Grief.

So today we're continuing our series on the deeply formed life, and we're talking about deeply formed grief today. Deeply formed grief.

Grief is never something that I feel like is easy or fun for us to talk about or acknowledge, and maybe it even feels a little funny in a series that we're doing on the deeply formed life. But we all grieve in some form or another. At this point, even today, all of us are probably grieving something or someone. I was joking with some people last night. I said, today's the day we're all going to cry together.

But really, it is one of those times where sometimes we avoid things for so long and it gets built up that if we don't take hold of our grief and if we don't process it, eventually it starts to take hold of us. And so it's important for us to have moments as followers of Jesus to look back and think, how do we grieve? Are we grieving? What does it look like for us to grieve? And how can we do that following the way of Jesus?

The story of Lazarus

We're going to read today bits and pieces of John chapter 11. It's the famous story of Jesus raising Lazarus back to life. So there's your spoiler today. He doesn't stay dead. He comes back to life.

But I'm going to read a few verses of this story:

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus was now sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.

John 11:1-3

So this is just kind of telling us that this is the Mary that anointed Jesus with her perfume, poured her perfume on the Lord, wiped his feet. So that's a reminder to us that she was close to Jesus. This wasn't a stranger. This wasn't their first time interacting together. She knew Jesus. They were close.

So the sisters sent word. They sent people to go and to find Jesus and say, Lord, the one you love, who was their brother, is sick. When he heard this, Jesus said, the sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory, so that God's son may be glorified through it. Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days. And then he said to his disciples, let us go back to Judea. So we see here something really interesting where Jesus is not rushing in this moment, but it's acknowledging, like it's saying Jesus loved them. He loved them. He loved them. But yet he didn't rush.

If you keep going, it says:

Rabbi, the disciples said to him, a short while ago the Jews were trying to stone you and yet you are going back there? Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world's light. But when a person walks at night they stumble, for they have no light. After he had said this, he went on to tell them, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.

John 11:8-11

His disciples replied, Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better. Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then he told them plainly, Lazarus is dead. And for your sake, I'm glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him. Then Thomas, also known as Didymus, said to the rest of the disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him.

Then we move on to where it says that Jesus arrives there and he finds that Lazarus had been there in the tomb for four days. Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem. Many Jews had come to Mary and Martha to comfort them for their loss of their brother. And when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

Martha said to Jesus:

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.

John 11:21-22

And Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha answered, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. And Jesus said to her:

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?

John 11:25-26

And Martha said, Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Messiah, the son of God who is to come into the world.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word today. We thank you for the invitation that we get to receive through it, to come to you with all that we are, our emotions, our feelings, our pain, our questions, our curiosities, our anger, our frustration. God, we can come with every single piece of who we are to you, and that you are with us in it. We thank you that we get to see this today in this text, in this story. I pray that we would feel your presence as we open up our ears to hear and our hearts to receive from you today. We ask this in your name. Amen.

We'll continue to finish the story as we go. But what we see here is that these two sisters lost their brother and they are experiencing grief. Grief, loss, pain. These are all things on this side of eternity that we cannot avoid.

The reality of grief

In Romans 8, it talks about this where it says all creation is groaning. I think about even as a baby enters into the world, the first sound that you hear is a cry. It's almost like this child is leaving the comfort of what they knew in the womb and entering into this unknown. And the only way to express it is this pain, this cry, this groan, this ache.

Our whole lives are filled with moments of grief. Pain and disappointment are not fun emotions, and so they're typically things that we try to just push down as far as we can. We avoid them. We numb them. We deny them. We try to take spiritual shortcuts around them. They turn into wounds or addictions. We rationalize. We avoid it.

But we have a choice today when it comes to our grief. We can choose to let it be something that is terminal, something that gets the best of us, something that in the end ends up destroying us or taking us far away from Jesus. Or we can choose to take our grief to the Lord and let it be transformational.

How we grieve is the difference between terminal loss and transformational living.

Grieving with God

We lament. We grieve with God. At some point in your life, you have or you will experience deep loss. You will experience surface level loss, whether it is the loss of a physical loved one that has died and is no longer here, or whether it's the loss of stability, the loss of a relationship, the loss of health. And then there's the type of grief that we experience when we move or we change jobs or a friendship that used to be one way is now another. When we experience disappointment or unmet expectations and everything in between.

If you're a follower of Jesus today, then my hope for you is that we can together walk through a roadmap of how we process our grief with God, and that we can see that there's an invitation to not only grieve with Jesus, but experience new life with Jesus through the process. And if you're here and you're not quite sure if you're following Jesus, then I hope that you too can see that he cares in a deep way for the pain in your life and that he longs to heal it.

