped of everything. If we are honest, all of life is one of going through a series of losses and nobody is exempt. Every night you shed a layer of skin or two! Wouldn t it be great if we could lose weight that way, but just going to bed and waking up 10 pounds lighter? The reality of loss is a critical issue of spiritual maturity and discipleship and we find throughout the scriptures. It is not possible to grow into maturity as a disciple of Christ and grow into a mother and father of the faith without dealing with the issue of grief and loss and allowing it to enlarge our heart. In a very real way, loss leads to wholeness. Loss leads to depth. Grief and loss lead to an ability to be free in life and truly engage life. Through loss we learn to let go of things that we need to let go of and our souls grow and are changed. Every family, culture and race has a different way of dealing with grief and loss. The challenge for all of us is to do it God s way so we Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 2

3 can be healthy and grow into the people God longs for us to be. We find this truth in the scriptures as two-thirds of the Psalms are grief songs or laments to God. The Book of Jeremiah is filled with laments and grief expressed to God. The Book of Job is and epic poem of Job s struggle with grief and loss. In fact, some of the first words out of Jesus mouth as he began his public ministry are these: Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Today we are going to look at Jesus and how he deals with grief and loss. Jesus gives us a model of what it looks like for us to be fully human and engage our unavoidable human condition in which we experience grief, loss and sadness. The text we have before us today is meant to melt and move us. I was at the Garden of Gethsemane last year about this time. The Church of All Nations is built on top of the rock tradition says Jesus went to when he prayed. GRAPHIC 1 GRAPHIC 2 GRAPHIC 3 GRAPHIC 4 Garden Olive Trees Exterior of Church Interior Church Ceiling Interior Church Rock of Agony We are going to read it together and I encourage you as we read it to enter into the passage. Try to imagine yourself there. We begin Matthew 26, verse Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, Sit here while I go over there to pray. 37 He took Peter and Zebedee s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. 38 He told them, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me. 39 He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine. 40 Then he returned to the disciples and found them asleep. He said to Peter, Couldn t you watch with me even one hour? 41 Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak! 42 Then Jesus left them a second time and prayed, My Father! If Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 3

4 this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done. 43 When he returned to them again, he found them sleeping, for they couldn t keep their eyes open. 44 So he went to pray a third time, saying the same things again. 45 Then he came to the disciples and said, Go ahead and sleep. Have your rest. But look the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46 Up, let s be going. Look, my betrayer is here! Verse 37 tells us that Jesus became anguished and distressed. The word anguished means sad or depressed or sorrowful. If you have ever struggled with depression then know that our God knows what that feel like as Jesus struggled here in the Garden at Gethsemane with sorrow, depression and a deep, deep sadness. Jesus is also troubled and severely distressed. Jesus also says it very clearly to his disciples in verse 38 when he says, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. In verse 39 we are told that he falls face down on the ground and prays. Our physical position and our posture before God says something about what s going on spiritually inside of us. If we re kneeling or if we re standing or if we re slouching all say something different. Here we find Jesus flat out on the ground, crying out in prayer. The picture is one of brokenness and being empty. He has nothing to hold onto but God at this point. Luke says in Chapter 22 that Jesus is in such anguish that he prayed so earnestly that sweat is like drops of blood fall to the ground off him. This is supposed to shock us. Have you ever been overwhelmed to the point where you just flat out have nothing left? In the days ahead Jesus will feel cut off from God. He s going to experience and taste hell. As he considers becoming sin, he who knew no sin, he is overwhelmed with grief. Think of every sin that s ever been committed in human history, from genocide to rape to incest to war to murder to lies to broken promises. He s drinking the whole cup. Jesus is looking at this loss and the cup in front of him and he is overwhelmed, saddened, troubled, and anguished. Don t forget that he also is experiencing the loss of His friends. Even Judas was close to Jesus. They spent three years developing a friendship. Judas is going to betray him and Jesus knows it. His eleven disciples whom he has served, loved, washed their feet, taught them, been patient with, will all abandon him and deny they even know him. They re all going to desert him. Israel, the nation he loves Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 4

5 and that gave him birth, God s Chosen People, is going to desert him. The world he loves is going to crucify him, and do it all in the name of God, which is who he is in the flesh. What a mess. What s incredible about this passage is that it refers to Jesus being handed over to authorities. In a very real sense Jesus is letting go of control. He s being handed over. If I was a Matthew, Mark, Luke or John I might be tempted to cut this part out of the Bible. This is not your typical superhero, like in The Incredibles. I would want Jesus to be strong, a conquering Messiah. I would have cleaned Jesus up for this passage and made him look better. Have you ever seen that movie Charge of the Light Brigade or The Alamo? You know, just something heroic is what we want to see. Polycarp was an early leader in the church and in 167, at the age of 86, he refused to burn incense to the Roman Emperor. He said, "Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior? Bring forth what thou wilt". He was martyred for his faith and as they were lighting the fire around him, being burned at the stake for his faith, he yells, Let it burn! Light the fire! Why do you delay? Tradition says that the flames did not touch him and so he was pierced by a sword and bled to death. Now that s a hero, right! Jesus gives us a different picture of one who is fully God AND fully human as he lays face down, praying in agony. The early church struggled with this passage and tried to minimalize it but we are meant to feel the full weight of Jesus sorrow and loss. What s so heavy about this passage is Jesus wants this to be postponed or he s looking to God, asking if there is any way out. Is there another plan? Can you get your will done some way with me not having to drink this cup? If it is possible, please do it! Notice that Jesus goes to pray this same prayer three times. One of the important messages for us to catch in this story has to do with the fact that Jesus prayer is NOT answered. If we think Jesus is going to always give us health, wealth, and prosperity and have all the bad things removed from our lives then this passage shoots a hole right through that theory. It is important here to notice is that Jesus does not get his miracle. His prayer is literally, If it s possible let s get salvation of the world some other way, can we do that? If we think a miracle is getting our own way or a miracle is going to look a certain way, then this passage shows us something radically different. In fact, we re not God and we don t get all our miracles either, and neither did Jesus. Jesus is teaching us and modeling for us a whole new way of being a human Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 5

6 being. What does it mean to be a human being on Earth? In this moment, Jesus is fully human AND he s fully God. In the middle of his fervent prayer he recognizes that God s divine will must be done and not his human will. This passage brings us to a very important question for us as follows of Christ. How do we live in such a way that as we walk through loss and grief our soul is enlarged and not constricted? There are numerous ways we can walk through grief and loss and really experience them and Pete mentions two of them in his book that are really helpful. The first is this. Listening to the Interruption of the Grief verses Not Listening Every time a loss comes into our lives they interrupt our plans. I don t know about you, but I ve got plans, and my plans do not include suffering, grief, and loss. Every time a loss or grief or suffering comes along, my first response is most often, Get this out of here! For most of us, when we experience a big loss or grief, our tendency is to ignore them or throw them out. Losses come in so many so forms, everything from literal deaths of people we love, to divorces, to separations, to breakups of relationships that will never get restored, to illnesses, to crushing disappointments, to betrayals of affairs and abuse, to lost jobs and lost dreams that we have that we realize are not going to happen. Our children experience hardships and failures or our parents disappoint us. Doors shut for what it seems like forever and we can only hope and pray that new ones are going to open somewhere. Painful memories of decisions we ve made and maybe people we ve hurt create loss and we carry those with us. They come in so many forms and ways and our plans get dashed. Our culture does very poorly with loss, especially church culture at times. We get messages like, don t feel, don t talk about it, stuff it and numb it. Someway medicate yourself. That s why we love addictions; everything from shopping, to food, to drugs, to alcohol, you name it. Part of the issue is that when we go through loss and grief we lose control, and who wants to be out of control? We talked last week about how, when we experience grief or loss, we can often hit a wall and our faith just doesn t work the way we d like it to work. We don t have all the answers and there s a sense of shame in that. What tends to kick in for all of us is shame and guilt and a message Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 6