Grief will catch you. Grief is not a one and done type of thing. And sometimes it hits you when you're least expecting it.

Last week we talked a lot about what does it look like for us to be the deeply formed Imago Dei, and recognizing that we all get to bear the image of God and get to step into creating his culture, his kingdom culture. But we also have been formed by the cultures around us, from our countries of origin and our ethnicities. They form us.

And when it comes to grief, we grieve a lot of times based on how the culture around us grieved. Recently, I've been invited to a lot of funerals for people that are now celebrations of life. There's nothing wrong with this. This isn't bad. But it's interesting to me to think that now we're jumping from what used to be a funeral where you would spend days mourning and grieving. It was very much wearing all black. Then a few years ago, a friend of mine from college passed away quite tragically and she was young. Instead of wearing black, they said everyone wear bright, fun colors, and it's a celebration of life. We ate tacos, and it was a beautiful celebration of life.

But it's interesting how sometimes, if we're not careful, we can skip to just the joy and the celebration, and we don't take time to really mourn and grieve and acknowledge the pain of what's happening. Jesus wants us to experience all of it so that we can be fully formed into healed, whole people. Because if we don't name it and if we don't bring it to him, he can't heal it and he can't transform it.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the life, but we also have to mourn. There's nothing wrong with getting to a place of joy in our life, but we have to take time to grieve and to truly let go of what was.

In this story today, I want to talk about two different types of grief. There are many types of grief. There are many different ways that people process. So this is not an end all be all. There's not enough time today to get into all of it. But I want to talk about ambiguous grief and then the grief of when you do lose someone physically.

Ambiguous loss is a person's profound sense of loss and sadness that is not associated with the death of a loved one. For example, I can be someone that feels things very deeply. So even when I move from an apartment, sometimes I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm going to miss this so much. And I realized, why am I feeling so sad? Why am I feeling these things? I'm like, oh, I'm grieving. I'm grieving that this is where I sat every morning and drank my coffee, or I'm grieving this, or I'm grieving that.

And then other times it is like when I think of sometimes the friendships I used to have or different places that I used to be in, and you can start to feel certain types of feelings and you don't know how to name it. I'm like, oh, I'm grieving. I'm grieving that I'm not as close to that person anymore. Even though they're still alive, I'm grieving that this changed. Every time things change, we're grieving.

And then when we lose someone, there is this mourning experience that's followed by the death of someone that we were close to, someone that was important to us. Those are the two different types of grief that we're kind of talking about.

We read just this encounter of Jesus and the sisters giving word to Jesus that Lazarus was dead. And then when he finally gets there, he has an encounter with Martha.

How did Martha experience her grief? The first thing she does is she expresses it to Jesus. She came and she's like, where were you? What was happening? He died. She's complaining to him. She's questioning him. She's pointing out these unmet expectations that she had of Jesus in this moment where she's saying, where were you? Where were you?

And then we see Jesus points her back to who he was. She's saying, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And then he's saying, your brother's going to rise again. He says, I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die. And whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this? And Martha says, yes, Lord, I believe this.

We see this encounter of Martha expressing her grief. She's not denying it. She's not suppressing it. She's not pretending like it doesn't exist. She's being so honest with Jesus, face to face in this moment of saying, he's dead. Where were you? You needed to be here. If you were here, this would not have happened.

And Jesus is saying, like, reminding her, do you know who I am? I'm the resurrection and the life for all that believe in me. This is not the end. Your brother will live again. And she says, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God who has come into the world.

In her grief, she chose to turn to God and she chose to trust in who he was in the in-between. This is the difference between terminal and transformational. Are you avoiding? Are you numbing it? Are you finding shortcuts? Are you trying to explain your pain? Are you dwelling in your pain? Are you identifying with your pain and your grief? Are you turning to addictions? Are you trying to rationalize it? Are you trying to find shortcuts and just skip to joy? Or are you coming to Jesus?

Martha did not avoid. She did not numb. She did not take a shortcut. She named it. She expressed it. She turned to God with it. She trusted God with it.

Jesus helped Martha learn that she can come to Jesus with every single piece of who she is, of her human experience, of what she's walking through, and that he welcomes it. Jesus is giving Martha permission to complain, permission to express grief. He's helping her turn to God and trust him. This is a form of lament.

What is lament?