7 we received somewhere that begins to replay in our heads, I must deserve this. I m unlovable and unworthy, and this is why I m suffering. I have had people tell me in my office, as they share a devastating grief or loss they had no control over, This must be happening because I deserve it. I deserved the abuse that happened to me because I m unlovable. Unfortunately, this message has been sent at times by the church and so when I m sad or feeling shame or guilty, the last place we want to be is church. We wait for our sadness or depression to leave and the happy feelings return and then we ll come back. Or we come to church and we fake it. We re sad, but we praise God. We re just good, good, good and we don t want anyone to think otherwise. We end up pretending and we have fellowships and churches of pretend and pretense as if we re not grieving and going through losses. The irony is that at the center of our faith is a man on the ground grieving loss! We create communities in his name where we don t grieve and we end up pretending we are not broken and that everything is perfect. We sometimes inadvertently send the message that good Christians or strong Christians don t get hurt or confused or discouraged. And good Christians definitely don t fall on their faces like this, especially leaders! Yet, here s Jesus, the leader of all of us! He s God in the flesh and he s a mess in this moment! If there is anything that should shake up our understanding of God, it is this image of God in the flesh on the ground. Because Jesus is entirely human just like us; he has emotions. He has a body. He has a mind. He s real. Jesus really is one of us and he does not stuff it. He actually says to the disciples My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death. One translation says, I feel so bad I could die. Have you ever felt like that? I feel so bad I could die. And there s your cup. There s something in front of you or something you re in and you re saying, I can t take it. Lord, please take this cup from me! I m at my limit. That s exactly where Jesus is, and he s the Messiah, God in the flesh. Throughout history, there have been Christians who have struggled with this passage. They don t like it because they reject the fleshly and very human, Gethsemane Jesus. There was an early heresy around the first couple hundred years of the Christian faith which claimed that Jesus was God, but he really wasn t fully human. He was kind of like human but in a spacesuit! He didn t really touch the ground but walked on air. They were called gnostics, from the Greek work gnosis, which means, to know. You just had to know about Jesus with your mind and you were good because Jesus was really just spirit. This couldn t be God Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 7

8 struggling like this, in a very human way in this story and gnostics actually tried to remove stories like this from the early Christian letters and writings which became our Bible. They wanted to get rid of all of these scripture texts altogether. Orthodox faith, from the earliest century however, won out and made it clear that Jesus was fully human and fully God. This is what the scriptures teach and what we read from the beginning, which is why we give permission to listen and feel the interruptions that come into our lives. It is biblical to feel. Could you imagine Jesus saying to the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, Hey guys, we re headed for a tough time. You know, I m the King and God s on the throne. So it s going to look bad, but you hang in there, all right, because the world s going to get saved! Woohoo! Then there is the story of Jesus coming to see his friend Lazarus and Lazarus is dead. The Bible says that Jesus wept. What we would do? We would probably change that passage jump right to the resurrection part. Jesus would say, All right, let s go! On with it! Lazarus up! We would skip the weeping part and the waiting part. We would have had Jesus cleaning up and solving the problem and resurrecting him. In Jerusalem, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because they were unresponsive to his message. We would have had Jesus see Jerusalem and say, I want to gather you like a hen gathers her chickens. Rather than weep, we d say, You re done! I m going to Alexandria, Carthage or some other city. You re losers! I m out of here! If we re honest, this whole weeping over a city makes us a bit uncomfortable. He is the Savior of the world after all! We don t want our Savior grieving and weeping over the city. Just move on! Remember that Jesus cried out on the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We don t really like that either, if we re honest. We want Jesus to say, Victory in Jesus! We want victory, victory, victory! We don t want a kneel down, like they do at the end of a football game. We want a Hail Mary at the very least and we want it completed to win the game! The second commandment is to not have other images of God that are warped and this is our God, prostrate on the ground, overwhelmed, in anguish, sweating drops of blood, and depressed as a human being, wrestling with the will of God. God often reveals himself in ways that we find surprising and almost hidden, like an infant born to peasant parents in first century Palestine. God appears hidden and we can t see what he s doing. It feels like God s absent. Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 8

9 God is present, but we re wondering where he is. Nicholas Wolterstorff was a professor of theology at Yale and wrote Lament for a Son after his 25 year old son was killed in a rock climbing incident. Here s what he wrote about living through that experience. Eric was bursting with plans. Now it s all gone. All the rich future he held gone in those tumbling seconds... Nothing fills the void of his absence. He's not replaceable. We can't go out and get another just like him There's a hole in the world now. In the place where he was there's now just nothing. Only a gap remains. Please don't say it's not really so bad, because it is. Death is awful, demonic. I cannot fit it all together I can only endure with Job. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric's death. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I also believe my son s life was cut off in its prime. I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss To the most agonizing question I have ever asked I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me. We unfortunately get taught this message at time in our lives. It may never be taught verbally, but it is an invisible rule we find in much church formation. To listen to the interruption of losses and griefs and end up like Jesus on the ground crying out before God, basically is to be a bad Christian. We can t possibly have faith if we re such a mess. I want to remind you that the one thing this passage teaches us very clearly is that telling ourselves to not listen to the interruption and allow ourselves to feel the weight of it is, first of all, inhuman because we are a human beings julst like Jesus. We re not robots. The first thing we do is we listen to this interruption versus try to shove it away or medicate it away. We actually face it head on and listen for God and listen to ourselves. The second thing we do is we learn to fall. Learn to Fall When he was 35 years old, Phillip Simmons found out that he had Lou Gehrig s disease or ALS. This is the same disease Stephen Hawkins suffers from. ALS is a very slow and very horrible way to die. Phillip was told that he d be dead within a few years. The disease did eventually take his life, but he wrote this little book in which he coined this term learning to fall. If you have Lou Gehrig s disease, you slowly lose bodily control over time and you end up falling a lot. It s Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 9

10 very humiliating and Phillip wrote about he had to learn to fall, not only so he wouldn t get hurt too badly, but also because he knew it was just going to be part of his life. He talked about learning to lean into a fall and not trying to not fall. I was reminded of a University of California Berkeley study I read about in college that found that most serious injuries in skiing happened when people were trying NOT to fall. If skiers were taught to fall well and lean into a fall, instead of trying to prevent it, they could often avoid serious injury. I like this expression because grieving our losses or embracing our losses is like learning to fall. It goes opposite our whole culture, Western culture, which is about staying up, getting bigger, being better, going higher and achieving more success. When we try to apply this Western notion to our spirituality; being bigger, better, stronger, more mature, it can be disastrous. We act like we have our act together even when we are falling apart! We try to live out a spirituality of ascent when we get to grief and loss, but the Christian faith is about descent to a cross and a burial, which then leads to a resurrection. We can t really grow spiritually and experience emotional health without addressing this issue of grief and how we look at and approach losses in our life. We listen to the interruptions as from God somehow in this and then we learn to fall because it doesn t happen naturally. Grief and Loss Breaks our Self Will When we learn to fall we learn to give up control and we are able to say the words of Jesus, Not my will, but THY will be done. It s only in moments of grief and loss that we realize our plans do not have the final say. I know what some are thinking, Of course Jesus said yes to God. It was easy for him. He was God in the flesh! No, it wasn t easy for him. He was still fully human. In fact, the big debate of this passage over history has been the fact that Jesus had a human will and a divine will. His human will is struggling to say yes to God. Maximus was born in 580 B.C. in Istanbul, which at that point was the center of the Roman Empire. He was with the Emperor in the court. He became a Christian and ended up becoming a monk. Then he became a bishop and a theologian. People were trying again to attack the humanity of Christ. Maximus wrote about Gethsemane as a decisive moment in human history when Jesus said yes to doing the Father s will and not his own. Jesus made a free choice from his human will to drink the cup for the salvation of the world. In essence Jesus said, I Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 10