How do we grieve? We grieve with God. The scripture is not short of processes for us, but one of the ways that God has given us a guide to deal with our grief is through lament.

First of all, lament is a form of praise. The Old Testament scholars have studied and looked back at all the different collections of Psalms that we have in scriptures. The title of all the Psalms together comes from this Hebrew word, Tehillim, which is a compilation of praises. That's what they refer to Psalms as. It's like they brought all these Psalms together and they call them praises.

They're called praises, yet two-thirds of the Psalms that we know of are laments, expressions of grief and complaints. That is a little hard for us to reconcile with the way that sometimes we think we have to separate those things. We can't experience sorrow and suffering and joy at the same time. But we see something referred to as a collection of praises, a collection of Psalms. Two-thirds of them are laments. Why is that?

A lament is this complaint or this accusation coming to God, but it is rooted in trusting his character. A lament is an appeal to God based on confidence in his character.

When we lament, we're coming to God and we're expressing these frustrations. We're asking things like, where were you? Why weren't you here? When are you going to come through? When are you going to heal this? When are you going to help me overcome this? We do this with the confidence in who he is. We know that someday Jesus is coming back again and we will be completely healed. We will be completely restored. This pain and this groaning will be no more.

It's saying, I have confidence in the character of God right now in this moment. But if I'm honest, it doesn't mean that life isn't hard. It means that I can have complete confidence in the character of God, but still not be satisfied with the things that I see on the news, with what's happening around the world. I can be completely confident in the character of God to fulfill his promises while still not knowing what to do with the pain and the suffering that people are experiencing.

Lament is a form of praise because it's rooted in feeling safe enough to come to God. Feeling safe enough to trust him with the deepest parts of who we are. Lament takes faith. It's about choosing to lean in and talk to God when we're feeling weak, when we're feeling vulnerable, rather than checking out in bitterness and letting bitterness take root.

That's exactly what the enemy wants and longs for us to do. When we experience loss, when we're grieving, the enemy wants us to turn away from God and to be tempted to then take things into our own hands or to blame God, rather than coming to God with our questions, with our anger, with everything that we're feeling.

Maybe like me, you grew up in a faith tradition where you didn't really know that you could be angry with God sometimes. You didn't know that you could have questions or that you could cry out and say, God, why is this happening? But read Psalms and you will see time and time again, these prayers of lament, these praises of lament of saying, God, I'm turning to you and I trust you enough to be my full self in this moment and to say, this is what I'm feeling.

If you have things that you're grieving, you are in good company.

Lament also pays attention. Close attention to pain. Jesus paid attention to pain. He saw the pain that people were walking through and he was right there with them.

Going back to that scripture, after Martha had said this to the Lord and she had just said, yes, Lord, I believe you're the Messiah, she went back and she calls her sister Mary aside and she says, the teacher's here. He's here and he's asking for you. When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him.

Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house comforting her noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there because Lazarus is dead.

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. Where have you laid him? He asked. Come and see, Lord, they replied.

Jesus wept.

John 11:35

Then the Jews said, See how he loved him. But some of them said, Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?

Jesus paid attention to the pain of Mary. He paid attention to the pain of Martha. He was with them in it. And it says that he wept. The shortest verse in the Bible. He wept. Jesus wept in that moment with them.

Lament pays attention. It's a prayer, a practice for us to pay attention to the pain that we're feeling and recognize that Jesus is with us in it. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. So not only is he with us in it, but he felt grief. He felt the emotions that we feel as humans in our human bodies. He felt those things. He knows what it's like. He's no stranger to it. He was filled with sorrow too. This was a friend of his.

Pay attention to the pain that you're experiencing and know that Jesus is with you in it.

Lament turns us towards God when pain tempts us to run from him. It turns us to God when pain tempts us to run from him.

Nobody likes fake people, right? There's nothing worse than being with someone, and even sometimes people in customer service, I'm like, are you really this nice? Is this really who you are? Is this just like a facade? There's something about this where I don't think there's anyone that's like, I love when people lie to my face. I love when people are not honest with me. No, nobody's like that.

We don't like fake people. And guess what? Jesus doesn't like fake people either. He also doesn't want you coming and just pretending everything's good, pretending everything's okay, pretending you have it all together. He also wants you to be honest with him.

The closest friends in our lives are normally the ones that we can be the most honest with, right? The ones that you can actually cry in front of, not just like, oh, sorry, a few tears, but like cry in front of, like ugly, nasty cry in front of. Those are the people that we long to be around. The people that have no problem just being like, this is who I really am. This is what I'm really going through. There's no fakeness here.