11 will go to hell for the world and bear it. Maximus argued that this was a free act that Jesus chose to do. The Emperor at the time went crazy because the Emperor in those days believed they were God and divine and there was no human part to Jesus. He had Maximus arrested for saying that Jesus was fully human and cut out his tongue so he would never teach that again. Then he cut off his right hand so he would never write again and teach this stuff. It s important to note that a price was paid for this passage, so we could see the full humanity of Jesus. Jesus decision to choose the cup and follow God s will was something he learned in the midst of grief and loss. He learned it. Notice that three times Jesus asks if this whole plan could happen another way. He was like most of us humans in that he didn t want to sacrifice. He s honest because he wants to be in control, which is how we all struggle. Brings us finally to a place of deep love and letting go We learn to not play God. We like control. We like controlling life. We like controlling what s going on around us. Grieving and loss and learning to fall is all about letting go and realizing that we re not going to be God. We don t get to play God anymore; controlling everybody and everything in your circumstances. The sad thing is some of us go through our losses and we get up and we start fixing things all over again. God s trying to get us to fall and we re telling God to get lost. We re standing up because we re not going to let that happen to us. Phil Simmons, who wrote the book, Learning To Fall, wrote this about his biggest lesson learned. He writes about how our culture is about accomplishing things. We see life as a set of problems to be solved. We ve invented new medicines and technology. We ve gone to the moon. We perceive problems and then we solve the problems, so we have books like Six Ways To Find a Maid, Eight Steps To A Successful Marriage, Nine Ways To Improve Your Finances, and 21 steps to fix your sex life. We have problems and we solve them. The problem is that at its deepest level, life is not a problem, but a mystery. Problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. He writes, I wish I could have learned this lesson more easily. Each of us is brought to the cliff s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion or we can leap off the cliff into mystery. We hand ourselves over. We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling and it is Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 11

12 the hardest. Imagine being at a cliff and God s inviting you to let go and relinquish and fall off the cliff. We think, I m going to die out here. God s going to abandon me. Here s the beauty. We can fall off the cliff into the arms of a loving God, and because of the willingness of Christ to go to the cross, experience death and then resurrection we know that God will always be with us. So we can follow and fall off the cliff and let go and relinquish when everything in us is screaming control! This is crazy! We know that God s arms will catch us as we let ourselves go. Part of what happens as we let ourselves and grieve is that we learn to fall AND we unlearn control. We re unlearning these images of God that are totally ridiculous. They re not true. Instead, we learn to embrace and experience mystery. You ll notice in this passage Jesus has his three closest friends. It says in Luke s gospel they are a stone s throw away, which is about 30 to 50 yards away. Jesus needs friends and we need friends, but we don t need friends that are saying things that are stupid. We need friends who are willing to bow before the mystery of suffering and death. We don t know what s really going on in much of our grief and loss. When people are in anguish, laying face down in prayer, we don t try to preach at them about how God s on the throne and so they can get up! We don t try to tell them what WE think God is doing because it will make US feel better. Instead we re patient. We re watchful and we pray. Here s an important truth about grief and loss. We need people with us who will pray for us, but we don t need them telling us what God s doing. When someone s suffering please don t tell them what God s doing because you don t really know what God s doing. We give people some emotional space, a stone s throw. We need fellowship, but we don t need fellowship that s in our face because grief and loss can be a very lonely experience. There is no getting around it and we can t just plow through. As we move through our journey with Christ and we have our Gethsemane experience our soul is growing, but it can be lonely because nobody can grieve for you. We can grieve with others but we can t do their grieving for them. We need people with us, but hopefully not in our face. So remember as we learn to fall, and as we journey with others who are grieving, don t say stupid things, all right? We learn to wait on God. God will help people in His time. Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 12

13 Deep grieving empties our hearts of junk making more space for God to fill Something else happens in our souls as we re learning to fall and letting go of control. Deep grieving empties our souls of junk. There s stuff that gets out of our lives in grieving and loss that I don t know what else takes them out like grieving and loss does. As that stuff gets out of us, things that we thought were so important; whatever we are attached to that s not healthy, there is now space in your soul for God to fill. Good grief and loss create a vacancy in us for God. As you learn to fall we actually become free because we re beginning to see life in its proper perspective. As we go through grief through life we don t get rid of our pain. We absorb it. It becomes a part of who we are. We always carry it and it enlarges us. It transforms us. We don t ever quote, get over it. It s now part of us. When we allow grief and loss to enlarge our soul we receive a great gift we can give to the world which is a tender, compassionate, loving person. Praying is at the center of discipleship More than anything else, what we learn from this passage is that prayer is at the center of discipleship. As we learn to fall, we learn dependence because we have nowhere else to go. Jesus learns to fall as he is in prayer. His strength does not come about because he has willpower, but rather because he s so dependent. Jesus shows us that we really learn to pray as we grieve. Praying and grieving are all wrapped up together. Something really interesting in this story is that Peter doesn t think prayer is important. He s falling asleep. He s going to wake up when the guards come to arrest Jesus and then he s going to get his sword out and be active. He s read the book, 3 Simple Steps to Save the Savior! He s going to take control and cut off an ear because those praying things a waste of time. When we go through grief and loss is when we really come to realize that praying is no longer a waste of time. It s our lifeline, because we re falling. We have nowhere else to go. We re off the cliff. We re hanging onto God and we don t know what God s doing, but we know this, God is good and God s steadfast love endures forever. We shed our false selves and so many other things when we fall. I don t know where you are today, but God s inviting you to detach from controlling life through grief and loss, so you can begin to hear the voice of the one who loves you and who has come to give you life. Discovering that life Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 13