God wants that too. All of who we are, all of our emotion, all of our pain. The fact that we have a book called Lamentations in the Bible should show us that. The Psalms, again, two-thirds of them are laments.

God can handle your pain. And more than that, he wants it so he can heal it. He can restore it. He can give you new life. Yet we're so tempted in life when we're experiencing pain, when we're experiencing grief, when we're experiencing loss. We're so tempted instead of going to God to just give him the silent treatment, or to fall into despair, to fall into, I can't do this. Or we deny it and say, everything's just fine.

But lament continues to encourage us time and time again. Talk to God about your struggles. Trust him. And it starts by simply practicing expressing our pain to him.

Lament is not a way to explain away your pain, but it offers us the chance to trust him through the pain and through the process. That's what we see both Mary and Martha doing. They trusted Jesus to go with them through the process of grief and through the process of healing.

So this is often what I think that we do in our life when it comes to our relationship with Jesus. Based maybe on the way that we've been formed, on what we think is expected of us when we follow Jesus. We think, okay, I know that God wants a relationship with me. I know that he sent Jesus on the cross to die, to pay the price for my sins. I recognize that.

But sometimes we feel like we still have to be fake and we have to hold it all together. When things are going well, it's like, okay, I know I'm supposed to go to church. I'm supposed to worship. So we'll do that. And we're like, yes, I'm building my relationship with Jesus. The Bible tells me I can ask, and like, he'll give me things. Great. So we'll do that. We'll ask God for things. But not like the big things, just maybe like some things. God, can you help me get to work on time? When really, you can just do that yourself. He gave you a body to wake up and move.

We come to him with like these little things. We're like, okay, God. Then we're like, yep, I'm going to praise. Okay, I'll thank God for that. I'll do this and that. We come to him with all these things that we think we're supposed to when we're happy, when things are going well. We come to him when we have questions about something. It's all these things that we think we're supposed to do. We're building and we're building and giving pieces of us.

But what we see is that it's not actually going to stay strong. Eventually it's going to fall down because we're not giving him all of who we are. We're just giving him the things that we think he wants, or what our culture around us has formed us into thinking we're supposed to talk to Jesus about or go to God with.

But here's the reality of who God really wants us to be and how Jesus really longs for us to interact with him. When I'm happy, I come to you. When I'm sad, I come to you. When I have questions, I come to you. When I'm doubting, I come to you. When I'm afraid, I come to you. When I'm angry, I come to you. When I'm rejoicing, I come to you. When I'm scared, I come to you. When I'm feeling things that I don't even know how to express, I come to you.

And all of a sudden we realize that we are building and forming a strong relationship with the Lord that is one of depth and is one that cannot be shaken and will not easily fall.

God longs to have every single piece of who you are. The ones that you think he wants and the ones that you would be so ashamed to come to him with. He wants to know your thoughts. He wants those prayers. He wants to know what's on your mind and he wants to be with you in it. That's the God that we serve.

It's not just some of our feelings and our emotions and our questions, but it's all of it. Wherever you're at today, know that he welcomes you when you're rejoicing and he welcomes you when you're in pain. He welcomes you when you're giving him glory and he welcomes you in the midst of the grief and everything in between.

Jesus longs to have relationships with you that are relationships of depth and that he is with you in that today.

How to lament

I want to walk us through practically today how we lament. Psalm 13 illustrates this in a beautiful way. It's just one of the many Psalms that does this. Psalm 13 is a psalm, one of the many psalms of lament, and it starts like this:

How long, O Lord, will you forget me. Forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

Psalm 13:1

The first thing that we see in lament, in the process for us of taking our grief to the Lord, is starting with just turning to God. Simply turning to God.

The next thing that we see common for lament is that you bring your complaint to God. You tell God what's going on. Every lament has some sort of complaint:

How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Psalm 13:2

There's a complaint of saying like, how long is this gonna happen? This is not just like rehearsing of anger, but this is a raw, honest conversation of someone expressing the emotions and the pain of what they're feeling.

Then there's this ask. To ask boldly for help. To ask the Lord to come in and to help you:

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Lest my enemy say I have overcome him. Lest my foes rejoice when I fall.

Psalm 13:3-4

And then finally, it's choosing to trust. This is the final destination of our laments. This is where we land. We start with turning to God, telling him our complaint, what's on our mind, expressing how we feel, asking him to come and to intervene, and then we choose to trust in the in-between.

More than the different stages of grief that we could go through, lament is just this language and this process that we can start to put our trust back in God and to trust him to put all of our brokenness back together.

We have to remember though that lament is not our final prayer, but it is more so a prayer in the meantime. It's a prayer of saying God, even right now, though right now I don't feel healed or whole and I don't see what you're doing and I don't see how you're working, I'm choosing to trust you and I'm choosing to put my hope and my faith in who you are, who your word tells me you are, in the character of who I've seen you to be, and what I know you have promised is still to come.

Jesus, I love just like the comment when they're like, he's dead, Lazarus is dead. And he's like, yeah, he fell asleep. You know, and sometimes I think we look around and we're like, oh my, things are falling apart. It's so broken. And Jesus is like, just wait, just give it a minute. I'm coming, I'm coming. It's a prayer in the meantime.

Ambiguous grief is often talked about as like saying goodbye to one thing and hello to another. In the sense of sometimes you might not even realize you're grieving the smaller things in life, but really, any change that you experience in your life, you're saying goodbye to one thing and hello to another. There's going to need to be a time for you to grieve, for you to process that, to process what did you say goodbye to? What does that look like?

But then there's the physical death that occurs. And for those of us who are in Christ Jesus, when we say goodbye to this side of eternity, we're saying hello to glory for all of eternity and relationship with God face to face.

But then what about the in-between when there's pain, when there are people that we have lost, that we are missing, that we are grieving?

Jesus wept. But both Mary and Martha, their first response to him was that honesty of if only you had been here. Mary handled her grief just like Martha by being honest with God about where she was. She brought her grief to Jesus. In a way, she's kind of putting the blame on him and saying like, this is your fault. Where were you? Why were you not here? She's saying it didn't have to be this way.

Have you ever had a moment like that in your life where you're looking and you're like, what is happening? It didn't have to be this way.

And what was Jesus' response in that moment? It was grace. Jesus meets us in the midst of our grief with grace. Part of that grace, part of the beauty is that he grieves with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

And so we do not have to fear expressing our pain, our hurt, our unmet expectations, just like Mary did, just like Martha did. Jesus welcomes it. And just like he wept with Mary and Martha, he wants to sit with you in your pain, in your grief. He wants to weep with you and be with you through that process.

When we're in the tension of the in-between, the now and the not yet, the death and still waiting for resurrection, it can be painful. It's the pain of waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

But as we keep reading, we see that Jesus did what he said he was going to do. He went to Lazarus and he raised him back to life. Death does not win in this story. And death does not win in our stories. There is more hope coming.

So then what do we do in the in-between? We see here that we have permission to grieve just as Mary grieved and Martha grieved and Jesus grieved. You can grieve with Jesus when you feel like all is lost and you don't know how to name it. You can come before him and say, God, would you help me? Would you help me in this moment?

Whether it's a breakup or the loss of a job or a friendship growing distant or someone moving away or you're moving away or maybe someone physically no longer being here anymore, we can name it and we can release it and grieve with God and let him heal it. When we name it, we can grieve it and we can let Jesus heal it. And as he does that, he's healing us.

If you're here today, I want to invite you. I want to encourage you to lean into this practice of lament in your life, of having these real, raw, honest conversations with God. To continue to confess to him what you're feeling, what you're walking through. To not try to explain the emotions away.

Half of my prayer journals sometimes are, God, I don't know what to do with all of these things. We see things. We walk through things. We carry things with people. It's heavy and it's hard. And the reality is that we don't have to do it alone. We can carry that together. But we can do it with Jesus. That's the best place to be. To grieve with God. To recognize how we process our grief, what we do with our grief is the difference between terminal and it separating us from God or transformational living and us walking in the fullness of who he's created us to be.

It's not just people that have happy, exciting, joy-filled emotions and days, but people that are embracing our humanity, our pain, our tears, our unmet expectations. And saying, Jesus, I'm going to bring it all to you and trust that you're with me in it.

I want us to just take a few minutes. I'm going to invite you to pull out your phone or to pull out your journal and just take a moment. This might be really uncomfortable if you tend to be a more like, I just want to sing and praise and worship type of person. These feelings are hard. And if you are like, I need to come back because if I start, then it's just gonna get too hard, you can do that too. But I want to encourage you. Take a minute and would you write out a lament in your own way?

Would you take a minute to have an honest conversation with God, to name your pain, to turn to him, to tell him what you're really feeling, your questions, your doubts, your anger, your complaint, to ask him to help and then to choose to trust?

If you need a reference, Psalm 13 is a great example of how to do this.