14 involves listening to the interruptions and then it s learning to fall. We learn to listen and to follow. Something happens to our soul through grief and loss that happens in no other way. This is the path to resurrection. Jesus said that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains only a single seed. Some things have to die or it just remains and we re stuck. That s why loss and grief for some of us in this room it is the best thing that ever happened. Yes, it is horrible. We find ourselves face down before God. We are overwhelmed. We re at our limit. We feel like we re going to die, but God wants us to know that this is for our resurrection. But before that resurrection comes remember there s a burial and there s a waiting and there s a transition. It s our choice to let go, to learn to receive the interruptions, to learn to fall even though everyone around us is going the opposite direction. The promise is that if it dies it produces many seeds. There is no other way but allowing grief and loss to enlarge your soul. Then we become a person that people run to in their pain because they know we have been there. We have been seasoned. We have been matured. The invitation is for us to persevere and to stay with God when we want to quit because like Job, we have to wait. David had to wait. Abraham and Sarah had to wait. Ruth had to wait. Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to wait. Moses had to wait. Jeremiah had to wait. Paul had to wait. Jesus is waiting there on the ground and crying out to the Father. We, like Jesus, let our stony hearts be broken. I don t know what scares you, but what should scare us is our heart growing hard and cold. There s nothing scarier than that. When our heart is growing hard and people tell us the truth in love, it means nothing. We could have Jesus in our face preaching the Sermon on the Mount and doing signs and wonders, and if our heart is hard we believe we have heard that before been there and done that. There is nothing scarier than a hard heart. We want to invite the losses and griefs of our life to cause our heart to become soft, malleable, and open to God, and that allow us to jump off the cliff. God will use our pain grow our soul, if we are open to his Spirit, and we can become a gift to others. I wish there was another way for this transformation to happen, but our faith teaches us that it comes through the cross which ultimately leads to resurrection. I d like to close with a prayer that is in the form of a poem. It was written by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, many years ago. It s a beautiful prayer and we ve printed it on your Message Notes for today so you don t need to worry Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 14

15 about writing it down. I invite you to pray it with out loud. Patient Trust Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is a law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability- And that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you. your ideas mature gradually let them grow. let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don t try to force them on, As though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstance acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you. And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Prayer Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 15

16 Let s pray God, help us to be open to interruptions to our plans so we can acknowledge the grief and loss we experience. Help us to learn to fall into your loving arms as our heavenly parent. If we are honest, we don t want to walk through tough moments. We want the world to always work out according to our plans. Help us to pray and long for your will to be done even in the midst of the pain and loss we feel. Sometimes we really want a door to be open and it s shut. God, not my will, but your will be done. We really want a relationship with this certain person to work and it s not. We re lonely and scared. God, not my will, but your will be done. As we look to the future and the choices before us we want to grab control. We want security. We want to know that it s all going to work out. God, not my will, but your will be done. We prefer to skip all this pain and detours and going backwards and falling down. But God, not my will, but your will be done. Lord, you ve sent the Holy Spirit to live inside of us; to be upon us, to move in us and to enable us to live life as it was meant to be lived, and that is falling into your arms of love and not running from them. Enlarge all of our souls in this room through our losses and griefs that we may experience resurrection and be a gift to those around us. May we trust that through our griefs and loss we will experience a resurrection this Easter. In the name of your son the Christ we pray. Amen. Sermon preached by Jeff Huber March 21-22, 2015 Page 16